The day after the inquest, the funeral took place. As the clock of Speckport cathedral chimed in sonorous sweetness the hour of ten, all that was earthly of Mrs. Leroy was placed in the hearse, and the gloomy cortege started. A great many carriages followed the mistress of Redmon to her last long home; and, in the foremost, two ladies, robed in sable, and vailed in crape, rode. The outward mourning was for the dead, the deeperdeuilof the heart for the living—for him who, on this wretched August day, was a prisoner in Speckport jail, awaiting his trial for the greatest crime man can commit, doomed to suffer, perhaps, the greatest penalty man can inflict.
Nobody in all the long line of carriages talked; they crouched into corners, and shivered, and were silent, and sulky, and cross, and uncomfortable, and gaped, and wished the thing was well over, or that they had never come.
They got their wish after a while. The last sod was beaten down, and the carriages rattled back into the foggy town—all but three or four; and they drove back to the eerie old house, never so lonely and desolate as now. One ceremony was yet to be gone through—that ceremony the reading of the last will and testament of Mrs. Leroy. Here, where it had been written, in the ghostly reception-room, where the inquest had taken place, and where the rats and black beetles had it all their own way, it was to be read. It was this that brought Mrs. Marsh, who had been ill and hysterical ever since she had heard the result of the inquest, to the funeral at all. To her it was a great and joyful thing this wealth that after to-day was to be theirs, and not even in her grief could she forego the pleasure of being present. Heaven knows, it was nothing of the sort brought her daughter—the silent agony she had endured since yesterday can never be told; but she had hope yet. She had hope in this very wealth that was to be hers to help him. Young as she was, she knew enough of the power of money to be aware it can do almost anything in this world, and smooth the road to the next; and she trusted in its magic power to free her imprisoned brother. They all went into the silent and forlorn house together; Mr. Darcy, who was to read the will, and whose face was distressed and troubled to the last degree; Mr. Blair, as an intimate friend of the family; Mr. McGregor, Senior, and Dr. Leach; Mrs. McGregor and Mrs. Blair were with Mrs. Marsh, and Miss McGregor and Miss Blair were deeply sympathetic with Miss Marsh—the heiress!—and Mr. Val Blake, with his sister on his arm; and Midge, who had been at the signing of the will, brought up the rear.
The shutters of the closed rooms had all been opened, and the casements raised, for the first time in many a day, and the pale light of the foggy morning poured in. Lawyer Darcy took his seat at a table, and laid out on it a legal-looking document tied with red tape. The others seated themselves around the apartment; and Nathalie Marsh, in her deep mourning-robes, and her thick black crape vail down over her face, took her seat beside one of the open windows, and leaned her forehead on her hand, as if it ached.
Long afterward, when she was gone from them forever, they remembered that drooping black figure and bowed young head, with one or two bright curls, like lost sunbeams, shimmering out from under her crape bonnet. Long afterward, they thought of how she had sat that dull and miserable day, suffering as these patient womanly martyrs only suffer, and making no sign.
Lawyer Darcy seemed strangely reluctant to commence his task. He lingered and lingered, his face pale and agitated, his lips twitching nervously, and the fingers that untied the document before him, trembling. His voice, too, when he spoke, was not quite steady.
"I am afraid," said the lawyer, in that unsteady voice, "that the reading of this will will be a shock—a disappointment! I know it must astonish all, as it did me, and I should like to prepare you for it, before it is read."
There was a surprised and alarmed murmur, but no one spoke.
"You are all aware," the lawyer went on, keeping his eyes resolutely from that drooping figure at the window, "that when Mrs. Leroy made her will after coming to Speckport she bequeathed all she possessed to her ward, Miss Marsh. I drew up the will, and she made no secret of her intentions."
There was another painful pause. Val Blake broke it.
"Of course," he said, impatiently, "we all know Mrs. Leroy left Miss Marsh heiress of Redmon."
"But you do not know," said Mr. Darcy, "that a short time ago—in fact, a few days before her tragical death, she revoked that first will and made a new one."
"What?" the cry was from Val Blake, but no one heeded him; every eye was strained upon the lawyer.
"Made a new one," the lawyer repeated, still averting his eyes from the black form at the window; "a new one, entirely different; leaving, I am sorry to say, Redmon away from Miss Marsh—in point of fact, disinheriting her."
There were two little feminine shrieks from the Misses Blair and McGregor, a hysterical cry from Mrs. Marsh, but the bowed figure at the window never stirred. In the unnatural stillness of her attitude, her face hidden behind her crape mask, there was something more fearful than any outbursts of wild womanly distress.
"The new will was made, as I told you," continued Mr. Darcy, "but a few days before her death; made whilst smarting under a sense of anger, and what she called ingratitude. Miss Marsh had offended her, disobeyed her in a matter on which she had set her heart, and for this she was going to disinherit her. I expostulated, entreated, did all I could, but in vain. She was obstinate, and this new will was made, which I now hold in my hand."
Mrs. Marsh's face had turned as white as that of a dead woman, and great beads of cold sweat stood on her forehead. But she sat rigidly still, listening, and feeling as though she were in some dreadful dream.
"I drew up the will," pursued Mr. Darcy, "and Midge yonder and old Nettleby signed it. I fancied when her first resentment cooled, she would see the injustice of her act, and retract it. I was right; the day preceding the night of her death, hearing she was ill, I called to see her, and she told me to come the next morning, and a third will should be made, leaving all to Nathalie as at first. Next morning she was dead."
To the dark form, whose drooping face was pitifully hidden by the black vail, did any memory come of the words spoken to her by the dead woman that fatal night, and which had then been so mysterious:
"I'll make it all right, Natty! I'll make it all right!" Did she know what was meant now?
"And do you mean to say, Mr. Darcy," Val Blake cried, astonished and indignant, "that Nathalie Marsh is not the heiress of Redmon?"
"I do! this will disinherits her! It is a crying wrong, but no fault of mine."
"And who, then, is the heir?" asked Mr. McGregor.
"She bequeaths all she possesses, unconditionally, to her brother, Philip Henderson, or, in case of his death, to his children. I will read the will."
Amid that profound and impressive stillness, the lawyer read the last will and testament of Jane Leroy. It was concise enough, and left the whole of her property, real and personal, without conditions, to her brother, Philip Henderson, and his heirs, with the exception of five pounds to Miss Nathalie Marsh, to buy a mourning-ring.
Mr. Darcy hesitated over this last cruel passage, and felt inclined to leave it out; but he did not, and there was a suppressed murmur of indignation from every lip on hearing it.
Poor Mrs. Marsh was catching her breath in hysterical gasps, and being fanned and sprinkled with cold water, and the palms of her hands slapped by Miss Jo and the two married ladies. And still the vailed figure at the window sat rigidly there, uttering no cry, shedding no tears.
There are griefs too deep for words, too intense for tears, when we can only sit in mute and stony despair, while the world reels under our feet, and the light of the sun is blackness. To Nathalie Marsh, the loss of fortune was the loss of everything—brother, lover, home, happiness—the loss of all to which she had looked forward so long, for which she had endured so much. And now, she sat there, like a figure carved in ebony; and only for the ghastly pallor of her face in the indistinct glimpses of it they could catch through the vail, could they tell that she even heard.
It was Val Blake who again broke the silence that followed the reading of the will.
"I protest against this will!" he indignantly cried. "It is unjust and ungrateful! You should never have produced it, Mr. Darcy. You should have read the former will."
"You are jesting, Mr. Blake! While regretting as much as you can possibly do this unfortunate change, my duty is sacred, and by this will we must abide. Mrs. Marsh seems very ill; I think she had better be conveyed home."
