CHAPTER XVI.THE EBBING OF THE TIDE.
The finishing stroke was given to the handsome suite of rooms intended for the bride, which Geraldine pronounced perfect, while even Lilian went into ecstasies over them. Her taste had been consulted in everything, and a stranger would have easily mistaken her for the future occupant, so careful was Geraldine that she should be suited. And now nothing was wanting to complete the furnishing except Mildred’s beautiful piano, which was to come when she did, and with a self-satisfied expression upon her face, Geraldine locked the door, and giving the key to Lawrence said something pleasant to him of the day when Mrs. Lawrence Thornton would first cross the threshold of her future home.
Two dressmakers, one with her scissors fastened to her belt with a steel chain, and the other with a silken cord, were hired at an enormous expense and sent to Beechwood, whither the Lady Geraldine followed them to superintendin person the making of the dresses and the arrangements for the wedding. With an unsparing hand the Judge opened his purse, bidding Mildred take all she wanted, and authorizing Geraldine to buy whatever a bride like her was supposed to need. In the village everybody was more or less engaged in talking of the party,—wondering who would be invited and what they would wear. Mothers went to Springfield in quest of suitable garments for the daughters, who sneered at the dry-goods to be found at home. Husbands were bidden to be measured for new coats. White kids rose in value, and the Mayfield merchants felt their business steadily increasing as the preparations progressed. Even Mildred became an object of uncommon interest, and those who had seen her all her life, now ran to the window if by chance she appeared in the street, a thing she finally ceased to do, inasmuch as Geraldine told her it wasn’t quite genteel.
So Mildred stayed at home, where chairs and tables, piano and beds, literally groaned with finery, and where a dozen times a day the two dressmakers from Boston gave herfits, with Geraldine standing by and suggesting another whalebone here and a little more cotton there, while Miss Steel-chain declared that “Miss Howell’s was a perfect form and didn’t need such things at all.”
“She’s as free from deformity as most people, I’ll admit,” Geraldine would say, “but one shoulder is a triflehigher than the other, while she had a bad school-girl habit of standing on one foot, which naturally makes her waist wrinkle on one side.”
So Mildred was tortured after the most approved fashion, wondering if they supposed she was never to have a single thing after she was married, and so were making up a most unheard-of quantity of clothes to be hung away in the closet until they were entirely out of date.
Now, as of old, Oliver was her refuge when weary or low spirited. On the day of Lawrence’s visit to him, he had been found by one of his companions lying upon the floor in a kind of fainting-fit, which left him so weak that he was unable longer to pursue his studies, and at last came home to Hepsy, who declared him to be in “a galloping consumption.” Mildred was sorry for his ill health, but she was glad to have him home again; it seemed so nice to steal away from laces, silks, satins and flowers, and sit alone with him in his quiet room. She wondered greatly at the change one short month had produced in him, but she was too happy herself to think very much of it, and she failed to see how he shrank from talking with her of the future, even though he knew nothing could interest her more.
“I ain’t a bit anxious to be married,” she said to him one night, when making him her usual visit, “but I do want to be with Lawrence. I think it real mean in his father to send him West just now. Did I tell you he’sgone to Minnesota, and I shan’t see him for two whole weeks. Then he’ll stay with me all the time till the very day; but it seems so long to wait. To think I must eat breakfast, and dinner, and supper fourteen times before he comes! It’s terrible, Oliver, and then I’ve got a fidget in my brain that something is going to happen, either to him or to me,—him, most likely. Maybe he’ll be killed. I do wish he hadn’t gone;” and Mildred’s eyes filled with tears as she thought of Lawrence dying on the distant prairies, the victim of some horrible railroad disaster. “But I am not going to borrow trouble,” she said. “It comes fast enough,” and asking Oliver if he should be very, very sorry when she was Mildred Thornton, she tripped back to the house, still bearing with her the harrowing presentiment that “something was going to happen.”
“I mean to write to Lawrence,” she said, “and tell him to be careful; tell him not to ride in the front car, nor the last car, nor the middle car, nor over the wheels, nor in the night, and to be sure and walk across Suspension Bridge when he comes back.”
Satisfied that, if he followed the directions implicitly he would return to her alive, she ran up to her room, where she could be alone while she wrote the important letter. Groping about in the dark until she found the matches, she struck a light, and finding her portfolio, took it to the table, where lay a singular looking note, sealed with a wafer, and directed to “Miss Mildred Howell.”
“What in the world!” she exclaimed, taking up the soiled bit of foolscap. “Where did this come from, and what can it be?”
As a sure means of solving the mystery, she broke the seal at once, and with a beating heart read as follows:
“Forgive me, Miss Howell. If I keep still any longer I shall be awful wicked. I or’to have told you who you be long ago, but bein’ I didn’t I must tell you now. I’ve been hangin’ ’round a good while to see you alone, but couldn’t. I came to the door a day or two ago and asked for a drink of water, but that woman with the big black eyes was in the kitchen, and acted as if she mistrusted I wanted to steal, for she staid by watching me till I got tired, and went off without seeing you at all. You know that old hut across the river where there don’t nobody live. Come there to-morrow just as it is getting dark, and I will tell you who you be. I know, for I’m the very one that brung you to the door. You ain’t low-lived, so don’t go to worryin’ about that; and if you are afraid to come alone, let that Judge come with you, and stay a little ways off. Now don’t fail to be there, for it is important for you to know.
“E. B.”
“E. B.”
“E. B.”
“E. B.”
For a time after reading this Mildred sat in a kind of maze. She had been so happy of late that she had ceased to wonder who she was. Indeed she scarcely cared to know, particularly if the information must come through as ignorant a channel as this letter would seem to indicate.
