CHAPTER II.
Trifles, light as air,Are, to the jealous, confirmations strongAs proofs of holy writ.—Othello.
Trifles, light as air,Are, to the jealous, confirmations strongAs proofs of holy writ.—Othello.
Trifles, light as air,Are, to the jealous, confirmations strongAs proofs of holy writ.—Othello.
Trifles, light as air,
Are, to the jealous, confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.—Othello.
It was spring-time in the South—that rich, bright season more luxurious in foliage and profuse in fragrance than our warm and mellow summers ever are. The orange-trees were all in flower; carnations blushed warm and glowing upon the garden banks; the grass was mottled with tiny blossoms, gorgeous and sweet as the air they breathed. All around the house which Zulima occupied was hedged in with honeysuckles and prairie-roses, that sheltered the grounds and leaped up here and there among the magnolia-trees, lacing them together in festoons and arcades of fantastic beauty.
Poor, poor Zulima! With this beautiful paradise to wander in, with the sweet air, the warm sky, and all that world of flowers, how unhappy she was! Alone—utterly alone!—her child slept in the bosom of another; her husband had been months away in the far North; an unacknowledged wife, a bereaved parent, how could she choose but weep? Weeks had gone by and no letter reached her; at first her husband had written every day; and with his letters, eloquent of love, lying against her heart, she could not be wholly miserable; thinking of him she sometimes forgot to mourn for her child. At first she had been greatly distressed by the impediments which the flight of De Grainges had multiplied against the acknowledgment of her marriage, but this event had in no degree shaken the holy trust which that young heart placed in the object of its love. Singularly unambitious in her desires, but impetuous in feeling, she only felt the continued secrecy maintained regarding her marriage, because it separated her from the babe she had learned to love so intensely. True, it served as a restraint upon her husband, and frequently deprivedher of his presence, but with her imaginative nature, the slight romance of this privacy only served to keep her affections more vivid and her fancy more restless. She was all impulse, all feeling, and sometimes, like a caged bird, she grew wild and restive under the restraints that necessity had placed upon her.
Weeks went by, one after another, and now Zulima grew wild with vague fears. Why was he silent? where could he be wandering thus to forget her so completely? Her nights were sleepless; her eyes grew bright and wild with feverish anxiety. That young heart was in every way prepared for the poison which was to be poured into it drop by drop, till jealousy, that most fierce and bitter of all the passions, should break forth in its might and change her whole being.
Zulima had gone forth alone, not into the garden to sigh among its wilderness of blossoms, but away, with an aching heart and pale forehead, to suffer among the wild nooks of the neighboring hollows. Here nature started to life in harsher beauty, and sent forth her sweets with a sort of rude waywardness, forming a contrast to the voluptuous air and over cultivation that closed in her home, as it were, from the rough and true things of the world.
Another day was to be passed in that agony of impatience which none but those of a highly imaginative nature can ever dream of—a weary night had been spent, the morning had come—surely, surely that daymustbring a letter from the absent one.
The air of her chamber—that chamber where her child had slept in her bosom, wherehehad been so often—she would not wait there; all the associations were so vivid, they goaded her on to keener impatience. She could not draw a deep breath in that room, thinking ofhimandit.
So, as I have said, Zulima stole forth and wandered away where all was wild as her own feelings, and a thousand times more tranquil. Ross had promised her to return very early from the city that day, when he hoped—the villain could not look into her eyes as he said it—when he hoped to bring a letter that would make his sweet guest smile again.
