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+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
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
+
+By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+
+Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front
+door of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town
+of Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
+door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not
+open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately
+closed it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an
+embarrassed air on the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive glance
+up at the second-story windows, passed hastily down the street towards
+the river, keeping close to the fences and garden walls on her left.
+
+There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements, though
+there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She
+was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing
+low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly
+meaningless if the features had not been emphasized--italicized, so to
+speak--by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would
+have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer
+to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her glory
+was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She
+wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow
+crape bonnet profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
+artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly
+risen sun, ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point
+blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an
+imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
+spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden
+walls and fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near
+the wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning
+splendor, if so bold a figure is permissible.
+
+Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine moved slowly up Anchor
+Street, fingered noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on either
+side, and drained the heeltaps of dew which had been left from the
+revels of the fairies overnight in the cups of the morning-glories.
+Not a soul was stirring yet in this part of the town, though the
+Rivermouthians are such early birds that not a worm may be said to
+escape them. By and by one of the brown Holland shades at one of the
+upper windows of the Bilkins mansion--the house from which Miss Margaret
+had emerged--was drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral nightcap looked
+out on the sunny street. Not a living creature was to be seen, save the
+dissipated family cat--a very Lovelace of a cat that was not allowed a
+night-key--who was sitting on the curbstone opposite, waiting for
+the hall door to be opened. Three quarters of an hour, we repeat, had
+passed, when Mrs. Margaret O'Rourke, _née_ Callaghan, issued from the
+small, dingy house by the river, and regained the door-step of the
+Bilkins mansion in the same stealthy fashion in which she had left it.
+
+Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr.
+Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of
+the premises before the family were up, and got herself
+married--surreptitiously and artfully married, as if matrimony were an
+indictable offence.
+
+And something of an offence it was in this instance. In the first
+place Margaret Callaghan had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins
+family, and the old people--there were no children now--had rewarded
+this long service by taking Margaret into their affections. It was a
+piece of subtile ingratitude for her to marry without admitting the
+worthy couple to her confidence. In the next place, Margaret had married
+a man some eighteen years younger than herself. That was the young man's
+lookout, you say. We hold it was Margaret that was to blame. What does
+a young blade of twenty-two know? Not half so much as he thinks he does.
+His exhaust-less ignorance at that age is a discovery which is left for
+him to make in his prime.
+
+     “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, _is_ that 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!
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It had been no part of Margaret's plan to acknowledge the marriage so
+soon. Though on pleasure bent, she had a frugal mind. She had invested
+in a husband with a view of laying him away for a rainy day--that is to
+say, for such time as her master and mistress should cease to need her
+services; for she had promised on more than one occasion to remain with
+the old people as long as they lived. Indeed, if Mr. O'Rourke had come
+to her and said in so many words, “The day you marry me you must leave
+the Bilkins family,” there is very little doubt but Margaret would
+have let that young sea-monster slip back unmated, so far as she was
+concerned, into his native element. The contingency never entered into
+her calculations. She intended that the ship which had brought Ulysses
+to her island should take him off again after a decent interval of
+honeymoon; then she would confess all to Mrs. Bilkins, and be forgiven,
+and Mr. Bilkins would not cancel that clause supposed to exist in his
+will bequeathing two first-mortgage bonds of the Squedunk E. B. Co. to a
+certain faithful servant. In the mean while she would add each month to
+her store in the coffers of the Rivermouth Savings Bank; for Calypso had
+a neat sum to her credit on the books of that provident institution.
+
+But this could not be now. The volatile bridegroom had upset the
+wisely conceived plan, and “all the fat was in the fire,” as Margaret
+philosophically put it. Mr. O'Rourke had been fully instructed in the
+part he was to play, and, to do him justice, had honestly intended to
+play it; but destiny was against him. It may be observed that destiny
+and Mr. O'Rourke were not on very friendly terms.
+
+After the ceremony had been performed and Margaret had stolen back to
+the Bilkins mansion, as related, Mr. O'Rourke with his own skilful hands
+had brewed a noble punch for the wedding guests. Standing at the head of
+the table and stirring the pungent mixture in a small wash-tub purchased
+for the occasion, Mr. O'Rourke came out in full flower. His flow of
+wit, as he replenished the glasses, was as racy and seemingly as
+inexhaustible as the punch itself. When Mrs. McLaughlin held out her
+glass, inadvertently upside down, for her sixth ladleful, Mr. O'Rourke
+gallantly declared it should be filled if he had to stand on his head
+to do it. The elder Miss O'Leary whispered to Mrs. Connally that Mr.
+O'Rourke was “a perfic gintleman,” and the men in a body pronounced
+him a bit of the raal shamrock. If Mr. O'Rourke was happy in brewing a
+punch, he was happier in dispensing it, and happiest of all in drinking
+a great deal of it himself. He toasted Mrs. Finnigan, the landlady, and
+the late lamented Finnigan, the father, whom he had never seen, and Miss
+Biddy Finnigan, the daughter, and a young toddling Finnigan, who was at
+large in shockingly scant raiment. He drank to the company individually
+and collectively, drank to the absent, drank to a tin-peddler who
+chanced to pass the window, and indeed was in that propitiatory mood
+when he would have drunk to the health of each separate animal that came
+out of the Ark. It was in the midst of the confusion and applause which
+followed his song, “The Wearing of the Grane,” that Mr. O'Rourke, the
+punch being all gone, withdrew unobserved, and went in quest of Mrs.
+O'Rourke--with what success the reader knows.
+
+*****
+
+According to the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles
+Henry, after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and
+tribulations and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like
+Christian's burden. The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, but, like
+some of those models in the Patent Office at Washington, it fails to
+work. Charles Henry does not go on sitting at Laura's feet and reading
+Tennyson to her forever: the rent of the cottage by the sea falls due
+with prosaic regularity; there are bakers, and butchers, and babies, and
+tax-collectors, and doctors, and undertakers, and sometimes gentlemen
+of the jury, to be attended to. Wedded life is not one long amatory poem
+with recurrent rhymes of love and dove, and kiss and bliss. Yet when
+the average sentimental novelist has supplied his hero and heroine with
+their bridal outfit and arranged that little matter of the marriage
+certificate, he usually turns off the gas, puts up his shutters, and
+saunters off with his hands in his pockets, as if the day's business
+were over. But we, who are honest dealers in real life and disdain to
+give short weight, know better. The business is by no means over; it is
+just begun. It is not Christian throwing off his pack for good and all,
+but Christian taking up a load heavier and more difficult than any he
+has carried.
+
+If Margaret Callaghan, when she meditated matrimony, indulged in any
+roseate dreams, they were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found
+herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home, and face to face with
+the fact that she had a white elephant on her hands. It is not likely
+that Mr. O'Rourke assumed precisely the shape of a white elephant to her
+mental vision; but he was as useless and cumbersome and unmanageable as
+one.
+
+Margaret and Larry's wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs.
+Finnigan's establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up
+housekeeping in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept
+the floor of her apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on
+the dresser as bright as your lady-love's eyes, and the cooking-stove as
+neat as the machinery on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the
+stove with lamp-black she was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt
+the palate of her marine monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament,
+she went about her work singing softly to herself at times, and would
+have been very happy that first week if Mr. O'Rourke had known a sober
+moment. But Mr. O'Rourke showed an exasperating disposition to keep
+up festivities. At the end of ten days, however, he toned down, and
+at Margaret's suggestion that he had better be looking about for some
+employment he rigged up a fishing-pole, and set out with an injured air
+for the wharf at the foot of the street, where he fished for the rest of
+the day. To sit for hours blinking in the sun, waiting for a cunner to
+come along and take his hook, was as exhaustive a kind of labor as he
+cared to engage in. Though Mr. O'Rourke had recently returned from a
+long cruise, he had not a cent to show. During his first three days
+ashore he had dissipated his three years' pay. The housekeeping expenses
+began eating a hole in Margaret's little fund, the existence of which
+was no sooner known to Mr. O'Rourke than he stood up his fishing-rod in
+one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught nothing but cobwebs.
+
+“Divil a sthroke o' work I 'll do,” said Mr. O'Rourke, “whin we can live
+at aise on our earnin's. Who 'd be afther frettin' hisself, wid money in
+the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?”
+
+And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the
+wharves, and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his
+hands in his pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat
+on the door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the
+passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency
+out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around
+the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a
+feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne'er-do-weels of Rivermouth.
+
+It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From
+all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight
+to array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was
+edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row,
+like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand's wharf, with their
+twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O'Rourke in
+contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as
+it were.
+
+The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice--quite in the
+rough, to be sure--and he played, on the violin like an angel. He did
+not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way,
+just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the
+more pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of
+personal property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or
+three o'clock in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to
+the distraction of all the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and
+innumerable dogs in the distance.
+
+Unfortunately, Mr. O'Rourke's freaks were not always of so innocent a
+complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and
+other spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his
+nocturnal feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door
+of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement
+not wholly disconnected with an interior view of the police-station
+(bridewell is the local term); so it happened that Mr. O'Rourke woke up
+one fine morning and found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in
+the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that the bull's-eye in the glass
+door of The Wee Drop winked at him in an insult-in' manner as he was
+passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent
+ten dollars and costs, which made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank
+account. So Margaret's married life wore on, and all went merry as a
+funeral knell.
+
+After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parcæ,
+had closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down
+on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst
+into tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she
+persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler
+sex are apt to be--to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the
+first vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing,
+which was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in
+the preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are
+necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back
+again. Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when
+he was well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the
+fish-market--for Mr. O'Rourke had long since given over the onerous
+labor of catching dinners--he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she
+liked the change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rourke was good to her.
+
+“Troth, thin, sur,” said Margaret, with a short, dry laugh, “he 's the
+divil's own!”
+
+Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gayety of
+champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr.
+Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
+
+“I 'm afraid, Margaret,” he remarked sorrowfully, “that you are not
+making both ends meet.”
+
+“Begorra, I 'd be glad if I could make one ind meet!” returned Margaret.
+
+With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, Mr. Bilkins gradually drew
+from her the true state of affairs. Mr. O'Rourke was a very bad case
+indeed; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly
+drunk; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would
+not last until winter. Mr. O'Rourke was perpetually coming home with a
+sprained ankle, or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken
+most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove.
+“In short,” as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to
+Mrs. Bilkins, “he had broken all those things which he should n't have
+broken, and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long
+ago--his neck, namely.”
+
+The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins most was this: in spite
+of all, Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart.
+Further than keeping the poor creature up waiting for him until ever
+so much o'clock at night, it did not appear that he treated her
+with personal cruelty. If he had beaten her, perhaps she would have
+worshipped him. It needed only that.
+
+Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr.
+Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan
+was laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that
+convinced him she had made up her mind to adopt it.
+
+“Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof!” cried
+Mrs. Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke took
+up their abode in the Bilkins mansion--Margaret as cook, and Larry as
+gardener.
+
+“I 'm convanient if the owld gintleman is,” had been Mr. O'Rourke's
+remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr. O'Rourke
+had the faintest idea of gardening. He did n't know a tulip from a
+tomato. He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to
+undertake anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability.
+
+Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband for any great botanical
+knowledge; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr. O'Rourke pointed
+to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out of flower, and
+remarked, “Thim 's a nate lot o' pur-taties ye 've got there, sur.” Mr.
+Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr. O'Rourke's skill in
+gardening; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any
+case to make Margaret's lot easier.
+
+Reestablished in her old home, Margaret broke into song again, and
+Mr. O'Rourke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not
+agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature
+has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject
+were heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily, Mr. Bilkins was not without
+a sense of humor, else he would have found Mr. O'Rourke insupportable.
+Just when the old gentleman's patience was about exhausted, the gardener
+would commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but
+loved him for the moment.
+
+“Larry,” said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of
+September, “just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands.”
+
+Mr. O'Rourke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with
+the monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820!
+
+Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober.
+
+“Eight hundred and twenty what?” cried Mr. Bilkins, feeling very warm,
+as he naturally would in so high a temperature.
+
+“Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose, sur.”
+
+“Larry, you 're an idiot.”
+
+This was obviously not to Mr. O'Rourke's taste; for he went out and
+brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of
+numerals running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed, “Add 'em up
+yerself, thin!”
+
+Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr. Bilkins had not spent
+the greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O'Rourke
+into the mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr.
+O'Rourke's method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received
+a lot of a very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that
+morning, turned over to Mr. O'Rourke the duty of planting them. Though
+he had never seen a bulb in his life, Larry unblushingly asserted that
+he had set out thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady of O'Grady Castle,
+“an illegant place intirely, wid tin miles o' garden-walks,” added
+Mr. O'Rourke, crushing Mr. Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble
+flower-beds.
+
+The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done
+his work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles
+and squares on top of the soil.
+
+“Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?” cried Mr. Bilkins,
+wrathfully.
+
+“An' did n't I set 'em out?” expostulated Mr. O'Rourke. “An' ain't they
+a settin' there beautiful?”
+
+“But you should have put them into the ground, stupid!”
+
+“Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how could they iver git out agin?
+Give the little jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!”
+
+For two weeks Mr. O'Rourke conducted himself with comparative propriety;
+that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
+regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious strains
+of music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of
+the north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would
+desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain of.
+
+The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand
+at the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a pretence
+of working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously immediately
+after breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner.
+Nobody knew what he did with himself in the interval, until one day he
+was observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His retreat
+discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part
+of the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of
+temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.
+
+Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman,
+she coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad,
+any way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours
+and hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a
+light in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the
+gravel walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about
+the house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which
+women hide their care.
+
+One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen
+stove. O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but
+not Larry. Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret was
+humming “Kate Kearney” quite merrily. But when her work was done, she
+stole out at the back gate and went in search of him. She scoured the
+neighborhood like a madwoman. O'Rourke had not been at the 'Finnigans'.
+He had not been at The Wee Drop since Monday, and this was Wednesday
+night. Her heart sunk within her when she failed to find him in the
+police-station. Some dreadful thing had happened to him. She came back
+to the house with one hand pressed wearily against her cheek. The dawn
+struggled through the kitchen windows, and fell upon Margaret crouched
+by the stove.
