The daylight had returned, but the sun was not yet up, and the air was cold, when a heavy hand was laid upon the sleeping squaws, and shook them roughly.
"What are yez doin' here? Stailin' is it ye're afther, eh?"
"Sleep here all night," was Thérèse's answer, as she slowly regained her feet. She was stiff with cold. "No home to go to--come here."
"A shindy at home was it? Turned out of doors is it ye are? Sarves ye right, maybe. But it's a could sleepin' place,althe same, and wan niver knows. The gates won't be opened these two hours, but ye can come in this way. Here's an empty luggige room, where yez cuddn't do no harm ef ye wanted."
He ushered them in, closed the door behind them, and turned the key with a knowing wink.
"Oi'm clair of yez now, me beauties. The pollisman can do as he thinks best when he comes on at sivin o'clock. Oi've catched them if they're wanted, an' that's as much as they kin expect from a night watchman."
The police sergeant arrived at his appointed time. The squaws had accepted their confinement with a contented mind, and were asleep. Under the shelter of a roof and on a wooden floor, they could stretch themselves at length, which was grateful after the cramped position of the night.
Their apathetic indifference convinced the man of authority that their tale was true; they had come on the pier while the gates were open the evening before, and fallen asleep. It was wrong, as he assured them, and he could take them up for it; but to what good end? he asked himself. He was avirtuosoin malefactors, and did not care to encumber himself with a capture out of which so little credit with his superiors could be got, as three squawks sleeping on a pier.
"Look out, now!" he said, shaking his finger at them. "I let you off this time, but if"--another shake of his finger--"but if ever--I--catch-you here again--you may look out for squalls."
Thérèse had lifted her head in dull indifference; but at the sound of his voice her face changed. She looked at him. It was now long ago since she had heard that voice before--when she was quite a girl, the speaker quite a young man--but the occasion was a momentous one. It was when she had been arrested by mistake instead of Fidèle. If only it had been Fidèle indeed; and if Fidèle had been punished then as she deserved, she would not have come back again, like the hungry ghosts of the long forgotten dead, to push the living from their stools and bring them to ruin.
There kindled a red coal down deep at the bottom of Thérèse's eyes and made them glow and burn, and the surging blood rose to her weather-beaten cheek and reddened it behind the scarce transparent; skin the lips parted, and the white teeth glistened, and for the moment Thérèse in her fury looked handsomer, if in an evil way, than she had ever done in her youth. It was no apathetic face now, carven in walnut wood, but rather the features of a snake-haired fury, as one may see them at times in the caverns of a red-coal fire.
She laid her hand upon the sergeant as he was turning to go, after having discharged his prisoners.
"I know you," she said, as he turned in surprise. "Remember me?"
"You? Where have I seen you? When was it?"
"Long ago--enfante perdue--Remember now?"
"What? You the woman that stole the child, and the nuns got off? Yes, I remember you. You should be at theIsle aux Noixnow, I do believe. Look out, as I said a little ago, or you'll go there yet, some day. Don't you be expecting the ladies will do as much for you next time."
"Enfante encore perdue?"
"To be sure. Do you know where it is?"
"Morte," grunted Thérèse, with a wicked flash of her eye--"ze bones."
"Murder? Do you say it was murdered? Did you see it done? Did you do it yourself?"
"No. Fidèle and Paul."
"Will you swear out an information. There is a reward still out. It has not been withdrawn that ever I heard. If I get you that reward, is it a bargain that I am to draw it for you and keep half? Is it a bargain?"
"Bargain."
"And you will swear an information?"
"Vill swear."
"Where shall I find you?--to-morrow morning, say?"
Thérèse shook her head despondingly, and looked at her children. "Hungry."
"Who's your buck?"
"Paul was."
"I know Paul. Has he turned you off?"
"Got Fidèle."
"Aha! That's it, is it? And you know where those bones are? Sure?"
"Svear."
"Then you'll get even with them yet, my beauty. And, stay, here's a dollar for you. You say you're hungry, and Paul has turned you out of doors. Be on the Lachine side of the ferry this evening. I may have to lock you up, but you'll be well used."
That evening, at sunset, the police landed Paul and Fidèle, both handcuffed, on the Lachine wharf, where Thérèse joined the party of her own accord, and they all proceeded by train to Montreal. Thérèse could not refrain from uttering one cluck of triumph as she passed her late master and looked at his bonds, while he shot her a look of fury and strained at his handcuffs in a way which showed it was well that they were strong; and then all the party subsided into the stony stillness of their ordinary demeanour.
There was nothing very striking in the first examination which followed. Thérèse recollected having seen a small grave dug in the back kitchen, and an empty box laid beside it. Then Fidèle had come in and exchanged clothes with her, and then she (Thérèse) went away. Neither Fidèle nor the baby had been seen afterwards. She herself had been taken up and accused of stealing the child, but it had been shown that she had not left Caughnawaga on the day of the kidnapping, and she had been acquitted. After that Paul had taken her as his squaw, and they had lived together ever since. A fortnight ago Fidèle had returned, and since then she had suffered much ill-usage, and finally been turned out of doors.
