The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Rivermouth Romance, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: A Rivermouth Romance Author: Thomas Bailey Aldrich Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23358] Last Updated: March 3, 2018 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE *** Produced by David Widger
“Curly gold locks cover foolish brains,
Billing and cooing is all your cheer;
Sighing and singing of midnight strains,
Under Bonnybell's window panes,—
Wait till you come to Forty Year!”
In one sense Margaret's husband had come to forty year—she
was forty to a day.
Mrs. Margaret O'Rourke, with the baddish cat following close at her heels,
entered the Bilkins mansion, reached her chamber in the attic without
being intercepted, and there laid aside her finery. Two or three times,
while arranging her more humble attire, she paused to take a look at the
marriage certificate, which she had deposited between the leaves of her
Prayer-Book, and on each occasion held that potent document upside down;
for Margaret's literary culture was of the severest order, and excluded
the art of reading.
The breakfast was late that morning. As Mrs. O'Rourke set the coffee-urn
in front of Mrs. Bilkins and flanked Mr. Bilkins with the broiled mackerel
and buttered toast, Mrs. O'Rourke's conscience smote her. She afterwards
declared that when she saw the two sitting there so innocent-like, not
dreaming of the comether she had put upon them, she secretly and
unbeknownst let a few tears fall into the cream-pitcher. Whether or not it
was this material expression of Margaret's penitence that spoiled the
coffee does not admit of inquiry; but the coffee was bad. In fact, the
whole breakfast was a comedy of errors.
It was a blessed relief to Margaret when the meal was ended. She retired
in a cold perspiration to the penetralia of the kitchen, and it was
remarked by both Mr. and Mrs. Bilkins that those short flights of vocalism—apropos
of the personal charms of one Kate Kearney who lived on the banks of
Killarney—which ordinarily issued from the direction of the scullery
were unheard that forenoon.
The town clock was striking eleven, and the antiquated timepiece on the
staircase (which never spoke but it dropped pearls and crystals, like the
fairy in the story) was lisping the hour, when there came three tremendous
knocks at the street door. Mrs. Bilkins, who was dusting the brass-mounted
chronometer in the hall, stood transfixed, with arm uplifted. The
admirable old lady had for years been carrying on a guerilla warfare with
itinerant venders of furniture polish, and pain-killer, and crockery
cement, and the like. The effrontery of the triple knock convinced her the
enemy was at her gates—possibly that dissolute creature with
twenty-four sheets of note-paper and twenty-four envelopes for fifteen
cents.
Mrs. Bilkins swept across the hall, and opened the door with a jerk. The
suddenness of the movement was apparently not anticipated by the person
outside, who, with one arm stretched feebly towards the receding knocker,
tilted gently forward, and rested both hands on the threshold in an
attitude which was probably common enough with our ancestors of the Simian
period, but could never have been considered graceful. By an effort that
testified to the excellent condition of his muscles, the person instantly
righted himself, and stood swaying unsteadily on his toes and heels, and
smiling rather vaguely on Mrs. Bilkins.
It was a slightly-built but well-knitted young fellow, in the not
unpicturesque garb of our marine service. His woollen cap, pitched forward
at an acute angle with his nose, showed the back part of a head thatched
with short yellow hair, which had broken into innumerable curls of painful
tightness. On his ruddy cheeks a sparse sandy beard was making a timid début.
Add to this a weak, good-natured mouth, a pair of devil-may-care blue
eyes, and the fact that the man was very drunk, and you have a
pre-Raphaelite portrait—we may as well say it at once—of Mr.
Larry O'Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of the United
States sloop-of-war Santee.
The man was a total stranger to Mrs. Bilkins; but the instant she caught
sight of the double white anchors embroidered on the lapels of his jacket,
she unhesitatingly threw back the door, which with great presence of mind
she had partly closed.
A drunken sailor standing on the step of the Bilkins mansion was no
novelty. The street, as we have stated, led down to the wharves, and
sailors were constantly passing. The house abutted directly on the street;
the granite door-step was almost flush with the sidewalk, and the huge
old-fashioned brass knocker—seemingly a brazen hand that had been
cut off at the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to
malefactors—extended itself in a kind of grim appeal to everybody.
It seemed to possess strange fascinations for all seafaring folk; and when
there was a man-of-war in port the rat-tat-tat of that knocker would
frequently startle the quiet neighborhood long after midnight. There
appeared to be an occult understanding between it and the blue-jackets.
