The Magnificent Adventure by Emerson Hough (best ereader under 100 txt) đź“•
"You give me no long shrift, mother?" said the youth, with a twinkle in his eye.
"How can I? I can only tell you what is in the book of life. Do I not know? A mother always loves her son; so it takes all her courage to face what she knows will be his lot. Any mother can read her son's future--if she dares to read it. She knows--she knows!"
There was a long silence; then the widow continued.
"Listen, Merne," she said. "You call me a prophetess of evil. I am not that. Do you think I speak only in despair, my boy? No, there is something larger than mere happiness. Listen, and believe me, for now I could n
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“It has come at last,” said the mother of Meriwether Lewis. “The wilderness has him, as I knew it would! I told him, here at this place, when he was a boy, that at last the load would weigh him down.”
“The rumor is that he died by his own hand. I find it difficult to believe. It is far more likely that some enemy or robber was guilty of the deed.”
“Whom had he ever harmed?” she demanded of Jefferson.
“None in the world, with intent; but he had enemies. Whether by his own hand or that of another, he died a gallant gentleman. He would not think of himself alone. But listen—bear with me if I tell you that could your son send out the news himself, perhaps he might say ’twas by his own hand he perished, and not by that of another!”
“Never, Mr. Jefferson, never will I believe that! It was not in his nature!”
“I agree with you. But when we take the last wishes of the dead, we take what is the law for us. And the law of your son was the law of honor. Suppose, my dear madam, there were a woman concerned in this matter?”
“He never wronged a woman in his life——”
“Precisely, nor in his death would he wrong one! Do you begin to see?”
“Did he ever speak to you of her?”
“It was impossible that he should; but I knew them both. I knew their secret. Were it in his power to do so, I am sure that he carried his secret with him, so that it might never be shared by any. That secret he has guarded in death as in life.”
“But shall I let that stain rest on his name?” The dark eye of the old woman gleamed upon her son’s friend.
“Do not I love him also? I am speaking now only of his own wish—not ours. I know that he would shield her at any cost—nay, I know he did shield her at any cost. May not we shield him—and her—no matter what the cost to us? If he laid that wish on us, ought we not to respect it? Madam, I shall frame a letter which will serve to appease the criticism of the public in regard to your son. If it be not the exact truth—and who shall tell the exact truth?—it will at least be accepted as truth, and it will forever silence any talk. What should the public know of a life such as his? There are some lives which are tragically large, and such was his. He lived with honor, and he could not die without it. What was in his heart we shall not ask to know. If ever he sinned, he is purged of any sin.”
Jefferson was silent for a moment, holding the bereaved mother’s hand in his own.
“He shall have a monument, madam,” he went on. “It shall mark his grave in yonder wilderness. They shall name at least a county for him, and hold it his sacred grave-place—there in Tennessee, by the old Indian road. Let him lie there under the trees—that is as he would wish. He shall have some monument—yes, but how futile is all that! His greatest monument will be in the vast new country which he has brought to us. He was a man of a natural greatness not surpassed by any of his time.”
What of Theodosia Alston, loyal and lofty soul, blameless wife, devoted and pathetic adherent to the fallen fortunes of her ill-starred father?
Three years after Meriwether Lewis laid him down to sleep in the forest, a ship put out from Charleston wharf. It was bound for the city of New York, where at that time there was living a broken, homeless, forsaken man named Aaron Burr—a man execrated at home, discredited abroad, but who now, after years of exile, had crept home to the country which had cast him out.
A passenger on that ship was Theodosia Alston, the daughter of Aaron Burr. That much is known. The ship sailed. It never came to port. No more is known.
To this day none knows what was the fate of Aaron Burr’s daughter, one of the most appealing figures of her day, a woman made for happiness, but continually in close touch with tragedy. Wherever her body may lie, she has her wish. The sound of the eternal waters is the continuous requiem in her ears. Her secret, if she had one, is washed away long ere this, and is one with the eternal secrets of the sea. As to her sin, she had none. Above her memory, since she has no grave, there might best be inscribed the words she wrote at a time of her own despair:
“I hope to be happy in the next world, for I have not been bad in this.”
