The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

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For four days she had not tasted food. Her child was sick. She had
_begged_ a few crumbs for him, but even _he_ had eaten nothing all day.
Then the tempter came, and--why need I say it?--she sinned. Turn not
away from her, O you, her sister, who have never known a want or felt a
woe! Turn not away. It was not for herself; she would have died--gladly
have died! It was for her sick, starving child that she did it. Could
she, _should_ she have seen him STARVE?

Some months after that, she noticed in the evening paper, among the
arrivals at the Astor House, the name of John Hallet. That night she
went to him. She was shown to his room, and rapping at the door, was
asked to 'walk in.' She stepped inside and stood before him. He sprang
from his seat, and told her to leave him. She begged him to hear
her--for only one moment to hear her. He stamped on the floor in his
rage, and told her again to go! She did not go, for she told him of the
pit of infamy into which she had fallen, and she prayed him, as he hoped
for heaven, as he loved his own child, to save her! Then, with terrible
curses, he opened the door, laid his hands upon her, and--thrust her
from the room!

Why should I tell how, step by step, she went down; how want came upon
her; how a terrible disease fastened its fangs on her vitals; how Death
walked with her up and down Broadway in the gas-light; how, in her very
hours of shame, there came to her visions of the innocent
past--thoughts of what she MIGHT HAVE BEEN and of what SHE WAS? The mere
recital of such misery harrows the very soul; and, O God! what must be
the REALITY!

As she finished the tale which, in broken sentences, with long pauses
and many tears, she had given me, I rose from my seat, and pacing the
room, while the hot tears ran from my eyes, I said; 'Rest easy, my poor
girl! As sure as God lives, you shall be avenged. John Hallet shall feel
the misery he has made you feel. I will pull him down--down so low, that
the very beggars shall hoot at him in the streets!'

'Oh! no; do not harm him! Leave him to God. He may yet repent!'

The long exertion had exhausted her. The desire to tell me her story had
sustained her; but when she had finished, she sank rapidly. I felt of
her pulse--it scarcely beat; I passed my hand up her arm--it was icy
cold to the elbow! She was indeed dying. Giving her some of the cordial,
I called her child.

When I returned, she took each of us by the hand, and said to Franky:
'My child--your mother is going away--from you. Be a good boy--love this
gentleman--he will take care of you!' Then to me she said: 'Be kind to
him, sir. He is--a good child!'

'Have comfort, madam, he shall be my son. Kate will be a mother to him!'

'Bless you! bless her! A mother's blessing--will be on you both! The
blessing of God--will be on you--and if the dead can come back--to
comfort those they love--I will come back--and comfort _you_!'

I do not know--I can not know till the veil which hides her world from
ours, is lifted from my eyes, but there have been times--many
times--since she said that, when Kate and I have thought she was KEEPING
HER WORD!

For a half-hour she lay without speaking, still holding our hands in
hers. Then, in a low tone--so low that I had to bend down to hear--she
said:

'Oh! is it not beautiful! Don't you hear? And look! oh! look! And my
mother, too! Oh! it is too bright for such as I!'

The heavenly gates had opened to her! She had caught a vision of the
better land!

In a moment she said:

'Farewell my friend--my child--I will come----' Then a low sound
rattled in her throat, and she passed away, just as the last rays of the
winter sun streamed through the low window. One of its bright beams
rested on her face, and lingered there till we laid her away forever.

And now, as I sit with Kate on this grassy mound, this mild summer
afternoon, and write these lines, we talk together of her short, sad
life, of her calm, peaceful death, and floating down through the long
years, comes to us the blessing of her pure, redeemed spirit, pleasant
as the breath of the flowers that are growing on her grave. We look up,
and, through our thick falling tears, read again the words which we
placed over her in the long ago:

FRANCES MANDELL:

Aged 23.

SHE SUFFERED AND SHE DIED.

WEEP FOR HER.

TAKE CARE!

When the blades of shears are biting,
Finger not their edges keen;
When man and wife are fighting,
He faces ill who comes between.
JOHN BULL, in our grief delighting,
Take care how you intervene!

SHOULDER-STRAPS;

OR, MEN, MANNERS, AND MOTIVES IN 1862.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY AND EPISODICAL--MEASURING-WORMS, DUSSELDORF PICTURES,
AND PARISIAN FORTUNE-TELLERS.

This is going to be an odd jumble.