Years ago there was a young Bilkins, one Pendexter Bilkins—a sad
losel, we fear—who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and
fell overboard in a gale off Hatteras. “Lost at sea,” says the chubby
marble slab in the Old South Burying-Ground, “ætat 18.” Perhaps that is
why no blue-jacket, sober or drunk, was ever repulsed from the door of the
Bilkins mansion.
Of course Mrs. Bilkins had her taste in the matter, and preferred them
sober. But as this could not always be, she tempered her wind, so to
speak, to the shorn lamb. The flushed, prematurely old face that now
looked up at her moved the good lady's pity.
“What do you want?” she asked kindly.
“Me wife.”
“There 's no wife for you here,” said Mrs. Bilkins, somewhat taken aback.
“His wife!” she thought; “it's a mother the poor boy stands in need of.”
“Me wife,” repeated Mr. O'Rourke, “for betther or for worse.”
“You had better go away,” said Mrs. Bilkins, bridling up, “or it will be
the worse for you.”
“To have and to howld,” continued Mr. O'Rourke, wandering retrospectively
in the mazes of the marriage service, “to have and to howld, till death—bad
luck to him!—takes one or the ither of us.”
“You 're a blasphemous creature,” said Mrs. Bilkins, severely.
“Thim 's the words his riverince spake this mornin', standin' foreninst
us,” explained Mr. O'Rourke. “I stood here, see, and me jew'l stood there,
and the howly chaplain beyont.”
And Mr. O'Rourke with a wavering forefinger drew a diagram of the
interesting situation on the door-step.
“Well,” returned Mrs. Bilkins, “if you 're a married man, all I have to
say is, there's a pair of fools instead of one. You had better be off; the
person you want does n't live here.”
“Bedad, thin, but she does.”
“Lives here?”
“Sorra a place else.”
“The man's crazy,” said Mrs. Bilkins to herself.
While she thought him simply drunk she was not in the least afraid; but
the idea that she was conversing with a madman sent a chill over her. She
reached back her hand preparatory to shutting the door, when Mr. O'Rourke,
with an agility that might have been expected from his previous
gymnastics, set one foot on the threshold and frustrated the design.
“I want me wife,” he said sternly.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bilkins had gone up town, and there was no one in the
house except Margaret, whose pluck was not to be depended on. The case was
urgent. With the energy of despair Mrs. Bilkins suddenly placed the toe of
her boot against Mr. O'Rourke's invading foot, and pushed it away. The
effect of this attack was to cause Mr. O'Rourke to describe a complete
circle on one leg, and then sit down heavily on the threshold. The lady
retreated to the hat-stand, and rested her hand mechanically on the handle
of a blue cotton umbrella. Mr. O'Rourke partly turned his head and smiled
upon her with conscious superiority. At this juncture a third actor
appeared on the scene, evidently a friend of Mr. O'Rourke, for he
addressed that gentleman as “a spalpeen,” and told him to go home.
“Divil an inch,” replied the spalpeen; but he got himself off the
threshold, and returned his position on the step.
“It's only Larry, mum,” said the man, touching his forelock politely; “as
dacent a lad as iver lived, when he 's not in liquor; an' I 've known him
to be sober for days to-gither,” he added, reflectively. “He don't mane a
ha'p'orth o' harum, but jist now he's not quite in his right moind.”
“I should think not,” said Mrs. Bilkins, turning from the speaker to Mr.
O'Rourke, who had seated himself gravely on the scraper, and was weeping.
“Hasn't the man any friends?”
“Too many of 'em, mum, an' it's along wid dhrinkin' toasts wid 'em that
Larry got throwed. The punch that spalpeen has dhrunk this day would amaze
ye. He give us the slip awhiles ago, bad 'cess to him, an' come up here.
Did n't I tell ye, Larry, not to be afther ringin' at the owld gintleman's
knocker? Ain't ye got no sinse at all?”
“Misther Donnehugh,” responded Mr. O'Rourke with great dignity, “ye 're
dhrunk agin.”
Mr. Donnehugh, who had not taken more than thirteen ladles of rum-punch,
disdained to reply directly.
“He's a dacent lad enough”—this to Mrs. Bilkins—“but his head
is wake. Whin he's had two sups o' whiskey he belaves he's dhrunk a bar'l
full. A gill o' wather out of a jimmy-john 'd fuddle him, mum.”
“Is n't there anybody to look after him?”
“No, mum, he's an orphan; his father and mother live in the owld counthry,
an' a fine hale owld couple they are.”