The evidence seemed sufficient, but in court it would need as corroboration the finding of the bones; therefore, there was a remand, and two days later the prisoners were brought before the magistrate again. The persons sent to dig under the floor had found a box, which was produced, and a thrill of hushed excitement ran through the court room; the male prisoner, even, threw aside his sullen stolidity, turned to the constable in charge, and spoke a few words. The constable conveyed the message to the Crown attorney, who addressed the magistrate, and he forthwith appointed counsel for the defence, leaning back in his chair, and allowing the youngavocata few minutes to converse with his client. The lawyer listened to Paul, shook his head, raised his hand in remonstrance, and spoke soothingly; but the red man's anger, having once found voice, grew fiercer and more determined every moment. He shook out his long straight hair as a furious animal will toss his mane, and gnashed his teeth, while his usually dull eyes blazed like living coals. He put aside the arguments and remonstrances of his adviser with a gesture of impatience, and, looking to the magistrate, rose to his feet. The advocate, seeing that his client was impracticable, preferred to take the work upon himself, and addressed the bench.
He told "that, in spite of all which he could say, the prisoner--the male one--while disclaiming art and part in the crime of murder, was resolved to claim from the court that he should not stand his trial alone, or in company only with the ignorant squaw who sat at his side. Whatever had taken place--and here, in tribute to his own professional credit, he must be permitted to say that it was sorely against his wish and advice that he was now driven to admit that anythinghadtaken place, and he would have defied the learned counsel opposite to prove that there had, and more, to bring it home to these much-injured Indians--it was but right that the instigator should be brought to stand his trial by the side of his instruments, and he claimed of the court to permit the prisoner Paul to swear an information against Ralph Herkimer, financier, broker, banker,"--"and bankrupt," some one muttered--"for conspiring with and suborning, and inciting by promise of gain, the prisoner Paul to steal, kidnap, abduct, and make away with the infant daughter of George Selby, professor of music, in the city of Montreal." He told "how the said Herkimer had continued to pay an annual stipend or pension to the said Paul during many years, till, on pressing the said Paul to make away with the said child, Paul had declared that he could not, and the said stipend or pension had ceased to be paid from that day forward."
It was with enhanced interest that, when this had been settled, and a warrant ordered to issue for Herkimer's apprehension, the box was placed on the table, and the lid ordered to be removed.
His worship, the magistrate, arranged his spectacles on his nose, the county attorney compressed his lips to steady his nerves, lest the sight of horror to be disclosed should disturb his delicate sensibilities; and, then, as the lid came away, there appeared--what might once have been a lock of hay! Time and mildew had done much to destroy it, the shaking it had undergone since it was disturbed had contributed yet more towards returning it to its primal condition of dust; but hay it was, most surely, though even as they looked it seemed crumbling away under the light and the freer air. The finders had identified the box. It was manifestly the one referred to by the chief witness. But where were the bones? Where any evidence of murder? Not a morsel was there of bone, or even a lock of hair.
The magistrate shrugged his shoulders. He was a disinterested party, and could appreciate without alloy of personal feeling the humour of his court holding inquest upon an empty box. The Crown prosecutor bit his lip, infinitely disconcerted, and the sergeant of police looked foolish. There was still the charge of kidnapping, however, that was sworn to by the chief witness, whose evidence, after all, was confirmed by the box. It was a grave, a box, and a live baby which she had seen, and she had not said that she saw the murder. The male prisoner's own statement and confession, after being warned, was also in evidence against him. His counsel turned and looked at him, as much as to say, "I told you so; but youwouldspeak out, notwithstanding my advice. Now, take the consequence."
Paul was more surprised than anybody at the discovery of emptiness within the box. His jaw actually dropped in amazement, notwithstanding the natural rigidity of his facial muscles. He might have got off, it almost seemed; but then there would have been no information laid against Herkimer, and ever since the day he had been dismissed with contumely from his office before all those sniggering clerks, his fingers had been itching to be at the man's throat, and only prudence had restrained them. Fidèle's face remained unchanged, for, naturally, she was not surprised; but there came a twinkle of childish humour into her face to see how all those arrogant whites had been fooled by a poor squaw.
Thérèse was disappointed, but not more than her experiences as a squaw had long taught her to bear. The down-trodden are not much crushed when an expectation gives way. Her foes, it was true, were not to be tried for their lives, but they were still to be locked up, and punished in some sort later on, while she herself, an indispensable witness, would be well cared for till all was settled.
George Selby was notified at once, of course, that the inquiry into his child's disappearance had suddenly and unexpectedly revived itself, after so many years, with the prospect of solving the mystery, if not of restoring the lost one.