+
+She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr. Bilkins came down she
+confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been home
+for two nights.
+
+“Mayhap he 's drownded hisself,” suggested Margaret, wringing her hands.
+
+“Not he,” said Mr. Bilkins; “he does n't like the taste of water well
+enough.”
+
+“Troth, thin, he does n't,” reflected Margaret, and the reflection
+comforted her.
+
+“At any rate, I 'll go and look him up after breakfast,” said Mr.
+Bilkins. And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth
+with the depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rourke without much
+difficulty. “Come to think of it,” said the old gentleman to himself,
+drawing on his white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor Street
+“_I_ don't want to find him.”
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+But Mr. O'Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins
+directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite
+confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought
+to perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was
+discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in
+Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered
+about town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then
+explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took
+a careful survey of the wharves along the river on his way home. He even
+shook the apple-tree near the stable with a vague hope of bringing
+down Mr. O'Rourke, but brought down nothing except a few winter
+apples, which, being both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad
+representatives of the object of his search.
+
+That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion with
+a straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O'Rourke's, which had been found
+on Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but O'Rourke
+was always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress is not to
+be pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had
+drowned himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen
+overboard while intoxicated.
+
+The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is regulated
+by laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that
+a certain percentage of the earth's population is bound to drown itself
+annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then, that
+Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the
+ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and pleasure
+parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly
+business. But Mr. O'Rourke failed to appear among the flotsam and jetsam
+which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the River-mouth
+wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting
+morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of
+those immense schools of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment
+with the fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod
+or a mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She
+averted her head in making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to
+detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a
+man fall into the sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the
+scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of
+hashed fish?
+
+     “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.
+
+*****
+
+“What--what is it, Ezra?” cried Mrs. Bilkins, changing color, and rising
+hastily from the breakfast table. Her first thought was of apoplexy.
+
+There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed back from his forehead, and
+his eyes fixed vacantly on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held out at
+arm's length before him.
+
+“Good heavens, Ezra! what _is_ the matter?”
+
+Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically, as if he were a great
+wax-doll, and somebody had pulled his wire.
+
+“Can't you speak, Ezra?”
+
+His lips opened, and moved inarticulately; then he pointed a rigid
+finger, in the manner of a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper,
+which he held up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his shoulder. When she
+had read it she sunk back into her chair without a word, and the two sat
+contemplating each other as if they had never met before in this world,
+and were not overpleased at meeting.
+
+The paragraph which produced this singular effect on the aged couple
+occurred at the end of a column of telegraph despatches giving the
+details of an unimportant engagement that had just taken place between
+one of the blockading squadron and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement
+itself does not concern us, but this item from the list of casualties on
+the Union side has a direct bearing on our narrative:--
+
+     “_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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+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]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
+
+By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+
+Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front
+door of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town
+of Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
+door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not
+open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately
+closed it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an
+embarrassed air on the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive glance
+up at the second-story windows, passed hastily down the street towards
+the river, keeping close to the fences and garden walls on her left.
+
+There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements, though
+there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She
+was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing
+low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly
+meaningless if the features had not been emphasized--italicized, so to
+speak--by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would
+have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer
+to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her glory
+was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She
+wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow
+crape bonnet profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
+artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly
+risen sun, ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point
+blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an
+imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
+spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden
+walls and fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near
+the wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning
+splendor, if so bold a figure is permissible.
+
+Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine moved slowly up Anchor
+Street, fingered noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on either
+side, and drained the heeltaps of dew which had been left from the
+revels of the fairies overnight in the cups of the morning-glories.
+Not a soul was stirring yet in this part of the town, though the
+Rivermouthians are such early birds that not a worm may be said to
+escape them. By and by one of the brown Holland shades at one of the
+upper windows of the Bilkins mansion--the house from which Miss Margaret
+had emerged--was drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral nightcap looked
+out on the sunny street. Not a living creature was to be seen, save the
+dissipated family cat--a very Lovelace of a cat that was not allowed a
+night-key--who was sitting on the curbstone opposite, waiting for
+the hall door to be opened. Three quarters of an hour, we repeat, had
+passed, when Mrs. Margaret O'Rourke, _n�e_ Callaghan, issued from the
+small, dingy house by the river, and regained the door-step of the
+Bilkins mansion in the same stealthy fashion in which she had left it.
+
+Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr.
+Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of
+the premises before the family were up, and got herself
+married--surreptitiously and artfully married, as if matrimony were an
+indictable offence.
+
+And something of an offence it was in this instance. In the first
+place Margaret Callaghan had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins
+family, and the old people--there were no children now--had rewarded
+this long service by taking Margaret into their affections. It was a
+piece of subtile ingratitude for her to marry without admitting the
+worthy couple to her confidence. In the next place, Margaret had married
+a man some eighteen years younger than herself. That was the young man's
+lookout, you say. We hold it was Margaret that was to blame. What does
+a young blade of twenty-two know? Not half so much as he thinks he does.
+His exhaust-less ignorance at that age is a discovery which is left for
+him to make in his prime.
+
+     "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 _d�but_. 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, "�tat 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, _is_ that 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!
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It had been no part of Margaret's plan to acknowledge the marriage so
+soon. Though on pleasure bent, she had a frugal mind. She had invested
+in a husband with a view of laying him away for a rainy day--that is to
+say, for such time as her master and mistress should cease to need her
+services; for she had promised on more than one occasion to remain with
+the old people as long as they lived. Indeed, if Mr. O'Rourke had come
+to her and said in so many words, "The day you marry me you must leave
+the Bilkins family," there is very little doubt but Margaret would
+have let that young sea-monster slip back unmated, so far as she was
+concerned, into his native element. The contingency never entered into
+her calculations. She intended that the ship which had brought Ulysses
+to her island should take him off again after a decent interval of
+honeymoon; then she would confess all to Mrs. Bilkins, and be forgiven,
+and Mr. Bilkins would not cancel that clause supposed to exist in his
+will bequeathing two first-mortgage bonds of the Squedunk E. B. Co. to a
+certain faithful servant. In the mean while she would add each month to
+her store in the coffers of the Rivermouth Savings Bank; for Calypso had
+a neat sum to her credit on the books of that provident institution.
+
+But this could not be now. The volatile bridegroom had upset the
+wisely conceived plan, and "all the fat was in the fire," as Margaret
+philosophically put it. Mr. O'Rourke had been fully instructed in the
+part he was to play, and, to do him justice, had honestly intended to
+play it; but destiny was against him. It may be observed that destiny
+and Mr. O'Rourke were not on very friendly terms.
+
+After the ceremony had been performed and Margaret had stolen back to
+the Bilkins mansion, as related, Mr. O'Rourke with his own skilful hands
+had brewed a noble punch for the wedding guests. Standing at the head of
+the table and stirring the pungent mixture in a small wash-tub purchased
+for the occasion, Mr. O'Rourke came out in full flower. His flow of
+wit, as he replenished the glasses, was as racy and seemingly as
+inexhaustible as the punch itself. When Mrs. McLaughlin held out her
+glass, inadvertently upside down, for her sixth ladleful, Mr. O'Rourke
+gallantly declared it should be filled if he had to stand on his head
+to do it. The elder Miss O'Leary whispered to Mrs. Connally that Mr.
+O'Rourke was "a perfic gintleman," and the men in a body pronounced
+him a bit of the raal shamrock. If Mr. O'Rourke was happy in brewing a
+punch, he was happier in dispensing it, and happiest of all in drinking
+a great deal of it himself. He toasted Mrs. Finnigan, the landlady, and
+the late lamented Finnigan, the father, whom he had never seen, and Miss
+Biddy Finnigan, the daughter, and a young toddling Finnigan, who was at
+large in shockingly scant raiment. He drank to the company individually
+and collectively, drank to the absent, drank to a tin-peddler who
+chanced to pass the window, and indeed was in that propitiatory mood
+when he would have drunk to the health of each separate animal that came
+out of the Ark. It was in the midst of the confusion and applause which
+followed his song, "The Wearing of the Grane," that Mr. O'Rourke, the
+punch being all gone, withdrew unobserved, and went in quest of Mrs.
+O'Rourke--with what success the reader knows.
+
+*****
+
+According to the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles
+Henry, after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and
+tribulations and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like
+Christian's burden. The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, but, like
+some of those models in the Patent Office at Washington, it fails to
+work. Charles Henry does not go on sitting at Laura's feet and reading
+Tennyson to her forever: the rent of the cottage by the sea falls due
+with prosaic regularity; there are bakers, and butchers, and babies, and
+tax-collectors, and doctors, and undertakers, and sometimes gentlemen
+of the jury, to be attended to. Wedded life is not one long amatory poem
+with recurrent rhymes of love and dove, and kiss and bliss. Yet when
+the average sentimental novelist has supplied his hero and heroine with
+their bridal outfit and arranged that little matter of the marriage
+certificate, he usually turns off the gas, puts up his shutters, and
+saunters off with his hands in his pockets, as if the day's business
+were over. But we, who are honest dealers in real life and disdain to
+give short weight, know better. The business is by no means over; it is
+just begun. It is not Christian throwing off his pack for good and all,
+but Christian taking up a load heavier and more difficult than any he
+has carried.
+
+If Margaret Callaghan, when she meditated matrimony, indulged in any
+roseate dreams, they were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found
+herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home, and face to face with
+the fact that she had a white elephant on her hands. It is not likely
+that Mr. O'Rourke assumed precisely the shape of a white elephant to her
+mental vision; but he was as useless and cumbersome and unmanageable as
+one.
+
+Margaret and Larry's wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs.
+Finnigan's establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up
+housekeeping in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept
+the floor of her apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on
+the dresser as bright as your lady-love's eyes, and the cooking-stove as
+neat as the machinery on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the
+stove with lamp-black she was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt
+the palate of her marine monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament,
+she went about her work singing softly to herself at times, and would
+have been very happy that first week if Mr. O'Rourke had known a sober
+moment. But Mr. O'Rourke showed an exasperating disposition to keep
+up festivities. At the end of ten days, however, he toned down, and
+at Margaret's suggestion that he had better be looking about for some
+employment he rigged up a fishing-pole, and set out with an injured air
+for the wharf at the foot of the street, where he fished for the rest of
+the day. To sit for hours blinking in the sun, waiting for a cunner to
+come along and take his hook, was as exhaustive a kind of labor as he
+cared to engage in. Though Mr. O'Rourke had recently returned from a
+long cruise, he had not a cent to show. During his first three days
+ashore he had dissipated his three years' pay. The housekeeping expenses
+began eating a hole in Margaret's little fund, the existence of which
+was no sooner known to Mr. O'Rourke than he stood up his fishing-rod in
+one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught nothing but cobwebs.
+
+"Divil a sthroke o' work I 'll do," said Mr. O'Rourke, "whin we can live
+at aise on our earnin's. Who 'd be afther frettin' hisself, wid money in
+the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?"
+
+And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the
+wharves, and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his
+hands in his pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat
+on the door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the
+passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency
+out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around
+the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a
+feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne'er-do-weels of Rivermouth.
+
+It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From
+all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight
+to array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was
+edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row,
+like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand's wharf, with their
+twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O'Rourke in
+contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as
+it were.
+
+The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice--quite in the
+rough, to be sure--and he played, on the violin like an angel. He did
+not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way,
+just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the
+more pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of
+personal property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or
+three o'clock in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to
+the distraction of all the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and
+innumerable dogs in the distance.
+
+Unfortunately, Mr. O'Rourke's freaks were not always of so innocent a
+complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and
+other spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his
+nocturnal feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door
+of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement
+not wholly disconnected with an interior view of the police-station
+(bridewell is the local term); so it happened that Mr. O'Rourke woke up
+one fine morning and found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in
+the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that the bull's-eye in the glass
+door of The Wee Drop winked at him in an insult-in' manner as he was
+passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent
+ten dollars and costs, which made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank
+account. So Margaret's married life wore on, and all went merry as a
+funeral knell.
+
+After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parc�,
+had closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down
+on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst
+into tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she
+persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler
+sex are apt to be--to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the
+first vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing,
+which was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in
+the preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are
+necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back
+again. Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when
+he was well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the
+fish-market--for Mr. O'Rourke had long since given over the onerous
+labor of catching dinners--he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she
+liked the change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rourke was good to her.
+
+"Troth, thin, sur," said Margaret, with a short, dry laugh, "he 's the
+divil's own!"
+
+Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gayety of
+champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr.
+Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
+
+"I 'm afraid, Margaret," he remarked sorrowfully, "that you are not
+making both ends meet."
+
+"Begorra, I 'd be glad if I could make one ind meet!" returned Margaret.
+
+With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, Mr. Bilkins gradually drew
+from her the true state of affairs. Mr. O'Rourke was a very bad case
+indeed; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly
+drunk; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would
+not last until winter. Mr. O'Rourke was perpetually coming home with a
+sprained ankle, or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken
+most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove.
+"In short," as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to
+Mrs. Bilkins, "he had broken all those things which he should n't have
+broken, and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long
+ago--his neck, namely."
+
+The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins most was this: in spite
+of all, Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart.
+Further than keeping the poor creature up waiting for him until ever
+so much o'clock at night, it did not appear that he treated her
+with personal cruelty. If he had beaten her, perhaps she would have
+worshipped him. It needed only that.
+
+Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr.
+Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan
+was laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that
+convinced him she had made up her mind to adopt it.
+
+"Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof!" cried
+Mrs. Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke took
+up their abode in the Bilkins mansion--Margaret as cook, and Larry as
+gardener.
+
+"I 'm convanient if the owld gintleman is," had been Mr. O'Rourke's
+remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr. O'Rourke
+had the faintest idea of gardening. He did n't know a tulip from a
+tomato. He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to
+undertake anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability.
+
+Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband for any great botanical
+knowledge; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr. O'Rourke pointed
+to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out of flower, and
+remarked, "Thim 's a nate lot o' pur-taties ye 've got there, sur." Mr.
+Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr. O'Rourke's skill in
+gardening; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any
+case to make Margaret's lot easier.
+
+Reestablished in her old home, Margaret broke into song again, and
+Mr. O'Rourke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not
+agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature
+has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject
+were heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily, Mr. Bilkins was not without
+a sense of humor, else he would have found Mr. O'Rourke insupportable.
+Just when the old gentleman's patience was about exhausted, the gardener
+would commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but
+loved him for the moment.
+
+"Larry," said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of
+September, "just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands."
+
+Mr. O'Rourke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with
+the monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820!
+
+Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober.
+
+"Eight hundred and twenty what?" cried Mr. Bilkins, feeling very warm,
+as he naturally would in so high a temperature.
+
+"Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose, sur."
+
+"Larry, you 're an idiot."
+
+This was obviously not to Mr. O'Rourke's taste; for he went out and
+brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of
+numerals running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed, "Add 'em up
+yerself, thin!"
+
+Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr. Bilkins had not spent
+the greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O'Rourke
+into the mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr.
+O'Rourke's method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received
+a lot of a very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that
+morning, turned over to Mr. O'Rourke the duty of planting them. Though
+he had never seen a bulb in his life, Larry unblushingly asserted that
+he had set out thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady of O'Grady Castle,
+"an illegant place intirely, wid tin miles o' garden-walks," added
+Mr. O'Rourke, crushing Mr. Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble
+flower-beds.
+
+The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done
+his work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles
+and squares on top of the soil.
+
+"Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?" cried Mr. Bilkins,
+wrathfully.
+
+"An' did n't I set 'em out?" expostulated Mr. O'Rourke. "An' ain't they
+a settin' there beautiful?"
+
+"But you should have put them into the ground, stupid!"
+
+"Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how could they iver git out agin?
+Give the little jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!"
+
+For two weeks Mr. O'Rourke conducted himself with comparative propriety;
+that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
+regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious strains
+of music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of
+the north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would
+desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain of.
+
+The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand
+at the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a pretence
+of working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously immediately
+after breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner.
+Nobody knew what he did with himself in the interval, until one day he
+was observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His retreat
+discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part
+of the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of
+temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.
+
+Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman,
+she coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad,
+any way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours
+and hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a
+light in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the
+gravel walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about
+the house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which
+women hide their care.
+
+One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen
+stove. O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but
+not Larry. Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret was
+humming "Kate Kearney" quite merrily. But when her work was done, she
+stole out at the back gate and went in search of him. She scoured the
+neighborhood like a madwoman. O'Rourke had not been at the 'Finnigans'.
+He had not been at The Wee Drop since Monday, and this was Wednesday
+night. Her heart sunk within her when she failed to find him in the
+police-station. Some dreadful thing had happened to him. She came back
+to the house with one hand pressed wearily against her cheek. The dawn
+struggled through the kitchen windows, and fell upon Margaret crouched
+by the stove.
+
+She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr. Bilkins came down she
+confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been home
+for two nights.
+
+"Mayhap he 's drownded hisself," suggested Margaret, wringing her hands.
+
+"Not he," said Mr. Bilkins; "he does n't like the taste of water well
+enough."
+
+"Troth, thin, he does n't," reflected Margaret, and the reflection
+comforted her.
+
+"At any rate, I 'll go and look him up after breakfast," said Mr.
+Bilkins. And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth
+with the depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rourke without much
+difficulty. "Come to think of it," said the old gentleman to himself,
+drawing on his white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor Street
+"_I_ don't want to find him."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+But Mr. O'Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins
+directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite
+confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought
+to perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was
+discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in
+Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered
+about town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then
+explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took
+a careful survey of the wharves along the river on his way home. He even
+shook the apple-tree near the stable with a vague hope of bringing
+down Mr. O'Rourke, but brought down nothing except a few winter
+apples, which, being both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad
+representatives of the object of his search.
+
+That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion with
+a straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O'Rourke's, which had been found
+on Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but O'Rourke
+was always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress is not to
+be pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had
+drowned himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen
+overboard while intoxicated.
+
+The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is regulated
+by laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that
+a certain percentage of the earth's population is bound to drown itself
+annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then, that
+Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the
+ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and pleasure
+parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly
+business. But Mr. O'Rourke failed to appear among the flotsam and jetsam
+which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the River-mouth
+wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting
+morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of
+those immense schools of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment
+with the fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod
+or a mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She
+averted her head in making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to
+detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a
+man fall into the sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the
+scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of
+hashed fish?
+
+     "Imperial C�sar, 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 � 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.
+
+*****
+
+"What--what is it, Ezra?" cried Mrs. Bilkins, changing color, and rising
+hastily from the breakfast table. Her first thought was of apoplexy.
+
+There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed back from his forehead, and
+his eyes fixed vacantly on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held out at
+arm's length before him.
+
+"Good heavens, Ezra! what _is_ the matter?"
+
+Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically, as if he were a great
+wax-doll, and somebody had pulled his wire.
+
+"Can't you speak, Ezra?"
+
+His lips opened, and moved inarticulately; then he pointed a rigid
+finger, in the manner of a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper,
+which he held up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his shoulder. When she
+had read it she sunk back into her chair without a word, and the two sat
+contemplating each other as if they had never met before in this world,
+and were not overpleased at meeting.
+
+The paragraph which produced this singular effect on the aged couple
+occurred at the end of a column of telegraph despatches giving the
+details of an unimportant engagement that had just taken place between
+one of the blockading squadron and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement
+itself does not concern us, but this item from the list of casualties on
+the Union side has a direct bearing on our narrative:--
+
+     "_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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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      A Rivermouth Romance, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+     <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto" cellpadding="4" border="3">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front door
+      of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town of
+      Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
+      door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not open
+      itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately closed
+      it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an embarrassed air on
+      the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive glance up at the second-story
+      windows, passed hastily down the street towards the river, keeping close
+      to the fences and garden walls on her left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements, though
+      there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She
+      was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing
+      low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly
+      meaningless if the features had not been emphasized&mdash;italicized, so
+      to speak&mdash;by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet
+      would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we
+      refer to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her
+      glory was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning.
+      She wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow
+      crape bonnet profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
+      artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly
+      risen sun, ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point
+      blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an
+      imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
+      spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden
+      walls and fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near the
+      wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning
+      splendor, if so bold a figure is permissible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine moved slowly up Anchor
+      Street, fingered noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on either side,
+      and drained the heeltaps of dew which had been left from the revels of the
+      fairies overnight in the cups of the morning-glories. Not a soul was
+      stirring yet in this part of the town, though the Rivermouthians are such
+      early birds that not a worm may be said to escape them. By and by one of
+      the brown Holland shades at one of the upper windows of the Bilkins
+      mansion&mdash;the house from which Miss Margaret had emerged&mdash;was
+      drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral nightcap looked out on the sunny
+      street. Not a living creature was to be seen, save the dissipated family
+      cat&mdash;a very Lovelace of a cat that was not allowed a night-key&mdash;who
+      was sitting on the curbstone opposite, waiting for the hall door to be
+      opened. Three quarters of an hour, we repeat, had passed, when Mrs.
+      Margaret O'Rourke, <i>née</i> Callaghan, issued from the small, dingy
+      house by the river, and regained the door-step of the Bilkins mansion in
+      the same stealthy fashion in which she had left it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr.
+      Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of the
+      premises before the family were up, and got herself married&mdash;surreptitiously
+      and artfully married, as if matrimony were an indictable offence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And something of an offence it was in this instance. In the first place
+      Margaret Callaghan had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins family,
+      and the old people&mdash;there were no children now&mdash;had rewarded
+      this long service by taking Margaret into their affections. It was a piece
+      of subtile ingratitude for her to marry without admitting the worthy
+      couple to her confidence. In the next place, Margaret had married a man
+      some eighteen years younger than herself. That was the young man's
+      lookout, you say. We hold it was Margaret that was to blame. What does a
+      young blade of twenty-two know? Not half so much as he thinks he does. His
+      exhaust-less ignorance at that age is a discovery which is left for him to
+      make in his prime.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Curly gold locks cover foolish brains,
+          Billing and cooing is all your cheer;
+     Sighing and singing of midnight strains,
+     Under Bonnybell's window panes,&mdash;
+          Wait till you come to Forty Year!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      In one sense Margaret's husband <i>had</i> come to forty year&mdash;she
+      was forty to a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>comether</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;apropos
+      of the personal charms of one Kate Kearney who lived on the banks of
+      Killarney&mdash;which ordinarily issued from the direction of the scullery
+      were unheard that forenoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;possibly that dissolute creature with
+      twenty-four sheets of note-paper and twenty-four envelopes for fifteen
+      cents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>début</i>.
+      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&mdash;we may as well say it at once&mdash;of Mr.
+      Larry O'Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of the United
+      States sloop-of-war Santee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;seemingly a brazen hand that had been
+      cut off at the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to
+      malefactors&mdash;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&mdash;a sad
+      losel, we fear&mdash;who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and
+      fell overboard in a gale off Hatteras. &ldquo;Lost at sea,&rdquo; says the chubby
+      marble slab in the Old South Burying-Ground, &ldquo;ætat 18.&rdquo; Perhaps that is
+      why no blue-jacket, sober or drunk, was ever repulsed from the door of the
+      Bilkins mansion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; she asked kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There 's no wife for you here,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, somewhat taken aback.
+      &ldquo;His wife!&rdquo; she thought; &ldquo;it's a mother the poor boy stands in need of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me wife,&rdquo; repeated Mr. O'Rourke, &ldquo;for betther or for worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better go away,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, bridling up, &ldquo;or it will be
+      the worse for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To have and to howld,&rdquo; continued Mr. O'Rourke, wandering retrospectively
+      in the mazes of the marriage service, &ldquo;to have and to howld, till death&mdash;bad
+      luck to him!&mdash;takes one or the ither of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You 're a blasphemous creature,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, severely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thim 's the words his riverince spake this mornin', standin' foreninst
+      us,&rdquo; explained Mr. O'Rourke. &ldquo;I stood here, see, and me jew'l stood there,
+      and the howly chaplain beyont.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Mr. O'Rourke with a wavering forefinger drew a diagram of the
+      interesting situation on the door-step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; returned Mrs. Bilkins, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bedad, thin, but she does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lives here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorra a place else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man's crazy,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want me wife,&rdquo; he said sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;a spalpeen,&rdquo; and told him to go home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Divil an inch,&rdquo; replied the spalpeen; but he got himself off the
+      threshold, and returned his position on the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's only Larry, mum,&rdquo; said the man, touching his forelock politely; &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added, reflectively. &ldquo;He don't mane a
+      ha'p'orth o' harum, but jist now he's not quite in his right moind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think not,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, turning from the speaker to Mr.
+      O'Rourke, who had seated himself gravely on the scraper, and was weeping.
+      &ldquo;Hasn't the man any friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Misther Donnehugh,&rdquo; responded Mr. O'Rourke with great dignity, &ldquo;ye 're
+      dhrunk agin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Donnehugh, who had not taken more than thirteen ladles of rum-punch,
+      disdained to reply directly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a dacent lad enough&rdquo;&mdash;this to Mrs. Bilkins&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is n't there anybody to look after him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, mum, he's an orphan; his father and mother live in the owld counthry,
+      an' a fine hale owld couple they are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has n't he any family in the town&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure, mum, he has a family; was n't he married this blessed mornin'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indade, thin, he was&mdash;the pore divil!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the&mdash;the person?&rdquo; inquired Mrs. Bilkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it the wife, ye mane?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, the wife: where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, thin, mum,&rdquo; said Mr. Donnehugh, &ldquo;it's yerself can answer that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Bilkins. &ldquo;Good heavens! this man's as crazy as the
+      other!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Begorra, if anybody's crazy, it's Larry, for it's Larry has married
+      Margaret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What Margaret?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Bilkins, with a start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret Callaghan, sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Our</i> Margaret? Do you mean to say that OUR Margaret has married
+      that&mdash;that good-for-nothing, inebriated wretch!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a civil tongue the owld lady has, any way,&rdquo; remarked Mr. O'Rourke,
+      critically, from the scraper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it there ye are, me jew'l!&rdquo; cried Mr. O'Rourke, discovering her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Bilkins wheeled upon Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret Callaghan, <i>is</i> that thing your husband?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-yes, mum,&rdquo; faltered Mrs. O'Rourke, with a woful lack of spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then take it away!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Bilkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; 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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It had been no part of Margaret's plan to acknowledge the marriage so
+      soon. Though on pleasure bent, she had a frugal mind. She had invested in
+      a husband with a view of laying him away for a rainy day&mdash;that is to
+      say, for such time as her master and mistress should cease to need her
+      services; for she had promised on more than one occasion to remain with
+      the old people as long as they lived. Indeed, if Mr. O'Rourke had come to
+      her and said in so many words, &ldquo;The day you marry me you must leave the
+      Bilkins family,&rdquo; there is very little doubt but Margaret would have let
+      that young sea-monster slip back unmated, so far as she was concerned,
+      into his native element. The contingency never entered into her
+      calculations. She intended that the ship which had brought Ulysses to her
+      island should take him off again after a decent interval of honeymoon;
+      then she would confess all to Mrs. Bilkins, and be forgiven, and Mr.
+      Bilkins would not cancel that clause supposed to exist in his will
+      bequeathing two first-mortgage bonds of the Squedunk E. B. Co. to a
+      certain faithful servant. In the mean while she would add each month to
+      her store in the coffers of the Rivermouth Savings Bank; for Calypso had a
+      neat sum to her credit on the books of that provident institution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this could not be now. The volatile bridegroom had upset the wisely
+      conceived plan, and &ldquo;all the fat was in the fire,&rdquo; as Margaret
+      philosophically put it. Mr. O'Rourke had been fully instructed in the part
+      he was to play, and, to do him justice, had honestly intended to play it;
+      but destiny was against him. It may be observed that destiny and Mr.
