All-Story Weekly/Volume 98/Number 3/Fires Rekindled/Chapter 2

EVERAL days—probably a week—since I last wrote here. I am taking small heed of the flight of time. I don't have to. And sometimes, as with hashish eaters, moments and days—or ages!—appear inextricably confounded. The soul has measures of its own.

The weather is fine and soft; my landlady tells me it is often so in London in the season—that is, during the summer session of parliament. I had a line from Joan that Philip is getting on, but saying nothing of coming back here. It looks as if the crisis of the war was at hand. I may see something of it even in London, though hitherto there has been nothing more than a rather ineffectual attempt to bomb folks in the streets from German Zeppelins. Perhaps the war is but the material analogue of a mighty spiritual change in the world. The glass through which we have seen darkly during so many centuries may be about to dissolve, leaving us face to face with the reality of things!

I've been arranging my work on the biography. I found the librarian, or curator, of the British Museum Library to be a very pleasant gentleman, miraculously conversant with the millions of volumes under his change, and kind enough to take an interest even in my little investigation. He opines that the old files of the London Times and Morning Post are likely to afford my best browsing-ground, together with pamphlets, play-bills, and other fugitive scraps thrown off by the world as it revolves; and he can, if necessary, gain me access to state archives of the period.

There are also collections of personal correspondence between persons of more or less importance during the first part of the last century. Working upon material so ample, there is good hope that I shall happen upon something germane to my purpose; my ancestor can hardly have passed through his year in London without leaving some foot-prints on the sands of the time, thickly trodden though they were. His figure and fate engage me more than ever. I have a gratuitous notion that in learning to fathom him, I shall be gaining a better understanding of myself!

It's a mere notion, and not a plausible one. So far as outwardly appears, Captain Heathcote's character, temperament, and life were almost the categorical opposite of my own. But sympathies sometimes run perversely. Just because I can't be and do what he did and was, I take my revenge upon nature by entering imaginatively into his being and doing. Or it may be something a little less obvious than that. It may be that I am not so much innately incapable of such a career as his, as I am lacking in the circumstances that surrounded him, and in the opportunity that he met and availed of.

I have lived in peaceful times, and have been a near invalid, withdrawn amid books and meditations, with a shrinking from contacts with actualities—especially from aggressive contacts. But vivid narratives of action, peril, and adventure always attract me, and the adventures related of my ancestor very particularly. I seem to feel myself in his saddle as he rides on his headlong escapades; I'm at the tiller of his boat in the storm: I plot in his brain the escape from the Spanish stockade; I fight his duel and kill his man! Anon, I convince the wise and cautious President that Jackson was in the right as to the spy, and I take ship, confidently, for England, pledging myself to conquer the prejudices of the British premier.

Now I plunge, rejoicing, into the splendid tide of London society, its dinners, its balls, its receptions, its great ladies and famous beauties. And all the while I am sitting motionless and mute at my desk, a hermit, a dim-eyed student, an old bachelor!

No doubt heredity is a truth, and personal traits skip a generation or two and crop out afresh, to be repressed or stimulated by conditions, education, customs, accidents. In some remote and double-locked chamber of my subconscious being may abide the germ of qualities that flamed into splendid results in Captain Heathcote. I might have been he. In a sense, I may be he! But then ought I not to be able to solve his mystery, even without the help of the British Museum? I fear my relations with him are not quite intimate enough for that! I am an admirer, but not a psychometrist. I can't identify myself with him so closely as to divine his doings out of whole cloth, so to say. Or, if I could, I couldn't summon effrontery enough to pass it off as sober history.

Though, for my own private edification, I might stretch a point!

A romantic, impulsive, audacious young scapegrace he must have been! He was but fifteen when, rebelling against the straitness of existence on the New England homestead, he shipped before the mast on a Salem vessel, bound for the East Indies round the Horn. Stray hints of him came back from Ceylon, Hong-Kong, Sumatra, and the Philippines; by and by he turned up at Panama. He crossed the Isthmus, and in the course of a year or two made his way up through Mexico to Texas, then a Spanish possession. In Mexico City he fought two duels—was wounded in one and killed his man in the other.

About 1812 he was in New Orleans, and there is some basis for the belief that he commanded a privateer in the war with England. There is no doubt that he was in the battle of New Orleans, and by that time was on cordial terms with Jackson—although Jackson was much the elder, the two were kindred spirits. In New Orleans he met the girl whom he married (after a whirlwind courtship, I fancy!) Her given-name was Dolores; her family Spanish. He was now about thirty years old.

Their matrimonial experience was probably far from being tame and uneventful. He must have been a hard man to manage;and she hardly qualified to exercise judicious management. He seems to have been well supplied with money, and treated her generously from that point of view; but their temperaments clashed: they quarreled and made up; he never brought her to New England, but at the time of the Seminole War they were residing in Baltimore, and it was there that she gave birth to a child, which died in infancy while Captain Heathcote was helping Jackson singe the King of Spain's beard in Florida, and tread on the mighty toes of Great Britain. Dolores does not appear afterward in the story. I incline to think she rejoined her family in New Orleans.