No one ventured to speak to Nathalie, her unnatural manner awed them; but when her mother was supported from the room, and she arose to follow, good natured Miss Jo was beginning a homily on resignation, and on its being all for the best, perhaps, in the end. Her brother, however, cut her short with very little ceremony, and handed Miss Marsh in after her mother, and seating himself by the coachman, they started off rapidly. He might have spared himself the trouble; good Miss Jo might have preached for an hour, and Nathalie would not have heard one word of it. She sat looking straight before her, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, conscious of nothing, save only that dull and dark despair at her heart. Midge, who had come with them in the carriage, waited on Mrs. Marsh, and cried quietly all the way, bestowing anything but blessings on the memory of her late mistress.
Mr. Blake assisted both ladies into the house when they reached Cottage Street. Mrs. Marsh, who was very ill and in a state of hysterics, he carried in his arms and laid on the sofa. Nathalie entered the parlor, closed the door, and, still wearing her bonnet and mantle, sat down by the window that looked out on the blurred and misty street. She had flung back her vail, and in her white and ghastly face and dilated violet eyes you could read a waiting look. Nathalie was waiting for one, who, by some secret prescience, she knew would soon come.
Doctor Leach entered the cottage soon after their return, prescribed for Mrs. Marsh, and departed again. Had he been able to minister to a mind diseased, he might have prescribed for Nathalie, too; but that not coming within his pharmacopœia, he left without seeing her.
It was dusk when he for whom she waited came. The dull wet day was ending in a duller and wetter evening, and the tramp, tramp of the long-roaring waves on the shore made a dull bass for the high, shrill soprano shrieks of the wind. The lamps were flaring through the foggy twilight in the bleak streets, when Captain Cavendish, in a loose overcoat, and bearing an umbrella, wended his way to that house of mourning. He had not been two hours in Speckport, but he had heard all that had transpired. Was there one in the town, from the aristocratic denizens of Golden Row and Park Lane to the miserable dwellers in filthy back-alleys and noisome water-side streets, that did not know, and were not discussing these unhappy events with equal gusto? The robbery and murder of Mrs. Leroy, the inquest, the sentence and imprisonment of Charley Marsh, the will, and the disinheriting of Nathalie, all were as well known in the obscurest corner of Speckport as in that unhappy home to which he was going.
In the course of that long afternoon Midge had only once ventured into the parlor, and that was in fear and trembling, to ask her young mistress to take a cup of tea and some toast which she brought.
Nathalie had tasted nothing since the day before; and poor Midge, with tears in her fretful eyes, urged it upon her now. The girl looked at her out of a pair of hollow eyes, unnaturally large and bright, in a vague way, as if trying to comprehend what she said; and when she did comprehend, refusing. Midge ventured to urge; and then Nathalie broke out of her rigid, despairing stillness, into passionate impatience.
"Take it away!" she cried, "and leave me alone! Leave me alone, I tell you!"
Midge could do nothing but obey. As she quitted the room with the tray, there came a knock at the front door. She set down the tray and opened it, and the tall form of the young English officer confronted her. Midge had no especial love for Captain Cavendish, as we know; but she was aware her young lady had, and was, for the first time in her life, glad to see him. It was good of him to come, she thought, knowing what had happened; and perhaps his presence might comfort her poor Miss Natty, and restore her to herself.
"Yes," Midge said, in answer to his inquiry; "Miss Marsh was at home, and would see him, she thought. If he would wait one minute she would ascertain."
She returned to the parlor to ask. But Nathalie had already heard his voice, and was sitting up, with a strained white face, and her poor wasted hands pressed hard over her heart. She only made an assenting motion to Midge's question, should she show him in, and a negative one when she spoke of bringing a lamp. Through all her torpor of utter misery, she was dimly conscious of a change in herself; that she was haggard and ghastly, and the beauty which had won him first to her side, utterly gone. That gloomy twilight hour was best befitting the scene so soon to take place; for her prophetic heart told her, as surely as if she had read it in the Book of Fate, that this meeting was to be their last.
Midge admitted him, and closing the door behind him, retired into a distant corner of the hall, and throwing her apron over her head, cried quietly, as she had done all day. She would have given a good deal if the white painted panels of the parlor door had been clear glass, and that she could have seen this man comforting her beloved young lady. Much as she had disliked him, she could have knelt down in her gratitude, and kissed the dust off his feet.
Even in the pale, sickly half-twilight of the dark evening, Captain Cavendish could see the haggard cheeks, the sunken eyes, and the death-like livid pallor of the girl's face, and was shocked to see it. He had expected to find her changed, but not like this; and there was real pity for the moment in his eyes as he bent over her and took her hand. He started to find it cold as ice, and it lay in his passive, and like a bit of marble.
"Nathalie," he said, "my darling! I am sorry; I cannot tell you how sorry I am for you. You have suffered indeed since I saw you last."
She did not speak. She had not looked at him once. Her dilated eyes were fixed on the blackening night-sky.
"I only reached Speckport an hour ago," he went on, "and I can never tell you how deeply shocked I was to hear of the dreadful events that have taken place since my departure. Is it all true?"
"Yes—all!" she said. Her voice sounded strange and far-off, even to herself, and she was aware it must sound hollow and unnatural to him.
"All is true! My brother is in prison, accused of murder, and I am a beggar!"
Her hand felt so icily deathlike in his, that he dropped it with a shiver. She still sat looking out into the deepening gloom, her white, set face gleaming marble-white against her black dress and the darkening room.
Captain Cavendish rose up from the seat he had taken, and began pacing rapidly up and down, heartily wishing the scene was over.
"I know," said the hollow voice, so unlike—so unlike the melodious voice of Nathalie, "that all between us must end now. Disgrace and poverty must be my portion from henceforth, and you will hardly care to marry so fallen and degraded a creature as I am. From all that binds you to me, Captain Cavendish, I free you now!"
In the depths of her heart, unseen in the darkness of despair even by herself, did any feeble ray of hope—that great gift of a merciful God—still linger? If so, the deep and prolonged silence that followed her words must have extinguished the feeble glimmer forever. When Captain Cavendish spoke, and it was some time before he did so, there was a quiver of shame in his tones, all unusual there. Very few ever had a better opinion of their own merits, or were less inclined to judge hardly of themselves, than George Percy Cavendish, but she made him despise himself now, and he almost hated her for it.
"You are generous, Miss Marsh," he said—cold and cruel words, and even he felt them so to be, "and I thank you for that generosity. Loss of fortune would be nothing to me—that is to say, I could overlook it—though I am not rich myself, but this other matter is different. As you say, I could hardly marry into a family stained with—unjustly let us hope—the brand of murder. I shall ever esteem and respect you, Miss Marsh, as the best and bravest of women, and I trust that you will yet make happy some one worthier of you than I am."
Is murder, the murder of the body, when a man plunges a knife into his fellow-man's breast, and leaves him stark and dead, the greatest of all earthly crimes? Earthly tribunals consider it so, and inflict death on the perpetrator. But is there not another murder—a murder of the heart—committed every day, of which we hear nothing, and which man has never made a law to punish. There are wounds which leave little outward trace; but the patient bleeds inwardly, yet bleeds to death for all that, and it is the same ultimatum, death, by a different means. But there is a higher tribunal; and perhaps before that, the sins over-looked by man shall be judged and condemned.
Captain Cavendish took his hat and turned to depart. He felt exceedingly uncomfortable, to say the least of it. He wished that black figure would not sit so petrified and stone-like, he wished that white face gazing out into the night would look a little less like the face of a corpse. He wished she would flame up in some wrathful outburst of womanly fury and insulted pride, and order him to depart, and never show her his false face again. He wished she would do anything but sit there, in that frozen rigidity, as if slowly turning to stone.