Zulima knew a place near the highway which led to the city, and yet sheltered from any traveler that mightpass, by the broken banks of a rivulet. Thick trees fell over it, and in some places the water was completely embowered by their branches. She could hear the tread of a horse from the spot, should one pass up from the city; and so, with a cheek that kindled and a heart that leaped to each sound, the young creature sat down to wait. To wait! oh, how hard a task for her untamed spirit, her eager wishes! Never till her marriage with Mr. Clark had Zulima’s vivid nature been fully aroused; never before had she been capable of the exquisite joy, the intense suffering that marked every stage of her attachment to that lofty and singular man. As she sat then by the lonely brook, the young creature gave herself up to a reverie that embraced all her life, for life with her seemed to have commenced only since she had met him. She drew forth his letters and read them again and again; tears blinded her sometimes, but she swept them away with her fingers, and read on, kissing here and there a line that spoke most eloquently to her heart. She came to the last letter; that was more ardent in its language, and warmer in its expression of love, than any of the others had been. Why was this the last? What had happened to check a pen so eloquent, to chill a heart so warm? Was he dead? This was Zulima’s thought; she never doubted his faith or distrusted his honor for a single moment. When the serpent jealousy reaches a heart like hers, it comes with a fling, striking his fang suddenly and at once. Zulima was not jealous, but that fierce pain lay coiled close by her heart, ready to make a leap that should envenom her whole being. More than once Zulima had started from her seat at some slight sound, which proved to be only a bird rising from the overhanging bank, or a rabbit leaping across the thick sward, and thus, between hope and despondency, dreams and thoughts of the stern real, the time crept by till noon. A wooden bridge scarcely lifted above the water, spanned the brook only a few yards from where Zulima was sitting. Here the bank fell abruptly, giving descent to a pretty cascade half swept by a sheet of pendant willow-branches. Their delicate shadows, broken with long gleams of sunshine falling aslant the water, told Zulima that the time of Ross’s return was fast drawing near. Now she became cruelly restless. Like some bright spirit sent downto trouble the waters at her feet, she wandered along the broken bank, gathered quantities of wild-flowers but to cast them away at the least noise, and frightening the ground-birds from their nests with reckless inattention to their cries, always listening, and half the time holding her breath with impatient longing for something to break the entire solitude that encompassed her.
It came at last—the distant tread of a horse—more than one—Zulima’s quick ear detected that in an instant. Still she could not be mistaken in the hoof-tread; she had heard it a hundred times when her heart was beating tumultuously as then, but without the sharp anxiety that now sent the blood from her cheek and lips while she listened. Ross had ridden her husband’s horse to the city that day, and she would have been sure of his approach though a troop of cavalry had blended its tramp with the well-known tread.
Zulima started from her motionless attitude, and springing up the bank, stood sheltered by the willow-branches, waiting for Ross to pass the bridge, when she would demand her letter. There she stood, trembling with keen impatience, eager and yet afraid of the sharp disappointment that might follow.
How leisurely those two horsemen rode toward the bridge! They were conversing earnestly, and the animals they rode moved close together, as if the riders were intent on some subject to which they feared giving full voice even in that profound solitude. They crossed the bridge at a walk, and without seeming quite conscious how it happened, the two men checked their horses close by the willows, and continued their conversation.
With one foot strained back and the other just lifted from the turf, ready to spring forward, Zulima had watched them coming, but somehow her heart sunk as they drew near, and without knowing it, she allowed that eager foot to sink heavily on the turf again, and shrinking timidly within her shelter, she waited with a beating heart for the conversation to be checked, that she might come forward without intrusion.
“Zulima!” they had used that name once, twice, before her agitation permitted the fact to convey any impression to her mind. But with that name was coupled another that would almost have aroused her heart from the apathy of death itself.
“We must convey it to her gradually; she must be subdued by degrees,” said Ross, smoothing the mane of his horse with one hand.
“Yes,” replied the other—the same man who had accompanied Ross on his visit to De Grainges’ cell—“with her inexperience and impetuous temper, there is no judging what extravagance she might enact. She might even start off in search of him, and then—”
Here a sensation of faintness came over Zulima, and she lost a few words. When the mist cleared from her brain, Ross was speaking.
“He would not see her. You do not know the man—see!”
Ross took a letter from his pocket, and the two held it between them, while Ross once or twice pointed out a paragraph with his finger and commented on it in a voice so low that Zulima could only gather what he said from the expression of his face.
The first words that she could distinguish were:
“This silence has already driven her wild; you will have a fine time of it when she hears this gossip about a rival.”