“Has n't he any family in the town”—
“Sure, mum, he has a family; was n't he married this blessed mornin'?”
“He said so.”
“Indade, thin, he was—the pore divil!”
“And the—the person?” inquired Mrs. Bilkins.
“Is it the wife, ye mane?”
“Yes, the wife: where is she?”
“Well, thin, mum,” said Mr. Donnehugh, “it's yerself can answer that.”
“I?” exclaimed Mrs. Bilkins. “Good heavens! this man's as crazy as the
other!”
“Begorra, if anybody's crazy, it's Larry, for it's Larry has married
Margaret.”
“What Margaret?” cried Mrs. Bilkins, with a start.
“Margaret Callaghan, sure.”
“Our Margaret? Do you mean to say that OUR Margaret has married
that—that good-for-nothing, inebriated wretch!”
“It's a civil tongue the owld lady has, any way,” remarked Mr. O'Rourke,
critically, from the scraper.
Mrs. Bilkins's voice during the latter part of the colloquy had been
pitched in a high key; it rung through the hall and penetrated to the
kitchen, where Margaret was thoughtfully wiping the breakfast things. She
paused with a half-dried saucer in her hand, and listened. In a moment
more she stood, with bloodless face and limp figure, leaning against the
banister, behind Mrs. Bilkins.
“Is it there ye are, me jew'l!” cried Mr. O'Rourke, discovering her.
Mrs. Bilkins wheeled upon Margaret.
“Margaret Callaghan, isthat thing your husband?”
“Ye-yes, mum,” faltered Mrs. O'Rourke, with a woful lack of spirit.
“Then take it away!” cried Mrs. Bilkins.
Margaret, with a slight flush on either cheek, glided past Mrs. Bilkins,
and the heavy oak door closed with a bang, as the gates of Paradise must
have closed of old upon Adam and Eve.
“Come!” said Margaret, taking Mr. O'Rourke by the hand; and the two
wandered forth upon their wedding journey down Anchor Street, with all the
world before them where to choose. They chose to halt at the small, shabby
tenement-house by the river, through the doorway of which the bridal pair
disappeared with a reeling, eccentric gait; for Mr. O'Rourke's
intoxication seemed to have run down his elbow, and communicated itself to
Margaret. O Hymen! who burnest precious gums and scented woods in thy
torch at the melting of aristocratic hearts, with what a pitiful penny-dip
thou hast lighted up our little back-street romance!
“Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, 't were to consider
too curiously to consider so.
Mr. Bilkins had come to adopt Margaret's explanation of O'Rourke's
disappearance. He was undoubtedly drowned; had most likely drowned
himself. The hat picked up on the wharf was strong circumstantial evidence
in that direction. But one feature of the case staggered Mr. Bilkins.
O'Rourke's violin had also disappeared. Now, it required no great effort
to imagine a man throwing himself overboard under the influence of mania
à potu; but it was difficult to conceive of a man committing
violinicide! If the fellow went to drown himself, why did he take his
fiddle with him? He might as well have taken an umbrella or a German
student-lamp. This question troubled Mr. Bilkins a good deal first and
last. But one thing was indisputable: the man was gone—and had
evidently gone by water.
It was now that Margaret invested her husband with charms of mind and
person not calculated to make him recognizable by any one who had ever had
the privilege of knowing him in the faulty flesh. She eliminated all his
bad qualities, and projected from her imagination a Mr. O'Rourke as he
ought to have been—a species of seraphic being mixed up in some way
with a violin; and to this ideal she erected a costly headstone in the
suburban cemetery. “It would be a proud day for Larry,” observed Margaret
contemplatively, “if he could rest his oi on the illegant monumint I 've
put up to him.” If Mr. O'Rourke could have read the inscription on it, he
would never have suspected his own complicity in the matter.
But there the marble stood, sacred to his memory; and soon the snow came
down from the gray sky and covered it, and the invisible snow of weeks and
months drifted down on Margaret's heart, and filled up its fissures, and
smoothed off the sharp angles of its grief; and there was peace upon it.
Not but she sorrowed for Larry at times. Yet life had a relish to it
again; she was free, though she did not look at it in that light; she was
happier in a quiet fashion than she had ever been, though she would not
have acknowledged it to herself. She wondered that she had the heart to
laugh when the ice-man made love to her. Perhaps she was conscious of
something comically incongruous in the warmth of a gentleman who spent all
winter in cutting ice, and all summer in dealing it out to his customers.