It was an old wound now, that sudden evanishment of the sweetest blossom which had shone upon their lives. His wife and he, each in pity to the other, seldom spoke of it, and therefore there appeared a skinning over or partial healing to have come; but it still bled inwardly, saddening, and oppressing with unspoken grief. In the fifteen years of their bereavement his wife had been brought down from youth and strength and beauty to premature old age. Within the last twelvemonths a change had come. As she had told him, peace and resignation had come to her, the sad peace of the mourners who resign their loved ones, believing it is well with them, though knowing they shall no more meet on earth; and her health had greatly improved. "Why, then," thought George, "should he disturb her?--revive the deadened misery and cause relapse? There would be doubt and anxiety while the inquiry was in progress, and, alas! there was little that could be called hope to look for at the conclusion." Therefore he said nothing to Mary, but he did not fail to present himself at the examination before the magistrate. It was a horrid idea that their innocent darling should have been murdered by Indians, though it was relieved by the consolatory thought that in all those years of mourning to the parents the child's troubles had long been of the past; and he said nothing when he went home after the first day's inquiry.
The next day of examination was one of the most painful George Selby had ever known. He shrank into an unnoticed corner when the box was brought into the court-room--shrank from it, but could not tear away his eyes. And then he listened to Paul's accusation of his Mary's nephew, and for the first time he divined the motive of the seemingly wanton and inexplicable crime. Oh! how deeply in his heart he cursed the detestable money of that domineering old man, who, not satisfied with having his way in life, must needs strive to impose it after death, working misery and soul destruction upon his nearest kin. He shivered and clasped his hands before his eyes when the lid was to be lifted from the box. He heard the drawing of the nails, the creak and giving way of each one in its turn, and then there was a stillness; but after that there came no sigh of horror, the air thrilled with a movement of disappointment, felt rather than to be heard, and he came forward and peered into the faces of the crowd. The one additional horror was to be spared him of being called on to recognize his child's remains in the presence of curious strangers.
He peered intently at the prisoners, one of whom had virtually confessed but a moment before. He noted Paul's amazement and confusion. He noted that the squaw by his side remained calm, save that there stole a look of mockery into her face, as she surveyed the court, and he felt sure that that woman was not a murderess. It was his heart which was on the strain, and enabled him to see and read the reality untrammelled by judgment's frequent errors, wrong deductions, and misinterpretations. He could discern that of which the professional experience of officials took no note, for the heart is clearer sighted than the head.
With them there was a juridical problem to be solved by pure reason, an indictment to be made, presentable before a judge and jury--a proposition that the prisoners at the bar were guilty of a specific offence, with evidence in proof. "Where is my child?" was the ruling thought which filled George Selby's mind. The squaw at the bar was the stealer. So much was proved by the witness under oath, and by the implied admission of her fellow prisoner. But she had not murdered the child, though perhaps it had been intended that she should; so much could be drawn from her tranquillity and the confusion of her companion. He felt that he must question that squaw forthwith, and after the prisoners had been formally committed to stand their trial, he obtained speech of her through the assistance of the police sergeant, who took care to elicit an assurance that the reward, advertised fifteen years before in a placard of which he produced a copy, would still be paid when the baby's fate was discovered.
"Mary," George said to his wife that evening when they met. "I have news."
"News, George? News of what?"
"The news we have been waiting for all these years. The squaw is found at last--the right one. She is sister of the one who was taken up at the time. The two changed clothes. That accounts for the confusion at the trial. Those who identified her recognized the clothes. Those who swore to her being in Caughnawaga that day spoke truth, too."
"Oh, George!" with a weary sigh; "Is it all to be gone through again? The misery and the pain? Yet now I feel so sure my precious one is at peace, in the arms of God, that I think I can bear it. It is well the discovery, whatever it may be, did not come earlier to embitter our grief."
"And yet, my dearest, already something which will shock you has come to light--the instigator of the wrong is named. His accomplice accuses him. That wretched fortune of your most misguided brother has been at the root of all our trouble. That men who find themselves so little wise in directing their own courses, should strive to perpetuate their folly, by imposing their will on others after they are dead!"
"You mean that it was Ralph? I have often suspected that; but it seemed so merciless and inhuman a thing to do, that I have blushed for shame at my suspicions, even when alone, and cast the thought behind me. Poor wretch! Look at him now!--shamed and dishonoured--run away to the States--afraid to show his face in Canada! Martha and the boy are to be pitied in belonging to him, for they are good; but they do not know him, and no one will be ruffian enough to enlighten them. Martha is back at St. Euphrase again. Susan had a letter from her to-day. The house there is settled on her, it seems, and she wants to give it up to the creditors, but Ralph says she must not, and that before long he will be on his feet again, and pay everybody."
"I fear Ralph meant worse than merely to set the child aside, and it is no thanks to his intentions if he has not innocent blood on his hands."
"Hush! George. It is right you should tell me the facts, but do not draw inferences. Judge not."
"My dear, I judge no one; but I have seen the squaw. She tells me she was ordered to make away--to bury. The very box, which was to have been used, was produced in court--produced as it had been dug out from under the kitchen floor, and you may fancy how my heart died within me at the sight; but when the box was opened, it was found to be empty, and the squaw has told me that when she came to look at our angel, she found it was impossible to obey the inhuman command. She buried the empty box and carried the child away. She speaks of a road with trees, and a valley with a broad river, and says that she laid the baby upon the stoop of a house before going down the hill. She says she recollects the house perfectly. A police sergeant, who seems to have charge of the case, says he believes it must be near St. Euphrase, and the sheriff has allowed me to take him and his prisoner there to-morrow. I have ordered a carriage, and we will endeavour to take her over the old ground."