"Nathalie!" he said, venturing to take her icy fingers again, "will you not speak one word to me before I go?"
She withdrew her fingers, not hastily or in anger, but never looked at him.
"I have nothing to say," her unnatural voice replied.
"Then good-bye, Nathalie!"
"Good-bye!"
He opened and closed the parlor door, opened and closed the front door, and was gone. He looked at the window of that dark room as he strode by, and fancied he saw the white face gleaming on him menacingly through the gloom. The white face was there, but not menacing. Whatever she might feel in the time to come, when the first terrible shock of all this was over, she could feel nothing so petty as resentment now. Her anguish was too supreme in this first dreadful hour. The world to her stood still, and the blackness of desolation filled the earth. "All for love, and the world well lost!" had been her motto. It was for his sake she had risked everything, and verily, she had her reward!
Mrs. Major Wheatly was a very fine lady, and lived in a very fine house two or three miles out of town. Having secured a traveling companion and a governess for her daughter, in the person of Miss Rose, the little Speckport school-mistress, she had desired that young person to come out to their place immediately, and assist in the packing and other arrangements, preparatory to starting. Miss Rose had obeyed, and being out of town had heard nothing of the inquest and the verdict until that night, when the major drove in, after dusk, with the news. Mrs. Major Wheatly, like any other fine lady, was greatly addicted to news, and received a severe shock in her nervous system by the manner in which her paid companion received the intelligence. They were all sitting at tea when the major blurted out the story, and his conviction that "the young scamp would be hung, and serve him right," and Miss Rose had fallen suddenly back in her chair in a violent tremor and faintness. All the next day she had gone about so pale and subdued that it gave Mrs. Wheatly the fidgets to look at her; but whatever she felt, she had wisely kept to herself, and made her moan inwardly, as dependents who know their places always should. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"—that day brought its own evil tidings. The major returning at his usual hour of the evening from town, announced the astounding intelligence that Miss Nathalie Marsh was disinherited, and the broad lands of Redmon given to another. Mrs. Major Wheatly sipped her tea and ate her buttered toast, and was deeply sympathetic. She had met the pretty, golden-haired, violet-eyed heiress often in society, and had admired and liked her, as most people did, and was as sorry for her as was consistent with the dignity of so great a lady.
"Of course Captain Cavendish must recede now," she said: "he paid her very marked attentions, but of course he will not marry a penniless bride. Were they engaged, I wonder?"
"Cavendish is a fortune-hunter," said the major. "Miss Marsh is a very nice girl, and a very pretty one, and altogether too good for him. No fear of his marrying her, my dear; he wouldn't marry the Venus Celestis herself, without a handsome dowry."
"Mrs. Wheatly," Miss Rose said, "I must go into town to-morrow morning, to see my friends and say good-bye."
She was so pale and tremulous saying this, that the lady hastened to assent, nervously, lest she should make another scene.
"I am going in about nine o'clock," the major said, "and will drive you. Harris will take you back."
"And you must not stay long, Miss Rose," his lady languidly said; "remember we start at half-past two, and there is so much to be done."
The clock on the sitting-room mantel of that silent house on Cottage Street was pointing to half-past nine, when Betsy Ann, with fuzzy hair and sleepy face, hastened to answer a knock at the front door. She stared sleepily at her visitor, who came hurriedly in.
"Is she here, Betsy Ann?—Miss Marsh?"
"Yes'm," Betsy Ann said, "she's up in your room, and Miss Laura Blair and Midge, they've been and sot up with her all night, and me and Miss Jo Blake we've been sitting up with Mrs. Marsh. Midge, she's gone to bed now, and you'd better go up-stairs."
Miss Rose ascended the stairs, and tapped at the door that had been her own. It was opened by Laura Blair, looking pale and fagged.
"Is it you, Miss Rose?" she said, in a low voice, kissing her. "I was afraid you were not coming to say good-bye."
"I could not come sooner, and can stay only an hour now. How is she?"
"There is no change. She has lain all night as she lying now."
Miss Rose looked at the bed, tears slowly swelling up and filling her soft brown eyes. Nathalie lay among the white pillows, her amber tresses trailing and falling loose all about, her hands clasped over her head, her haggard face turned to the window overlooking the bay, her wide-open blue eyes staring blankly at the dim gray sea melting away into the low gray sky.
"She lies like that," Laura softly said, "all the time. We sat up with her all night, but she never slept, she hardly moved; whenever we went near the bed, we found her eyes wide open and vacant, as they are now. If she could only talk or cry, she would be better, but it makes one's heart ache to look at her."
"Does she not talk?"
"She will answer you if you speak to her, but that is all. She is quite conscious, but she seems to be in a sort of torpor. I will leave you with her, and lie down for half an hour. She was very fond of you, and perhaps you can do more with her than I could."
Laura departed; and Miss Rose, going over to the bed, stooped down and kissed the cold, white face, leaving two bright tears upon it.
"Nathalie, dearest," she said, "do you know me?"
Her large, melancholy eyes turned upon her sweet, tender face.
"Yes," she said, in that voice so unlike her own, that it startled her hearer. She seemed so unlike herself every way, that Miss Rose's tears rained down far faster than they would have done at any outbreak of grief.
"You are ill, my darling," Miss Rose faltered through her tears. "I wish I could stay and nurse you back to health, but I am going away to-day—going, perhaps, never to come back."
"Going away? Oh, yes. I remember!"
She turned wearily on the pillow, still gazing out over the wide sea, as if her thoughts were far away.
"I am very sorry for you, dear, dear Nathalie! Very, very sorry for you! It seems to me, sometimes, there is nothing in all this world but suffering, and sorrow, and death."
"Death!" Nathalie echoed, catching with sudden and startling vehemence at the word. "Miss Rose, are you afraid to die?"
The question was so sudden and so strange, that Miss Rose could not for a moment answer. A wild gleam of light had leaped into the sick girl's eyes, and irradiated her face so unnaturally, that it struck her companion with terror.
"Afraid to die?" she faltered. "To die, Nathalie?"
"Yes," Nathalie repeated, that abrupt energy yet in her voice; "you are good and charitable, better than any other girl I know, and you ought not to be afraid to die. Tell me, are you?"
She laid hold of Miss Rose's wrist, and looked wildly into her frightened face. The girl tried to still her beating heart and answer.
"I am not good, Nathalie. I am an erring and sinful creature; but, trusting in the great mercy of God, I think I shall not be afraid to die when it shall please him to call me. We must rely on his mercy, Nathalie, on that infinite compassion for our misery that made him die for us. If we thought of his justice, we might all despair."
Nathalie turned away, and looked out again over the dark, tossing bay. The sweet voice of Miss Rose broke the stillness.
"To the just, Nathalie, there is no such word as death! To quit this world, to them, is only passing from earth to Heaven in the arms of angels. Why should we ever grow to love this world, when day after day it is only passing from one new trouble and sorrow to another?"
"Sorrow!" Nathalie repeated, in a voice sadder than any tears. "Yes, sorrow, sorrow, sorrow! There is nothing left now but that."
"Heaven is left, my darling," Miss Rose whispered, her fair face radiant. "Oh, look up, Nathalie! When all the world deserts us, there is One left who will never turn away when we cry out to him. We may turn our backs upon him and forget him in the hour of our happiness and prosperity, but when the world darkens around us, and all earthly love fails, he will never leave us or forsake us, but will lead us lovingly back to a better and purer bliss. Remember, Nathalie, the way to heaven is the way of the Cross. It is a hard and thorny one, perhaps; but think of the divine feet that have trodden it before us."