She had not the same excuse for laughing at the baker; yet she laughed
still more merrily at him when he pressed her hand over the steaming loaf
of brown-bread, delivered every Saturday morning at the scullery door.
Both these gentlemen had known Margaret many years, yet neither of them
had valued her very highly until another man came along and married her. A
widow, it would appear, is esteemed in some sort as a warranted article,
being stamped with the maker's name.
There was even a third lover in prospect; for according to the gossip of
the town, Mr. Donnehugh was frequently to be seen of a Sunday afternoon
standing in the cemetery and regarding Mr. O'Rourke's headstone with
unrestrained satisfaction.
A year had passed away, and certain bits of color blossoming among
Margaret's weeds indicated that the winter of her mourning was oyer. The
ice-man and the baker were hating each other cordially, and Mrs. Bilkins
was daily expecting it would be discovered before night that Margaret had
married one or both of them. But to do Margaret justice, she was faithful
in thought and deed to the memory of O'Rourke—not the O'Rourke who
disappeared so strangely, but the O'Rourke who never existed.
“D' ye think, mum,” she said one day to Mrs. Bilkins, as that lady was
adroitly sounding her on the ice question—“d' ye think I 'd
condescind to take up wid the likes o' him, or the baker either, afther
sich a man as Larry?”
The rectified and clarified O'Rourke was a permanent wonder to Mr.
Bilkins, who bore up under the bereavement with noticeable resignation.
“Peggy is right,” said the old gentleman, who was superintending the
burning out of the kitchen flue. “She won't find another man like Larry
O'Rourke in a hurry.”
“Thrue for ye, Mr. Bilkins,” answered Margaret. “Maybe there's as good
fish in the say as iver was caught, but I don't be-lave it, all the same.”
As good fish in the sea! The words recalled to Margaret the nature of her
loss, and she went on with her work in silence.
“Larry O'Rourke, seaman, splinter wound in the leg.
Not serious.”
That splinter flew far. It glanced from Mr. O'Rourke's leg, went plumb
through the Bilkins mansion, and knocked over a small marble slab in the
Old South Burying Ground.
If a ghost had dropped in familiarly to breakfast, the constraint and
consternation of the Bilkins family could not have been greater. How was
the astounding intelligence to be broken to Margaret? Her explosive Irish
nature made the task one of extreme delicacy. Mrs. Bilkins flatly declared
herself incapable of undertaking it. Mr. Bilkins, with many misgivings as
to his fitness, assumed the duty; for it would never do to have the news
sprung suddenly upon Margaret by people outside.
As Mrs. O'Rourke was clearing away the breakfast things, Mr. Bilkins, who
had lingered near the window with the newspaper in his hand, coughed once
or twice in an unnatural way to show that he was not embarrassed, and
began to think that may be it would be best to tell Margaret after dinner.
Mrs. Bilkins fathomed his thought with that intuition which renders women
terrible, and sent across the room an eye-telegram to this effect, “Now is
your time.”
“There 's been another battle down South, Margaret,” said the old
gentleman presently, folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket. “A
sea-fight this time.”
“Sure, an' they 're allus fightin' down there.”
“But not always with so little damage. There was only one man wounded on
our side.”
“Pore man! It's sorry we oughter be for his wife an' childer, if he's got
any.”
“Not badly wounded, you will understand, Margaret—not at all
seriously wounded; only a splinter in the leg.”
“Faith, thin, a splinter in the leg is no pleasant thing in itself.”
“A mere scratch,” said Mr. Bilkins lightly, as if he were constantly in
the habit of going about with a splinter in his own leg, and found it
rather agreeable. “The odd part of the matter is the man's first name. His
first name was Larry.”
Margaret nodded, as one should say, There's a many Larrys in the world.
“But the oddest part of it,” continued Mr. Bilkins, in a carelessly
sepulchral voice, “is the man's last name.”
Something in the tone of his voice made Margaret look at him, and
something in the expression of his face caused the blood to fly from
Margaret's cheek.
“The man's last name!” she repeated, wonderingly.
“Yes, his last name—O'Rourke.”
“D'ye mane it?” shrieked Margaret—“d' ye mane it? Glory to God! O
worra! worra!”
“Well, Ezra,” said Mrs. Bilking, in one of those spasms of base
ingratitude to which even the most perfect women are liable, “you 've made
nice work of it. You might as well have knocked her down with an axe!”