“What ought I to do?” she said, one moment half resolvingto keep the appointment at the deserted hut, as it was called, and the next shrinking from doing so with an undefinable presentiment that some great evil would result. “I wish Lawrence was here to go with me,” she thought, but as that could not be, she determined at last to show the note to the Judge and ask him his advice.
“What the plague,” exclaimed the Judge, reading the note a second time. “Somebody knows who you are? Brought you herself in the basket? Ain’t from a low-lived family? What does the old hag mean? No, no, gipsy. Let her go to grass. We don’t care who you are. It’s enough that I’ve taken you for my daughter, and that in little more than three weeks, Lawrence will take you for his wife. No, no. Let E. B. sit in the deserted hut till she’s sick of it.”
And this he said because he, too, experienced a most unaccountable sensation of dread, as if a cloud were hovering over Mildred, darker, far darker than the one from under which she had so recently passed.
“But,” persisted Mildred, “maybe I ought to know. I wonder who this woman is. She says she stopped here once for a drink, and was frightened off by the woman with the big black eyes. That must have been Geraldine.”
“Did you speak to me?” asked the lady in question, who was passing through the hall, and had heard her name.
“Don’t tell her of the note. Simply ask about thewoman,” whispered the Judge, feeling that if anything about Mildred should prove to be wrong, he would rather no one but themselves should know it.
Mildred comprehended his meaning at once, and in reply to Geraldine, said: “I have a reason for wishing to know if you remember an old woman’s coming into the kitchen and asking for water, a day or two ago.”
“Yes, I remember her well,” answered Geraldine, “for she reminded me so much of the city thieves. She asked several questions, too, about the girl who was to be married,—which was your room, and all that. Why? What of her?”
“Nothing much,” returned Mildred. “How did she look?”
“Like a witch,” answered Geraldine. “Tall, spare, angular, with a pock-marked face, a single long tooth projecting over her under lip, and a poking black bonnet. I thought I saw her going down the road just at dusk to-night, but might have been mistaken.”
Mildred turned pale at the very idea of having ever been associated with such a creature, or of meeting her alone at the deserted hut, and she was trying to think of some excuse to render Geraldine for having thus questioned her, when one of the dressmakers came to the rescue, and called Miss Veille away.
“What do you think now?” Mildred asked of the Judge, when they were alone.
“Think as I did before,” he replied. “We won’t go near the hag. We don’t want to know who you are.”
“But,” and drawing nearer to him, Mildred looked wistfully in his face; “but what if I am somebody whom Lawrence mustn’t marry? Wouldn’t it be better to know it before it’s too late?”
“Heavens and earth, child,” returned the Judge. “Do you think anything can induce him to give you up. Wouldn’t you marryhimif he was anything short of a nigger?”
This remark was suggestive, and Mildred chimed in:
“I’ll ask Rachel about that woman. She saw her, too.”
Hurrying off to the kitchen she found the old negress, whose story agreed exactly with Geraldine’s, except, indeed, that she described the stranger as worse-looking even than Miss Veille had done.
“I saw such a person in the avenue to-night,” said Luce, who was present, while her little child six years old testified stoutly to having seen a woman with a big bonnet in the lower hall.
“Thinks she’ll get some money,” growled the Judge, when Mildred repeated this to him; “but we’ll cheat her. If she knows who you are, let her come boldly and tell, and not entice you into the woods. There’s bedevilment somewhere.”
But all his efforts were fruitless to convince Mildred.The more she thought of it, the more excited she grew, and the more anxious she became to meet a person who could tell her of her parentage,—of her mother, maybe; the mother she had never known, but had dreamed of many and many a time.
“Go to bed,” the Judge said at last. “You’ll feel differently in the morning.”
Mildred obeyed so far as going to bed was concerned, but the morning found her more impatient than she had been the previous night, and not even Oliver, to whom she confided the story, had the power to quiet her. Go to the deserted hut she would, and if the Judge would not accompany her she would go alone, she said.
So it was at last decided that both the Judge and Oliver should act as her escort, by means of insuring her greater safety, and then, with a feverish restlessness, Mildred counted the lagging hours, taking no interest in anything, not even in the bridal dress, which was this day finished and tried on.
Very, very beautiful she looked in it, with the orange blossoms resting amid the braids of her nut-brown hair, but she scarcely heeded it for the terrible something which whispered to her continually:
“You will never wear it,—never.”
Then as her vivid imagination pictured to her the possibility that that toothless hag might prove to be her mother, and herself lying dead in the deserted hut just asshe surely should do, her face grew so white that Geraldine asked in alarm what was the matter.
“Nothing much,” she answered, as she threw off the bridal dress. “I am low-spirited to-day, I guess.”
“You’ll have a letter to-night, maybe, and that will make you feel better,” suggested Geraldine.
“I hope so,” returned Milly, and fearful lest Geraldine, whom all the day she had tried to avoid, should speak again of the woman, she ran off upstairs, and indulged in a good, hearty cry, glancing often over her shoulder as if afraid there was some goblin there come to rob her of happiness.
Never once, however, did she waver in her resolution of going to the hut, and just after the sun went down she presented herself to the Judge, asking if he were ready.
“Ready for what? Oh, I know, that wild-goose chase. Yes, I’m ready.”
And getting his hat and cane, they started, stopping for Oliver, who even then tried to dissuade Mildred from going.
But he could not, and in almost unbroken silence the three went on their way, Mildred a little in advance, with a white, stony look upon her face, as if she had made up her mind to bear the worst, whatever it might be.