“It may not reach her; indeed, how can it?”
“These things always reach head-quarters sooner or later,” was the reply, so far as it reached Zulima, for that moment the horse which Ross rode became tired of inaction and shied around suddenly; his rider with difficulty secured the letter, which was crushed in his hand, as he hastened to draw the curb, while an envelope, which had contained it, fluttered to the ground.
“Let it go, let it go. I have all that is important,” cried Ross, checking his companion, who was about to dismount, and reining in his impatient steed with difficulty.
The next instant they were both out of sight.
Scarcely had they gone, when Zulima sprang from her covert and seized the envelope. It was her husband’s writing, addressed to Ross, the post-mark Philadelphia—a letter from her husband and not to her! Zulima held her breath; she looked wildly around, as if in search of something that could explain this mystery; then her eyes fell to the writing again. Tears, that seemed half fire, flashed down upon thepaper; her lips began to quiver, she covered the fragment of paper with passionate kisses, and then cast it from her, exclaiming wildly, “Not to me—not to me!”
Zulima returned home that day as she had never done before. The slow, creeping pace, so eloquent of depression and baffled hope, that had previously marked her return home, was exchanged for a hurried tread and excited demeanor. She was fully aroused to a sense of wrong, to a knowledge that some mystery existed which involved her own future. All her suspicions were vague and wildly combined with such facts as lay before her, but not the less powerful and engrossing.
She found Ross in the hall, standing by the back-door, which opened to the garden, and talking to his traveling companion. The conference was checked as she came up, and she heard Ross say, quickly, “Hush! hush! she is here!” Then the two stepped out and sauntered slowly along the garden-walk. Zulima followed their footsteps, and with the wild fire of excitement burning in her cheeks and eyes.
Ross turned to meet her. His look was calm, his voice compassionate.
“We have heard nothing. There was no letter,” he said, interpreting the question that hung on her lips.
“No letter to any one?”
Ross looked at her keenly. It was a strange question, and startled him. Could the young creature suspect that he was in correspondence with her husband? She might conjecture, but could not know. With this thought he answered her:
“He seems to have forgotten all his friends, for even upon business Mr. Clark communicates with no one.”
Zulima parted her lips to answer, but checking herself, she turned away and went to her room. Her previous distrust of Ross was fully confirmed by the false answer that he had given; henceforth she resolved to act for herself.
There was a storm that night; the orange-trees and the thick lime-groves were swept by a hurricane that rocked the old mansion house like a cradle. The rain came down in torrents, dashing against the windows, and sweeping out with the wind in waves of dusky silver. All night long the lightning and the winds wrangled and caroused around the house, kindling up the chamber of Zulima every other moment witha torrent of white flame. She was writing—always writing, or with impatient hands tearing up that which she had done, dissatisfied that language could not be made more eloquent. She lifted her pale face as the lightning came in, sweeping over her loosened hair and her long white robe, and longed to dip her pen in the flame, that it might burn the feelings that were heaving her bosom upon the paper, and kindle like feelings in the soul of her husband. Sometimes the lightning found tears upon her cheek, trickling down from her long eyelashes and raining over her paper in torrents that would have quenched the fiery words she so longed to write; sometimes it found a smile parting her lips, and a gleam of ineffable affection glowing in her eyes. Changeful as the storm was that beautiful face, where the tumult of her feelings was written plainly as the tempest could be traced upon the sky.