"Stop, stop, stop!" Nathalie impatiently cried out, "why do you talk to me like this! I am not good—I am only miserable and despairing, and I want to die, only I am afraid!"
She moved away her face; but Miss Rose, bending over her still, kissed once more the averted face.
"There was a time, Nathalie," she said softly, "when I was almost as miserable as you are now, when, God forgive me, I prayed in my passionate and wicked rebellion to die too. There was a time, Nathalie, when I was rich and flattered, and beloved and happy—as happy as we can ever be with the blind happiness of a lotus-eater when we never think or thank the good God from whom that happiness comes. I thought myself an heiress as you did, Nathalie; my father was looked upon as a rich and honorable man, and his only daughter the most enviable girl in all the city of Montreal. It was balls and parties, and the theater and the opera, every night; and riding and driving, and dressing and shopping all day long. I had my carriage to ride in, a fine house to live in, servants to wait on me, and rich dresses and jewels to wear; and I thought life was one long holiday, made for dancing and music, and sunshine and joy. I had a lover, too, whom I thought loved me, and to whom I had given my whole heart, and we were on the verge of being married. Are you listening to me, Nathalie?"
"Yes," Nathalie said. She had been listening intently, forgetting for the first time her own sorrows, to hearken to the story, so like her own.
"Well, Nathalie, in one day, almost as you have done, I lost all—father, lover, fortune, honor. My father went out from breakfast, hale and well, and was carried home two hours afterward, struck dead. Congestion of the brain they said it was. I was so frantic at first, I could realize nothing but his death, but I was soon sternly compelled to listen to other bitter facts. Instead of being an heiress, I was a beggar. I was far poorer than you, for I was motherless and without a home to shelter me. The creditors seized everything—house, furniture, carriages, horses, plate, pictures—and turned me, in point of fact, into the street. I had been educated in a convent, and the good nuns gave me a home; but for that, I might have gone to the almshouse, for the friends of prosperity are but frail reeds to lean upon in adversity. He whom I was to have wedded, Nathalie, cast me off; he could never disgrace his English friends by bringing to them as his wife the daughter of a wretched defaulter. Dearest Nathalie, I need not tell you what I suffered—you are feeling the same anguish now—and I was rebellious and despairing, and wished impiously for nothing but death. The nuns, with the sweetness and patience of angels, as they are, used to sit by me for hours, telling me that blessed are they who mourn and are chastened; but I could not listen. Oh! it was a miserable, miserable time! and there seemed no light for me either in earth or heaven. If I had been 'cursed with the curse of an accomplished evil prayer,' and died then in my wicked despair, I shudder to think of what would have been my fate. But that merciful and loving Father had pity on me in spite of myself, and it is all over now, and I am happy. Yes, Nathalie, happy, with a far better and more rational happiness than I ever felt in the most joyous days of my prosperity; and I have learned to thank God daily, now, for what I then thought the greatest misery that could ever befall me. I wished to take the vail; but the nuns knew the wish proceeded from no real vocation, but from that weary heart-sickness that made me so disgusted with the world, and would not consent, at least not then. I was to go out into the world again, and mingle in its ceaseless strife once more; and if at the end of a year the desire was as strong as ever, I was to go back to that peaceful haven, like the dove to the ark, and be sheltered from the storms of life forever. So I came here, Nathalie; and I am happy, as I say—happy, as with Heaven's help you will one day be. I labor for a sacred cause, and until that is accomplished, I shall enter no convent—it is to pay my father's debts. They are not so very large now; and in three or four years, if life and health be granted me, I hope to accomplish my task.
"And now, Nathalie, you have heard my story; it is not a very romantic one, but in many ways it is similar to your own. This fever of wretchedness will pass, as mine has done, if you only pray. All the secret lies there, pray; and he who has said 'Seek and ye shall find,' will not refuse you peace."
Her face was like the face of an angel. Nathalie looked into the inspired eyes, and felt how sinful and lost she was beside this heroic girl—this simple, womanly martyr, kissing meekly the rod which struck her—this patient, humble soul, rebelling not, but thanking God alike for the joy and suffering it pleased him to send. She felt, through all the dull torpor of suffering, how unworthy she was beside her; but she could not, in that first bitter hour, imitate her. She could not; she only turned away again in gloomy silence.
"You will think of all this, dearest Nathalie," the soft, tender voice went on; "for all this pain, like every other earthly pain, must pass away. The great lesson of life is endurance; and all, from the king to the beggar, must learn it."
She rose, as she spoke, to go, for more than an hour had passed, and kissed the cold and averted face again.
"I must leave you, Nathalie," she said, her tears falling on that colorless face. "Good-bye, and God bless and comfort you."
"Good-bye," was the only response; and Miss Rose left the room. Laura Blair met her in the lower hall.
"Are you going?" she asked; "the gig is waiting for you."
"Yes; but I think I should like to see Mrs. Marsh, to say good-bye."
"She is asleep, and so is Miss Blake. I will say it to both of them for you. I am very sorry you are going, Miss Rose. Do you think you will ever come back?"
"Oh, yes, I hope so! If I send you my address, Miss Blair, will you write and tell me how—how all my friends get on?"
"Yes, with pleasure."
Betsy Ann came out to bid farewell, and Laura kissed her, and watched her as she entered her gig and was driven away. Miss Rose had no time to bid good-bye to any one else; but when she reached the station early in the afternoon, in the carriage, with Major and Mrs. and Miss Wheatly, she found all her pupils assembled, in Sunday attire, waiting to say farewell. Mrs. Wheatly shrugged her shoulders at the scene, and stared through her eye-glass, and was relieved when they were all seated in the car and the scene was over. As they took their place, a gentleman on the platform leaned his elbow on the window, and lifted his hat in salutation to the ladies.
"Hallo, Blake!" said the major, nodding familiarly, "come to see us off?"
"No," said Val; "I've come to see myself off. I'm going to take a couple of holidays and look at the country. Keep a place for me, Miss Rose; I want to talk to you. I'll be in in a brace of shakes."
It is probable a brace of shakes meant fifteen minutes, for at the expiration of that period of time, and just as the train was in motion, Mr. Blake lounged in, laden with oranges, peaches, and newspapers, which he distributed promiscuously, and then took a seat beside Miss Rose. It was pleasant to have Val for a traveling companion, for he knew every inch of the country, and was so full of stories and anecdotes as to be perfectly fascinating. He talked of the murder, asserted his belief in Charley's innocence, in spite of any amount of circumstantial evidence, and his firm conviction that the mystery would be speedily cleared up; his present journey, he hinted, being taken to bring about that desirable result. The fact was, Mr. Blake had of his own choice turned amateur detective, and was on the track of Miss Cherrie Nettleby, and positively resolved never to stop until he had hunted that young lady down. A telegram had been dispatched to Greentown the day before, and the answer Val had expected returned; Cherrie had never been near her relations in Greentown at all. The reply threw the family at the cottage into consternation, but Val reassured them by expressing his resolution to find her, if she was above ground. From his inquiries at the station, he had found out from the clerk, who knew her (who did not know Cherrie?) that she had taken a through ticket to the terminus, thirty miles beyond Greentown. The conductor remembered very well the pretty girl with the dark eyes and curls, and rosy cheeks; had found her dozing every time through the night he had passed in that car; remembered her ticket was for S——, the terminus, but was positive she had got out before they reached the final station. Where or when she had left, he could not say; it was after night, and passengers were getting out and coming in at every station, and she could easily depart among them unnoticed. He did not know whether she had gone as far as Greentown; but he did not remember seeing her after they passed that place. Val got out at nearly every station where they made any stop, and inquired for the pretty girl with the dark eyes and curls, but without success. At Greentown, he bade Miss Rose farewell; told her to take care of herself and not be sea-sick, and not to go and marry an Englishman before she returned to them; and, carpet-bag in hand, and the address of Cousin Ellen in his pocket, strolled along through the gray twilight to pursue his inquiries. He found the farmhouse easily enough, but not Cherrie. She had never been seen there, and no one who had been at the station that night had seen any young lady whatever alight.
