The Redemption of David Corson by Charles Frederic Goss

C >> Charles Frederic Goss >> The Redemption of David Corson

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

The silence in which she awaited the answer to her question became
profound and in it the ticking of the old clock sounded like the blows
of a blacksmith's hammer, the purring of the cat like the roar of
machinery, and the beating of his heart like the dull thud of a
battering ram.

As if reading his inmost thoughts, the white-faced woman said: "And so
thee thought that I was always old and gray?"

As she uttered these words in a tone of indescribable sadness, a faint
smile played around the corners of her mouth--such a marble smile as
might have appeared upon the face of Niobe. In an instant more it had
composed itself into its former sadness, as a sheet of pure water
resumes its calmness, after having been lightly stirred by a summer
wind.

So long did she stand regarding him with looks of unutterable love that
he could not endure the strain of the withheld secret, but exclaimed
hoarsely: "Go on! Mother, for God's sake, go on! If thee has something
to disclose, reveal it at once!"

It seemed impossible for her to speak. The opening of the secrets of
her heart to God before the bar of judgment could have cost her no
greater effort than this confession to her son.

"David," she said, in a voice that sounded like an echo of a long-dead
past, "the fear that the sins of thy parents should be visited upon thee
has tormented every hour of my life. I have watched thee and prayed for
thee as no one but a mother who has drunk the bitter cup to its dregs
could ever do. I have trembled at every childish sin. In every little
fault I have beheld a miniature of the vices of thy mother and thy
father--thy father! Oh! David, my son--my son!"

The white lips parted, but no sound issued from them. She raised her
white hand and clutched at her throat as if choking. Then she trembled,
gasped, reeled, and fell forward into his arms.

In a moment more, the agitated heart had ceased to beat, and the secret
of her life was hidden in its mysterious silence. The sudden,
inexplicable and calamitous nature of this event came near unsettling
the mental balance of the sensitive and highly organized youth. Coming
as it did upon the very heels of the experiences which had so thoroughly
shaken his faith in the old life, he felt himself to be the target for
every arrow in the quiver of misfortune.

He seemed to himself not so much like a boat that had sprung a single
leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints
left open to the inrushing waters.

Into the unfilled gap in his mother's narrative, ten thousand suspicions
crept, each displacing the other and leaving him more and more in
darkness and in dread with regard to the origin of his own life.
Wherever he went and whatever he did these confused suspicions resounded
in his ears like the murmur in a seashell.

He did not dare communicate this story even to his sister; for if she
knew nothing he feared to poison her existence by telling her, and if
she knew all he had not the courage to listen to the sequel. Perhaps no
other experience in life produces a more profound shock than a discovery
like that upon which David had so suddenly stumbled. It leads to despair
or to melancholy, and many a life of highest promise has been suddenly
wrecked by it. While he brooded over this mystery the days slipped past
the young mystic almost unnoted; he wandered about the farm, passing
from one fit of abstraction into another, doing nothing, saying nothing,
thinking everything.

The world was shrouded in a gloom through whose shifting mists a single
star shone now and then, emitting a brilliant and dazzling ray. It was
the figure of a gypsy.

In his heavy, aching heart thoughts of her alone aroused an emotion of
joy. As other objects lost their power to attract or charm, she more and
more filled all his horizon.

Her name was whispered by each passing breeze. It was syllabled by every
singing bird. The old clock ticked it on the stairway. The hoofs of his
horse which he rode recklessly over the country uttered it to the hard
roads on which they fell--"Pepeeta, Pepeeta, Pepeeta."

Whenever he really tried to banish the temptations which haunted his
soul, they always returned to the swept and garnished chamber bringing
with them seven spirits worse than themselves.

He tried to look forward to the future with hope. But how can a man hope
for harvests, when all his seed corn has been destroyed? If his father
was bad, what hope was there that he could be better?

He made innumerable resolves to take up the duties of life where he had
laid them down, but they were all like birds which die in the nest where
they are born.

Pepeeta was drawing him irresistibly to herself; he was like a man in
the outer circle of a vortex, of which she was the center. The touch of
her soft hand which he could still feel, the farewell glance of eyes
which still glowed before his imagination, attracted him like a powerful
magnet. It was true that he did not know where she was; but he felt that
he could find her in the uttermost parts of the earth by yielding
himself to the impulse which she had awakened in his heart.