“But, my dear”—
“Oh, bother!—my smelling-bottle, quick!—second bureau drawer—left-hand
side.”
Joy never kills; it is a celestial kind of hydrogen of which it seems
impossible to get too much at one inhalation. In an hour Margaret was able
to converse with comparative calmness on the resuscitation of Larry
O'Rourke, whom the firing of a cannon had brought to the surface as if he
had been in reality a drowned body.
Now that the whole town was aware of Mr. O'Rourke's fate, his friend Mr.
Donne-hugh came forward with a statement that would have been of some
interest at an earlier period, but was of no service as matters stood,
except so far as it assisted in removing from Mr. Bilkins's mind a passing
doubt as to whether the Larry O'Rourke of the telegraphic reports was
Margaret's scape-grace of a husband. Mr. Donnehugh had known all along
that O'Rourke had absconded to Boston by a night train and enlisted in the
navy. It was the possession of this knowledge that had made it impossible
for Mr. Donnehugh to look at Mr. O'Rourke's gravestone without grinning.
At Margaret's request, and in Margaret's name, Mr. Bilkins wrote three or
four letters to O'Rourke, and finally succeeded in extorting an epistle
from that gentleman, in which he told Margaret to cheer up, that his
fortune was as good as made, and that the day would come when she should
ride through the town in her own coach, and no thanks to old flint-head,
who pretended to be so fond of her. Mr. Bilkins tried to conjecture who
was meant by old flint-head, but was obliged to give it up. Mr. O'Rourke
furthermore informed Margaret that he had three hundred dollars
prize-money coming to him, and broadly intimated that when he got home he
intended to have one of the most extensive blow-outs ever witnessed in
Rivermouth.
“Och!” laughed Margaret, “that's jist Larry over agin. The pore lad was
allus full of his nonsense an' spirits.”
“That he was,” said Mr. Bilkins, dryly.
Content with the fact that her husband was in the land of the living,
Margaret gave herself no trouble over the separation. O'Rourke had shipped
for three years; one third of his term of service was past, and two years
more, God willing, would see him home again. This was Margaret's view of
it. Mr. Bilkins's view of it was not so cheerful The prospect of Mr.
O'Rourke's ultimate return was anything but enchanting. Mr. Bilkins was by
no means disposed to kill the fatted calf. He would much rather have
killed the Prodigal Son. However, there was always this chance: he might
never come back.
The tides rose and fell at the Rivermouth wharves; the summer moonlight
and the winter snow, in turn, bleached its quiet streets; and the two
years had nearly gone by. In the mean time nothing had been heard of
O'Rourke. If he ever received the five or six letters sent to him, he did
not fatigue himself by answering them.
“Larry's all right,” said hopeful Margaret. “If any harum had come to the
gossoon, we'd have knowed it. It's the bad news that travels fast.”
Mr. Bilkins was not so positive about that. It had taken a whole year to
find out that O'Rourke had not drowned himself.
The period of Mr. O'Rourke's enlistment had come to an end. Two months
slipped by, and he had neglected to brighten River-mouth with his
presence. There were many things that might have detained him,
difficulties in getting his prize-papers or in drawing his pay; but there
was no reason why he might not have written. The days were beginning to
grow long to Margaret, and vague forebodings of misfortune possessed her.
Perhaps we had better look up Mr. O'Rourke.
He had seen some rough times, during those three years, and some harder
work than catching cunners at the foot of Anchor Street, or setting out
crocuses in Mr. Bil-kins's back garden. He had seen battles and shipwreck,
and death in many guises; but they had taught him nothing, as the sequel
will show. With his active career in the navy we shall not trouble
ourselves; we take him up at a date a little prior to the close of his
term of service.
Several months before, he had been transferred from the blockading
squadron to a gun-boat attached to the fleet operating against the forts
defending New Orleans. The forts had fallen, the fleet had passed on to
the city, and Mr. O'Rourke's ship lay off in the stream, binding up her
wounds. In three days he would receive his discharge, and the papers
entitling him to a handsome amount of prize-money in addition to his pay.
With noble contempt for so much good fortune, Mr. O'Rourke dropped over
the bows of the gun-boat one evening and managed to reach the levee. In
the city he fell in with some soldiers, and, being of a convivial nature,
caroused with them that night, and next day enlisted in a cavalry
regiment.
Desertion in the face of the enemy—for, though the city lay under
Federal guns, it was still hostile enough—involved the heaviest
penalties. O'Rourke was speedily arrested with other deserters, tried by
court-martial, and sentenced to death.