Val remained in Greentown that night, and went on pursuing his inquiries next day, but with the like result. He went on to S——; it was just possible she had gone on there, and taken the steamer for Quebec. He inquired at all the hotels, but no one answering to her description had stopped at any of them, and her name was not on the list of passengers by the last steamer.
Mr. Blake spent three days in the search, and was then compelled by business to return to town. Short as had been his absence, Speckport had received a new shock—no less than the escape of the prisoner from jail. Charley Marsh had broken prison and fled! How, could not very clearly be ascertained, though the bars had been wrenched from his window and the casement found wide open, his quilts torn into strips, and dangling from it. But the window was high, and there was a wall to be got over afterward, and how he had accomplished that last feat, puzzled Speckport. He had accomplished it, however, and was flown; and the police were after him, scouring the woods. Rewards were offered for his capture. Mr. Blake put his hands in his pockets and whistled, when he heard it. The recollection of a certain fact, not known to all Speckport as it was to him, rushed upon his memory. In the days gone by, when the late Mr. Marsh had been a wealthy man, and the jailer of the prison (not jailer then) sued for a debt he could not pay, Mr. Marsh had come to his relief, paid the debt, and freed him. It was hardly probable the man had forgotten this obligation, and the bread cast then upon the waters had returned after many days. But the jailer was not suspected, and he and Val kept their own counsel.
"I hope he'll get clear off," thought Val; "for if ever he's caught now, unless the real criminal turns up, there will be nothing to save him. This flight of his is enough to hang him, in itself."
The first person to tell Val Blake of Charley's flight was Captain Cavendish. He found that officer killing time by lounging on the platform, and staring at the passengers, as he alighted. Speckport, from time immemorial, had had a great fancy for crowding steamboat wharves and railway-platforms, to look at new arrivals; and strangers in the place fell into the habits of the natives, unconsciously.
"Poor devil!" said the captain, swinging his cane airily about, and linking his arm in Val's; "I hope he'll dodge them, and escape Jack Ketch. I never like to see any one I've been on friendly terms with once, coming to that."
"Are your friends in the habit of coming to it?" Mr. Blake asked, innocently.
"Bah! How did you enjoy your trip up the country?"
"As well as I expected."
"And did you find Cherrie?"
"What?"
"Did you find Cherrie?" serenely repeated Captain Cavendish.
"No," said Val. "Do you know where she is!"
The question might have disconcerted any other man, but it only made the young officer stare.
"I! My dear fellow, I don't understand you!"
"Oh, yes, you do," said Mr. Blake. "I think you are about as apt to know the hiding-place of little Cherrie as any other man in this province. That she is in hiding I am positive; and I'll ferret her out yet, as sure as my name's Blake."
There was a certain determination in Mr. Blake's voice that the captain by no means liked, but he only laughed indifferently.
"Success to you! No one will be more rejoiced to see the little dear back in Speckport than I! The place is a desert without her; but I give you my word of honor, Blake, she might be in the moon for all I know to the contrary."
And in saying this, Captain Cavendish spoke the truth, for Cherrie had not yet written.
The notion had been vaguely floating through Val's mind, ever since the robbery and murder and Cherrie's flight, that the English officer was in some way connected with the affair. He might even have mentally suspected him of the crime, but for one circumstance. It was at precisely eleven o'clock Midge had first been alarmed by the flying footsteps of the assassin; and at precisely eleven the Princess Royal had left Speckport, with the captain on board. It was clear he could not be in two places at once; so Val had acquitted him of the murder, but not of knowing Cherrie's whereabouts. Even now, he was anything but ready to take him at his word, but it was useless to press the question.
"How do they get on in Cottage Street?" he asked. "I presume you are there every day."
"I call every day, of course," replied Captain Cavendish, a slight flush coloring his nonchalant face; "but I never see any one except Midge, or that other girl."
"Betsy Ann?"
"I suppose so. No one is permitted to enter, it appears, except your sister and Miss Blair."
"Indeed," said Val; "I should think you would have the entry above all others. Have you not seen Nathalie since those melancholy changes have occurred?"
"Yes. Once."
"Ah! At Cottage Street?"
"Yes."
"Well," said Val, who was never restrained by sentimental delicacy, "what did she say?"
"Not much, but what she did say was exceedingly to the point. She gave me mycoup de conge."
"You don't say so! Did you take it?"
"What could I do? She was inexorable! Of course, as a man of honor, I should have made her my wife, in spite of all, but she was determined."
A queer smile went wandering for a second or two round Mr. Blake's mouth, but he instantly called his risible faculties to order, and became grave again.
"How are they? How do they take Charley's escape?"
"Mrs. Marsh is poorly—confined to her bed, I believe, but Nathalie, they tell me, appears better, and takes care of her mother. Your sister, however, will be able to tell you all particulars."
"I say, Cavendish," exclaimed Val, "you could go in for Jane McGregor, now. She is nearly as rich as poor Natty was to be."
"Bah! What do I care for her riches?"
"Oh, yes, I understand; but just reflect that her papa will give her ten thousand pounds on her wedding-day, and three times that much at his death; and I am sure you will be brought to take pity on her."
"Take pity on her?"
"Tah! Tah! Tah!" cried Val; "don't play innocent. You know as well as I do, she is dying for you."
"But, my dear Blake," expostulated the captain, "she has red hair and freckles."
"Auburn hair—auburn! As for the freckles, her guineas will cover them. Will you come in?" They were at the office door, but Captain Cavendish declined.
"I have to go to barracks," he said. "Good morning."
Mr. Blake spent some two hours in his office, attending to business, and then sallied forth again. His steps were bent in the direction of Cottage Street, where he expected to find his sister. The house looked as if some one were dead within—the blinds all down, the doors all closed—and no one visible within or without. It was Midge who opened the door, in answer to his loud knock. "How are you, Midge?" inquired Mr. Blake, striding in, "and how are Mrs. and Miss Marsh?"
Midge's reply was a prolonged and dismal narrative of the sufferings of both. The elder lady was unable to leave her bed—she had fretted herself into a low, nervous fever, and was so cross, and captious, and quarrelsome, and peevish, that she made the lives of every one in the house a misery to them. She did nothing but sigh, and cry, and moan, and complain from morning till night, and from night till morning. Nothing they did pleased her.
Of Nathalie, Midge had the reverse of this story to tell—she never complained at all. No, Midge wished she would; her mute despair was far harder to bear than the weary complainings of her mother. She sat by that petulant invalid mother's side the livelong day, holding cooling drinks to her poor parched lips, bathing the hot brow and hands, and smoothing the tossed pillow; rarely speaking, save to ask or answer some question; never replying to the endless reproaches of the sick woman; never uttering one complaint or shedding one tear.
Mr. Val Blake was ushered by Midge into the darkened chamber of Mrs. Marsh, and looked at Nathalie sitting by her bedside. In spite of what he had heard, he was shocked at the change which the past week had made in her—shocked at the wasted and shadowy form, the wan, transparent hands, the hollow eyes and haggard cheeks. She was dressed in mourning, and the crape and bombazine made her look quite ghastly by contrast.