"Something will come of it, George, I feel sure. Take me with you, dearest; it will be maddening to live through the interminable hours between now and your return. Let me come with you."
"There will not be room, dear. A squaw out of jail would not be pleasant company in a carriage. They are not over tidy, remember. For myself, I shall sit with the driver."
"Then I shall take the early train to St. Euphrase, and go to Judith's. Be sure you come to me as early as ever you can, I shall be faint with impatience."
When Mary Selby and her sister Susan arrived at the Rectory of St. Euphrase, next morning, the family mind was already excited by other news; so much so, that, notwithstanding this was the first visit Judith's sisters had ever paid, and it was unexpected, they were received precisely as if they had dropped in from the next street, and their coming were an every-day occurrence. The family capacity for surprise had been forestalled.
"Only think!" cried Betsey, the irrepressible; "young Jordan has been here--Randolph, you know.Iknow him quite well; was at a party at their house, when I stayed with you last winter--knew him a little, before then, but not much. Well, he tells Uncle Dionysius here--that's not here, exactly, but in the study--that he ran away with Miss Rouget, the seignior's daughter. Stuck-up looking thing she is. No complexion to speak of; a snub nose. Yes, indeed, Aunt Judy, it is a snub.Nez retroussé, is it? That's because she's Miss Rouget de La Hache, and a kind of a somebody; though folks do say they've lost their money all the same--like better folks who make less moan. But, anyhow, Randolph ran away with her--fixed a fire-escape on to her bedroom window, and down she came, bag and baggage, in the dead of the night; and everybody in the house fast asleep. They went to New York, and were married before a squire, and now they have come home, and are staying with Mrs. Jordan, at The Willows. And they are going to be married all over again, from the beginning--twice over again, I should say, for he has just been speaking to Uncle Dionysius, and now he has gone to the Roman Catholic priest, with a letter from an archbishop, and no less, bidding him raise no difficulties, but just do it. Think of that! Is it not impressive? The same two people to be three times married, and always to one another! I suppose there will be no getting out of that, anyhow, as long as they live. If even they were to go to Chicago, I suppose it would take three divorce suits to separate them. They can only dissolve one marriage at a time, so I have heard. What doyouthink. Miss Susan?"
"I never was married, my dear. I have suffered too much from neuralgia for some years back to be able to think of marrying, or anything else."
"Well! That's not me, now. If I was to have neuralgy, I'd want a man to take care of me, all the more, 'pears to me. I'm 'takin' steps,' as uncle there says, to get the man right off; and then the neuralgy may come if it wants to, I can't help it."
Both visitors' eyes were fixed on the speaker. The recollections of their own youth furnished no such amazing expression of maidenly opinion. Betsey coloured a little, coughed, and began once more, while her uncle and aunt, taught by experience, sat silent, waiting till she should talk herself out of breath.
"The fact is, Mrs. Selby, I'm to be married immediately; as soon, that is, as I can get ready, and that depends mostly on Mademoiselle Ciseau. She'll have to make my gown, and she says she's over head and ears in orders, between so many deaths and all the marriages; for you know Matildy Stanley's going to marry--more proper if she'd be making her soul, at her time of life, than thinking of sich--and that chit Muriel--set her up--she's to be married the same day as her aunt, though they ain't no kin at all, nohow, to one another, and Matildy knows it. I call it going before their Maker with a lie in their right hand--goin' to church to be married, and tellin' such a story."
"But who are the bridegrooms, Betsey?"
"Me? I'm going to marry Mr. Joe Webb--Squire Webb, I should say, it sounds more respectful--justice of the peace, and the handsomest fellow round here about. But never mind the men, just for one minute. Everybody knows there must be a man to make a wedding, and any kind does quite well; but think of a poor girl married without a gown, or the wrong kind of one. How people would talk! You bein' from the city, will be able to give me an idea. Here are a lot ofswatchesthe storekeeper got me from Montreal, and every one has the price marked on to it. White satin? Oh, yes, it's pretty and stylish; but I see by 'Godey's Magazine' the upper crust ain't as partial to marryin' in white as they used to be; and white satin would not be much use afterwards for apple-paring bees, and sich; that's the form our gaiety takes mostly in the country round here. Yellow? Well, I did read not long ago about arecherchénuptials, somewhere, and the bride was dressed to represent a sunflower--poetical fancy, wasn't it? Yes, yellow's a good colour--easily seen--but it soils just as bad as white, or worse, for one can sayécrufor dirty white, but what can be said for soiled yellow? Just nothing, for everybody sees it's gone dirty.
