The Missing Bride | Page 2

service with Paul
Jones, the American Sea King, and turned the brighter part of his
character up to the light. He performed miracles of valor--achieved for
himself a name and a post-captain's rank in the infant navy and finally
was permitted to retire with a bullet lodged under his shoulder blade, a
piece of silver trepanned in the top of his skull, a deep sword-cut across
his face from the right temple over his nose to the left cheek--and with
the honorary title of commodore.
He was a perfect beauty about this time, no doubt, but that did not
prevent him from receiving the hand of his cousin Henrietta Kalouga,
who had waited for him many a weary year.
No children blessed his late marriage, and as year after year passed,
until himself and his wife were well stricken in years, people, who
never lost interest in the great estate, began to wonder to which among
his tribe of impoverished relations Nickolas Waugh would bequeath the
manor of Luckenough.
His choice fell at length upon his orphan grandniece, the beautiful
Edith Lance, whom he took from the Catholic Orphan Asylum, where
she had found refuge since the death of her parents and placed in one of
the best convent schools in the South.
At the age of seventeen Edith was brought home from school and
established at Luckenough as the adopted daughter and acknowledged
heiress of her uncle.
Delicate, dreamy and retiring, and tinged with a certain pensiveness,
the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive
temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of
St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough

than any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her. And when
at the call of social duty she did go into company, she exercised a
refining and subduing influence, involuntary as it was potent.
Yet in that lovely, fragile form, in that dreaming, poetical soul, lay
undeveloped a latent power of heroism soon to be aroused into action.
"Darling of all hearts and eyes," Edith had been at home a year when
the War of 1812 broke out.
Maryland, as usual, contributed her large proportion of volunteers to
the defense of the country. All men capable of bearing arms rapidly
mustered into companies and hastened to put themselves at the disposal
of the government.
The lower counties of Maryland were left comparatively unprotected.
Old men, women, children and negroes were all that remained in
charge of the farms and plantations. Yet remote from the scenes of
conflict and hitherto undisturbed by the convulsions of the great world,
they reposed in fancied safety and never thought of such unprecedented
misfortunes as the evils of the war penetrating to their quiet homes.
But their rest of security was broken by a tremendous shock. The
British fleet under Admiral Sir A. Cockburn suddenly entered the
Chesapeake. And the quiet, lonely shores of the bay became the scene
of a warfare scarcely paralleled in atrocity in ancient or modern times.
If among the marauding band of licensed pirates and assassins there
was one name more dreaded, more loathed and accursed than the rest, it
was that of the brutal and ferocious Thorg--the frequent leader of
foraging parties, the unsparing destroyer of womanhood, infancy and
age, the jackal and purveyor of Admiral Cockburn. If anywhere there
was a beautiful woman unprotected, or a rich plantation house
ill-defended, this jackal was sure to scent out "the game" for his master,
the lion. And many were the comely maidens and youthful wives
seized and carried off by this monster.
The Patuxent and the Wicomico, with the coast between them, offered
no strong temptation to a rapacious foe, and the inhabitants reposed in

the fancied security of their isolation and unimportance. The business
of life went on, faintly and sorrowfully, to be sure, but still went on.
The village shops at B---- and C---- were kept open, though tended
chiefly by women and boys. The academicians at the little college
pursued their studies or played at forming juvenile military companies.
The farms and plantations were cultivated chiefly under the direction of
ladies whose husbands, sons and brothers were absent with the army.
No one thought of danger to St. Mary's.
Most terrible was the awakening from this dream of safety, when, on
the morning of the 17th of August, the division under the command of
Admiral Cockburn--the most dreaded and abhorred of all--was seen to
enter the mouth of the Patuxent in full sail for Benedict. Nearly all the
able-bodied men were absent with the army at the time when the
combined military and naval forces tinder Admiral Cockburn and
General Ross landed at that place. None remained to guard the homes
but aged men,