+      O'Rourke were not on very friendly terms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the ceremony had been performed and Margaret had stolen back to the
+      Bilkins mansion, as related, Mr. O'Rourke with his own skilful hands had
+      brewed a noble punch for the wedding guests. Standing at the head of the
+      table and stirring the pungent mixture in a small wash-tub purchased for
+      the occasion, Mr. O'Rourke came out in full flower. His flow of wit, as he
+      replenished the glasses, was as racy and seemingly as inexhaustible as the
+      punch itself. When Mrs. McLaughlin held out her glass, inadvertently
+      upside down, for her sixth ladleful, Mr. O'Rourke gallantly declared it
+      should be filled if he had to stand on his head to do it. The elder Miss
+      O'Leary whispered to Mrs. Connally that Mr. O'Rourke was &ldquo;a perfic
+      gintleman,&rdquo; and the men in a body pronounced him a bit of the raal
+      shamrock. If Mr. O'Rourke was happy in brewing a punch, he was happier in
+      dispensing it, and happiest of all in drinking a great deal of it himself.
+      He toasted Mrs. Finnigan, the landlady, and the late lamented Finnigan,
+      the father, whom he had never seen, and Miss Biddy Finnigan, the daughter,
+      and a young toddling Finnigan, who was at large in shockingly scant
+      raiment. He drank to the company individually and collectively, drank to
+      the absent, drank to a tin-peddler who chanced to pass the window, and
+      indeed was in that propitiatory mood when he would have drunk to the
+      health of each separate animal that came out of the Ark. It was in the
+      midst of the confusion and applause which followed his song, &ldquo;The Wearing
+      of the Grane,&rdquo; that Mr. O'Rourke, the punch being all gone, withdrew
+      unobserved, and went in quest of Mrs. O'Rourke&mdash;with what success the
+      reader knows.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      According to the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles Henry,
+      after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and tribulations
+      and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like Christian's burden.
+      The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, but, like some of those models in
+      the Patent Office at Washington, it fails to work. Charles Henry does not
+      go on sitting at Laura's feet and reading Tennyson to her forever: the
+      rent of the cottage by the sea falls due with prosaic regularity; there
+      are bakers, and butchers, and babies, and tax-collectors, and doctors, and
+      undertakers, and sometimes gentlemen of the jury, to be attended to.
+      Wedded life is not one long amatory poem with recurrent rhymes of love and
+      dove, and kiss and bliss. Yet when the average sentimental novelist has
+      supplied his hero and heroine with their bridal outfit and arranged that
+      little matter of the marriage certificate, he usually turns off the gas,
+      puts up his shutters, and saunters off with his hands in his pockets, as
+      if the day's business were over. But we, who are honest dealers in real
+      life and disdain to give short weight, know better. The business is by no
+      means over; it is just begun. It is not Christian throwing off his pack
+      for good and all, but Christian taking up a load heavier and more
+      difficult than any he has carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Margaret Callaghan, when she meditated matrimony, indulged in any
+      roseate dreams, they were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found
+      herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home, and face to face with
+      the fact that she had a white elephant on her hands. It is not likely that
+      Mr. O'Rourke assumed precisely the shape of a white elephant to her mental
+      vision; but he was as useless and cumbersome and unmanageable as one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret and Larry's wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs. Finnigan's
+      establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up housekeeping
+      in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept the floor of her
+      apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on the dresser as bright
+      as your lady-love's eyes, and the cooking-stove as neat as the machinery
+      on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the stove with lamp-black she
+      was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt the palate of her marine
+      monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament, she went about her work
+      singing softly to herself at times, and would have been very happy that
+      first week if Mr. O'Rourke had known a sober moment. But Mr. O'Rourke
+      showed an exasperating disposition to keep up festivities. At the end of
+      ten days, however, he toned down, and at Margaret's suggestion that he had
+      better be looking about for some employment he rigged up a fishing-pole,
+      and set out with an injured air for the wharf at the foot of the street,
+      where he fished for the rest of the day. To sit for hours blinking in the
+      sun, waiting for a cunner to come along and take his hook, was as
+      exhaustive a kind of labor as he cared to engage in. Though Mr. O'Rourke
+      had recently returned from a long cruise, he had not a cent to show.
+      During his first three days ashore he had dissipated his three years' pay.
+      The housekeeping expenses began eating a hole in Margaret's little fund,
+      the existence of which was no sooner known to Mr. O'Rourke than he stood
+      up his fishing-rod in one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught
+      nothing but cobwebs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Divil a sthroke o' work I 'll do,&rdquo; said Mr. O'Rourke, &ldquo;whin we can live
+      at aise on our earnin's. Who 'd be afther frettin' hisself, wid money in
+      the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the wharves,
+      and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his hands in his
+      pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat on the
+      door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the
+      passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency
+      out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around
+      the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a
+      feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne'er-do-weels of Rivermouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From
+      all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight to
+      array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was
+      edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row,
+      like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand's wharf, with their
+      twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O'Rourke in
+      contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as it
+      were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice&mdash;quite in
+      the rough, to be sure&mdash;and he played, on the violin like an angel. He
+      did not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way,
+      just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the more
+      pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of personal
+      property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or three o'clock
+      in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to the distraction of all
+      the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and innumerable dogs in the
+      distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately, Mr. O'Rourke's freaks were not always of so innocent a
+      complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and other
+      spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his nocturnal
+      feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door of The Wee
+      Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement not wholly
+      disconnected with an interior view of the police-station (bridewell is the
+      local term); so it happened that Mr. O'Rourke woke up one fine morning and
+      found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in the rear of the Brick
+      Market. His plea that the bull's-eye in the glass door of The Wee Drop
+      winked at him in an insult-in' manner as he was passing by did not prevent
+      Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent ten dollars and costs, which
+      made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank account. So Margaret's married
+      life wore on, and all went merry as a funeral knell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parcæ, had
+      closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down on
+      the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst into
+      tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she persisted
+      in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler sex are apt
+      to be&mdash;to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the first
+      vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing, which
+      was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in the
+      preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are
+      necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back again.
+      Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when he was
+      well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the fish-market&mdash;for
+      Mr. O'Rourke had long since given over the onerous labor of catching
+      dinners&mdash;he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she liked the
+      change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rourke was good to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Troth, thin, sur,&rdquo; said Margaret, with a short, dry laugh, &ldquo;he 's the
+      divil's own!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gayety of
+      champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr.
+      Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm afraid, Margaret,&rdquo; he remarked sorrowfully, &ldquo;that you are not making
+      both ends meet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Begorra, I 'd be glad if I could make one ind meet!&rdquo; returned Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, Mr. Bilkins gradually drew
+      from her the true state of affairs. Mr. O'Rourke was a very bad case
+      indeed; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly
+      drunk; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would not
+      last until winter. Mr. O'Rourke was perpetually coming home with a
+      sprained ankle, or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken
+      most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove.
+      &ldquo;In short,&rdquo; as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to Mrs.
+      Bilkins, &ldquo;he had broken all those things which he should n't have broken,
+      and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long ago&mdash;his
+      neck, namely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins most was this: in spite of all,
+      Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart. Further than
+      keeping the poor creature up waiting for him until ever so much o'clock at
+      night, it did not appear that he treated her with personal cruelty. If he
+      had beaten her, perhaps she would have worshipped him. It needed only
+      that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr.
+      Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan was
+      laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that convinced
+      him she had made up her mind to adopt it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof!&rdquo; cried
+      Mrs. Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke took up
+      their abode in the Bilkins mansion&mdash;Margaret as cook, and Larry as
+      gardener.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm convanient if the owld gintleman is,&rdquo; had been Mr. O'Rourke's
+      remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr. O'Rourke
+      had the faintest idea of gardening. He did n't know a tulip from a tomato.
+      He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to undertake
+      anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband for any great botanical
+      knowledge; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr. O'Rourke pointed
+      to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out of flower, and
+      remarked, &ldquo;Thim 's a nate lot o' pur-taties ye 've got there, sur.&rdquo; Mr.
+      Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr. O'Rourke's skill in
+      gardening; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any
+      case to make Margaret's lot easier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reestablished in her old home, Margaret broke into song again, and Mr.
+      O'Rourke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not
+      agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature
+      has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject were
+      heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily, Mr. Bilkins was not without a sense
+      of humor, else he would have found Mr. O'Rourke insupportable. Just when
+      the old gentleman's patience was about exhausted, the gardener would
+      commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but loved
+      him for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Larry,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of
+      September, &ldquo;just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. O'Rourke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with the
+      monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight hundred and twenty what?&rdquo; cried Mr. Bilkins, feeling very warm, as
+      he naturally would in so high a temperature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose, sur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Larry, you 're an idiot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was obviously not to Mr. O'Rourke's taste; for he went out and
+      brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of
+      numerals running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed, &ldquo;Add 'em up
+      yerself, thin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr. Bilkins had not spent the
+      greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O'Rourke into the
+      mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr. O'Rourke's
+      method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received a lot of a
+      very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that morning,
+      turned over to Mr. O'Rourke the duty of planting them. Though he had never
+      seen a bulb in his life, Larry unblushingly asserted that he had set out
+      thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady of O'Grady Castle, &ldquo;an illegant place
+      intirely, wid tin miles o' garden-walks,&rdquo; added Mr. O'Rourke, crushing Mr.
+      Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble flower-beds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done his
+      work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles and
+      squares on top of the soil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?&rdquo; cried Mr. Bilkins,
+      wrathfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An' did n't I set 'em out?&rdquo; expostulated Mr. O'Rourke. &ldquo;An' ain't they a
+      settin' there beautiful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you should have put them into the ground, stupid!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how could they iver git out agin?
+      Give the little jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For two weeks Mr. O'Rourke conducted himself with comparative propriety;
+      that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
+      regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious strains of
+      music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of the
+      north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would
+      desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand at
+      the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a pretence of
+      working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously immediately after
+      breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner. Nobody
+      knew what he did with himself in the interval, until one day he was
+      observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His retreat
+      discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part of
+      the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of
+      temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman, she
+      coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad, any
+      way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours and
+      hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a light
+      in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the gravel
+      walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about the
+      house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which women
+      hide their care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen stove.
+      O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but not Larry.
+      Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret was humming &ldquo;Kate
+      Kearney&rdquo; quite merrily. But when her work was done, she stole out at the
+      back gate and went in search of him. She scoured the neighborhood like a
+      madwoman. O'Rourke had not been at the 'Finnigans'. He had not been at The
+      Wee Drop since Monday, and this was Wednesday night. Her heart sunk within
+      her when she failed to find him in the police-station. Some dreadful thing
+      had happened to him. She came back to the house with one hand pressed
+      wearily against her cheek. The dawn struggled through the kitchen windows,
+      and fell upon Margaret crouched by the stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr. Bilkins came down she
+      confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been home
+      for two nights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mayhap he 's drownded hisself,&rdquo; suggested Margaret, wringing her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not he,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins; &ldquo;he does n't like the taste of water well
+      enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Troth, thin, he does n't,&rdquo; reflected Margaret, and the reflection
+      comforted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate, I 'll go and look him up after breakfast,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins.
+      And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth with the
+      depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rourke without much difficulty.
+      &ldquo;Come to think of it,&rdquo; said the old gentleman to himself, drawing on his
+      white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor Street &ldquo;<i>I</i> don't want to
+      find him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But Mr. O'Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins
+      directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite
+      confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought to perch
+      in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was discoverable. The
+      Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in Rivermouth; there were
+      five or six other low drinking-shops scattered about town, and through
+      these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then explored various blind
+      alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took a careful survey of the
+      wharves along the river on his way home. He even shook the apple-tree near
+      the stable with a vague hope of bringing down Mr. O'Rourke, but brought
+      down nothing except a few winter apples, which, being both unripe and
+      unsound, were not perhaps bad representatives of the object of his search.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion with a
+      straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O'Rourke's, which had been found on
+      Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but O'Rourke was
+      always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress is not to be
+      pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had drowned
+      himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen overboard while
+      intoxicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is regulated by
+      laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that a
+      certain percentage of the earth's population is bound to drown itself
+      annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then, that
+      Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the
+      ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and pleasure
+      parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly
+      business. But Mr. O'Rourke failed to appear among the flotsam and jetsam
+      which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the River-mouth
+      wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting
+      morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of those
+      immense schools of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment with the
+      fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod or a
+      mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She
+      averted her head in making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to
+      detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a
+      man fall into the sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the
+      scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of
+      hashed fish?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
+     Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, 't were to consider
+      too curiously to consider so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>mania
+      à potu</i>; 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&mdash;and had
+      evidently gone by water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;It would be a proud day for Larry,&rdquo; observed Margaret
+      contemplatively, &ldquo;if he could rest his oi on the illegant monumint I 've
+      put up to him.&rdquo; If Mr. O'Rourke could have read the inscription on it, he
+      would never have suspected his own complicity in the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;not the O'Rourke who
+      disappeared so strangely, but the O'Rourke who never existed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D' ye think, mum,&rdquo; she said one day to Mrs. Bilkins, as that lady was
+      adroitly sounding her on the ice question&mdash;&ldquo;d' ye think I 'd
+      condescind to take up wid the likes o' him, or the baker either, afther
+      sich a man as Larry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rectified and clarified O'Rourke was a permanent wonder to Mr.
