Kitabı oku: «The Senator's Bride», sayfa 8

CHAPTER XIII.
ON THE OCEAN

 
"Wan was her cheek
With hollow watch, her mantle torn,
Red grief and mother's hunger in her eye."
 

—Tennyson's "Princess."

 
"There is none
In all this cold and hollow world, no fount
Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within
A mother's heart."
 

—Hemans.

At dusk of the next day Paul Winans walked impatiently up and down the floor of his room at the Arlington House. He was waiting for the appearance of Keene, the best detective in the District, who had promised to meet him at six o'clock that evening, to report progress.

Norah had gone back to her suffering mistress the night before, and a vague report that had reached Winans to-day relative to Grace's illness weighed heavily on him, as, with clasped hands and a beating heart, he walked up and down, restlessly, striving with his agony.

Remorse was busy with his soul. In this great shock that had come upon him and his wife he lost sight of his own personal grievance, and thought only of her, forgetting his hot rage of two nights before, and thinking only that the breach his senseless jealousy had made between their two hearts was now immeasurably widened by the hand of fate. In some sort he felt himself an innocent agent in the child's loss, and scarcely dared hope for his wife's forgiveness.

"Come in," he said, pausing, as a knock echoed on the door with military precision. "Ah! Fontenay, is it you? I expected Keene, the detective. Come in—sit down."

Captain Fontenay did as requested, turning a silent look of commiseration on his friend.

"I have just come from calling on Miss Clendenon," he observed, "and learned that Mrs. Conway has not yet returned from Mrs. Winans' hotel. In fact, I believe she thinks best to remain with her until she gets better. She has, as Miss Lulu informed me, taken rooms for herself, and Miss Clendenon, of course, who is to rejoin her there this evening—Conway remaining at his hotel."

"Ah! that is kind of Mrs. Conway," said Winans, surprisedly. "I should not have expected so much kind feeling from one who has always appeared to me a mere cold-hearted devotee of fashion and pleasure."

"The devil is not as black as he is painted," the captain quotes, sententiously.

"This Miss Clendenon seems a pleasant, or rather, a sweet little creature," mused the Senator, aloud; "one of the sort of women, I think—don't you?—who is worthy the devoted affection of any one."

"I think so," says the captain, with enthusiasm.

"I was thinking"—musingly this—"that I would like her to know my wife—like to see a cordial friendship grow up between the two. Grace has never had an intimate female friend. She is singularly quiet, reticent, and reserved with every one. It would, I think, be something of a comfort to her to be brought into familiar intercourse with Willard Clendenon's sister. She needs the sympathy and society of one of her own sex."

"Let us hope they may become friends," says the captain, heartily.

"But, Fontenay, this illness of Grace—I heard a rumor of it to-day—our unfortunate affairs are by this time a town-talk. She is not seriously out of sorts, I presume, and I am not brave enough to go there now, and look on the desolation I have wrought."

Fontenay walked across the room and laid his hand on the other's arm, gravely and sympathizingly.

"No—yes," he says; "well, the truth is, Winans, I hate to be the bearer of the tidings, but the fact is simply this: Mrs. Winans' excessive agitation and grief have culminated in what the physician calls a serious attack of brain fever."

"Great Heaven! what have I done?"

The strong man reeled backward as if from a blow just as another professional rap sounded on the door.

"Come in," he says, with a strong effort at self-control.

This time it was Keene. Slender, small, and shrewd-looking, he fits his name, and his name fits him. He bows to both gentlemen, leisurely taking the seat he is offered.

"Anything new?" he is asked.

"A moment, if you please. Senator, if you will be so kind as to order up the chamber-maid who attends the ladies' parlors on this floor, I will ask her a few questions."

Winans rang the bell violently.

"You do not suppose she has stolen the child?" he queries, a little astonished.

"Not at all," Mr. Keene smiled cheerfully back.

A white-aproned waiter answered the bell just then, Winans gave the desired order, and resumed his moody walk again, until interrupted by the entrance of the maid he had summoned. A rather pretty and pleasant-faced girl she was, neatly dressed, and with a due modicum of modesty, for the color came into her smooth, round cheek, and she looked down and trifled with her apron-string as Mr. Keene smiled approval at her.