Did the little brook in Tennessee ever find its way down to the sea? Did it carry a scattered drop of a man’s lifeblood, little by little thinning, thinning on its long journey? Did ever a wandering flake of ashes, melting, rest on its bosom for so great a journey as that toward the sea?
Did the sound of a voice in the wilderness, passing across the unknown leagues, ever reach an ear that heard? Who can tell? Perhaps in the great ten thousand years such things may be—perhaps deep calls to deep, and there are no longer sins nor tears.
A million hearth-fires mark the camp-fire trail of Meriwether Lewis. We own the country which he found, and for which he paid. He sleeps. Above him stands the monument which his chief assigned to him—his country. It rises now in glory and splendor, the perfected vision which he saw.
That is the happy ending of his story—his country! It is ours. As its title came to us in honor, it is for us to love it honorably, to use it honorably, and to defend it honorably. None may withstand us while we hold to his ambitions—while our sons measure to the stature of such a man.
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[1] During the following winter Mr. Merry had opportunity to fulfill his threat. In February, 1804, the President again invited him to dine, in the following words:
“Thomas Jefferson asks the favor of Mr. Merry to dine with a small party of friends on Monday, the 13th, at half past three.”
Mr. Merry, still smarting all these months, stood on his dignity and addressed his reply to the Secretary of State.
Reviewing at some length what seemed to him important events, he added:
“If Mr. Merry should be mistaken as to the meaning of Mr. Jefferson’s note, and it should prove that the invitation is designed for him in a public capacity, he trusts that Mr. Jefferson will feel equally that it must be out of his power to accept it, without receiving previously, through the channel of the Secretary of State, the necessary formal assurance of the President’s determination to observe toward him those niceties of distinction which have heretofore been shown by the executive government of the United States to the persons who have been accredited as our Majesty’s ministers.
“Mr. Merry has the honor to request of Mr. Madison to lay this explanation before the President, and to accompany it with the strongest assurance of his highest respect and consideration.”
The Secretary of State, who seems to have been acting as social secretary to Mr. Jefferson, without hesitation replied as follows:
“Mr. Madison presents his compliments to Mr. Merry. He has communicated to the President Mr. Merry’s note of this morning, and has the honor to remark to him that the President’s invitation, being in the style used by him in like cases, had no reference to the points of form which will deprive him of the pleasure of Mr. Merry’s company at dinner on Monday next.
“Mr. Madison tenders to Mr. Merry his distinguished consideration.”
The friction arising out of this and interlocking incidents was part of the unfortunate train of events which later led up to the war of 1812.
[2] It is generally conceded that Theodosia Burr Alston must have been acquainted with her father’s most intimate ambitions, and with at least part of the questionable plans by which he purposed to further them. Her blind and unswerving loyalty to him, passing all ordinary filial affection, was a predominant trait of her singular and by no means weak or hesitant character, in which masculine resolution blended so strangely with womanly reserve and sweetness.
[3] Mr. Merry did so and reported the entire proposal made by Burr. The proposition was that the latter should “lend his assistance to his majesty’s government in any manner in which they may think fit to employ him, particularly in endeavoring to effect a separation of the Western part of the United States from that which lies between the mountains in its whole extent.”
But though deeply interested in the conspiracy to separate the Western country, Mr. Merry was not too confiding, for in his message to Mr. Pitt he added the following confidence, showing his own estimate of Burr:
“I have only to add that if strict confidence could be placed in him, he certainly possesses, perhaps in a much greater degree than any other individual in this country, all the talents, energy, intrepidity, and firmness which it requires for such an enterprise.”
[4] The original journals of these two astonishing young men—one of them just thirty years old, the other thirty-four—should rank among the epic literature of the world. Battered about, scattered, separated, lost, hawked from hand to hand, handed down as unvalued heritages, “edited” first by this and then by that little man, sometimes to the extent of actual mutilation or alteration of their text—the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hold their ineffacable clarity in spite of all. Their most curious quality is the
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