Mr. Blake's visit was not a long one. Nathalie scarcely spoke at all, and his sister was not there. Mrs. Marsh, who had been asleep when he entered, awoke presently, and poured her dreary wailings into his ear. Val consoled her as well as he could; but there was no balm in Gilead for her, and he was glad when he could with decency get out of the reach of her querulous voice. Her time, of late, seemed pretty equally divided between dozing and bewailings; and she fretted herself into another slumber shortly after.
Left alone, Nathalie Marsh sat by the window, while the dull afternoon wore away, looking out over the gloomy bay, with a darkly brooding face. Her desolation had never seemed so present to her as on this eerie evening. She had been stunned and stupefied by the rapidly-falling blows, but the after-pain was far more acute and keen than that first dull sense of suffering. "Ruined and disgraced!" they were the two ugly words on which all the changes of her thoughts rang. Ruined and disgraced! Yes, she was that; and she who had once been the belle and boast of the town could never hold up her head there any more. How those who had envied and hated her for her beauty and her prosperity, would exult over her now! What had she done that such misery should fall upon her? What had she done?
The little house in Cottage Street was very still. Mrs. Marsh yet dozed fitfully; Midge had gone out to give herself an airing, and Betsy Ann was standing in the open front door, looking drearily out at the rain, which was beginning to fall with the night. Like Mariana, she was "a-weary,"—though, not being quite so far gone in the blues as that forlorn lady, she did not wish she was dead—and was staring dismally at the slanting rain, when the rustle of a dress on the stairs made her turn round, and become transfixed with amazement at beholding Miss Marsh, in bonnet and shawl, arrayed to go out. Betsy Ann recoiled as if she had seen a ghost, for the white face of the young lady looked awfully corpse-like, in contrast with her sable wrappings.
"Good gracious me! Miss Natty!" she gasped, "you're never going out in this here rain! Ye'll get your death!"
If Nathalie heard her, she did not heed, for she walked steadily out and on through the wet evening, until she was lost to Betsy Ann's shivered view. There were very few abroad that rainy evening, and those few hurried along with bent heads and uplifted umbrellas, and saw not the black figure flitting by them in the gloom. On she steadfastly went, through the soaking rain, heeding it no more than if it were rays of sunshine; on, with one purpose in her face, with her eyes ever turned in one direction—toward the sea.
Cottage Street wound away with a path that led directly to the shore. It had been familiar to her all her life, and there was an old disused wharf at the end, where she and Charley had used to play in the sunny summer days long ago—a hundred years ago, it seemed, at the least. It was a useless old wharf, rotten, and slippery, and dangerous, to which boats were made fast, and where fishermen mended their nets. To this wharf Nathalie made her way in the thickening darkness, the piteous rain beating in her face, the sea-wind fluttering her black vail and soaking dress. Heaven knows what purpose the poor half-delirious girl had in her mind! Perhaps only to stand on the familiar spot, and listen to the familiar voices of the wind and waves dashing against the rotten logs and slimy planks of the old wharf, on which she had spent so many happy hours. No one ever knew how it was; and we must only pity her in her dumb agony of despair, and think as mercifully of the dark and distracted soul as we can. The night was dark, the wharf dangerous and slippery with the rain, and one might easily miss their footing and fall. Who can say how it was? but there was a suppressed cry—the last wail of that despairing soul—a sullen plunge, a struggle in the black and dreadful waters, another smothered cry, and then the wharf was empty, and the devouring waves had closed over the golden head of Nathalie Marsh!
In the roar of the surf on the shore, and the wailing cry of the night wind, there was no voice to tell what had happened in the lonely gloom of the rainy night. No, surely, or the faithful servant, who entered the cottage dripping, after her constitutional, would have fled wildly to the scene of the tragedy, instead of standing there in the kitchen, talking to Betsy Ann, as she placed her wet umbrella in a corner to drip.
"I went up to Miss Jo's," said Midge, shaking herself, and giving Betsy Ann an impromptu shower-bath, "and she made me stay for tea, and fetch this umberel home. How's the Missis—asleep?"
"Yes," said Betsy Ann, looking nervous and scared, for she was mortally afraid of the dwarf; "but you didn't—I mean to say, was not Miss Natty to Blake's?"
"Miss—What!" screamed Midge; "how should Miss Natty get there, stupid! Isn't she in her own room?"
"No, she ain't," said Betsy Ann, looking still more scared; "and I don't know where she is, neither! She came down stairs just afore dark, with her things on, and went out in all the rain. She wouldn't tell me where she was going, and she wouldn't stay in for me; and you needn't look so mad about it, for I couldn't help it! There!"
Midge's florid face turned ashen gray with terror; a vague, nameless, dreadful fear, that brought cold beads of sweat out on her brow. Betsy Ann had no need to back in alarm; it was not anger that blanched the homely face, and her ears were in no danger of being boxed.
"Which way did she take?" she asked, her very voice husky with that creeping fear.
"She went straight along," Betsy Ann replied, "as if a going to the shore."
It was the answer Midge had expected, but the hands fastening her shawl shook so, as she heard it, that she could hardly finish that operation.
"Go to Mr. Blake!" she said; "run for your life, and tell Mr. Val to hurry to the beach, and fetch a lantern. Tell him I am afraid something dreadful has happened."
She hurried off herself, as she spoke, heedless of the invalid up-stairs, of lashing rain, and driving wind, and black night. Heedless of all but that terrible fear, Midge hurried through the storm to the shore.
In the next day's issue of the Speckport Spouter, the following item appeared:
"Mysterious Disappearance!—Yesterday evening, about seven o'clock, Miss Nathalie Marsh quitted her residence in Cottage Street, without informing her friends where she was going, and has not since been heard of. Upon the discovery of her absence, search was made along the shore, in which direction she was seen to go, and a crape vail, recognized as belonging to Miss Marsh, found on the old wharf at the end of Cottage Street. The vail had been caught by a spike projecting from the wharf, immediately above the water. It is feared that a dreadful accident has happened, and the young lady has been drowned. She had been ill and a little delirious some time before, and we presume wandered down to the old wharf, a most dangerous place at all times, and particularly so on a dark and stormy night, such as last night was, and fell in. Any intelligence of her will be thankfully received, and liberally rewarded, by her afflicted friends. The young lady was dressed in deep mourning, and might easily be recognized by the luxuriant abundance of her golden hair."
"Mysterious Disappearance!—Yesterday evening, about seven o'clock, Miss Nathalie Marsh quitted her residence in Cottage Street, without informing her friends where she was going, and has not since been heard of. Upon the discovery of her absence, search was made along the shore, in which direction she was seen to go, and a crape vail, recognized as belonging to Miss Marsh, found on the old wharf at the end of Cottage Street. The vail had been caught by a spike projecting from the wharf, immediately above the water. It is feared that a dreadful accident has happened, and the young lady has been drowned. She had been ill and a little delirious some time before, and we presume wandered down to the old wharf, a most dangerous place at all times, and particularly so on a dark and stormy night, such as last night was, and fell in. Any intelligence of her will be thankfully received, and liberally rewarded, by her afflicted friends. The young lady was dressed in deep mourning, and might easily be recognized by the luxuriant abundance of her golden hair."