At last Zulima became wholly absorbed in that which she was writing. Her pen flew across the paper, her eyes grew luminous with ardent light. She no longer startled at some new outbreak of the storm; when the lightning flashed over her, she only wrote the faster, as if inspired by the flame. A great magnolia-tree near the window, with all its garniture of leaves, its massive branches and broad white blossoms, was uprooted and hurled down upon the house, shaking it furiously in every timber. That instant Zulima was placing her name to the letter, which in all this whirl of the elements she had written to her husband. She dropped the pen with a scream, and darted toward the window. The sash was broken and choked up by a great branch of the magnolia, through whose dark leaves and white blossoms, crushed and broken together, the lightning shot like a storm of lurid arrows. The broken glass, the rent foliage, white and green, fell around Zulima as she thrust aside the massive bough with both hands, and looked forth. It was completely uptorn, that fine old tree! The fresh earth, matted to its roots, rose high in the air, dripping with rain, and its great trunk crushed the wicker garden-seat into atoms, where she and her husband had sat together the evening before his departure. Heart-sick and faint, Zulima drew back. The letter to her husband lay upon the table, and near it the taper flared, throwing a jet of flame over the delicate writing.
Pale and trembling, for the fall of that old magnolia had terrified her like a prophecy, Zulima folded the paper and directed it. But how her hand shook; the name of her husband was blurred as she wrote it, and with a deep sigh she took up the sealing-wax and held it in the half-extinguished light. Her hand was very unsteady, and a drop or two of the hot wax fell upon her palm and wrist, burning into the delicate flesh like a blood-spot. Still, in her sad preoccupation, Zulima felt nothing of the pain, but sealed her letter just as her light flared out, and sat down in the gloom to wait for morning.
Two weary hours she spent in that dark stillness, for the hurricane having done its work, passed off as suddenly as it had arisen, leaving the night hushed and still, like a giant lying down to rest after a hard fight.
When the morning came, with its sweet breath and rosy light, Zulima arose. Hastily binding up her hair, and changing her dress, she took up her letter and left the house. All around the old mansion was littered with vestiges of the storm. She was obliged to make her way through branches heavy with drenched blossoms and young fruit; fragments of lusty vines that had cast their grateful shade around the dwelling but a day before; oak boughs wrenched away from the neighboring groves, and masses of torn foliage that lay heaped upon the door-step and along the walk, she was compelled to traverse on her passage to the highway.
Scarcely heeding the ruin around her, Zulima walked on toward the city; her delicate slippers were speedily saturated with wet, and at another time that tenderly-nurtured frame must have yielded to the discomfort and fatigue of her unusual exertion. But she had an object to attain—an object which depended wholly upon herself; and when a woman’s heart and soul is in an effort, when was her strength known to give way? The old cathedral clock was striking six when Zulima entered New Orleans; a few negroes were abroad, going to or from the markets, and around the wharves arose a confused sound as of a hive of bees preparing to swarm. At another time Zulima might have been startled at finding herself the only white female abroad in a great city, but now she only drew the folds of black lace more closely over her bonnetand walked on. With her own hands she mailed the letter which conveyed, as it were, her soul to the husband who seemed to have forgotten her. A sigh broke up from her heart as the folded paper slid from her hand into the yawning mail-bag, and then, with a feeling of relief born of her own exertions, she turned away.
“I have trusted no one; he will get my letter now,” she murmured over and over again during her rapid walk home, and with that vivid reaction so common to imaginative natures, she became almost happy in the sweet hopes that this reflection aroused to life again. Oh, it is so difficult for the young to feel absolute despair or absolute resignation; both are the fruit of good or evil old age.
Unmolested, as she had left it, Zulima stole back to her chamber. Weary, and yet with a heart more free than it had been for weeks, she flung off her damp garments, and lying down, slept sweetly for an hour. Zulima dreamed that she was sitting with her husband beneath the great magnolia-tree; her babe lay upon the turf laughing gleefully, and, with its little hands in the air, grasping after the summer insects as they flashed overhead. All at once a whirlwind rushed out, as it were, from the depths of the sky, overwhelming her with its violence. She strove to reach her child, but fell upon her face to the earth, shrieking wildly to her husband to save her and it. Then fell upon her one of those dark, fantastic clouds that make our dreams so fragmentary. She felt the magnolia upheave under her, and scatter down the fresh earth from its roots till she was half buried. Husband and child both were gone, leaving her prostrate and almost dead, to battle her way through the storm alone—alone! Zulima awoke with these words upon her lips.