"A dark veil of mystery hangs over my past. My present is full of misery
and unrest. I will see if the future has any joys in store for me," he
said to himself at the close of one of his restless days.

Without so much as a word of farewell, he crept out of the house in the
gathering dusk, and started in pursuit of the bright object that floated
like a will-o'-the-wisp before his inner eye.

A feeling of exultation and relief seized him as he left the place made
dark and dreadful by the memory of that tragic scene through which he
had so recently passed; the quiet of the evening soothed his perturbed
spirits, and the tranquil stars looked down upon him with eyes that
twinkled as if in sympathy.

It is an old tradition of the monks, that when the sap begins to run in
the vines on sunny slopes, a revolt and discontent thrills in the
bottles imprisoned in the darkness of the wine vaults. Such a discontent
and fever had been thrilling in David's veins during these warm spring
days, when the whole world had been in a ferment of life, and he had
been bottled up in the gloom and narrowness of the little country
village; and yielding himself to the emotions that seethed in his
breast, he broke all the tender ties of the past and went blindly into
the future.

He had been suddenly fascinated by a beautiful woman and bewildered by
an unscrupulous man; he had felt the foundations of his religious faith
shaken, and discovered that his own life had sprung from an illicit
passion. These are violent blows, and many a man has gone down before a
single one of them. If the blows had been delivered singly at long
intervals he might have survived the shock; but following each other in
swift succession like great tidal waves they had literally swept him
from his moorings.

Such collapses fill us with horror and questioning. How do they come
about? Can they be prevented? These are the deepest problems of life,
and our psychology is still impotent to solve them. We can detect and
measure the dross in metals or the poison in drugs; but we have no
solvent that will reduce a complex nature like David's into its original
elements and enable us to differentiate a son's responsibility from that
of his father.

We make bold guesses and confident affirmations as to the comparative
influence of heredity and environment. We enter into learned
disputations as to the blessing or the bane of an education such as his.
But every such case is still a profound and insoluble mystery. The most
comprehensive laws and the most careful generalizations meet with too
many exceptions to enable us to form a science. The children of the good
are too often bad and the children of the bad too often good to permit
us to dogmatize about heredity. We learn as our experience deepens and
our horizon widens to regard such collapses with a compassionate
sympathy and a humbled consciousness of our own unfitness to judge and
condemn. Whether we create our individuality or only bring it to
light--is the question that makes us stumble! But while we move in the
midst of uncertainties in this realm, there is another in which we walk
in the glare of noonday. We know beyond the peradventure of a doubt
that whatever may be the origin of such weakness as that of the young
mystic, the results are always inevitable! Nature never asks any
questions nor makes any allowances. To her mind, sin is sin! Whatsoever
a man sows--that shall he also reap. Whether he yield to evil
voluntarily or be driven into it by resistless force; whether he sin
because of a self-originating propensity or because his father sinned
before him, is all one to those resistless executors of Nature's law,
sickness, sorrow, disaster, death!

No man ever defeated Nature! No man ever will! From the instant when he
turned his back upon his home, David's fate was sealed. He was playing
against a certainty and he knew it. But he ought to have remembered it!
It was of this that he ought to have been thinking, and not of the
gypsy's eyes!

Sometimes such men escape from the final catastrophe of the long series;
but not from the intermediate lashings!

This brutal, idiotic step of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal
fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man
advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in
spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute
portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the
final issue of a human life until the last sigh is drawn.

CHAPTER XI.

THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL

"To tell men they cannot help themselves is to fling them into
recklessness and despair."--Froude.

Although David did not know the exact route the quack had laid out for
his journey, he was certain that it would be easy enough to trace him in
that sparsely-settled region, and so he turned his face in the direction
in which the equipage vanished when he watched it from the barn. His
movements did not seem to come from his own volition but to originate in
something external. He had a sense of yielding to necessity. There are
heroic moments in our lives, when that subtle force we call our "will"
demonstrates, or at all events persuades us, that we are "_free_." There
are others, like those through which the young adventurer was now
passing, when we experience a feeling of utter helplessness amidst
cosmic forces and believe ourselves to be straws in a mighty wind or
ill-fated stars borne along a predestined orbit.

Surrendering himself to the current of events, the recalcitrant Quaker
escaped for a time the painful consciousness of personal responsibility.