"Brown? and navy blue? I guess one of these would be the best. You like the blue, eh? Well, now, that's strange, for to me the brown looks a deal the best. I could be married in my travelling dress, with a bonnet trimmed with white roses and peacock's feathers--I seem to see it in my mind's eye. Sweet and rather distinguished--but it would be better with the brown, would it not, than with the blue? Now, do really give me your candid opinion, Mrs. Selby; you have everything about you at home in such good taste."
Betsey got out of breath at last, and rose to take away herswatches, and there was an opening for the visitors to explain the cause of their unlooked for advent. Both Judith and her husband were kind and sympathizing, and both were shocked beyond measure at the part which Ralph had played in the transaction. For Martha's sake, however, and for the credit of the family, the subject was dropped when Betsey returned to the room, she being a known blab of the most flagrant kind.
Mary succeeded in restraining her impatience for tidings of her husband's success within bounds, for several hours; but after the one o'clock dinner it grew stronger than her will, and would not be controlled.
"By which way are they most likely to reach the village, Judith? I feel myself fretting into a fever as I sit. I must be up and doing, or I shall lose my senses. Betsey, my dear, will you not come out with me? We will walk in the direction we are most likely to meet them. It will bring me the news a minute or two sooner, and it soothes me to feel I am doing. You will tell me about your own plans, too, dear. It is good for me to listen to other people's concerns, if only to distract me from my own."
Betsey was nothing loth. She was good-natured, at least, if not endowed with all the other virtues. They walked through the village, and up the turnpike road coming from the east. Mary, notwithstanding her weakness, was so urged forward by impatience that Betsey, scarce able to keep up with her, was soon out of breath, and quite unable to make the interesting confidences she had intended.
"Is not that a carriage coming this way? I see two men on the driving-box, and one of them is George. Oh! the time is come. Lend me your arm, Betsey, dear, to steady me. I am getting faint. If this is another disappointment, how shall I bear it?"
The carriage drew near. One look in George's face told all. Hopelessness had settled on it; he looked utterly cast down. He alighted as his wife drew near, and the afflicted ones embraced in silent wretchedness, as they had done many a time before. The story of the expedition did not take long to tell.
The squaw was able to point out the way she had taken all across the Reservation, with circumstantial details, which made it impossible to doubt the accuracy of her recollection, and argued a hopeful termination to their search. On gaining the public road they entered the carriage, and still the squaw went on recognizing salient objects on either hand, and finally, at a forking of the road, where there stood a house, she cried out, that there was the place. It corresponded perfectly to her previous descriptions. They alighted, and the sergeant knocked at the door. A woman opened it, and when asked by the officer how long she had lived there, answered, after many repetitions of the question and much explanation, and disavowing that she understood English, twenty years. "Then you will remember," the policeman said, "if one summer night, many years ago, you found an infant lying at your door?" She answered that babies were never left there. She was a respectable woman, who had brought up a family of her own, and that the proper place to leave outcast children was a convent, or the priest's house.
Her hearing appeared so bad, her knowledge of English so slight, she seemed so cross, so deaf, and so stupid, that they could draw nothing from her but the disavowal of any knowledge of a child having been left there, which, however, was what they chiefly wanted to know, and they came away disappointed. The priest of the village might be able to make some inquiries, and they were now on their way to find him; but there was little to be expected after so many years.
"Where was this house with the woman?" asked Betsey, with awakened interest. "Not the first house we shall come to going up the hill?"
"Yes," said Selby, "that is the place."
"Well, then--but surely it cannot be!--that is the house Bruneau lives in--the Stanleys' man. His wife confessed to me and Aunt Judy, only last winter, that she found a baby at her door one summer night, many years ago, and carried it up to the door of the big house, where my cousins took it in and adopted it. But, from the way she spoke of Muriel's parentage, it can be no relation of yours, dear Mrs. Selby. She said it was--but I can't say what she said."
"If you please, miss," cried the sergeant, who had been listening, "will you be so kind as to walk back with us. As you know the woman, she will speak different to you from what she did to us. I feel noways sure that she was not lying when I questioned her, now you put the notion in my head."
Again there came knocking to Annette's door. Again she opened it, and looked as if she fain would have run away at sight of the policeman before her.
"Annette," said Betsey, "did you not tell me that you carried that baby you found on your stoop up to Miss Stanley's door and left it?"
"I know it," answered Annette, and covering her face with her apron, fled back into the interior of her house. They could hear her mount the little stair, and bang to a door, but they saw her no more. In truth, from the time she had unburdened her feelings to the rector's lady, a new misgiving oppressed her mind. Could English women be trusted to keep a promise, and they heretics? What would the Miss Stanleys say, first of her conduct towards themselves in foisting that particular child on them, and next in divulging the story, to the discredit of their adopted niece? And now the story was out, and there was a minister of the law come to take her.