It was but a dream. Louisa had entered the chamber and was examining the wet garments that her mistress had flung off, muttering suspiciously to herself as she saw the soiled slippers and other evidences of an early walk.
“What am de meaning ob all dis? What can de missus be about?” she muttered, casting down the raiment that had excited her distrust. The candle almost burned out, the drops of wax on the table, torn fragments of paper on the floor, were new objects of comment. The torn paper was all writtenupon, and had been gathered up in a grasp and wrenched asunder. The pieces were large, and might be easily combined. The negress could not read, but, with the quick cunning of her race, she saw that something unusual had happened, with which these fragments were connected, so gathering the papers in her apron, she bore them to her master, whose spy she was.
It was the noise that Louisa made going out which aroused Zulima from her wretched vision. The young creature started up, thanking God that it was but a dream. In moving about the room, she approached a window opening upon the garden just in time to see Ross follow her woman, Louisa, into the little slave-dwelling which we described in our last chapter.
Zulima lingered by the window. It was half an hour before Ross came forth again; he was followed by the slave woman, and stood conversing with her some time in one of the retired walks. Soon after, the young man who had been Ross’s companion from the city the previous day came up, and Louisa seemed to be dismissed. Still the two men conversed earnestly together, and, after a time, slowly retired into the slave-dwelling.
Since the previous day Zulima had grown suspicious, and she remarked all these movements with keen interest. Well she might, for that day and hour, in the low slave-dwelling, was written a letter destined to cast black trouble upon her whole life. There, two fiends, fashioned like men, sat down and concocted a foul slander against that innocent young woman which was to cling around her for years, and which her full strength might struggle against in vain. The very mail which carried out Zulima’s passionate and tender epistle to her husband, bore also a wicked slander framed by these two base men. The pleading words, the endearing expressions, that she had folded up fresh from her innermost soul, that he might know how truly she loved him, went jostling side by side with the fiendish assertion that she, Zulima Clark, had been unfaithful to his love.
And these two letters reached the husband in one package lying close to each other.He read the slander first.
Zulima waited, but no answer ever came to her letter. Week after week she lived upon that painful hope whichhangs upon the morrow, and still hope mocked her. Then she grew desperate. One day, when Ross came back from the city empty-handed as usual, Zulima had left his house with the avowed intention of seeking her husband in the North.
“Let her go,” said the fiend, coolly folding the letter she had left behind. “The mail travels faster than she can; my pretty bird shall find all things prepared for her coming.”
Again Ross sat down and wrote to the husband of Zulima, telling him that she fled from his house at night to escape the vigilant watch which had been placed upon her actions. The letter reached its destination and performed its evil work.
Zulima had taken passage for the North, but the brig must lie at its wharf a few hours, and the unhappy young creature was far too restless for confinement in the close cabin. A yearning desire possessed her to go and search for her infant. Though enjoined to caution and strict secresy, the place of her child’s residence had been intrusted to her, and she had found means to see it unsuspected, from time to time, before her husband’s departure. Now, when she was going in agony of spirit to seek the father, she could not depart without embracing his child once more, and, with its little hands around her neck, praying God to bless her mission. Urged by these keen desires, Zulima threw a scarf around her, and drawing down her vail, entered the streets of New Orleans. The house where her child lived was in the suburbs, and she was obliged to cross the city. With a quick step she threaded the streets, heedless of observation and only desirous of reaching her child before the brig was ready to sail.
Was it fate, or was it that sublime intuition that belongs to the higher order of feelings, which led poor Zulima by one of those large Catholic burial-places in New Orleans which seem to open the way to eternity through a paradise of flowers? It must have been the spiritual essence in her nature, for as the young mother passed this beautiful place of death, she looked eagerly through the gates, and something impelled her to enter. A wilderness of tombs, draped and garmented with vines all in blossom, and shrubs that exhaled perfume from every leaf, lay before her, and at that moment death looked sopleasant to poor Zulima that she longed to lie down and let her heart stop beating where so many had found quiet rest. These reflections brought tears to her eyes; she felt them dropping fast beneath her vail, and entered the inclosure that no one might witness her grief. Slowly and sadly she wandered on, forgetful of her purpose and possessed of a vague idea that her errand led no farther. A strange and dreamy sensation crept over her, the vigor of her limbs gave way, and sweeping the purple clusters of a passion flower from one of the marble slabs, she sat down. Zulima put aside her vail, and began to read the inscription upon the tomb while listlessly passing her finger through the deeply-cut letters.