The tranquil stars above him seemed to look down upon the wanderer in
silent approval. The night birds chanted their congratulations from the
tree tops, and reading his own thoughts into their songs he imagined he
heard them saying, "Let each one find his mate; let each one find his
mate."

The cool night breeze caressed and kissed him as it hurried by on silent
wings, and for an hour or two he tramped along with a peace in his heart
which seemed to be a reflection from the outside world.

But gradually a change came over the face of nature, and this, too,
reflected itself in the mirror of his soul.

In the heavens above him the clouds commenced to gather like hostile
armies. They skirmished, sent out their flying battalions and then fell
upon each other in irresistible fury. Great, jagged flashes of
lightning, like sword thrusts from gigantic and hidden hands rent the
sky; wild crashes of thunder pealed through the reverberating dome of
heaven; the rain fell in torrents; the elements of nature seemed to have
evaded their master, vaulted their barriers and precipitated themselves
in a furious struggle.

The lonely pilgrim perceived the resemblance which his conflicting
emotions bore to this wild scene, and smiled grimly. He found in all
this tumult a justification for the tempest in his soul.

It was not until the light of morning struggled through this universal
gloom, that the weary and bedraggled traveler entered the outskirts of
the then straggling but growing and busy village of Hamilton. Tired in
body and benumbed in mind, he made his way to the hotel, conscious only
of his desire and determination to look once more upon the face of the
woman whose image was so indelibly impressed upon his mind.

Approaching the desk he nervously asked if the doctor was among the
guests, flushed at the answer, demanded a room, ascended the steep
staircase, and was soon in bed and asleep. Fatigued by his long tramp,
he did not awaken until after noon, and then, having bathed, dressed and
broken his long fast, he knocked at the door of the room occupied by the
doctor and his wife.

There was a quick but gentle step in answer to his summons, and at the
music of that footfall his heart beat tumultuously. The door opened, and
before him stood the woman who had brought about this mysterious train
of events in his life.

She started back as she saw him, with an involuntary and timid motion,
but so great was her surprise and joy that she could not control her
speech or action sufficiently to greet him.

"Who is there?" cried the doctor, in his loud, imperative voice.

"Mr. Corson," she answered in tones that were scarcely audible.

"Corson? Who the d-d-deuce is Corson, and what the deuce does he want?"
he asked, rising and approaching the door.

The instant his eyes fell on the countenance of the Quaker, he threw up
both hands and uttered a prolonged whistle of astonishment.

"The preacher!" he exclaimed. "The lost is found. The p-p-prodigal has
returned. Come in, and let us k-k-kill the fatted calf!"

Coarse as the welcome was, it was full of sincerity, and its heartiness
was like balm to the wounded spirit of the youth. He grasped the
extended hand and permitted himself to be drawn into the room.

Pepeeta, who had recovered from the first shock of surprise and delight,
came forward and greeted him with a shy reserve. She gave him her hand,
and its gentle touch reanimated his soul. She smiled at him,--a gracious
smile, and its light illumined the darkness of his heart. His sadness
vanished. He once more felt an emotion of joy.

The excitement of their meeting having subsided they seated themselves,
David in an easy chair, the doctor on the broad couch, and Pepeeta on a
little ottoman at his feet. Vivid green curtains partially obscured the
bright sunshine which beat upon the windows. The wall-paper was cheap,
vulgar, faded. On the floor was an old ingrain carpet full of patches
and spattered with ink stains. A blue-bottle fly buzzed and butted his
head against the walls, and through the open casement hummed the traffic
of the busy little town.

Nothing could have been more expressive of triumph and delight than the
face of the quack. Whenever his feelings were particularly bland and
expansive, he had a way of taking the ends of his enormous moustache and
twirling them between his spatulate thumbs and fingers. He did this
now, and twisted them until the coarse hairs could be heard grating
against each other.

"Well, well!" he said, "so you could not resist the temptation? Ha! ha!
ha! No wonder! It's not every young fellow behind the p-p-plow-tail that
has a fortune thrust under his nose. Shows your g-g-good sense. I was
right. I always am. I knew you were too bright a man to hide your light
under a half b-b-bushel of a village like that. In those seven-by-nine
towns, all the sap dries out of men, and before they are forty they
begin to rattle around like peas in a p-p-pod. In such places young men
are never anything but milk sops, and old men anything but
b-b-bald-headed infants! You needed to see the world, young man. You
required a teacher. You have put yourself into good hands, and if you
stay with me you shall wear d-d-diamonds."