Without being an odd jumble, it could not possibly reflect American life
and manners at the present time with any degree of fidelity; for the
foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually,
within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time
of Noah's flood, and the disruption has not taken place long enough ago
for the new to have assumed any appearance of stability. The old deities
of fashion have been swept away in the flood of revolution, and the new
which are eventually to take their place have scarcely yet made
themselves apparent through the general confusion. The millionaire of
two years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues
from his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to
the most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day,
intent upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful
rents can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of
that time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky
adventures in government transportations or army contracts; and the
jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut street are busy resetting the diamonds
of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little
while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or
Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that have this year been
flashing at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the
bathing-beach and Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake,
in the old days; and if opera should ever revive, and the rich notes of
melody repay the _impresario_, as they enrapture the audience at the
Academy, there will be new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as
_outre_ and unaccustomed in their appearance there as was that of the
hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down
collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an
hour here on his way to the inauguration.

Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many
of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able
defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world
their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon
a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall.
Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been
exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them
brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly--impotent for
good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile
sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished
themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have
displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair
and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have
done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been
founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human
calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the
estimation men have held of themselves, and the light in which they
presented themselves to each other.

Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change
not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we
know to be truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God
only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been
founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has
passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability.
The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less
destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through
any thing more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood
upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of
old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until
the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been
undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from
our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live,
has fallen and been destroyed; and yet the nation does not die, but
gives promise of a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we
have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete old
is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth
the young and vigorous new. Change, transition, every where and in all
things: how can society fail to be disrupted, and who can speak, write,
or think with the calm decorum of by-gone days?

All this is obtrusively philosophical, of course, and correspondingly
out of place. But it may serve as a sort of forlorn hope--mental food
for powder--while the narrative reserve is brought forward; and there is
a dim impression on the mind of the writer that it may be found to have
some connection with that which is necessarily to follow.

So let the odd jumble be prepared, perhaps with ingredients as
incongruous as those which at present compose what we used to call the
republic, and as unevenly distributed as have been honors and emoluments
during a struggle which should have found every man in his place, and
every national energy employed to its best purpose.

I was crossing the City Hall Park to dinner at Delmonico's, one
afternoon early in July, in company with a friend who had spent some
years in Europe, and only recently returned. He may be called Ned
Martin, for the purposes of this narration. He had left the country in
its days of peace and prosperity, a frank, whole-souled young artist,
his blue eyes clear as the day, and his faith in humanity unbounded. He
had resided for a long time at Paris, and at other periods been
sojourning at Rome, Florence, Vienna, Dusseldorf, and other places where
art studies called him or artist company invited him. He had come back
to his home and country after the great movements of the war were
inaugurated, and when the great change which had been initiated was most
obvious to an observing eye. I had heard of his arrival in New York, but
failed to meet him, and not long after heard that he had gone down to
visit the lines of our army on the Potomac. Then I had heard of his
return some weeks after, and eventually I had happened upon him drinking
a good-will glass with a party of friends at one of the popular
down-town saloons, when stepping in for a post-prandial cigar. The
result of that meeting had been a promise that we would dine together
one evening, and the after-result was, that we were crossing the Park to
keep that promise.

I have said that Ned Martin left this country a frank, blue-eyed,
happy-looking young artist, who seemed to be without a care or a
suspicion. It had only needed a second glance at his face, on the day
when I first met him at the bar of the drinking-saloon, to know that a
great change had fallen upon him. He was yet too young for age to have
left a single furrow upon his face; not a fleck of silver had yet
touched his brown hair, nor had his fine, erect form been bowed by
either over-labor or dissipation. Yet he was changed, and the second
glance showed that the change was in the _eyes_. Amid the clear blue
there lay a dark, sombre shadow, such as only shows itself in eyes that
have been turned _inward_. We usually say of the wearer of such eyes,
after looking into them a moment, 'That man has studied much;' 'has
suffered much;' or, '_he is a spiritualist_.' By the latter expression,
we mean that he looks more or less beneath the surface of events that
meet him in the world--that he is more or less a student of the
spiritual in mentality, and of the supernatural in cause and effect.
Such eyes do not stare, they merely gaze. When they look at you, they
look at something else through you and behind you, of which you may or
may not be a part.