Miss Stanley sat in the dining-room making up her accounts. She sat at a table by the window, with her bills and account books spread in order before her, and her pen in her hand, waiting to begin--waiting till the wandering thoughts would come back from their wool-gathering, and settle down to work. Once and again she advanced so far as to dip her pen in the ink, but the figures did not come, the page before her continued white, the ink dried up in her pen. With her elbow on the table, her cheek upon her hand, she went on thinking--thinking about her household, though not about her accounts. She had been head of the family so long, had steered and directed it so many years, and they had been so happy together; and now, it made her head whirl to think of the changes that were coming to pass. In the drawing-room, at that moment, was Muriel with her Gerald--a pair of children, and as unthinkingly happy. Their clear laughter penetrated through closed doors, and she heard it where she sat. Matilda was in the morning-room with Considine, as utterly content, if less obstreperously merry than her niece. And Penelope sat alone.
The moisture gathered in her eyes as she thought, but promptly was brushed away as a disloyalty, for if "dear Tilly" had come to love another more, she was very sure she continued to love her aging sister none the less. And yet it did seem hard to see that other come in between. Since her sister had been a very little girl, she had been to her a mother, watching over and caring for her till they grew to be companions and friends. They had been all the world to one another, and while, with a mother's inconsistency, she had wondered at the blindness of the men, who did not come and marry her sister, she knew that if they had, she would have hated them for their success. And now, after all danger seemed over, when they had settled down to grow old together, when even their adopted daughter was old enough to marry the man, the devastating man, had come--broken in, to disturb the repose of their virginal paradise in the hour of coming twilight, and end the pensive sweetness of their lives.
Yet, and the thought constrained her to admit that it was far from being the worst thing possible which had befallen, she had extorted from her intending brother that he should not take her sister quite away. He was to live with her, and she with them. The house at St. Euphrase was to be hers--Penelope's--and they were to be her inmates. Considine would take a house in town, where she should live with them; and all three parties to the arrangement had professed they saw no reason why they should not always live together. "Yet, why would those two marry at all?" she thought; "surely the season when birds select their mates was past for them. From the things which Considine spoke of as remembering he must be positively old; and Tilly, her precious Tilly"--a new-born candour forced her to admit it now, though she had not thought of it before--"was no longer young. Why could they not live on as friends, as they had been doing? when Considine's company had really added flavour to their spinster lives. What would people say?" Penelope imagined, like the rest of us, that "people" care. It is a fancy which sticks most pertinaciously, despite its lack of reason. Why will we not judge "people" by ourselves? And is it not true that long before our neighbours have grown accustomed to their affairs themselves they have become a twice-told tale to us? We shrug our shoulders and pass on, seeking a new diversion somewhere else. Whatever we may do which pleases ourselves, "people" will cease to trouble their heads about it long before the nine days are over.
The fear of this notoriety, however, was a tonic thought to Penelope. Instinctively she bridled to think that any should presume to criticise a transaction inherfamily, and at once she ranged herself in spirit on her sister's side, and began to defend her. "'A man,'" she thought, "'is no older than he feels.' What eminent person is it who has written that? It is certainly true of Considine. See how erect he carries himself! How cheerful he is! and strong. His hair is white, but as thick as ever. He rides, and swims, and walks, like an active man of forty. And 'a woman is as young as she looks.' That is true of our Tilly. How well she wears! Who would fancy she was one age with Louisa Martindale? And yet I believe she is. What impertinence it will be if any one presumes to say a word!"
After that turn to her reflections, Penelope felt positively refreshed, and able to pull herself together. The pen was dipped in the ink once more, the bills taken up one by one, and the column of figures extended itself steadily down the page. But her industry was interrupted ere long. The parlour-maid appeared in some confusion. What was she to do? She had standing orders not do disturb her mistress when closeted in the dining-room, and she had been told an hour ago to show no one into the drawing-room or the parlour, and there were a lady and a gentleman and a policeman, and some more, asking to see Miss Stanley.
"Show them in here," Penelope said, wondering what was the matter. The mention of a policeman troubled her. Had it anything to do with the Herkimer bankruptcy?--Gerald being then in the house. The newspapers had been full of his father's doings of late, and they had had much trouble to keep them from Muriel's eyes. "Poor child," she ejaculated, "I hope it is nothing to distress her," and then the visitors walked in. Mrs. Selby and her husband--she had called on Mrs. Selby, and was glad to find in one of the visitors a person whom she knew--a policeman leading in a squaw, and Betsey Bunce--the "atrocity," as she called her in her mind. "How dared she enter there, after the passage which had taken place between them at the rectory as to Muriel's parentage?" Yet it was Betsey who came to the front now, seeing Selby look confused, and in doubt how to begin. "I can see by your face," said Betsey, "you ain't half well pleased, Cousin Penelope, to see me here, after me speaking my mind about what Aunt Judy and me fished out of your woman Annette. But it's that very same story has brought us all here to-day, and a good thing it was that I got hold of it, or goodness knows what would have come to these poor Selbys. You know from the papers all about their losing their little girl long ago. You know, too, that the squaw was taken up last week who ran away with her. Look at her! There she stands, beside the policeman, and not a bit ashamed of herself, as far as I can see. Could you believe that so much artfulness-you've read about it in the papers (the changing clothes and burying boxes, and running away, is what I allude to)--and so much wickedness--wringing two loving hearts (I'm sure that's the kind Mr. and Mrs. Selby have got, for I stayed with them last winter and found them real kind). Look at her, Miss Penelope, and say if you could have believed that so much artfulness, and wickedness, and brazen effrontery--she don't blink an eye even--could be tied up in one blanket."