It was an infant’s tomb. A child eighteen months old lay beneath the marble. Eighteen months—that was the age of her child, little Myra. She started up. It seemed as if her weight upon the marble could injure the little sleeper. Carefully drawing the passion-vine over the stone again, she turned away and was about to depart. But that instant there came bounding along the vista of a neighboring walk a young child, evidently rejoicing over its escape from some person who might have controlled its actions. In and out through the flowery labyrinth it darted, its chestnut curls floating on the wind, and its blue sash, loose at one end, sweeping the tombs at every turn. The child, at last, felt evidently quite secure from pursuit, for, leaning forward upon one tiny foot, she peered roguishly through the branches and burst into a clear ringing laugh that sounded amid the stillness like the sudden gush of a fountain.
Through and through Zulima’s heart rang that silvery shout; eye, lip, and cheek lighted up to the sound; she reached forth her arms—“Myra! Myra!”
The child heard her name and turned like a startled fawn, still laughing, but afraid that the black nurse had found her. When she saw only a beautiful woman with eyes brimful of tears, and outstretched hands, the laugh fled from her lips, and fixing her large brown eyes wonderingly on the strange face for a moment, she drew timidly toward the tomb by which Zulima stood.
“My child! my own dear child!” broke from the lips of that young mother, and sinking upon her knees, she snatchedthe little girl to her bosom, covering her lips and forehead with kisses.
“Do you love me? Myra, do you love me?” she cried, holding back the face of the infant between both her trembling hands, and gazing fondly on it through her tears; “Do you love me, Myra?”
At first the little girl was startled by the passionate tenderness of her mother, and she struggled to get away from the bosom that heaved so tumultuously against her form; but, as this touching cry for affection broke from Zulima’s lips, the child ceased to struggle, and lifting her clear eyes with a look of wondering pity, she clasped her little hands over her mother’s neck, and to her trembling lips pressed that little rosy mouth.
“Don’t cry so, I do love you!” lisped the child, in its sweet imperfect language.
These pretty words unlocked a flood of tender grief in the mother’s heart. She arose, with the child in her arms, and sat down upon the tomb. Smiles now broke through her tears, and during fifteen minutes it seemed to Zulima as if she had passed through that place of tombs into paradise, so sweet was the love that flooded her heart with every lisping tone of her child. But for the poor mother there was no lasting happiness. While her bosom was full of these sweet maternal feelings, there came tearing through the shrubbery a negro woman, panting with haste, and shouting in a coarse voice the name of little Myra.
“We must part, my child!” murmured Zulima, turning pale as the woman caught sight of her charge from a tomb which she had mounted to command a view of the grounds, and with a degree of self-command that was wonderful even to herself, she arose and led the little girl forward.
“Oh, Miss Myra, Miss Myra!” cried the negress, snatching up the little girl and kissing her with a degree of eagerness that made poor Zulima shudder; “what should I have done if you had been lost in earnest?”
Myra struggled to get away, and held out her arms to Zulima. How pale the poor mother was! Her eyes sparkled though at this proof of fondness in the child, and taking her from the woman, she kissed her forehead, and leading her alittle way off, bent down with a hand upon those bright ringlets, and called down a blessing from God upon her daughter. Ah! these blessings, what holy things they are! The sunshine they pour forth, how certain it is to flow back to the source and fill it with brightness! If “curses are like chickens that always come home to roost,” are not blessings like the ringdoves that coo most tenderly in the nest that shelters their birth? For many a day, while tossed upon the waters, Zulima was the happier for having seen and blessed her child.