+      Bilkins, who bore up under the bereavement with noticeable resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peggy is right,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, who was superintending the
+      burning out of the kitchen flue. &ldquo;She won't find another man like Larry
+      O'Rourke in a hurry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thrue for ye, Mr. Bilkins,&rdquo; answered Margaret. &ldquo;Maybe there's as good
+      fish in the say as iver was caught, but I don't be-lave it, all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&mdash;what is it, Ezra?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Bilkins, changing color, and
+      rising hastily from the breakfast table. Her first thought was of
+      apoplexy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed back from his forehead, and his
+      eyes fixed vacantly on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held out at arm's
+      length before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens, Ezra! what <i>is</i> the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically, as if he were a great
+      wax-doll, and somebody had pulled his wire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't you speak, Ezra?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips opened, and moved inarticulately; then he pointed a rigid finger,
+      in the manner of a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper, which he held
+      up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his shoulder. When she had read it she
+      sunk back into her chair without a word, and the two sat contemplating
+      each other as if they had never met before in this world, and were not
+      overpleased at meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The paragraph which produced this singular effect on the aged couple
+      occurred at the end of a column of telegraph despatches giving the details
+      of an unimportant engagement that had just taken place between one of the
+      blockading squadron and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement itself does
+      not concern us, but this item from the list of casualties on the Union
+      side has a direct bearing on our narrative:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;<i>Larry O'Rourke, seaman, splinter wound in the leg.
+     Not serious</i>.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Now is
+      your time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There 's been another battle down South, Margaret,&rdquo; said the old
+      gentleman presently, folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket. &ldquo;A
+      sea-fight this time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure, an' they 're allus fightin' down there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But not always with so little damage. There was only one man wounded on
+      our side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pore man! It's sorry we oughter be for his wife an' childer, if he's got
+      any.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not badly wounded, you will understand, Margaret&mdash;not at all
+      seriously wounded; only a splinter in the leg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Faith, thin, a splinter in the leg is no pleasant thing in itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mere scratch,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;The odd part of the matter is the man's first name. His
+      first name was Larry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret nodded, as one should say, There's a many Larrys in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the oddest part of it,&rdquo; continued Mr. Bilkins, in a carelessly
+      sepulchral voice, &ldquo;is the man's last name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man's last name!&rdquo; she repeated, wonderingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, his last name&mdash;O'Rourke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'ye mane it?&rdquo; shrieked Margaret&mdash;&ldquo;d' ye mane it? Glory to God! O
+      worra! worra!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Ezra,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilking, in one of those spasms of base
+      ingratitude to which even the most perfect women are liable, &ldquo;you 've made
+      nice work of it. You might as well have knocked her down with an axe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, bother!&mdash;my smelling-bottle, quick!&mdash;second bureau drawer&mdash;left-hand
+      side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Och!&rdquo; laughed Margaret, &ldquo;that's jist Larry over agin. The pore lad was
+      allus full of his nonsense an' spirits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That he was,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins, dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Larry's all right,&rdquo; said hopeful Margaret. &ldquo;If any harum had come to the
+      gossoon, we'd have knowed it. It's the bad news that travels fast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins was not so positive about that. It had taken a whole year to
+      find out that O'Rourke had not drowned himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps we had better look up Mr. O'Rourke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Desertion in the face of the enemy&mdash;for, though the city lay under
+      Federal guns, it was still hostile enough&mdash;involved the heaviest
+      penalties. O'Rourke was speedily arrested with other deserters, tried by
+      court-martial, and sentenced to death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the excitement was over, and this is always the trying time,
+      Margaret accepted the situation philosophically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pore lad's out o' harum's rache, any way,&rdquo; she reflected. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would n't wonder if Misthress Lincoln had a new silk gownd or two this
+      fall,&rdquo; Margaret would remark, sarcastically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prison rules permitted Mr. O'Rourke to receive periodical
+      communications &ldquo;from his friends outside.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>verbatim et literatim</i>:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     <i>febuary.   1864 mi belovid wife
+     fur the luv of God sind mee pop gose the wezel.
+     yours till deth</i>
+     .                                        <i>larry O rourke.</i>
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pop goes the Weasel&rdquo; was sent to him, and Mr. Bilkins ingeniously slipped
+      into the same envelope &ldquo;The Drunkard's Death&rdquo; and &ldquo;Beware of the Bowl,&rdquo;
+       two spirited compositions well calculated to exert a salutary influence
+      over a man imprisoned for life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. O'Rourke's summing up of his case was characteristic: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+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]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
+
+By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+
+Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company
+
+Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front
+door of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town
+of Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
+door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not
+open itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately
+closed it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an
+embarrassed air on the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive glance
+up at the second-story windows, passed hastily down the street towards
+the river, keeping close to the fences and garden walls on her left.
+
+There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements, though
+there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She
+was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing
+low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly
+meaningless if the features had not been emphasized--italicized, so to
+speak--by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet would
+have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we refer
+to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her glory
+was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning. She
+wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow
+crape bonnet profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
+artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly
+risen sun, ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point
+blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an
+imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
+spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden
+walls and fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near
+the wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning
+splendor, if so bold a figure is permissible.
+
+Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine moved slowly up Anchor
+Street, fingered noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on either
+side, and drained the heeltaps of dew which had been left from the
+revels of the fairies overnight in the cups of the morning-glories.
+Not a soul was stirring yet in this part of the town, though the
+Rivermouthians are such early birds that not a worm may be said to
+escape them. By and by one of the brown Holland shades at one of the
+upper windows of the Bilkins mansion--the house from which Miss Margaret
+had emerged--was drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral nightcap looked
+out on the sunny street. Not a living creature was to be seen, save the
+dissipated family cat--a very Lovelace of a cat that was not allowed a
+night-key--who was sitting on the curbstone opposite, waiting for
+the hall door to be opened. Three quarters of an hour, we repeat, had
+passed, when Mrs. Margaret O'Rourke, _nee_ Callaghan, issued from the
+small, dingy house by the river, and regained the door-step of the
+Bilkins mansion in the same stealthy fashion in which she had left it.
+
+Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr.
+Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of
+the premises before the family were up, and got herself
+married--surreptitiously and artfully married, as if matrimony were an
+indictable offence.
+
+And something of an offence it was in this instance. In the first
+place Margaret Callaghan had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins
+family, and the old people--there were no children now--had rewarded
+this long service by taking Margaret into their affections. It was a
+piece of subtile ingratitude for her to marry without admitting the
+worthy couple to her confidence. In the next place, Margaret had married
+a man some eighteen years younger than herself. That was the young man's
+lookout, you say. We hold it was Margaret that was to blame. What does
+a young blade of twenty-two know? Not half so much as he thinks he does.
+His exhaust-less ignorance at that age is a discovery which is left for
+him to make in his prime.
+
+     "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 _debut_. 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, "aetat 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, _is_ that 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!
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It had been no part of Margaret's plan to acknowledge the marriage so
+soon. Though on pleasure bent, she had a frugal mind. She had invested
+in a husband with a view of laying him away for a rainy day--that is to
+say, for such time as her master and mistress should cease to need her
+services; for she had promised on more than one occasion to remain with
+the old people as long as they lived. Indeed, if Mr. O'Rourke had come
+to her and said in so many words, "The day you marry me you must leave
+the Bilkins family," there is very little doubt but Margaret would
+have let that young sea-monster slip back unmated, so far as she was
+concerned, into his native element. The contingency never entered into
+her calculations. She intended that the ship which had brought Ulysses
+to her island should take him off again after a decent interval of
+honeymoon; then she would confess all to Mrs. Bilkins, and be forgiven,
+and Mr. Bilkins would not cancel that clause supposed to exist in his
+will bequeathing two first-mortgage bonds of the Squedunk E. B. Co. to a
+certain faithful servant. In the mean while she would add each month to
+her store in the coffers of the Rivermouth Savings Bank; for Calypso had
+a neat sum to her credit on the books of that provident institution.
+
+But this could not be now. The volatile bridegroom had upset the
+wisely conceived plan, and "all the fat was in the fire," as Margaret
+philosophically put it. Mr. O'Rourke had been fully instructed in the
+part he was to play, and, to do him justice, had honestly intended to
+play it; but destiny was against him. It may be observed that destiny
+and Mr. O'Rourke were not on very friendly terms.
+
+After the ceremony had been performed and Margaret had stolen back to
+the Bilkins mansion, as related, Mr. O'Rourke with his own skilful hands
+had brewed a noble punch for the wedding guests. Standing at the head of
+the table and stirring the pungent mixture in a small wash-tub purchased
+for the occasion, Mr. O'Rourke came out in full flower. His flow of
+wit, as he replenished the glasses, was as racy and seemingly as
+inexhaustible as the punch itself. When Mrs. McLaughlin held out her
+glass, inadvertently upside down, for her sixth ladleful, Mr. O'Rourke
+gallantly declared it should be filled if he had to stand on his head
+to do it. The elder Miss O'Leary whispered to Mrs. Connally that Mr.
+O'Rourke was "a perfic gintleman," and the men in a body pronounced
+him a bit of the raal shamrock. If Mr. O'Rourke was happy in brewing a
+punch, he was happier in dispensing it, and happiest of all in drinking
+a great deal of it himself. He toasted Mrs. Finnigan, the landlady, and
+the late lamented Finnigan, the father, whom he had never seen, and Miss
+Biddy Finnigan, the daughter, and a young toddling Finnigan, who was at
+large in shockingly scant raiment. He drank to the company individually
+and collectively, drank to the absent, drank to a tin-peddler who
+chanced to pass the window, and indeed was in that propitiatory mood
+when he would have drunk to the health of each separate animal that came
+out of the Ark. It was in the midst of the confusion and applause which
+followed his song, "The Wearing of the Grane," that Mr. O'Rourke, the
+punch being all gone, withdrew unobserved, and went in quest of Mrs.
+O'Rourke--with what success the reader knows.
+
+*****
+
+According to the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles
+Henry, after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and
+tribulations and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like
+Christian's burden. The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, but, like
+some of those models in the Patent Office at Washington, it fails to
+work. Charles Henry does not go on sitting at Laura's feet and reading
+Tennyson to her forever: the rent of the cottage by the sea falls due
+with prosaic regularity; there are bakers, and butchers, and babies, and
+tax-collectors, and doctors, and undertakers, and sometimes gentlemen
+of the jury, to be attended to. Wedded life is not one long amatory poem
+with recurrent rhymes of love and dove, and kiss and bliss. Yet when
+the average sentimental novelist has supplied his hero and heroine with
+their bridal outfit and arranged that little matter of the marriage
+certificate, he usually turns off the gas, puts up his shutters, and
+saunters off with his hands in his pockets, as if the day's business
+were over. But we, who are honest dealers in real life and disdain to
+give short weight, know better. The business is by no means over; it is
+just begun. It is not Christian throwing off his pack for good and all,
+but Christian taking up a load heavier and more difficult than any he
+has carried.
+
+If Margaret Callaghan, when she meditated matrimony, indulged in any
+roseate dreams, they were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found
+herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home, and face to face with
+the fact that she had a white elephant on her hands. It is not likely
+that Mr. O'Rourke assumed precisely the shape of a white elephant to her
+mental vision; but he was as useless and cumbersome and unmanageable as
+one.
+
+Margaret and Larry's wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs.
+Finnigan's establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up
+housekeeping in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept
+the floor of her apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on
+the dresser as bright as your lady-love's eyes, and the cooking-stove as
+neat as the machinery on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the
+stove with lamp-black she was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt
+the palate of her marine monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament,
+she went about her work singing softly to herself at times, and would
+have been very happy that first week if Mr. O'Rourke had known a sober
+moment. But Mr. O'Rourke showed an exasperating disposition to keep
+up festivities. At the end of ten days, however, he toned down, and
+at Margaret's suggestion that he had better be looking about for some
+employment he rigged up a fishing-pole, and set out with an injured air
+for the wharf at the foot of the street, where he fished for the rest of
+the day. To sit for hours blinking in the sun, waiting for a cunner to
+come along and take his hook, was as exhaustive a kind of labor as he
+cared to engage in. Though Mr. O'Rourke had recently returned from a
+long cruise, he had not a cent to show. During his first three days
+ashore he had dissipated his three years' pay. The housekeeping expenses
+began eating a hole in Margaret's little fund, the existence of which
+was no sooner known to Mr. O'Rourke than he stood up his fishing-rod in
+one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught nothing but cobwebs.
+
+"Divil a sthroke o' work I 'll do," said Mr. O'Rourke, "whin we can live
+at aise on our earnin's. Who 'd be afther frettin' hisself, wid money in
+the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?"
+
+And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the
+wharves, and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his
+hands in his pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat
+on the door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the
+passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency
+out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around
+the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a
+feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne'er-do-weels of Rivermouth.
+
+It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From
+all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight
+to array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was
+edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row,
+like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand's wharf, with their
+twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O'Rourke in
+contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as
+it were.
+
+The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice--quite in the
+rough, to be sure--and he played, on the violin like an angel. He did
+not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way,
+just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the
+more pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of
+personal property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or
+three o'clock in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to
+the distraction of all the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and
+innumerable dogs in the distance.
+
+Unfortunately, Mr. O'Rourke's freaks were not always of so innocent a
+complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and
+other spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his
+nocturnal feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door
+of The Wee Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement
+not wholly disconnected with an interior view of the police-station
+(bridewell is the local term); so it happened that Mr. O'Rourke woke up
+one fine morning and found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in
+the rear of the Brick Market. His plea that the bull's-eye in the glass
+door of The Wee Drop winked at him in an insult-in' manner as he was
+passing by did not prevent Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent
+ten dollars and costs, which made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank
+account. So Margaret's married life wore on, and all went merry as a
+funeral knell.
+
+After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parcae,
+had closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down
+on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst
+into tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she
+persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler
+sex are apt to be--to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the
+first vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing,
+which was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in
+the preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are
+necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back
+again. Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when
+he was well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the
+fish-market--for Mr. O'Rourke had long since given over the onerous
+labor of catching dinners--he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she
+liked the change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rourke was good to her.
+
+"Troth, thin, sur," said Margaret, with a short, dry laugh, "he 's the
+divil's own!"
+
+Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gayety of
+champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr.
+Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
+
+"I 'm afraid, Margaret," he remarked sorrowfully, "that you are not
+making both ends meet."
+
+"Begorra, I 'd be glad if I could make one ind meet!" returned Margaret.
+
+With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, Mr. Bilkins gradually drew
+from her the true state of affairs. Mr. O'Rourke was a very bad case
+indeed; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly
+drunk; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would
+not last until winter. Mr. O'Rourke was perpetually coming home with a
+sprained ankle, or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken
+most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove.
