I have on the contrary, striven to show you my friendship, in part requital of the kindness shown me by your parents."
"Do not speak of them, if you please."
"Ay, but I must. It was at the instance of your worthy mother that I sought you and strove to confer with you on, the cause of your evident unhappiness."
"You were the cause."
"I?"
"Yes--you! Did I not tell you then that I hated you; and did you not accept my defiance?"
"Yes; but when you saved my life!--"
"It was to spurn you--to put stripes upon you. I tell you, Alfred Stevens, I loathe you with the loathing one feels for a reptile, whose cunning is as detestable as his sting is deadly. I loathe you from instinct. I felt this dislike and distrust for you from the first moment that I saw you. I know not how, or why, or in what manner, you are a villain, but I feel you to be one! I am convinced of it as thoroughly as if I knew it. You have wormed yourself into the bosom of my family. You have expelled me from the affections of my parents; and not content with this, you have stolen to the heart of the woman to whom my life was devoted, to have me driven thence also. Can I do less than hate you? Can I desire less than your destruction? Say, having heard so much, whether you will make it necessary that I should again lay my whip over your shoulders."
The face of Stevens became livid as he listened to this fierce and bitter speech. His eye watched that of the speaker with the glare of the tiger, as if noteful only of the moment when to spring. His frame trembled. His lip quivered with the struggling rage. All his feeling of self-superiority vanished when he listened to language of so unequivocal a character--language which so truly denounced, without defining, his villany. He felt, that if the instinct of the other was indeed so keen and quick, then was the combat necessary, and the death of the rustic essential, perhaps, to his own safety. William Hinkley met his glance with a like fire. There was no shrinking of his heart or muscles. Nay, unlike his enemy, he felt a strange thrill of pleasure in his veins as he saw the effect which his language had produced on the other.
"Lead the way!" said Stevens; "the sooner you are satisfied the better."
"You are very courteous, and I thank you," replied Hinkley, with a subdued but sarcastic smile, "you will pardon me for the seeming slight, in taking precedence of one so superior; but the case requires it. You will please to follow. I will show you my back no longer than it seems necessary."
"Lead on, sir--lead on."
CHAPTER XXIII.
UNEXPECTED ISSUES.
William Hinkley ascended the narrow path leading to the hills with an alacrity of heart which somewhat surprised himself. The apprehensions of danger, if he felt any, were not of a kind to distress or annoy him, and were more than balanced by the conviction that he had brought his enemy within his level. That feeling of power is indeed a very consolatory one. It satisfies the ambitious heart, though death preys upon his household, one by one; though suffering fevers his sleep; though the hopes of his affection wither; though the loves and ties of his youth decay and vanish. It makes him careless of the sunshine, and heedless of the storm. It deadens his ear to the song of birds, it blinds his eye to the seduction of flowers. It makes him fly from friendship and rush on hate. It compensates for all sorts of loneliness, and it produces them.
It is a princely despotism; which, while it robs its slave of freedom, covers him with other gifts which he learns to value more; which, binding him in fetters, makes him believe that they are sceptres and symbols before which all things become what he desires them. His speech is changed, his very nature perverted, but he acquires an "open sesame"
by their loss, and the loss seems to his imagination an exceeding gain.
We will not say that William Hinkley was altogether satisfied with HIS bargain, but in the moment when he stood confronting his enemy on the bald rock, with a deadly weapon in each hand--when he felt that he stood foot to foot in equal conflict with his foe, one whom he had dragged down from his pride of place, and had compelled to the fearful issue which made his arrogance quail--in that moment, if he did not forget, he did not so much feel, that he had lost family and friends, parents and love; and if he felt, it was only to induce that keener feeling of revenge in which even the affections are apt to be swallowed up.
Stevens looked in the eye of the young man and saw that he was dangerous. He looked upon the ante-revolutionary pistols, and saw that they were dangerous too, in a double sense.
"Here are pistols," he said, "better suited to our purpose. You can sound them and take your choice."
"These," said Hinkley, doggedly, "are as well suited as any. If you will, you can take your choice of mine; but if you think yours superior, use them. These are good enough for me."
"But this is out of all usage," said Stevens.
"What matters it, Mr. Stevens? If you are satisfied that yours are the best, the advantage is with you. If you doubt that mine can kill, try them. I have a faith in these pistols which will content me; but we will take one of each, if that will please you better, and use which we think proper."
Stevens expressed himself better pleased to keep his own.
"Suit yourself as to distance," said Hinkley, with all the coolness of an unmixed salamander. His opponent stepped off ten paces with great deliberation, and William Hinkley, moving toward a fragment of the rock upon which he had placed his "revolutions" for the better inspection of his opponent, possessed himself of the veterans and prepared to take the station which had been a.s.signed him.
"Who shall give the word?" demanded Stevens.
"You may!" was the cool rejoinder.
"If I do, I kill you," said the other.
"I have no fear, Mr. Stevens," answered William Hinkley with a degree of phlegm which almost led Stevens to fancy he had to deal with a regular Trojan--"I have no fear," he continued, "and if you fancy you can frighten me by this sort of bragging you have very much mistaken your man. Shoot when you please, word or no word."