The intelligence burst like a shell upon the quiet household in Anchor
Street, listening daily for the sound of Larry O'Rourke's footstep on the
threshold. It was a heavy load for Margaret to bear, after all those years
of patient vigil. But the load was to be lightened for her. In
consideration of O'Rourke's long service, and in view of the fact that his
desertion so near the expiration of his time was an absurdity, the Good
President commuted his sentence to imprisonment for life, with loss of
prize-money and back pay. Mr. O'Rourke was despatched North, and placed in
Moyamensing Prison.
If joy could kill, Margaret would have been a dead woman the day these
tidings reached Rivermouth; and Mr. Bilkins himself would have been in a
critical condition, for, though he did not want O'Rourke shot or hanged,
he was delighted to have him permanently shelved.
After the excitement was over, and this is always the trying time,
Margaret accepted the situation philosophically.
“The pore lad's out o' harum's rache, any way,” she reflected. “He can't
be git-tin' into hot wather now, and that's a fact. And maybe after
awhiles they 'll let him go agin. They let out murtherers and thaves and
sich like, and Larry's done no hurt to nobody but hisself.”
Margaret was inclined to be rather severe on President Lincoln for taking
away Larry's prize-money. The impression was strong on her mind that the
money went into Mr. Lincoln's private exchequer.
“I would n't wonder if Misthress Lincoln had a new silk gownd or two this
fall,” Margaret would remark, sarcastically.
The prison rules permitted Mr. O'Rourke to receive periodical
communications “from his friends outside.” Once every quarter Mr. Bilkins
wrote him a letter, and in the interim Margaret kept him supplied with
those doleful popular ballads, printed on broadsides, which one sees
pinned up for sale on the iron railings of city churchyards, and seldom
anywhere else. They seem the natural exhalations of the mould and pathos
of such places, but we have a suspicion that they are written by
sentimental young undertakers. Though these songs must have been a solace
to Mr. O'Rourke in his captivity, he never so far forgot himself as to
acknowledge their receipt. It was only through the kindly chaplain of the
prison that Margaret was now and then advised of the well-being of her
husband.
Towards the close of that year the great O'Rourke himself did condescend
to write one letter. As this letter has never been printed, and as it is
the only specimen extant of Mr. O'Rourke's epistolary manner, we lay it
before the reader verbatim et literatim:—
febuary. 1864 mi belovid wife
fur the luv of God sind mee pop gose the wezel.
yours till deth
. larry O rourke.
“Pop goes the Weasel” was sent to him, and Mr. Bilkins ingeniously slipped
into the same envelope “The Drunkard's Death” and “Beware of the Bowl,”
two spirited compositions well calculated to exert a salutary influence
over a man imprisoned for life.
There is nothing in this earthly existence so uncertain as what seems to
be a certainty. To all appearances, the world outside of Moyamensing
Prison was forever a closed book to O'Rourke. But the Southern Confederacy
collapsed, the General Amnesty Proclamation was issued, cell doors were
thrown open; and one afternoon Mr. Larry O'Rourke, with his head neatly
shaved, walked into the Bilkins kitchen and frightened Margaret nearly out
of her skin.
Mr. O'Rourke's summing up of his case was characteristic: “I 've been kilt
in battle, hanged by the court-martial, put into the lock-up for life, and
here I am, bedad, not a ha'p'orth the worse for it.”
None the worse for it, certainly, and none the better. By no stretch of
magical fiction can we make an angel of him. He is not at all the material
for an apotheosis. It was not for him to reform and settle down, and
become a respectable, oppressed tax-payer. His conduct in Rivermouth,
after his return, was a repetition of his old ways. Margaret all but broke
down under the tests to which he put her affections, and came at last to
wish that Larry had never got out of Moyamensing Prison.
If any change had taken place in Mr. O'Rourke, it showed itself in
occasional fits of sullenness towards Margaret. It was in one of these
moods that he slouched his hat over his brows, and told her she need not
wait dinner for him.
It will be a cold dinner, if Margaret has kept it waiting; for two years
have gone by since that day, and O'Rourke has not come home.
Possibly he is off on a whaling voyage; possibly the swift maelstrom has
dragged him down; perhaps he is lifting his hand to knock at the door of
the Bilkins mansion as we pen these words. But Margaret does not watch for
him impatiently any more. There are strands of gray in her black hair. She
has had her romance.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Rivermouth Romance, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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