Speckport read this paragraph over its breakfast coffee and toast, and was profoundly shocked thereby. And so poor Miss Marsh had drowned herself! They had expected as much all along—she was not the girl to survive such disgrace! But it was very dreadful; and they wouldn't wonder to hear next that the poor bereaved mother had died of a broken heart. They hoped the body would be recovered—it would be a melancholy consolation to her friends, not to say to her enemies, who would then be out of doubt as to her fate. People went past the house in Cottage Street with the same morbid curiosity that had driven them to Redmon after the murder, and stared at the closed blinds and muffled knocker, and thought of the wretched mother lying within, whose footsteps were even then crossing the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Two weeks passed, and these charitable wishes were not fulfilled. The mother of Nathalie still lay ill unto death, and still faithfully waited on by Midge and Miss Jo. It was toward the close of the second week that Val received a note from the coroner of a fishing-village, some ten miles up the coast, informing him that, the day previously, the body of a woman answering the description of Miss Marsh had been washed ashore, that an inquest had been held, and a verdict of "Found drowned" returned. If the missing girl's friends would come immediately they might be able to identify the corpse.
Before noon, after the receipt of this missive, Mr. Val Blake was bending over the corpse of the drowned woman, as it lay in its rough deal coffin in the village dead-house. Before sunset he was back in Speckport, and bore the deal coffin and its quiet contents to No. 16. Great St. Peter Street. The slender girlish form, the mourning dress, the long fair hair, were not to be mistaken, though what had been the face was too horrible to look upon. Val turned away from what had once been so beautiful, with a shudder; and thought of the Duke of Gandia, made a saint by a similar sight. Before morning, the deal coffin was inclosed in another of rosewood, and a grave dug in Speckport Cemetery. The funeral was an unusually quiet and solemn one, though there was no requiem mass for the soul of the departed offered up in the cathedral—why should there for a wretched suicide, forever lost?
Mr. Val Blake, with no sentimentality about him, and not over straight-laced either, in some things, was yet a generous, good-hearted fellow in the main, and placed a white marble cross over the dead girl's grave. Some very good people were rather scandalized by the act. A cross over the grave of a suicide!—it was sacrilege. But Mr. Blake did not care much what good people or bad people thought or said of his actions; and did just as he pleased, in spite of their teeth. So the white cross remained gleaming palely in the spectral moonlight, and casting its solemn shadow over the grave in the sunshine. It bore no inscription—what inscription could be placed over such a grave?—only the name "Nathalie." Her story was told, her life ended, the world went on, and she was forgotten! O sublime lesson of life! told in three words: Dead and forgotten!
So, while Charley skulked in dark places, a hunted criminal, with a price on his head, and his mother lay still hovering on that narrow boundary that divides life and death, morning sunlight and noonday shadows brightened and darkened around that pale cross in the cemetery, and the night winds sighed over Nathalie's grave.
The bleak blasts of a raw March afternoon swept through the city streets, cold and piercing, driving the dust in whirlwinds blindingly into the eyes of all it encountered.
In spite of the cold and the piercing wind, Broadway was not empty—Is Broadway ever empty, I wonder?—and business-men, buttoned up to the chin in overcoats, and with caps drawn over their frosty noses, tore along like comets, to home and dinner; ladies in silks, and velvets, and furs, swarm down the pave to meet them, and young and old, rich and poor, jostled and elbowed, and pushed and trod on one another's heels and toes, as usual in that thronged thoroughfare.
Moving among the ceaseless sea of human life, continually ebbing and flowing in Broadway, came a young woman, walking rapidly. I say "young woman" advisedly, for she was not a lady. Her black dress was gray and dingy, and frayed round the bottom; her black cloth mantle was of the poorest texture and simplest make, and her black straw bonnet was as plain and untrimmed as bonnet could be, and who could be a lady in such array as that? To a good many of the Broadway loungers, who devote their manly intellect to picking their teeth in front of first-class hotels, and stare at society going by for a living, her face was well known. It was a face not likely to pass unnoticed—not at all to be passed in a crowd; and more than once some of these expensively-got-up loafers had condescended to follow the young woman with the "deuced fine eyes;" but the black figure flitted along as if shod with the shoes of swiftness, and these languid admirers soon gave up the chase in despair.
I don't think she ever was conscious of this attention; she walked steadfastly on, looking straight before her, never to the right or left, her shawl drawn closely around her tall, slight figure, as much alone as if she had been on Peter Wilkins's desert island. To a home-sick stranger in New York, I wonder if Broadway, at the fashionable hour, is not the loneliest and dreariest of places? Hundreds of faces, and not one familiar or friendly countenance among them; not one smile or glance of recognition to the lonely and heart-weary brother or sister jostled about in their midst. The men and women who passed might have been a set of automatons, for all the interest the young person dressed in shabby mourning appeared to take in them, as she hurried on with that rapid step and that darkly-sullen face. For I am sorry to say this heroine of mine (and she is that) wore a look of habitual sullenness that was almost a scowl, and something fierce lay latent behind the flashing of those brilliant eyes, and bitter and harsh in the compressed lips. A passing physiognomist, not over-choice in his phrases, meeting her once in the street, had carelessly observed to a friend walking with him, that "there was a spice of the devil in that girl;" and perhaps the girl herself might have agreed with him, had she heard it.
Down town and west of Broadway, there is a certain unfashionable locality, known as Minetta Street. The houses are tall and dingy, and swarm with dirty children and noisy mothers; and it is dark and narrow, and utterly unknown on Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. Among the tall and dingy houses—all so much alike that they might have been cast in a mold—there is one with a white board in the front window of the ground-floor, bearing, in black letters, the name "Mrs. Butterby," and beneath this legend, "Lodgings." And in this bleak, windy twilight of this cold March day, the young woman dressed in black turns into Minetta Street, and walks into Mrs. Butterby's with the air of one having the right; for she is one of Mrs. Butterby's lodgers, this young person, and a lodger of some consequence, not only to the house, but to the whole street. And for this reason—she has a piano in her room! An old and battered piano, it is true, for which she only pays four dollars per month; but still it is a piano, and the wonderful harmonies her fingers evoke from its yellow keys, transfix Minetta Street with amazement and delight. She has the best room in Mrs. Butterby's house, the first floor parlor, front, and there is the faded remains of a Brussels carpet on the floor and a yellow-painted washstand in the corner, two cane-seated chairs, with three legs between them, a little table, with an oilcloth cover, and a sheet-iron stove; and these elegant luxuries all of which she has for the stipend of three dollars per week. There is a bed, too, and a small trunk, and the battered little high-backed piano, and there is almost room to turn round in the space which they leave. There is nothing like this elegant apartment in all Mrs. Butterby's house, and the other lodgers look into it with envious and admiring eyes. They are all young ladies, these lodgers—young factory-ladies, and young ladies in the dressmaking, and pantmaking, and vestmaking, and capmaking, and bookbinding lines of business, not to speak of an actress, a real actress, who performed in a Broadway theater, and whom they look upon with mingled awe and envy. But they like her better than they do the first-floor lodger, whom they unite in hating with a cordial hatred that would have delighted Dr. Johnson. They are all young ladies, but they stigmatize her as "that young woman," "that stuck-up thing," and would like to scratch those bright eyes of hers out of her head, though she never did anything to them in her life.