Let me say here, (this chapter being professedly episodical,) that the
painter who can succeed in transferring to canvas that expression of
_seeing more than is presented to the physical eye_, has achieved a
triumph over great difficulties. Frequent visitors to the old Dusseldorf
Gallery will remember two instances, perhaps by the same painter, of the
eye being thus made to reveal the inner thought and a life beyond that
passing at the moment. The first and most notable is in the 'Charles the
Second Fleeing from the Battle of Worcester.' The king and two nobles
are in the immediate foreground, in flight, while far away the sun is
going down in a red glare behind the smoke of battle, the lurid flames
of the burning town, and the royal standard just fluttering down from
the battlements of a castle lost by the royal arms at the very close of
Cromwell's 'crowning mercy.' Through the smoke of the middle distance
can be dimly seen dusky forms in flight, or in the last hopeless
conflict. Each of the nobles at the side of the fugitive king is heavily
armed, with sword in hand, mounted on heavy, galloping horses going at
high speed; and each is looking out anxiously, with head turned aside as
he flies, for any danger which may menace--not himself, but the
sovereign. Charles Stuart, riding between them, is mounted upon a dark,
high-stepping, pure-blooded English horse. He wears the peaked hat of
the time, and his long hair--that which afterward became so notorious in
the masks and orgies of Whitehall, and in the prosecution of his amours
in the purlieus of the capital--floats out in wild dishevelment from his
shoulders. He is dressed in the dark velvet, short cloak, and broad,
pointed collar peculiar to pictures of himself and his unfortunate
father; shows no weapon, and is leaning ungracefully forward, as if
outstripping the hard-trotting speed of his horse. But the true interest
of this figure, and of the whole picture, is concentrated in the eyes.
Those sad, dark eyes, steady and immovable in their fixed gaze, reveal
whole pages of history and whole years of suffering. The fugitive king
is not thinking of his flight, of any dangers that may beset him, of the
companions at his side, or even of where he shall lay his periled head
in the night that is coming. Those eyes have shut away the physical and
the real, and through the mists of the future they are trying to read
the great question of _fate_! Worcester is lost, and with it a kingdom:
is he to be henceforth a crownless king and a hunted fugitive, or has
the future its compensations? This is what the fixed and glassy eyes are
saying to every beholder, and there is not one who does not answer the
question with a mental response forced by that mute appeal of suffering
thought: 'The king shall have his own again!'

The second picture in the same collection is much smaller, and commands
less attention; but it tells another story of the same great struggle
between King and Parliament, through the agency of the same feature. A
wounded cavalier, accompanied by one of his retainers, also wounded, is
being forced along on foot, evidently to imprisonment, by one of
Cromwell's Ironsides and a long-faced, high-hatted Puritan cavalry-man,
both on horseback, and a third on foot, with _musquetoon_ on shoulder.
The cavalier's garments are rent and blood-stained, and there is a
bloody handkerchief binding his brow and telling how, when his house was
surprised and his dependents slaughtered, he himself fought till he was
struck down, bound and overpowered. He strides sullenly along, looking
neither to the right nor the left; and the triumphant captors behind him
know nothing of the story that is told in his face. The eyes, fixed and
steady in the shadow of the bloody bandage, tell nothing of the pain of
his wound or the tension of the cords which are binding his crossed
wrists. In their intense depth, which really seems to convey the
impression of looking through forty feet of the still but dangerous
waters of Lake George and seeing the glimmering of the golden sand
beneath, we read of a burned house and an outraged family, and we see a
prophecy written there, that if his mounted guards could read, they
would set spurs and flee away like the wind--a calm, silent, but
irrevocable prophecy: 'I can bear all this, for my time is coming! Not a
man of all these will live, not a roof-tree that shelters them but will
be in ashes, when I take my revenge!' Not a gazer but knows, through
those marvelous eyes alone, that the day is coming that he _will_ have
his revenge, and that the subject of pity is the victorious Roundhead
instead of the wounded and captive cavalier!

I said, before this long digression broke the slender chain of
narration, that some strange, spiritualistic shadow lay in the eyes of
Ned Martin; and I could have sworn, without the possibility of an error,
that he had become an habitual reader of the inner life, and almost
beyond question a communicant with influences which some hold to be
impossible and others unlawful.

The long measuring-worms hung pendent from their gossamer threads, as we
passed through the Park, as they have done, destroying the foliage, in
almost every city of the Northern States. One brushed my face as I
passed, and with the stick in my hand I struck the long threads of
gossamer and swept several of the worms to the ground. One, a very large
and long one, happened to fall on Martin's shoulder, lying across the
blue flannel of his coat in the exact position of a shoulder-strap.

'I say, Martin,' I said, 'I have knocked down one of the worms upon
_you_.'

'Have you?' he replied listlessly, 'then be good enough to brush it off,
if it does not crawl off itself. I do not like worms.'

'I do not know who _does_ like them,' I said, 'though I suppose, being
'worms of the dust,' we ought to bear affection instead of disgust
toward our fellow-reptiles. But, funnily enough,' and I held him still
by the shoulder for a moment to contemplate the oddity, 'this
measuring-worm, which is a very big one, has fallen on your shoulder,
and seems disposed to remain there, in the very position of a
_shoulder-strap_! You must belong to the army!'