William Hinkley stood with his back to the woods, his face toward the lake which spread itself, smooth and calm at a little distance. He did not perceive that his position was a disadvantageous one. The tree behind, and that beside him, rendered his body a most conspicuous mark; while his opponent, standing with his back to the uncovered rocks ranged with no other objects of any prominence. Had he even been sufficiently practised in the arts of the duello, he would most probably have been utterly regardless of these things. They would not have influenced his firmness in the slightest degree. His course was quite as much the result of desperation as philosophy. He felt himself an outcast as well from home as from love, and it mattered to him very little, in the morbid excitement of his present mind, whether he fell by the hand of his rival, or lived to pine out a wearisome existence, lonely and uninspired, a gloomy exile in the bitter world. He waited, it may be said, with some impatience for the fire of his antagonist. Once he saw the pistol of Stevens uplifted. He had one in each hand. His own hung beside him. He waited for the shot of the enemy as a signal when to lift and use his own weapon. But instead of this he was surprised to see him drop the muzzle of his weapon, and with some celerity and no small degree of slight of hand, thrust the two pistols under his coat-skirts.
A buz reached his ears a moment after--the hum of voices--some rustling in the bushes, which signified confusion in the approach of strangers.
He did not wish to look round as he preferred keeping his eye on his antagonist.
"Shoot!" he exclaimed--"quickly, before we are interrupted."
Before he could receive any answer there was a rush behind him--he heard his father"s voice, sudden, and in a high degree of fury, mingled with that of his mother and Mr. Calvert, as if in expostulation. From the latter the words distinctly reached his ears, warning him to beware.
Such, also, was the purport of his mother"s cry. Before he could turn and guard against the unseen danger, he received a blow upon his head, the only thing of which he was conscious for some time. He staggered and fell forward. He felt himself stunned, fancied he was shot, and sunk to the ground in an utter state of insensibility.
The blow came from his father"s crab-stick. It was so utterly unexpected by the parties who had attended old Hinkley to the place of meeting, that no efforts were made to prevent it. But the mother of the victim rushed in in time to defeat the second blow, which the father prepared to inflict, in the moment when his son was falling from the effects of the first. Grasping the coat skirts of her spouse, she pulled him back with no scrupulous hand, and effectually baffled his designs by bringing him down, though in an opposite direction, to the same level with the youth. Old Hinkley did not bite the dust, but the latter part of his skull most effectually b.u.t.ted it; and had not his head been quite as tough as his crab-stick, the hurt might have been quite as severe as that which the latter had inflicted on the son.
The latter lay as perfectly quiet as if all had been over with him. So much so, that the impression became very general that such was the case. Under this impression the heart of the mother spoke out in mingled screams of lamentation and reproach. She threw herself down by the side of the youth and vainly attempted to stop the blood which was streaming from a deep gash on his skull. While engaged in this work, her ap.r.o.n and handkerchief being both employed for this purpose, she poured forth a torrent of wrath and denunciation against her spouse. She now forgot all the offences of the boy, and even Alfred Stevens came in for his share of the anger with which she visited the offence and the offender.
"Shame! shame! you b.l.o.o.d.y-minded man," she cried, "to slaughter your own son--your only son--to come behind him and knock him down with a club as if he had been an inhuman ox! You are no husband of mine. He sha"n"t own you for a father. If I had the pick, I"d choose a thousand fathers for him, from here to Ma.s.sa.s.sippi, sooner than you. He"s only too good and too handsome to be son of yours. And for what should you strike him? For a stranger--a man we never saw before. Shame on you! You are a brute, a monster, William Hinkley, and I"m done with you for ever.
"My poor, poor boy! Look up, my son. Look up, William. Open your eyes.
It"s your own dear mother that speaks to you. O my G.o.d! you"ve killed him--he will not open his eyes. He"s dead, he"s dead, he"s dead!"
And truly it seemed so, for the youth gave no sign of consciousness. She threw herself in a screaming agony upon his body, and gave herself up to the unmeasured despair, which, if a weakness, is at least a sacred one in the case of a mother mourning her only son. Old Hinkley was not without his alarms--nay, not altogether without his compunctions. But he was one of that round head genus whose self-esteem is too much at all times for fear, or shame, or sensibility. Without seeking to a.s.sist the lad, and ascertain what was his real condition, he sought only to justify himself for what he had done by repeating the real and supposed offences of the youth. He addressed himself in this labor chiefly to Mr.
Calvert, who, with quite as much suffering as any of the rest, had more consideration, and was now busied in the endeavor to stanch the blood and cleanse the wound of the victim.
"He"s only got what he deserved," exclaimed the sullen, stubborn father.
"Do not speak so, Mr. Hinkley," replied Calvert, with a sternness which was unusual with him; "your son may have got his death."
"And he deserves it!" responded the other doggedly.
"And if he has," continued Calvert, "you are a murderer--a cold-blooded murderer--and as such will merit and will meet the halter."
The face of the old man grew livid--his lips whitened with rage; and he approached Calvert, his whole frame quivering with fury, and, shaking his hand threateningly, exclaimed:--
"Do you dare to speak to me in this manner, you miserable, white-headed pedagogue--do you dare?"
"Dare!" retorted Calvert, rising to his feet with a look of majesty which, in an instant, awed the insolence of the offender. Never had he been faced by such defiance, so fearlessly and n.o.bly expressed.
"Dare!--Look on me, and ask yourself whether I dare or not. Approach me but a step nigher, and even my love for your unfortunate and much-abused but well-minded son will not protect you. I would chastise you, with all my years upon me, in spite of my white head. Yours, if this boy should die, will never become white, or will become so suddenly, as your soul will wither, with its own self-torture, within you. Begone!--keep back--do not approach me, and, above all, do not approach me with uplifted hand, or, by Heaven, I will fell you to the earth as surely as you felled this boy! You have roused a feeling within me, William Hinkley, which has slept for years. Do not provoke it too far. Beware in season. You have acted the brute and the coward to your son--you could do so with impunity to him--to me you can not."