"Yes, Betsey," said Penelope, opening her eyes, and looking partly offended and partly confused; "and what after that? Mr. and Mrs. Selby and the rest scarcely allowed you to bring them up here, merely to afford you the pleasure of playing showman!"
"You interrupted me, Miss Penelope, or rather I got carried away with having so much to tell all at once; and then I stuck fast. However, as I was saying, that's the squaw! The Selbys are the parents, and you've got the baby in this house! You needn't look at me, cousin, as if I was crazy, for I ain't. It's Muriel--your Muriel--that I mean. Ask Annette Bruneau--by rights she should have been here, too, to make the thing complete, and to speak for herself; but, as I have spoken for all the rest, I may say for her that she would not let herself be brought. She ran upstairs and locked herself into her room, so we had to come along without her. Why don't you send for Muriel to see her mother. Miss Penelope? and Matildy should be here, too. She spoke very harsh to me the last time we met; but she was mad, then, so I bear no grudge. She'll be better friends now. And sheshouldbe here, too, to see the meeting of the long-lost child and her parents. It'll be real touching, and she deserves to see it, for she has been like a mother to Muriel--I'll allow that, for all that she said to me some weeks back."
Penelope fetched Muriel and Matilda, and the explanations were long and confused, mingled with embraces and many tears. Even Considine blew his nose, and the policeman passed his sleeve across his eyes; only the squaw looked on unmoved. "If all these whites were happy, as they said they were, why did they shed tears?"
The rush of words grew slower and more fitful after a while. Emotion is exhausting, whether it be grief or joy. Mary Selby sat with her arms round her daughter's waist, and her face buried in her bosom, while Matilda, half-jealous, and feeling half-bereaved, held the girl's hand.
Betsey stood up and surveyed the scene. It seemed her own handiwork, for had she not brought these people together? The emotional silence, when every one was filled with the same idea, made her think of the closing tableau in a pantomime, and to feel herself the beneficent spirit who had brought about the happydénouement. She could not refrain from holding out her parasol over so many bowed heads. It seemed to her to have become a magic wand, tipped with a sparkling star. She could fancy, too, that her gown had transformed itself into tinsel and transparent draperies, and that she was being slowly carried up through the ceiling to the sound of plaintive music.
Much could have been done with Betsey, I verily believe, if she had been caught early and submitted to culture. But "Tollover's Circus" had been her only introduction to the world of plastic imagination, scenic, or pictorial art; saving always "Godey's Magazine of the Fashions," which instructed her in a variety of knowledge she would have been better without, the knowledge, not very accurately stated, of how women with ten times her fortune, if she should ever come to have any, wear their clothes.
Ralph Herkimer sat in his New York hotel looking glum. The turn he had been expecting in Pikes Peak and Montana had come; the stock had been brought into notice at last, but it would have been better for him if it had remained unquoted on the share list, as it had been for weeks back. The turn was one for the worse. The shares had gone begging on Wall Street. Nobody would buy. He sat with his hands in his pockets, his chair tilted back, and his hat drawn over his eyes, pulling furiously at a huge cigar, and involving himself in smoke. It was a serious position of his affairs, and there was nothing he could do in the circumstances but wait--wait till he was ruined outright, which at the moment seemed likely enough, or be patient through months, if not years, till improvement came. Of the two alternatives, the former seemed at that moment the preferable, in so far as that it would be soonest over.
The Canada mail was in; his letters were brought him--an unpleasant bundle always now. "They can wait. There is no hurry." He pushes them aside. But, stay! There is one from his wife. "Martha," he says, and breaks the seal.
He was intensely sorry for himself that afternoon. The world was so hard. Nobody seemed a bit interested to know that he was on the verge of being ruined; in fact, it inclined them rather to get out of his way. "Ill-luck," one would have said, to see them, "must be infectious." His friends on Wall Street seemed busy that day whenever he wanted to discuss with them, and some had even been rather short, as to a manifest bore. If he would, he might have recollected that such are the manners and customs among money-makers, when a money-loser comes along. He had practised them himself; but that was when other people were the losers; now it was he, and that made all the difference.
But Martha was fond of him, and he turned to her letter for comfort and sympathy in his deep self-pity. He was fond of Martha, as fond, at least, as a busy man with his head full of other things can afford to be of anybody; but that Martha was fond ofhimin he never doubted, and that was the aspect of their connection, which was comfortable to dwell on at that moment. He lit a fresh cigar, and opened his letter.
