A Rivermouth Romance

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.

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.