They knew very little about her, either Mrs. Butterby or her fair lodgers, although she had been two months in the house, except that her name was Miss Wade, that she earned her living as an embroideress, and that she put on a great many unnecessary airs for a New York seamstress. She embroidered slippers, that were pictures in themselves, on rich velvets and silks, with floss and Berlin wool, and spangles, and beads; and cobweb handkerchiefs, that might have been the wonder of a Brussels lace-maker. She worked for a fashionable Broadway establishment, who asked fabulous prices for these gems of needlework, and who doled out a miserable pittance to the pale worker, whose light glimmered far into the night, and who bent over the glistening fabric in the gray and dismal dawn. They heard all this in the house, and nothing more; for, except to the landlady, she had never, scarcely, exchanged a word with a soul in it—with one exception—she had spoken to the actress, who occupied the room above her own, and who was nearly as cold and unsociable as herself. "Birds of a feather," the young ladies said, when Mrs. Butterby told how Miss Wade had been in Miss Johnston's room (the actress was Miss Johnston, in every-day life, and Miss St. John on the bills), sewing spangles and gold braid on Miss Johnston's theatrical robes, and how Miss Johnston had taken Miss Wade to the theater, and had made her stay and take tea with her in her own room. No human being of the "earth earthy," can quite live without any one to speak to; the heart must turn to some one, let it be ever so proud and self-sustained, and the actress was made of less coarse and rough clay than the young factory-ladies, who went dirty and hoopless all the week, and flaunted in gaudy silks on Sunday.
Up in her own room, Miss Wade took off her bonnet, and sat down to work with her mantle still on, for the fireless apartment was perishingly cold. She had sat there for nearly an hour, and the cheerless March gloaming was falling drearily on Minetta Street, when there was a shambling footstep on the stairs, a shuffling, slip-shod, down-at-the-heel tread in the hall, and a rap at her door. Miss Wade, work in hand, opened it, and saw her portly landlady smiling in the doorway.
"Miss Johnston's compliments, Miss, and would you please to step up to her room, she says. Bless my heart! ain't you got no fire on, this perishing evening?"
"It was too much trouble to light it," Miss Wade said, shutting and locking her room-door, and going along the dark and dirty hall, up a dark and dirty staircase, into another hall, darker and dirtier still, and tapping at the first door she met.
"Come in!" a feminine voice said, and Miss Wade went in accordingly. It was a smaller chamber than her own, and far less sumptuously furnished, with no fine fragments of Brussels on the bare floor, no piano in the corner, no yellow washstand, or oilclothed table. Its one dim window looked out on that melancholy sight, a New York backyard, and the gray and eerie dusk stole palely in, and the wild spring wind rattled the rickety casement. But it had a fire, this poor little room, in a little ugly black stove, and, sitting in the one chair the apartment boasted of, crouching over the heat, in a strange and wretched position, was the room's mistress. A poor, faded, pallid creature, young, but not youthful, with sharp cheekbones, and sunken eyes. She was wrapped in a plaid shawl, but she looked miserable and shivery, and crouched so low over the stove, that she nearly touched it. Sundry gaudy garments, all tinsel and spangles and glitter, lay on the bed, with two or three wigs keeping them company, a rouge-pot, and a powder-box. These were her stage-dresses; but, looking at her, as she sat there, you would as soon think of seeing a corpse tricked out in that ghostly grandeur as she.
She rose up as her visitor entered, with a pale smile of welcome, and placed the chair for her. There was a certain quiet grace about her that stamped her, like Miss Wade herself, God help her! as "one who had seen better days." But she was far more fragile than the seamstress. Whatever she had once been, she was nothing but a poor, wasted shadow now.
"Mrs. Butterby said you sent for me," Miss Wade remarked, taking the chair, and looking with a certain eagerness in her great eyes. "You spoke to the manager, I suppose?"
Miss Johnston, who had seated herself on a wooden footstool, did not look up to meet that eager, anxious gaze.
"Yes," she said, "but, I am sorry to say, I have been disappointed. The company was full, he said, and he wanted no more novices. He would not have taken me, had it not been at the earnest solicitation of a friend, and there was no room or need for any more."
The sullen look that had left Miss Wade's face for a moment returned, and a dark gloom with it. She did not speak; she sat with her brows drawn into a moody form, staring at the ugly little black stove.
"A friend of mine, though," the actress went on, "who has considerable influence, has promised to try and get you a situation in some other theater. I told him you would certainly be successful, and rise rapidly in the profession. I know you possess all the elements of a splendid tragic actress."
If we might judge by the darkly-passionate face and fiercely-smoldering eyes, the young woman who sat so gloomily staring straight before her, was capable of acting a tragedy in real life, quite as fast as on the stage. There was a certain recklessness about her, that might break out at any moment, and which told fate and poverty had goaded her on to desperation. When she spoke, her words showed she had neither heard nor heeded the actress's last remark.
"And so goes my last hope," she said, with slow, desperate bitterness; "the last hope of being anything but a poor, starved, beggarly drudge all the days of my life! I am a fool to feel disappointed. I might know well enough by this time, that there is nothing but disappointment for such a wretch as I!"
The reckless bitterness of this speech jarred painfully on the hearer's nerves. Miss Johnston looked at her half-pityingly.
"There is no need to despair," she quietly said; "the friend of whom I have spoken will be successful, and I am certain you will be a great actress yet. With me it is different. I will never rise above mediocrity."
"You don't seem to care much," said Miss Wade, looking at her pale, still face.
"I don't," said the actress, in the same quiet way.
"Have you no ambition at all, then?"
"No!"
She did not say it indifferently, but in a tone of hard endurance. Miss Wade's large eyes were fixed curiously on her face.
"I think," she said, "you have seen a great deal of trouble, and that it has crushed the ambition out of you. You were never born to be one of Mrs. Butterby's lodgers! Pardon me if I am impertinent."
"You are not," the actress said, neither denying nor acknowledging the charge. "Whatever I once was, I am Mrs. Butterby's lodger now, and a poor actress, who must sew the spangles on her own dress."
She took off the bed a short pink gauze skirt, and a bunch of tinsel braid, and began the womanly work of sewing, with her swift fingers.
"Are you to wear that to-night?" asked Miss Wade.
"Yes; it is the dress of a flower-girl."
"What is the play?"
"I forget the name," said the actress, indifferently; "it is a French vaudeville, written expressly for us. I am Ninon, a flower-girl, with two or three songs to sing. Will you come?"
"Thank you, I should like to go. It keeps me from thinking for a few hours, and that in itself is a blessing. What a miserable, worthless piece of business life is! I think I shall buy twenty cents worth of laudanum, some of these days, in some apothecary-shop, and put an end to it altogether."
The jarring, reckless tone had returned, and was painful to hear. The actress sewed, steadily on, replying not.
"It is well enough for those girls," Miss Wade said; "those rough, noisy, factory girls, brawny arms, and souls that never rise above a beau or silk dresses; but for me and for you, who were born ladies—it is enough to drive us mad! Look at me!" she cried, rising to her feet; "look at me, Miss Johnston! Do I look like one born for a drudge? Do I look like the women who fill this house?"
Miss Johnston looked up at the speaker, doing a little private theatrical tragedy, with her pale, quiet face, unmoved. Perhaps she had grown so used to tragedy that it had become stale and wearisome to her; and the regal figure drawn up to its full height, the white face, and flaring eyes, disturb her no more in her poor room, than Lady Macbeth, in black velvet, with blood on her hands, did on the theatrical boards.
"No," she said, "you are not at all like the factory-hands, Miss Wade. I never doubted you were born a lady."
"And a lady, rich and happy, flattered and courted, I should have been yet, but for the villainy of a man. My curse upon him, whether he be living or dead."
She began pacing up and down the floor, like any other tragedy-queen. Miss Johnston, finding it too dark to sew, arose, lit a candle, stood it on a wooden box that did service for a table, and composedly pursued her work.
"How was it?" she asked; "is it long ago?"
"Long!" exclaimed Miss Wade; "it seems hundreds of years ago; though I suppose scarcely seven have really passed since he fled, taking all he possessed with him, and leaving my mother and I to beg, or starve, or die, if we pleased. Of all the villains Heaven ever suffered to pollute this earth, I think Philip Henderson was the worst!"