It is easy to imagine what would be the quick, convulsive writhing
motion with which one would shrink aside and endeavor to get
instantaneously away from it, when told that an asp, a centipede or a
young rattlesnake was lying on the shoulder, and ready to strike its
deadly fangs into the neck. But it is not easy to imagine that even a
nervous woman, afraid of a cockroach and habitually screaming at a
mouse, would display any extraordinary emotion on being told that a
harmless measuring-worm had fallen upon the shoulder of her dress. What
was my surprise, then, to see the face of Martin, that had been so
impassive the moment before when told that the worm had fallen upon his
coat, suddenly assume an expression of the most awful fear and agony,
and his whole form writhe with emotion, as he shrunk to one side in the
effort to eject the intruder instantaneously!

'Good God! Off with it--quick! Quick, for heaven's sake!' he cried, in a
frightened, husky voice that communicated his terror to me, and almost
sinking to the ground as he spoke.

Of course I instantly brushed the little reptile away; but it was quite
a moment before he assumed an erect position, and I saw two or three
quick shudders pass over his frame, such as I had not seen since, many a
long year before, I witnessed the horrible tortures of a strong man
stricken with hydrophobia. Then he asked, in a voice low, quavering and
broken:

'Is it gone?'

'Certainly it is!' I said. 'Why, Martin, what under heaven can have
affected you in this manner? I told you that I had knocked a worm on
your coat, and you did not appear to heed it any more than if it had
been a speck of dust. It was only when I mentioned the _shape_ it had
assumed, that you behaved so unaccountably! What does it mean? Are you
afraid of worms, or only of _shoulder-straps_?' And I laughed at the
absurdity of the latter supposition.

'Humph!' said Martin, who seemed to have recovered his equanimity, but
not shaken off the impression. 'You laugh. Perhaps you will laugh more
when I tell you that it was not the worm, _as_ a worm, of which I was
thinking at all, and that my terror--yes, I need not mince words, I was
for the moment in abject terror--had to do altogether with the shape
that little crawling pest had assumed, and the part of my coat on which
he had taken a fancy to lodge himself!'

'No, I should not laugh,' I said; 'but I _should_ ask an explanation of
what seems very strange and unaccountable. Shall I lacerate a feeling,
or tread upon ground made sacred by a grief, if I do so?'

'Not at all,' was the reply. 'In fact, I feel at this moment very much
as the Ancient Mariner may have done the moment before he met the
wedding-guest--when, in fact, he had nobody to button-hole, and felt the
strong necessity of boring some one!' There was a tone of gayety in this
reply, which told me how changeable and mercurial my companion could be;
and I read an evident understanding of the character and mission of the
noun-substantive 'bore,' which assured me that he was the last person in
the world likely to play such a part. 'However,' he concluded, 'wait a
bit. When we have concluded the raspberries, and wet our lips with
green-seal, I will tell you all that I myself know of a very singular
episode in an odd life.'

Half an hour after, the conditions of which he spoke had been
accomplished, over the marble at Delmonico's, and he made me the
following very singular relation:

'I had returned from a somewhat prolonged stay at Vienna,' he said, 'to
Paris, late in 1860. During the fall and winter of that year I spent a
good deal of time at the Louvre, making a few studies, and satisfying
myself as to some identities that had been called in question during my
rambles through the Imperial Gallery at Vienna. I lodged in the little
Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or
three minutes' walk from the Louvre, having a baker with a pretty wife
for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit
comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two
visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large
proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space
was three quarters of the time more than I needed.

'I do not know that I can have any objection to your knowing, before I
go any further, that I am and have been for some years a believer in
that of which Hamlet speaks when he says: 'There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.' You
may call me a _Spiritualist_, if you like, for I have no reverence for
or aversion to names. I do not call _myself_ so; I only say that I
believe that more things come to us in the way of knowledge, than we
read, hear, see, taste, smell, or feel with the natural and physical
organs. I know, from the most irrefragable testimony, that there are
communications made between one and another, when too far apart to reach
each other by any of the recognized modes of intercourse; though how or
why they are made I have no definite knowledge. Electricity--that
'tongs with which God holds the world'--as a strong but odd thinker once
said in my presence, may be the medium of communication; but even this
must be informed by a living and sentient spirit, or it can convey
nothing. People learn what they would not otherwise know, through
mediums which they do not recognize and by processes which they can not
explain; and to know this is to have left the beaten track of old
beliefs, and plunged into a maze of speculation, which probably makes
madmen of a hundred while it is making a wise man of _one_. But I am
wandering too far and telling you nothing.

'One of my few intimates in Paris, a young Prussian by the name of
Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, not
to put too fine a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in
company with clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my
return to Paris in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those
places in which professional fortune-tellers carried on their business.
It was early in September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of
Von Berg, who had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I
went with him, late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the
Rue La Reynie Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward
the quays of the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue
Saint Martin. The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris,
although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the
front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time
had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the
house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hallway, that night,
well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow-candle in a tin sconce was
burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the
plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which
it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.

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