+"In short," as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to
+Mrs. Bilkins, "he had broken all those things which he should n't have
+broken, and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long
+ago--his neck, namely."
+
+The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins most was this: in spite
+of all, Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart.
+Further than keeping the poor creature up waiting for him until ever
+so much o'clock at night, it did not appear that he treated her
+with personal cruelty. If he had beaten her, perhaps she would have
+worshipped him. It needed only that.
+
+Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr.
+Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan
+was laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that
+convinced him she had made up her mind to adopt it.
+
+"Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof!" cried
+Mrs. Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke took
+up their abode in the Bilkins mansion--Margaret as cook, and Larry as
+gardener.
+
+"I 'm convanient if the owld gintleman is," had been Mr. O'Rourke's
+remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr. O'Rourke
+had the faintest idea of gardening. He did n't know a tulip from a
+tomato. He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to
+undertake anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability.
+
+Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband for any great botanical
+knowledge; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr. O'Rourke pointed
+to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out of flower, and
+remarked, "Thim 's a nate lot o' pur-taties ye 've got there, sur." Mr.
+Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr. O'Rourke's skill in
+gardening; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any
+case to make Margaret's lot easier.
+
+Reestablished in her old home, Margaret broke into song again, and
+Mr. O'Rourke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not
+agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature
+has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject
+were heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily, Mr. Bilkins was not without
+a sense of humor, else he would have found Mr. O'Rourke insupportable.
+Just when the old gentleman's patience was about exhausted, the gardener
+would commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but
+loved him for the moment.
+
+"Larry," said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of
+September, "just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands."
+
+Mr. O'Rourke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with
+the monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820!
+
+Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober.
+
+"Eight hundred and twenty what?" cried Mr. Bilkins, feeling very warm,
+as he naturally would in so high a temperature.
+
+"Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose, sur."
+
+"Larry, you 're an idiot."
+
+This was obviously not to Mr. O'Rourke's taste; for he went out and
+brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of
+numerals running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed, "Add 'em up
+yerself, thin!"
+
+Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr. Bilkins had not spent
+the greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O'Rourke
+into the mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr.
+O'Rourke's method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received
+a lot of a very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that
+morning, turned over to Mr. O'Rourke the duty of planting them. Though
+he had never seen a bulb in his life, Larry unblushingly asserted that
+he had set out thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady of O'Grady Castle,
+"an illegant place intirely, wid tin miles o' garden-walks," added
+Mr. O'Rourke, crushing Mr. Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble
+flower-beds.
+
+The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done
+his work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles
+and squares on top of the soil.
+
+"Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?" cried Mr. Bilkins,
+wrathfully.
+
+"An' did n't I set 'em out?" expostulated Mr. O'Rourke. "An' ain't they
+a settin' there beautiful?"
+
+"But you should have put them into the ground, stupid!"
+
+"Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how could they iver git out agin?
+Give the little jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!"
+
+For two weeks Mr. O'Rourke conducted himself with comparative propriety;
+that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
+regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious strains
+of music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of
+the north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would
+desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain of.
+
+The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand
+at the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a pretence
+of working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously immediately
+after breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner.
+Nobody knew what he did with himself in the interval, until one day he
+was observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His retreat
+discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part
+of the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of
+temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.
+
+Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman,
+she coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad,
+any way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours
+and hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a
+light in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the
+gravel walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about
+the house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which
+women hide their care.
+
+One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen
+stove. O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but
+not Larry. Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret was
+humming "Kate Kearney" quite merrily. But when her work was done, she
+stole out at the back gate and went in search of him. She scoured the
+neighborhood like a madwoman. O'Rourke had not been at the 'Finnigans'.
+He had not been at The Wee Drop since Monday, and this was Wednesday
+night. Her heart sunk within her when she failed to find him in the
+police-station. Some dreadful thing had happened to him. She came back
+to the house with one hand pressed wearily against her cheek. The dawn
+struggled through the kitchen windows, and fell upon Margaret crouched
+by the stove.
+
+She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr. Bilkins came down she
+confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been home
+for two nights.
+
+"Mayhap he 's drownded hisself," suggested Margaret, wringing her hands.
+
+"Not he," said Mr. Bilkins; "he does n't like the taste of water well
+enough."
+
+"Troth, thin, he does n't," reflected Margaret, and the reflection
+comforted her.
+
+"At any rate, I 'll go and look him up after breakfast," said Mr.
+Bilkins. And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth
+with the depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rourke without much
+difficulty. "Come to think of it," said the old gentleman to himself,
+drawing on his white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor Street
+"_I_ don't want to find him."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+But Mr. O'Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins
+directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite
+confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought
+to perch in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was
+discoverable. The Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in
+Rivermouth; there were five or six other low drinking-shops scattered
+about town, and through these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then
+explored various blind alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took
+a careful survey of the wharves along the river on his way home. He even
+shook the apple-tree near the stable with a vague hope of bringing
+down Mr. O'Rourke, but brought down nothing except a few winter
+apples, which, being both unripe and unsound, were not perhaps bad
+representatives of the object of his search.
+
+That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion with
+a straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O'Rourke's, which had been found
+on Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but O'Rourke
+was always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress is not to
+be pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had
+drowned himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen
+overboard while intoxicated.
+
+The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is regulated
+by laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that
+a certain percentage of the earth's population is bound to drown itself
+annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then, that
+Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the
+ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and pleasure
+parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly
+business. But Mr. O'Rourke failed to appear among the flotsam and jetsam
+which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the River-mouth
+wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting
+morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of
+those immense schools of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment
+with the fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod
+or a mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She
+averted her head in making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to
+detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a
+man fall into the sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the
+scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of
+hashed fish?
+
+     "Imperial Caesar, 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 a 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.
+
+*****
+
+"What--what is it, Ezra?" cried Mrs. Bilkins, changing color, and rising
+hastily from the breakfast table. Her first thought was of apoplexy.
+
+There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed back from his forehead, and
+his eyes fixed vacantly on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held out at
+arm's length before him.
+
+"Good heavens, Ezra! what _is_ the matter?"
+
+Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically, as if he were a great
+wax-doll, and somebody had pulled his wire.
+
+"Can't you speak, Ezra?"
+
+His lips opened, and moved inarticulately; then he pointed a rigid
+finger, in the manner of a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper,
+which he held up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his shoulder. When she
+had read it she sunk back into her chair without a word, and the two sat
+contemplating each other as if they had never met before in this world,
+and were not overpleased at meeting.
+
+The paragraph which produced this singular effect on the aged couple
+occurred at the end of a column of telegraph despatches giving the
+details of an unimportant engagement that had just taken place between
+one of the blockading squadron and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement
+itself does not concern us, but this item from the list of casualties on
+the Union side has a direct bearing on our narrative:--
+
+     "_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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diff --git a/23358.zip b/23358.zip
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #23358 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23358)
diff --git a/old/23358-h.htm.2021-01-25 b/old/23358-h.htm.2021-01-25
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      A Rivermouth Romance, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      A RIVERMOUTH ROMANCE.
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Thomas Bailey Aldrich
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      Boston And New York Houghton Mifflin Company
+    </h3>
+    <h4>
+      Copyright, 1873, 1885, and 1901
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+     <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto" cellpadding="4" border="3">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II. </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III. </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At five o'clock on the morning of the tenth of July, 1860, the front door
+      of a certain house on Anchor Street, in the ancient seaport town of
+      Rivermouth, might have been observed to open with great caution. This
+      door, as the least imaginative reader may easily conjecture, did not open
+      itself. It was opened by Miss Margaret Callaghan, who immediately closed
+      it softly behind her, paused for a few seconds with an embarrassed air on
+      the stone step, and then, throwing a furtive glance up at the second-story
+      windows, passed hastily down the street towards the river, keeping close
+      to the fences and garden walls on her left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a ghost-like stealthiness to Miss Margaret's movements, though
+      there was nothing whatever of the ghost about Miss Margaret herself. She
+      was a plump, short person, no longer young, with coal-black hair growing
+      low on the forehead, and a round face that would have been nearly
+      meaningless if the features had not been emphasized&mdash;italicized, so
+      to speak&mdash;by the small-pox. Moreover, the brilliancy of her toilet
+      would have rendered any ghostly hypothesis untenable. Mrs. Solomon (we
+      refer to the dressiest Mrs. Solomon, whichever one that was) in all her
+      glory was not arrayed like Miss Margaret on that eventful summer morning.
+      She wore a light-green, shot-silk frock, a blazing red shawl, and a yellow
+      crape bonnet profusely decorated with azure, orange, and magenta
+      artificial flowers. In her hand she carried a white parasol. The newly
+      risen sun, ricocheting from the bosom of the river and striking point
+      blank on the top-knot of Miss Margaret's gorgeousness, made her an
+      imposing spectacle in the quiet street of that Puritan village. But, in
+      spite of the bravery of her apparel, she stole guiltily along by garden
+      walls and fences until she reached a small, dingy frame-house near the
+      wharves, in the darkened doorway of which she quenched her burning
+      splendor, if so bold a figure is permissible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three quarters of an hour passed. The sunshine moved slowly up Anchor
+      Street, fingered noiselessly the well-kept brass knockers on either side,
+      and drained the heeltaps of dew which had been left from the revels of the
+      fairies overnight in the cups of the morning-glories. Not a soul was
+      stirring yet in this part of the town, though the Rivermouthians are such
+      early birds that not a worm may be said to escape them. By and by one of
+      the brown Holland shades at one of the upper windows of the Bilkins
+      mansion&mdash;the house from which Miss Margaret had emerged&mdash;was
+      drawn up, and old Mr. Bilkins in spiral nightcap looked out on the sunny
+      street. Not a living creature was to be seen, save the dissipated family
+      cat&mdash;a very Lovelace of a cat that was not allowed a night-key&mdash;who
+      was sitting on the curbstone opposite, waiting for the hall door to be
+      opened. Three quarters of an hour, we repeat, had passed, when Mrs.
+      Margaret O'Rourke, <i>née</i> Callaghan, issued from the small, dingy
+      house by the river, and regained the door-step of the Bilkins mansion in
+      the same stealthy fashion in which she had left it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not to prolong a mystery that must already oppress the reader, Mr.
+      Bilkins's cook had, after the manner of her kind, stolen out of the
+      premises before the family were up, and got herself married&mdash;surreptitiously
+      and artfully married, as if matrimony were an indictable offence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And something of an offence it was in this instance. In the first place
+      Margaret Callaghan had lived nearly twenty years with the Bilkins family,
+      and the old people&mdash;there were no children now&mdash;had rewarded
+      this long service by taking Margaret into their affections. It was a piece
+      of subtile ingratitude for her to marry without admitting the worthy
+      couple to her confidence. In the next place, Margaret had married a man
+      some eighteen years younger than herself. That was the young man's
+      lookout, you say. We hold it was Margaret that was to blame. What does a
+      young blade of twenty-two know? Not half so much as he thinks he does. His
+      exhaust-less ignorance at that age is a discovery which is left for him to
+      make in his prime.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Curly gold locks cover foolish brains,
+          Billing and cooing is all your cheer;
+     Sighing and singing of midnight strains,
+     Under Bonnybell's window panes,&mdash;
+          Wait till you come to Forty Year!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      In one sense Margaret's husband <i>had</i> come to forty year&mdash;she
+      was forty to a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>comether</i> 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;apropos
+      of the personal charms of one Kate Kearney who lived on the banks of
+      Killarney&mdash;which ordinarily issued from the direction of the scullery
+      were unheard that forenoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;possibly that dissolute creature with
+      twenty-four sheets of note-paper and twenty-four envelopes for fifteen
+      cents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>début</i>.
+      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&mdash;we may as well say it at once&mdash;of Mr.
+      Larry O'Rourke of Mullingar, County Westmeath, and late of the United
+      States sloop-of-war Santee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;seemingly a brazen hand that had been
+      cut off at the wrist, and nailed against the oak as a warning to
+      malefactors&mdash;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&mdash;a sad
+      losel, we fear&mdash;who ran away to try his fortunes before the mast, and
+      fell overboard in a gale off Hatteras. &ldquo;Lost at sea,&rdquo; says the chubby
+      marble slab in the Old South Burying-Ground, &ldquo;ætat 18.&rdquo; Perhaps that is
+      why no blue-jacket, sober or drunk, was ever repulsed from the door of the
+      Bilkins mansion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What do you want?&rdquo; she asked kindly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There 's no wife for you here,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, somewhat taken aback.
+      &ldquo;His wife!&rdquo; she thought; &ldquo;it's a mother the poor boy stands in need of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Me wife,&rdquo; repeated Mr. O'Rourke, &ldquo;for betther or for worse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had better go away,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, bridling up, &ldquo;or it will be
+      the worse for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To have and to howld,&rdquo; continued Mr. O'Rourke, wandering retrospectively
+      in the mazes of the marriage service, &ldquo;to have and to howld, till death&mdash;bad
+      luck to him!&mdash;takes one or the ither of us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You 're a blasphemous creature,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, severely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thim 's the words his riverince spake this mornin', standin' foreninst
+      us,&rdquo; explained Mr. O'Rourke. &ldquo;I stood here, see, and me jew'l stood there,
+      and the howly chaplain beyont.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Mr. O'Rourke with a wavering forefinger drew a diagram of the
+      interesting situation on the door-step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; returned Mrs. Bilkins, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bedad, thin, but she does.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lives here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sorra a place else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man's crazy,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins to herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want me wife,&rdquo; he said sternly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;a spalpeen,&rdquo; and told him to go home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Divil an inch,&rdquo; replied the spalpeen; but he got himself off the
+      threshold, and returned his position on the step.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's only Larry, mum,&rdquo; said the man, touching his forelock politely; &ldquo;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,&rdquo; he added, reflectively. &ldquo;He don't mane a
+      ha'p'orth o' harum, but jist now he's not quite in his right moind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should think not,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilkins, turning from the speaker to Mr.