"Whatever the results may be, I have determined to make the experiment,"
said David, shrugging his shoulders.

"Right you are. But what b-b-brought you round? You were as stiff as a
ramrod when I left you."

"Circumstances over which I had no control, and which I want to forget
as soon as possible. My old life has ended and I have come to seek a new
one."

"A new life? That's good. Well--we will show it to you, P-P-Pepeeta and
I! We will show you."

"The sooner the better. What am I to do?"

"Not too fast! There are times when it is better to g-g-go slow, as the
snail said to the lightning. We must make a b-b-bargain."

"Make it to suit yourself."

"You d-d-don't expect me to stick to my old offer, I reckon. When I made
it, Mahomet went to the m-m-mountain, and now the mountain comes to
Mahomet; see?"

"Do as you please, I am in no mood to split hairs, nor pennies. All I
ask is a chance to put my foot upon the first round of the ladder and if
I do not get to the top, I shall not hold you responsible," David
replied, dropping the "thees" of his Quaker life, in his determination
to divest himself of all its customs as rapidly as he could.

"Hi! hi! There's fire in the flint! Good thing! you don't want to split
pennies! Well, if you d-d-don't, I don't. You take me on the right side,
D-D-Davy. I'll do the square thing by you--see if I d-d-don't. Let's
have a drink. Bring the bottle, Pepeeta!"

She went to the mantel and returned with a flask and two glasses. The
quack filled them both and passed one to David. It was the first time in
his life that he had ever even smelt an intoxicant. He recoiled a
little; but having committed himself to his new life, he determined to
accept all that it involved. He lifted the fiery potion to his lips, and
drank.

"Hot, is it, my son?" cried the doctor, laughing uproariously at his
wry face. "You Quakers drink too much water! Freezes inside of you and
t-t-turns you into what you might call two-p-p-pronged icicles. Give me
men with red blood in their veins! And there's nothing makes b-b-blood
red like strong liquors!"

The whisky revived the courage and loosened the tongue of the youth. The
repugnance which he had instinctively felt for the vulgar quack began to
mellow into admiration. He asked and answered many questions.

"What part am I to take in this business?" he asked.

"What part are you to take in the business? That's good, 'Never put off
till to-morrow what you can d-d-do to-day.' 'Business first and then
pleasure.' 'The soul of business is dispatch.' These are good mottoes,
my lad. I learned them from the wise men; but if I had not learned them,
I should have invented them. What's your p-p-part of the business, says
you; listen! You are to be its m-m-mouth-piece. That tongue of yours
must wag like the tail of a d-d-dog; turn like a weather-vane; hiss like
a serpent, drip with honey and poison, be tipped with p-p-persuasion;
tell ten thousand t-t-tales, and every tale must sell a bottle of
p-p-panacea!"

He paused, and looked rapturously upon the face of his pupil.

"This panacea--has it merits? Will it really cure?" asked David.

The doctor laughed long and loud.

"Has it merits? Will it really cure? Ho! ho! 'Is thy bite good for the
b-b-backache?' said the sick mouse to the cat. What difference does it
make whether it will cure or not? Success in b-b-business is not based
upon the quality of the m-m-merchandise, my son."

"Upon what, then?" said David.

"Upon the follies, the weaknesses and the p-p-passions of mankind! Since
time began, a universal panacea' has been a sure source of wealth. It
makes no difference what the panacea is, if you only have the b-b-brains
to fool the people. There are only two kinds of people in the world, my
son--the fools and f-f-foolers!"

Even whisky could not make David listen to this cold-blooded avowal
without a shudder.

The keen eye of the quack detected it; but instead of adulterating his
philosophy, he doubled his dose.

"Shocks you, does it? You will g-g-get over that. We are not angels! we
are only men. Remember what old Jack Falstaff said? 'If Adam fell in a
state, of innocency, what shall I d-d-do in a state of villainy?'"

The boldness of the man and the radicalness of his philosophy dazzled
and fascinated the inexperienced youth.