And then comes that interval of mystery! And I, exactly a century later, am in London as he was, walk the streets and view the scenes that he knew, and am doing my best to get in touch with him! Outwardly alien from him as the poles, I feel a bond between us that unites us closer than twin-brotherhood! It sounds absurd, and maybe pure illusion, but I record my belief for what it's worth.

Something happened to him right in this neighborhood, that changed him vitally and lastingly. The more I mull over it, the more am I disposed to suspect that some love-adventure was at the bottom of it!

London social morality, under the sway and example of the Regent, was not puritanical. In that society he must have met renowned beauties, and they might be disposed to make a pet of the gallant young American. What more likely than that he lost his heart to one of them? In that case, anything might happen! If the lady of his choice proved less than adamant—and the chances are she would!—discovery and exposure may well have followed.

The English won't stand for an open esclandre—if lovers stay under the rose they are not meddled with; but if they emerge they must pay the costs. If the intrigue had not gone too far—if it was stopped, say, on the brink of an elopement—the lady would probably be removed out of harm's way. Had it come to a duel, news of it could hardly have failed to leak out, and the riddle I am puzzling over would have been answered long since. As it is, I grope in thick darkness!

Meanwhile I find the old London newspapers—especially the advertisements—rather fascinating. Here is the life and atmosphere of the time, as if I were back in the era of the "First Gentleman of Europe, In the Morning Post, every day, there is a paragraph under the title. "Court Circular." It briefly records the doings of royalty—at least the visible and trivial ones. "The Prince Regent, accompanied by ladies and gentlemen of his entourage, walked yesterday on the slopes of Windsor Palace." Where does he walk to-day, and in what company?

Under the heading, "Parliament," we are told that Lord Canning, replying to an interrogatory from the front opposition bench, declared that the posture of the Florida incident had undergone no alteration. This must refer to the Seminole War, and preceded the arrival in London of my ancestor. But the "Personal Notices" are more interesting—they give rein to the imagination. "Lady Rowena Grey, of Ormiston, lost her fan on the way home from the performance at the Drury Lane Theater." "The Publisher begs to announce a poem—'Endymion'—written by Mr. John Keats." "On the Banks of the Thames, near Twickenham, a small, well-appointed Villa is to lease on reasonable Terms." "A Private Gentleman will lend all or Part of Five Hundred Pounds on proper Security." "The Concert at which A. was to appear has been postponed till Tuesday . 5 o'ck [sic]." "Ayub, the Moorish Sorcerer, gives Advice daily from Nine Morning to Six Evening, or by Private Appointment." "A Letter awaits A. at the usual Place. L." And so on inimitably.

As I pore over these scraps I hear the early nineteenth century existence humming as busily as to-day, preoccupied with itself. I see women in high-waisted frocks, through the diaphanous skirts of which their garter-buckles sparkle; gentlemen in colored coats and trousers strapped under their boots, and funny truncated-cone hats perched on their abundant hair; coaches trundling on heavy wheels and swinging on huge springs, with coachmen and footmen bewigged and powdered.

Is that George Bryan, better known as Beau Brummel, pacing down the Row with a long cane and a lorgnette? No, it must be some imitator—the great Beau was forced into exile at Calais a year or more ago. But here comes a splendid cavalcade, with H. R. H. the Prince Regent at its head, uniformed and plumed, and bowing to the pretty lady in the coach—a compliment little apt to improve her reputation! And yonder, jogging easily along on his black barb, with his heroic nose and his enigmatic smile—here is the great duke himself! The crowd makes way for him and does him reverence; they will never cease to honor the conqueror of Bonaparte!

How little do we think of all these fine folks now—almost as little as they thought of us; yet in their own eyes they were as real and important as we are in ours—they, who now are nothing, as we in our turn shall soon be nothing! But as I read these old newspapers, which they in their day read, I hear their stir and feel their reality!

There was one paragraph in the Morning Post which I was impelled to copy out in full. I can give no reasonable excuse for doing it. It's ten thousand to one that it possesses no significance for me. "Asgard" has a Scandinavian look, and I get no Scandinavian vibration from the "E. A. A." on my window-shutter, nor from the lovely, undefined presence that seems to pervade my apartment. But I have associated that presence with an idea of singing. I don't hear her sing, but I feel she is a singer. I can't, somehow, imagine her as anything else! And her last name must begin with A. (I wonder whether it's her married name. I have an impression that it is! Here's the paragraph:

That's all! But when I shut my eyes I can almost see a slender, upright figure, with a laughing sparkle in her eyes, standing up before the group of lords and ladies, and singing—singing! I believe she wore a black silk frock trimmed with blue, and her neck and arms were wonderfully white, and she had auburn hair! Oh, how she sang!