+      O'Rourke, who had seated himself gravely on the scraper, and was weeping.
+      &ldquo;Hasn't the man any friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Misther Donnehugh,&rdquo; responded Mr. O'Rourke with great dignity, &ldquo;ye 're
+      dhrunk agin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Donnehugh, who had not taken more than thirteen ladles of rum-punch,
+      disdained to reply directly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He's a dacent lad enough&rdquo;&mdash;this to Mrs. Bilkins&mdash;&ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is n't there anybody to look after him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, mum, he's an orphan; his father and mother live in the owld counthry,
+      an' a fine hale owld couple they are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has n't he any family in the town&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure, mum, he has a family; was n't he married this blessed mornin'?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He said so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indade, thin, he was&mdash;the pore divil!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the&mdash;the person?&rdquo; inquired Mrs. Bilkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it the wife, ye mane?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, the wife: where is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, thin, mum,&rdquo; said Mr. Donnehugh, &ldquo;it's yerself can answer that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I?&rdquo; exclaimed Mrs. Bilkins. &ldquo;Good heavens! this man's as crazy as the
+      other!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Begorra, if anybody's crazy, it's Larry, for it's Larry has married
+      Margaret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What Margaret?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Bilkins, with a start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret Callaghan, sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Our</i> Margaret? Do you mean to say that OUR Margaret has married
+      that&mdash;that good-for-nothing, inebriated wretch!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a civil tongue the owld lady has, any way,&rdquo; remarked Mr. O'Rourke,
+      critically, from the scraper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it there ye are, me jew'l!&rdquo; cried Mr. O'Rourke, discovering her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Bilkins wheeled upon Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Margaret Callaghan, <i>is</i> that thing your husband?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ye-yes, mum,&rdquo; faltered Mrs. O'Rourke, with a woful lack of spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then take it away!&rdquo; cried Mrs. Bilkins.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; 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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It had been no part of Margaret's plan to acknowledge the marriage so
+      soon. Though on pleasure bent, she had a frugal mind. She had invested in
+      a husband with a view of laying him away for a rainy day&mdash;that is to
+      say, for such time as her master and mistress should cease to need her
+      services; for she had promised on more than one occasion to remain with
+      the old people as long as they lived. Indeed, if Mr. O'Rourke had come to
+      her and said in so many words, &ldquo;The day you marry me you must leave the
+      Bilkins family,&rdquo; there is very little doubt but Margaret would have let
+      that young sea-monster slip back unmated, so far as she was concerned,
+      into his native element. The contingency never entered into her
+      calculations. She intended that the ship which had brought Ulysses to her
+      island should take him off again after a decent interval of honeymoon;
+      then she would confess all to Mrs. Bilkins, and be forgiven, and Mr.
+      Bilkins would not cancel that clause supposed to exist in his will
+      bequeathing two first-mortgage bonds of the Squedunk E. B. Co. to a
+      certain faithful servant. In the mean while she would add each month to
+      her store in the coffers of the Rivermouth Savings Bank; for Calypso had a
+      neat sum to her credit on the books of that provident institution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this could not be now. The volatile bridegroom had upset the wisely
+      conceived plan, and &ldquo;all the fat was in the fire,&rdquo; as Margaret
+      philosophically put it. Mr. O'Rourke had been fully instructed in the part
+      he was to play, and, to do him justice, had honestly intended to play it;
+      but destiny was against him. It may be observed that destiny and Mr.
+      O'Rourke were not on very friendly terms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the ceremony had been performed and Margaret had stolen back to the
+      Bilkins mansion, as related, Mr. O'Rourke with his own skilful hands had
+      brewed a noble punch for the wedding guests. Standing at the head of the
+      table and stirring the pungent mixture in a small wash-tub purchased for
+      the occasion, Mr. O'Rourke came out in full flower. His flow of wit, as he
+      replenished the glasses, was as racy and seemingly as inexhaustible as the
+      punch itself. When Mrs. McLaughlin held out her glass, inadvertently
+      upside down, for her sixth ladleful, Mr. O'Rourke gallantly declared it
+      should be filled if he had to stand on his head to do it. The elder Miss
+      O'Leary whispered to Mrs. Connally that Mr. O'Rourke was &ldquo;a perfic
+      gintleman,&rdquo; and the men in a body pronounced him a bit of the raal
+      shamrock. If Mr. O'Rourke was happy in brewing a punch, he was happier in
+      dispensing it, and happiest of all in drinking a great deal of it himself.
+      He toasted Mrs. Finnigan, the landlady, and the late lamented Finnigan,
+      the father, whom he had never seen, and Miss Biddy Finnigan, the daughter,
+      and a young toddling Finnigan, who was at large in shockingly scant
+      raiment. He drank to the company individually and collectively, drank to
+      the absent, drank to a tin-peddler who chanced to pass the window, and
+      indeed was in that propitiatory mood when he would have drunk to the
+      health of each separate animal that came out of the Ark. It was in the
+      midst of the confusion and applause which followed his song, &ldquo;The Wearing
+      of the Grane,&rdquo; that Mr. O'Rourke, the punch being all gone, withdrew
+      unobserved, and went in quest of Mrs. O'Rourke&mdash;with what success the
+      reader knows.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      According to the love-idyl of the period, when Laura and Charles Henry,
+      after unheard-of obstacles, are finally united, all cares and tribulations
+      and responsibilities slip from their sleek backs like Christian's burden.
+      The idea is a pretty one, theoretically, but, like some of those models in
+      the Patent Office at Washington, it fails to work. Charles Henry does not
+      go on sitting at Laura's feet and reading Tennyson to her forever: the
+      rent of the cottage by the sea falls due with prosaic regularity; there
+      are bakers, and butchers, and babies, and tax-collectors, and doctors, and
+      undertakers, and sometimes gentlemen of the jury, to be attended to.
+      Wedded life is not one long amatory poem with recurrent rhymes of love and
+      dove, and kiss and bliss. Yet when the average sentimental novelist has
+      supplied his hero and heroine with their bridal outfit and arranged that
+      little matter of the marriage certificate, he usually turns off the gas,
+      puts up his shutters, and saunters off with his hands in his pockets, as
+      if the day's business were over. But we, who are honest dealers in real
+      life and disdain to give short weight, know better. The business is by no
+      means over; it is just begun. It is not Christian throwing off his pack
+      for good and all, but Christian taking up a load heavier and more
+      difficult than any he has carried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If Margaret Callaghan, when she meditated matrimony, indulged in any
+      roseate dreams, they were quickly put to flight. She suddenly found
+      herself dispossessed of a quiet, comfortable home, and face to face with
+      the fact that she had a white elephant on her hands. It is not likely that
+      Mr. O'Rourke assumed precisely the shape of a white elephant to her mental
+      vision; but he was as useless and cumbersome and unmanageable as one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret and Larry's wedding tour did not extend beyond Mrs. Finnigan's
+      establishment, where they took two or three rooms and set up housekeeping
+      in a humble way. Margaret, who was a tidy housewife, kept the floor of her
+      apartments as white as your hand, the tin plates on the dresser as bright
+      as your lady-love's eyes, and the cooking-stove as neat as the machinery
+      on a Sound steamer. When she was not rubbing the stove with lamp-black she
+      was cooking upon it some savory dish to tempt the palate of her marine
+      monster. Naturally of a hopeful temperament, she went about her work
+      singing softly to herself at times, and would have been very happy that
+      first week if Mr. O'Rourke had known a sober moment. But Mr. O'Rourke
+      showed an exasperating disposition to keep up festivities. At the end of
+      ten days, however, he toned down, and at Margaret's suggestion that he had
+      better be looking about for some employment he rigged up a fishing-pole,
+      and set out with an injured air for the wharf at the foot of the street,
+      where he fished for the rest of the day. To sit for hours blinking in the
+      sun, waiting for a cunner to come along and take his hook, was as
+      exhaustive a kind of labor as he cared to engage in. Though Mr. O'Rourke
+      had recently returned from a long cruise, he had not a cent to show.
+      During his first three days ashore he had dissipated his three years' pay.
+      The housekeeping expenses began eating a hole in Margaret's little fund,
+      the existence of which was no sooner known to Mr. O'Rourke than he stood
+      up his fishing-rod in one corner of the room, and thenceforth it caught
+      nothing but cobwebs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Divil a sthroke o' work I 'll do,&rdquo; said Mr. O'Rourke, &ldquo;whin we can live
+      at aise on our earnin's. Who 'd be afther frettin' hisself, wid money in
+      the bank? How much is it, Peggy darlint?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And divil a stroke more of work did he do. He lounged down on the wharves,
+      and, with his short clay pipe stuck between his lips and his hands in his
+      pockets, stared off at the sail-boats on the river. He sat on the
+      door-step of the Finnigan domicile, and plentifully chaffed the
+      passers-by. Now and then, when he could wheedle some fractional currency
+      out of Margaret, he spent it like a crown-prince at The Wee Drop around
+      the corner. With that fine magnetism which draws together birds of a
+      feather, he shortly drew about him all the ne'er-do-weels of Rivermouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was really wonderful what an unsuspected lot of them there was. From
+      all the frowzy purlieus of the town they crept forth into the sunlight to
+      array themselves under the banner of the prince of scallawags. It was
+      edifying of a summer afternoon to see a dozen of them sitting in a row,
+      like turtles, on the string-piece of Jedediah Rand's wharf, with their
+      twenty-four feet dangling over the water, assisting Mr. O'Rourke in
+      contemplating the islands in the harbor, and upholding the scenery, as it
+      were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rascal had one accomplishment, he had a heavenly voice&mdash;quite in
+      the rough, to be sure&mdash;and he played, on the violin like an angel. He
+      did not know one note from another, but he played in a sweet natural way,
+      just as Orpheus must have played, by ear. The drunker he was the more
+      pathos and humor he wrung from the old violin, his sole piece of personal
+      property. He had a singular fancy for getting up at two or three o'clock
+      in the morning, and playing by an open casement, to the distraction of all
+      the dogs in the immediate neighborhood and innumerable dogs in the
+      distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unfortunately, Mr. O'Rourke's freaks were not always of so innocent a
+      complexion. On one or two occasions, through an excess of animal and other
+      spirits, he took to breaking windows in the town. Among his nocturnal
+      feats he accomplished the demolition of the glass in the door of The Wee
+      Drop. Now, breaking windows in Rivermouth is an amusement not wholly
+      disconnected with an interior view of the police-station (bridewell is the
+      local term); so it happened that Mr. O'Rourke woke up one fine morning and
+      found himself snug and tight in one of the cells in the rear of the Brick
+      Market. His plea that the bull's-eye in the glass door of The Wee Drop
+      winked at him in an insult-in' manner as he was passing by did not prevent
+      Justice Hackett from fining the delinquent ten dollars and costs, which
+      made sad havoc with the poor wife's bank account. So Margaret's married
+      life wore on, and all went merry as a funeral knell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After Mrs. Bilkins, with a brow as severe as that of one of the Parcæ, had
+      closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down on
+      the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst into
+      tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she persisted
+      in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler sex are apt
+      to be&mdash;to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the first
+      vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing, which
+      was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in the
+      preparation of those hundred and one nameless comforts which are
+      necessities to the old, and wished in his soul that he had her back again.
+      Who could make a gruel, when he was ill, or cook a steak, when he was
+      well, like Margaret? So, meeting her one morning at the fish-market&mdash;for
+      Mr. O'Rourke had long since given over the onerous labor of catching
+      dinners&mdash;he spoke to her kindly, and asked her how she liked the
+      change in her life, and if Mr. O'Rourke was good to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Troth, thin, sur,&rdquo; said Margaret, with a short, dry laugh, &ldquo;he 's the
+      divil's own!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret was thin and careworn, and her laugh had the mild gayety of
+      champagne not properly corked. These things were apparent even to Mr.
+      Bilkins, who was not a shrewd observer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm afraid, Margaret,&rdquo; he remarked sorrowfully, &ldquo;that you are not making
+      both ends meet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Begorra, I 'd be glad if I could make one ind meet!&rdquo; returned Margaret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a duplicity quite foreign to his nature, Mr. Bilkins gradually drew
+      from her the true state of affairs. Mr. O'Rourke was a very bad case
+      indeed; he did nothing towards her support; he was almost constantly
+      drunk; the little money she had laid by was melting away, and would not
+      last until winter. Mr. O'Rourke was perpetually coming home with a
+      sprained ankle, or a bruised shoulder, or a broken head. He had broken
+      most of the furniture in his festive hours, including the cooking-stove.
+      &ldquo;In short,&rdquo; as Mr. Bilkins said in relating the matter afterwards to Mrs.
+      Bilkins, &ldquo;he had broken all those things which he should n't have broken,
+      and failed to break the one thing he ought to have broken long ago&mdash;his
+      neck, namely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The revelation which startled Mr. Bilkins most was this: in spite of all,
+      Margaret loved Larry with the whole of her warm Irish heart. Further than
+      keeping the poor creature up waiting for him until ever so much o'clock at
+      night, it did not appear that he treated her with personal cruelty. If he
+      had beaten her, perhaps she would have worshipped him. It needed only
+      that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Revolving Margaret's troubles in his thoughts as he walked homeward, Mr.
+      Bilkins struck upon a plan by which he could help her. When this plan was
+      laid before Mrs. Bilkins, she opposed it with a vehemence that convinced
+      him she had made up her mind to adopt it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never, never will I have that ungrateful woman under this roof!&rdquo; cried
+      Mrs. Bilkins; and accordingly the next day Mr. and Mrs. O'Rourke took up
+      their abode in the Bilkins mansion&mdash;Margaret as cook, and Larry as
+      gardener.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I 'm convanient if the owld gintleman is,&rdquo; had been Mr. O'Rourke's
+      remark, when the proposition was submitted to him. Not that Mr. O'Rourke
+      had the faintest idea of gardening. He did n't know a tulip from a tomato.
+      He was one of those sanguine people who never hesitate to undertake
+      anything, and are never abashed by their herculean inability.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins did not look to Margaret's husband for any great botanical
+      knowledge; but he was rather surprised one day when Mr. O'Rourke pointed
+      to the triangular bed of lilies-of-the-valley, then out of flower, and
+      remarked, &ldquo;Thim 's a nate lot o' pur-taties ye 've got there, sur.&rdquo; Mr.