It was a long letter, and began by answering all the questions which he had asked, and then it went on:
"Gerald and Muriel talk about their marriage continually, as is to be expected, poor children. I have been trying to stave it off till you shall have arranged your affairs, and are able to play the part you would wish on the occasion; but I am only Gerald's mother, and it is Muriel who has the right to say when. Besides, Gerald will not allow me to put in a word which would sound like wishing delay, and Muriel seems to think that if Gerald is there, it does not matter much about his father. I cannot altogether blame the girl; it would have been my own thought twenty-five years ago, and, to be sure, I like to see my boy valued as he deserves.
"But it is Matilda who is hurrying things forward in this railway fashion. No doubt she has the best right to arrange Muriel's affairs, she has been a mother to her; but the fact is, it is going to be a double wedding. Matilda herself and Muriel are to be married the same day; Considine has plucked up heart at last, proposed, and been accepted. He should have done it long ago, as I tell him. And now that the game is in Matilda's hands, she is more eager than the little girl of sixteen. She has had longer to wait, you will say, and that there are no fools like old fools. I know the way you men like to talk, pretending to be hard, and you as soft as the women--you, Ralph, at least, only your head is so full of business you do not give yourself leisure to think.
"And, oh! Ralph, dear, I do wish you would come back to Canada and silence the scurrilous reports that are in circulation. Only show face, and the cowards and liars who invent stories about an absent man will be silenced; for well I know there is not a syllable of truth in the wholefarrago. The city papers are detestable just now; and really, Ralph, you ought, for your son's and your wife's sake, as much as your own, to write your solicitors at once, and get them heavily fined for their abominable calumnies. Indifferent as you are to such things, you really cannot let that story pass which appeared in the papers the other day. It is getting copied into every paper in the Dominion, Gerald says, and he feels so sore about it; he won't show face in Montreal, he says, till it is set right. I mean, of course, the vile libel of that low Indian, Paul, which his counsel repeated to the magistrate, accusing you of having conspired to carry off and make away with your own first cousin--Mary Selby's child. I wish, dear Ralph, you would come back and face them out, the foul-tongued ruffians. That would shame them out of countenance and stop their mouths. The papers say there is a writ out against you. Come back, Ralph, give yourself up, and hurry on the trial. The sooner the truth is known the better. For all my confidence in you, I feel it painful to have the people's eyes fixed on me when I walk up the village to go to church, as if I were an evildoer. Think of it, Ralph, and come.
"But I am forgetting to tell you the great news. Your daughter-in-law to be, who do you think she is? A niece of the Stanleys, you will say. Never more mistaken in your life. She is no kin to them at all--not a drop of blood. She is your Aunt Selby's long-lost daughter. Think of that! The Indian, Paul, believed his squaw had killed her, but it seems she carried her into the country and left her at Bruneau's door, and Bruneau's wife, thinking she had enough of his children already on her hands, carried it up, and left it on the Stanleys' doorstep. Everybody supposed Muriel was their niece, though latterly the Bunces have been rather free with their innuendos. And now the girl turns out to be a great heiress. Strangest of all, it is what we have been calling Gerald's fortune, which she is heir to, and Gerald, the lucky boy, will get back by marriage the very fortune he loses by law. Nobody can say either that he marries Muriel for her money; but to tell the truth, they seem a pair of children in everything that relates to that."
Ralph smoked his cigar through to the end, smoked it till the butt dropped of itself upon his letter, charring the paper before it went out. He continued to sit, rigid in every limb, with his features drawn, and grey, and set; breathing heavily, but never moving. His life seemed living itself over again before his eyes, the prizes he had striven for, the means by which he had tried to win them, the vicissitudes of his career, and the end which he had reached. "Fool," was the only word he uttered, and it escaped him in a tone of mingled misery and wonder; misery, that it was himself; wonder, that he should have done it; for now his consciousness seemed divided in two, one half judging and wondering and scorning, the other, crushed into little save memory, and a sense of being undone, and having become a burden longing to be shaken off.
It was no awakening of conscience, such as moralists describe. He had never troubled himself with questions of right and wrong, true and false, honour and baseness. Success was the honour to which he had aspired, failure the one inexpiable baseness. A faculty unused in well-nigh half a century will scarcely leap into action and controlling predominance over powers and habits strengthened by constant use, all of a sudden. It was by his own poor standard that he stood condemned at last. He had so utterly and unnecessarily failed. What opportunities he had had! and how utterly they had been wasted in his hands.
He had been over-smart all through. In striving to make doubly sure, and assisting the forces that were making for his prosperity, he had defeated them. In attempting to shoulder up his fortunes he had pushed them over. And all was over now. What could he do henceforth? Even Martha, poor woman, would turn from him when she came to know. It was infinitely sad; it was beyond remedy, too altogether out of joint, ever to be set right. And then, he was so weary of it all, he had no heart even to try. Sleep, long and unbroken, sleep without dreams, sleep without a waking, that was all he yearned for, the one last good the universe held for him.
It was dusk now; the gas was alight all over the hotel, and in the streets. He staggered to his feet, and slowly went downstairs. A druggist's shop was near, and there he asked for essence of bitter almonds. The druggist observed to him that it was "dangerous in quantity," and must be used with care. "I'll take good care," Ralph answered, as he went out. They were the last words he was ever heard to utter.