Читать книгу Sheppard Lee, Written by Himself - Robert Montgomery Bird - Страница 26
ОглавлениеCONTAINING ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE ADVANTAGES OF DYING AN UNUSUAL DEATH, IN TIMES OF HIGH POLITICAL EXCITEMENT.
I never felt the slightest inclination to revisit the scenes of my late trouble and discontent; but the newspapers, which are the lights of the age, though occasionally somewhat smoky, acquainted me with the events that followed after my marvellous disappearance. "What has become of Sheppard Lee?" was the cry, after his creditors had sought for him in vain during a space of two weeks and more. No vestige of him was discovered, not the slightest clew to indicate his fate, beyond those already brought to light in the Owl-roost. It was impossible he could have fled without leaving some traces; and none were found. "And why should he fly?" men at last began to ask. He was in debt, it was true; but what could he gain by absconding, since his little property was necessarily left behind him?
In a word, the improbabilities of his having voluntarily fled were so great, that men began to recur to their original idea of his having been murdered. But why was he murdered? and by whom? Some few began to revive the charges against me—that is to say, against John H. Higginson; but brighter ideas were struck out, and John H. Higginson was forgotten. An old friend of mine, who never cared a fig for me, but who was ambitious to create a tumult, and become the leader of a party, got up in a public place, and recounted the history of William Morgan, and his mysterious abduction and murder by the masons of the empire state. A terrible agitation at once seized his listeners. "Poor, dear, unfortunate Sheppard Lee!" they cried; "the masons have Morganized him, for apostatizing from his oaths, and revealing the secrets of the society! Yes, he has been Morganized!" And, giving way to their rage, they were on the point of tarring and feathering all the free-masons they could lay their hands on; when, presto—as the conjurers say, they suddenly made discovery that the masons could not have murdered me for divulging secrets, inasmuch as I had never known them, nor for apostatizing, as I had never been a mason in my life.
But the tumult was not allowed to subside. My old friends of the administration, finding that their strength was dwindling away in the country, and dreading the event of the coming election, unless a reaction could be got up in their favour, suddenly burst into a fury, swore that I had been made away with by the opposition, on account of my remarkable zeal, energy, and success, as an electioneerer and political missionary; and taking my old hat and shoe, and carrying them round the village in solemn procession, they stopped in the market-place, where one of their chief orators—my faithful friend, the new postmaster—delivered a sort of funeral address, in which he compared the opponents of the administration to cut-throats and cannibals, pronounced them the enemies of liberty, swore that no honest patriot was safe among them, and declared—his declaration being illustrated by shouts, and groans, and grim faces—"that I had perished, the victim of a murderous opposition!"
But, as if that was not immortality enough for one of my humble pretensions, the opposition instantly turned the tables upon their accusers. Witnesses stepped forward to prove that, on the night when I was seen for the last time, I had, in the bar-room of the first hotel in the village, publicly denounced the hurrah party, as being based upon deception and fraud, and avowed my determination not only instantly to leave it, but to go my death thenceforth in opposition. "See the bloody vindictiveness and malice of the hurrah party!" they cried; "before the sun rose upon this unfortunate and honest man—honest, because he deserted his party the moment his eyes were opened to its corruption—he was a living man no longer. The bravoes of this horrible gang of mid-night murderers, who have trampled on our rights and liberties, and now trample on our lives, met the unlucky patriot as he returned to his lowly cot, and—just Heavens!—where was he now, save in his bloody and untimely grave? he, the humble, the unoffending, the honest, the universally-esteemed, the widely-beloved, the patriotic Sheppard Lee!—waylaid and ambushed! killed, slain, murdered, massacred! the victim of a despotic and vindictive cabal—the martyr of liberty, the—" In short, the noblest, honestest, dearest, best, and most ill-used creature that ever dabbled in the puddle of politics. One might suppose that this outcry of the antis, backed as it was by the full proof of my change of politics, would have stopped the mouths of the hurrah-boys. But it did no such thing; they only raved the louder. As for the proof of my backsliding, they treated that with contempt; proofs being as little regarded in politics as arguments. They accused the antis more zealously than before; and the antis recriminated with equal enthusiasm.
There were some men in the village who strove to appease the ferment, by directing suspicion upon the German doctor, and divers other personages, just as the humour of suspicion seized them, furiously accusing these suspected individuals of having had some hand in the catastrophe. But the German doctor and the other persons accused had nothing to do with politics, and were therefore suffered to go their ways. It is a great protection to one's reputation to keep clear of politics. The guilt of my murder was left to be borne by the hurrah-boys and the antis, one party or the other; but as the evidence was equally strong against either party, and just as strong against any one individual of either party as another, it resulted that I was murdered not only by both parties, but by every man of both parties;—a peculiarity in my history that proved me to have possessed, though I never dreamed it before, a vaster number both of energetic friends and bloodthirsty enemies (each man being both friend and enemy) than any other man in the whole world.
How the antis and the hurrah-boys settled the affair among them, I did not care to inquire. I was engrossed by the novelties and charms of a new being, and willing to forget that such a poor devil as Sheppard Lee had ever existed.