This was what the astute and unscrupulous instructor expected, and he
determined to pursue his advantage and effect, if possible, the complete
corruption of his pupil in a single lesson; and so he continued:

"Got to live, my son! Self-p-p-preservation is the first law, and so we
must imitate the rest of the b-b-brute creation, and live off of each
other! The big ones must feed upon the little and the strong upon the
weak. 'Every man for himself and the d-d-devil take the hindmost!'
That's my religion."

"You may be right," said David, "but I cannot say that I take to it
kindly. I do not see how a man can practice this cruelty and injustice
without suffering."

"Suffering! Idea of suffering is greatly exaggerated. Ever watch a
t-t-toad that was being swallowed by a snake? Looks as if he positively
enjoyed it. It's his mission. Born to be eaten! If there was as much
pain in the world as p-p-people say, do you think anybody could endure
it! Isn't the d-d-door always open? Can't a man quit when he wants to?
Suffering! Pshaw! Do I look as if I suffered? Does Pepeeta look as if
she suffered? And yet she b-b-bamboozles them worse than I do."

The head of the gypsy bent lower and lower over her crocheting.

"She plays upon them like a fife! They d-d-dance when she whistles! Next
to wanting a universal panacea for pain, the idiots want a knowledge of
the future! Everybody but me wants to know what kind of a to-morrow God
Almighty has made for him. I make my own to-morrows! I don't ask to
have my destiny made up for me like a t-t-tailor coat. I make my own
destiny. If things d-d-don't come my way, I just pull them! People talk
about 'following Providence!' I follow Providence as an Irishman follows
his wheel-barrow. I shove it! See? But that is not the way of the rest
of them, thank Fortune! And so Pepeeta gathers them in! Strange fish
g-g-get into her net, Davy. Back there in your own little t-t-town she
caught some of your long-faced old Quakers, b-b-big fellows with
broad-brimmed hats, drab coats and ox eyes, regular meetin'-goers! And
there was that little d-d-dove-eyed girl. What was it she wanted to
know, P-P-Pepeeta? Tell him. Ha! ha! Tell him and we will see him
b-b-blush."

"She asked me if her father was going to send her to Philadelphia this
winter," she answered, without lifting her eyes.

"I don't mean that!"

"She asked me whether I could tell them where to find the spotted
heifer."

"The d-d-deuce, child! Why don't you tell me what she asked you 'bout
D-D-Davy?"

"It is time for us to go to supper or we shall be late," she replied,
laying aside her work and rising.

"Sure enough!" cried the doctor, springing to his feet. "The Q-Q-Quaker
has knocked everything out of my head. Come on!"

He rose and began bustling about the room.

When Pepeeta glanced up from her work she saw in David's eye a grateful
appreciation of her courtesy and tact, and his look filled her with a
new happiness.

The disgust awakened in the Quaker's mind by the coarseness of the quack
was more than offset by the beauty and grace of the gypsy. When he
looked at her, when he was even conscious of her presence, he felt a
happiness which compensated for all that he had suffered or lost. He did
not stop to ask what its nature was. He had cast discretion to the
winds. He had in these few hours since his departure broken so utterly
with the past that he was like a man who had been suddenly awakened from
a long lapse of memory. His old life was as if it had never been. He
felt himself to be in a vacuum, where all his ideas must be newly
created. This epoch of his experience was superimposed upon the other
like a different geological formation. Like the old monks in their
cells, he was deliberately trying to erase from the parchment of his
soul all that had been previously written, in order that he might begin
a new life history.

CHAPTER XII.

THE MOTH AND THE FLAME

"Misled by Fancy's meteor-ray
By passion driven:
But yet the light that led astray
Was light from heaven."

--Burns.

A little before dusk the three companions started upon their evening's
business. The horses and carriage were waiting at the door and they
mounted to their seats. David was embarrassed by the novelty of the
situation, and Pepeeta by his presence; but the quack was in his highest
spirits. He saluted the bystanders with easy familiarity, ostentatiously
flung the hostler a coin, flourished his whip and excited universal
admiration for his driving.

During the turn which they took around the city for an advertisement, he
indoctrinated his pupil with the principles of his art.

"People to-day are just what they were centuries ago. G-g-gull 'em just
as easy. Make 'em think the moon is made of g-g-green cheese--way to
catch larks is to p-p-pull the heavens down--extract sunbeams from
c-c-cucumbers and all the rest! There's one master-weakness, Davy. They
all think they are sick, or if they d-d-don't, you can make 'em!"

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23