+      Bilkins, we repeat, did not expect much from Mr. O'Rourke's skill in
+      gardening; his purpose was to reform the fellow if possible, and in any
+      case to make Margaret's lot easier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Reestablished in her old home, Margaret broke into song again, and Mr.
+      O'Rourke himself promised to do very well; morally, we mean, not
+      agriculturally. His ignorance of the simplest laws of nature, if nature
+      has any simple laws, and his dense stupidity on every other subject were
+      heavy trials to Mr. Bilkins. Happily, Mr. Bilkins was not without a sense
+      of humor, else he would have found Mr. O'Rourke insupportable. Just when
+      the old gentleman's patience was about exhausted, the gardener would
+      commit some atrocity so perfectly comical that his master all but loved
+      him for the moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Larry,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins, one breathless afternoon in the middle of
+      September, &ldquo;just see how the thermometer on the back porch stands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. O'Rourke disappeared, and after a prolonged absence returned with the
+      monstrous announcement that the thermometer stood at 820!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins looked at the man closely. He was unmistakably sober.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight hundred and twenty what?&rdquo; cried Mr. Bilkins, feeling very warm, as
+      he naturally would in so high a temperature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eight hundthred an' twinty degrays, I suppose, sur.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Larry, you 're an idiot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was obviously not to Mr. O'Rourke's taste; for he went out and
+      brought the thermometer, and, pointing triumphantly to the line of
+      numerals running parallel with the glass tube, exclaimed, &ldquo;Add 'em up
+      yerself, thin!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps this would not have been amusing if Mr. Bilkins had not spent the
+      greater part of the previous forenoon in initiating Mr. O'Rourke into the
+      mysteries of the thermometer. Nothing could make amusing Mr. O'Rourke's
+      method of setting out crocus bulbs. Mr. Bilkins had received a lot of a
+      very choice variety from Boston, and having a headache that morning,
+      turned over to Mr. O'Rourke the duty of planting them. Though he had never
+      seen a bulb in his life, Larry unblushingly asserted that he had set out
+      thousands for Sir Lucius O'Grady of O'Grady Castle, &ldquo;an illegant place
+      intirely, wid tin miles o' garden-walks,&rdquo; added Mr. O'Rourke, crushing Mr.
+      Bilkins, who boasted only of a few humble flower-beds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The following day he stepped into the garden to see how Larry had done his
+      work. There stood the parched bulbs, carefully arranged in circles and
+      squares on top of the soil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did n't I tell you to set out these bulbs?&rdquo; cried Mr. Bilkins,
+      wrathfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An' did n't I set 'em out?&rdquo; expostulated Mr. O'Rourke. &ldquo;An' ain't they a
+      settin' there beautiful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you should have put them into the ground, stupid!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it bury 'em, ye mane? Be jabbers! how could they iver git out agin?
+      Give the little jokers a fair show, Misther Bilkins!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For two weeks Mr. O'Rourke conducted himself with comparative propriety;
+      that is to say, be rendered himself useless about the place, appeared
+      regularly at his meals, and kept sober. Perhaps the hilarious strains of
+      music which sometimes issued at midnight from the upper window of the
+      north gable were not just what a quiet, unostentatious family would
+      desire; but on the whole there was not much to complain of.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third week witnessed a falling off. Though always promptly on hand at
+      the serving out of rations, Mr. O'Rourke did not even make a pretence of
+      working in the garden. He would disappear mysteriously immediately after
+      breakfast, and reappear with supernatural abruptness at dinner. Nobody
+      knew what he did with himself in the interval, until one day he was
+      observed to fall out of an apple-tree near the stable. His retreat
+      discovered, he took to the wharves and the alleys in the distant part of
+      the town. It soon became evident that his ways were not the ways of
+      temperance, and that all his paths led to The Wee Drop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course Margaret tried to keep this from the family. Being a woman, she
+      coined excuses for him in her heart. It was a dull life for the lad, any
+      way, and it was worse than him that was leading Larry astray. Hours and
+      hours after the old people had gone to bed, she would sit without a light
+      in the lonely kitchen, listening for that shuffling step along the gravel
+      walk. Night after night she never closed her eyes, and went about the
+      house the next day with that smooth, impenetrable face behind which women
+      hide their care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One morning found Margaret sitting pale and anxious by the kitchen stove.
+      O'Rourke had not come home at all. Noon came, and night, but not Larry.
+      Whenever Mrs. Bilkins approached her that day, Margaret was humming &ldquo;Kate
+      Kearney&rdquo; quite merrily. But when her work was done, she stole out at the
+      back gate and went in search of him. She scoured the neighborhood like a
+      madwoman. O'Rourke had not been at the 'Finnigans'. He had not been at The
+      Wee Drop since Monday, and this was Wednesday night. Her heart sunk within
+      her when she failed to find him in the police-station. Some dreadful thing
+      had happened to him. She came back to the house with one hand pressed
+      wearily against her cheek. The dawn struggled through the kitchen windows,
+      and fell upon Margaret crouched by the stove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She could no longer wear her mask. When Mr. Bilkins came down she
+      confessed that Larry had taken to drinking again, and had not been home
+      for two nights.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mayhap he 's drownded hisself,&rdquo; suggested Margaret, wringing her hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not he,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins; &ldquo;he does n't like the taste of water well
+      enough.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Troth, thin, he does n't,&rdquo; reflected Margaret, and the reflection
+      comforted her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At any rate, I 'll go and look him up after breakfast,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins.
+      And after breakfast, accordingly, Mr. Bilkins sallied forth with the
+      depressing expectation of finding Mr. O'Rourke without much difficulty.
+      &ldquo;Come to think of it,&rdquo; said the old gentleman to himself, drawing on his
+      white cotton gloves as he walked up Anchor Street &ldquo;<i>I</i> don't want to
+      find him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III.
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      But Mr. O'Rourke was not to be found. With amiable cynicism Mr. Bilkins
+      directed his steps in the first instance to the police-station, quite
+      confident that a bird of Mr. O'Rourke's plumage would be brought to perch
+      in such a cage. But not so much as a feather of him was discoverable. The
+      Wee Drop was not the only bacchanalian resort in Rivermouth; there were
+      five or six other low drinking-shops scattered about town, and through
+      these Mr. Bilkins went conscientiously. He then explored various blind
+      alleys, known haunts of the missing man, and took a careful survey of the
+      wharves along the river on his way home. He even shook the apple-tree near
+      the stable with a vague hope of bringing down Mr. O'Rourke, but brought
+      down nothing except a few winter apples, which, being both unripe and
+      unsound, were not perhaps bad representatives of the object of his search.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening a small boy stopped at the door of the Bilking mansion with a
+      straw hat, at once identified as Mr. O'Rourke's, which had been found on
+      Neal's Wharf. This would have told against another man; but O'Rourke was
+      always leaving his hat on a wharf. Margaret's distress is not to be
+      pictured. She fell back upon and clung to the idea that Larry had drowned
+      himself, not intentionally, may be; possibly he had fallen overboard while
+      intoxicated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The late Mr. Buckle has informed us that death by drowning is regulated by
+      laws as inviolable and beautiful as those of the solar system; that a
+      certain percentage of the earth's population is bound to drown itself
+      annually, whether it wants to or not. It may be presumed, then, that
+      Rivermouth's proper quota of dead bodies was washed ashore during the
+      ensuing two months. There had been gales off the coast and pleasure
+      parties on the river, and between them they had managed to do a ghastly
+      business. But Mr. O'Rourke failed to appear among the flotsam and jetsam
+      which the receding tides left tangled in the piles of the River-mouth
+      wharves. This convinced Margaret that Larry had proved a too tempting
+      morsel to some buccaneering shark, or had fallen a victim to one of those
+      immense schools of fish which seem to have a yearly appointment with the
+      fishermen on this coast. From that day Margaret never saw a cod or a
+      mackerel brought into the house without an involuntary shudder. She
+      averted her head in making up the fish-balls, as if she half dreaded to
+      detect a faint aroma of whiskey about them. And, indeed, why might not a
+      man fall into the sea, be eaten, say, by a halibut, and reappear on the
+      scene of his earthly triumphs and defeats in the noncommittal form of
+      hashed fish?
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Imperial Cæsar, dead and turned to clay,
+     Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      But, perhaps, as the conservative Horatio suggests, 't were to consider
+      too curiously to consider so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>mania
+      à potu</i>; 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&mdash;and had
+      evidently gone by water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;It would be a proud day for Larry,&rdquo; observed Margaret
+      contemplatively, &ldquo;if he could rest his oi on the illegant monumint I 've
+      put up to him.&rdquo; If Mr. O'Rourke could have read the inscription on it, he
+      would never have suspected his own complicity in the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;not the O'Rourke who
+      disappeared so strangely, but the O'Rourke who never existed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D' ye think, mum,&rdquo; she said one day to Mrs. Bilkins, as that lady was
+      adroitly sounding her on the ice question&mdash;&ldquo;d' ye think I 'd
+      condescind to take up wid the likes o' him, or the baker either, afther
+      sich a man as Larry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The rectified and clarified O'Rourke was a permanent wonder to Mr.
+      Bilkins, who bore up under the bereavement with noticeable resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Peggy is right,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, who was superintending the
+      burning out of the kitchen flue. &ldquo;She won't find another man like Larry
+      O'Rourke in a hurry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thrue for ye, Mr. Bilkins,&rdquo; answered Margaret. &ldquo;Maybe there's as good
+      fish in the say as iver was caught, but I don't be-lave it, all the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What&mdash;what is it, Ezra?&rdquo; cried Mrs. Bilkins, changing color, and
+      rising hastily from the breakfast table. Her first thought was of
+      apoplexy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There sat Mr. Bilkins, with his wig pushed back from his forehead, and his
+      eyes fixed vacantly on The Weekly Chronicle, which he held out at arm's
+      length before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens, Ezra! what <i>is</i> the matter?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins turned his eyes upon her mechanically, as if he were a great
+      wax-doll, and somebody had pulled his wire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can't you speak, Ezra?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips opened, and moved inarticulately; then he pointed a rigid finger,
+      in the manner of a guide-board, at a paragraph in the paper, which he held
+      up for Mrs. Bilkins to read over his shoulder. When she had read it she
+      sunk back into her chair without a word, and the two sat contemplating
+      each other as if they had never met before in this world, and were not
+      overpleased at meeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The paragraph which produced this singular effect on the aged couple
+      occurred at the end of a column of telegraph despatches giving the details
+      of an unimportant engagement that had just taken place between one of the
+      blockading squadron and a Confederate cruiser. The engagement itself does
+      not concern us, but this item from the list of casualties on the Union
+      side has a direct bearing on our narrative:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;<i>Larry O'Rourke, seaman, splinter wound in the leg.
+     Not serious</i>.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Now is
+      your time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There 's been another battle down South, Margaret,&rdquo; said the old
+      gentleman presently, folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket. &ldquo;A
+      sea-fight this time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure, an' they 're allus fightin' down there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But not always with so little damage. There was only one man wounded on
+      our side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pore man! It's sorry we oughter be for his wife an' childer, if he's got
+      any.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not badly wounded, you will understand, Margaret&mdash;not at all
+      seriously wounded; only a splinter in the leg.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Faith, thin, a splinter in the leg is no pleasant thing in itself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mere scratch,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;The odd part of the matter is the man's first name. His
+      first name was Larry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Margaret nodded, as one should say, There's a many Larrys in the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the oddest part of it,&rdquo; continued Mr. Bilkins, in a carelessly
+      sepulchral voice, &ldquo;is the man's last name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man's last name!&rdquo; she repeated, wonderingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, his last name&mdash;O'Rourke.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;D'ye mane it?&rdquo; shrieked Margaret&mdash;&ldquo;d' ye mane it? Glory to God! O
+      worra! worra!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Ezra,&rdquo; said Mrs. Bilking, in one of those spasms of base
+      ingratitude to which even the most perfect women are liable, &ldquo;you 've made
+      nice work of it. You might as well have knocked her down with an axe!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, my dear&rdquo;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, bother!&mdash;my smelling-bottle, quick!&mdash;second bureau drawer&mdash;left-hand
+      side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Och!&rdquo; laughed Margaret, &ldquo;that's jist Larry over agin. The pore lad was
+      allus full of his nonsense an' spirits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That he was,&rdquo; said Mr. Bilkins, dryly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Larry's all right,&rdquo; said hopeful Margaret. &ldquo;If any harum had come to the
+      gossoon, we'd have knowed it. It's the bad news that travels fast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Bilkins was not so positive about that. It had taken a whole year to
+      find out that O'Rourke had not drowned himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps we had better look up Mr. O'Rourke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Desertion in the face of the enemy&mdash;for, though the city lay under
+      Federal guns, it was still hostile enough&mdash;involved the heaviest
+      penalties. O'Rourke was speedily arrested with other deserters, tried by
+      court-martial, and sentenced to death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the excitement was over, and this is always the trying time,
+      Margaret accepted the situation philosophically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pore lad's out o' harum's rache, any way,&rdquo; she reflected. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would n't wonder if Misthress Lincoln had a new silk gownd or two this
+      fall,&rdquo; Margaret would remark, sarcastically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prison rules permitted Mr. O'Rourke to receive periodical
+      communications &ldquo;from his friends outside.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 <i>verbatim et literatim</i>:&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     <i>febuary.   1864 mi belovid wife
+     fur the luv of God sind mee pop gose the wezel.
+     yours till deth</i>
+     .                                        <i>larry O rourke.</i>
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pop goes the Weasel&rdquo; was sent to him, and Mr. Bilkins ingeniously slipped
+      into the same envelope &ldquo;The Drunkard's Death&rdquo; and &ldquo;Beware of the Bowl,&rdquo;
+       two spirited compositions well calculated to exert a salutary influence
+      over a man imprisoned for life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. O'Rourke's summing up of his case was characteristic: &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>