"What is your name, my girl?"

"Annie Brady, sir."

"Ah, yes. Well, Miss Annie, you preside over the ladies' rooms on this floor? Attend to the ladies, I mean?"

"Oh! yes, sir."

"Well, Annie, I have heard—you can tell me if it is true—did any of the ladies you have been waiting on in this hotel leave here yesterday for a foreign port?"

The pretty Irish girl reflected.

"Yes, sir," with a small courtesy; "and indade I believe there was wan."

"You believe. Are you quite certain?"

"Yes, sir, I am quite certain. It were the poor English lady whose room was opposite this one—number 20, sir."

She half-opened the door and indicated number 20 with her finger.

"Just across the hall."

"The poor English lady; and why do you call her poor?" asked the detective, curiously, while the two gentlemen listened in silence, and the girl herself edged nearer the door in surprise and bewilderment commingled. "Was she in bad circumstances?"

"Why, no, sir, not that way; she seemed quite comfortable so far as money went. It were her mind, sir," said the girl, tapping her forehead significantly. "She seemed not quite right here, sir."

"And what sort of a lady was she, and what was her name?"

"Her name? It was Mrs. Moreland, sir, and she looked about thirty year old—a pretty little blue-eyed lady, quite broken down with trouble and grief. She came on here a few days ago from New York, and was going home to her friends in London."

"Ah! and was she alone? Did she talk with you much, and tell you the cause of her trouble?"

"She did talk to me sometimes. She seemed lonely and unsettled-like, and I thought it did her good to talk to some wan of her trials. A sore heart, ye know, sir, is all the betther for telling its griefs over to a sympathizing heart," said Annie, apologetically.

"Yes," said Keene, a little impatiently, "but you have not told us what her trouble was."

"To be sure," answered Annie, good-humoredly. "She had come over some two years since from London with her husband to seek a better fortune, and just when they were so snugly settled down in a dear little home in Brooklyn, and beginning to do well in the world, and wan little baby-bird come to make sunshine in the home, the husband and baby sickened and died, wan after the other, sir, and the poor heart-broken widdy is just going back to her friends almost crazy with the grief of it all," concluded Annie, quite breathless with her long speech.

A sparkle of blue lightning flashed in Keene's eyes.

"She had lost a child, you said?"

"Yes, sir, a pretty boy, scarce a year old. She showed me a photograph of them all—five little ones she had lost, he the last of them all—black-eyed, curly-headed little beauties they were—like their poor father, she said."

"And she was inconsolable at the loss of the baby?"

"Yes, sir; she fretted for it all the long days, sir—not quite right in her head, she was not, I know, but," said Annie, wiping away a glittering tear from her pink cheek, "it were pitiful like to see her a tossing on the sofa, and moaning, and like as not laughing wildly as she talked of baby Earle, as she called him."

"Seemed insane, you think?" asked Keene, in his quick, short manner.

"Not like that," answered Annie, with mild wonder at the gentleman's pertinacious curiosity, "but a little out of her mind—you've heard of people being melancholy mad, sir."

"Yes, oh, yes," said Keene, "and so you said good-by to this interesting little widow yesterday at about between eleven and twelve o'clock, and she left here and took the steamer for Liverpool?"

"She did go away at that time, sir, but I told her good-by earlier as my duties called me to another part of the building. She told nobody good-by. Indeed, all the waiters in the house—she always had a kind word for them, ye see—they all wondered they did not see her go out, and so missed saying good-by to her."

"But her baggage, Annie? How did her baggage go down?"

"Oh! her passage was taken, and her baggage sent to the steamer, yesterday."

"Yes; thank you, Miss Annie, and I believe that is all I want to ask you this evening."

Senator Winans supplemented Keene's thanks with a banknote, and Annie went bowing and smiling back to the regions whence she came.

The three men looked at each other, Keene breaking the ominous silence that had fallen:

"This is what I came to tell you, Senator Winans. Mrs. Moreland is on the ocean with your little boy. I have already telegraphed to Liverpool to have her stopped when she lands there. I have found that a woman answering her description left on the steamer yesterday with a child answering the description of yours; with the cunning of insanity that poor creature probably saw the child at the moment of leaving, and kidnapped it with the thought that it was her own."

He turned away, inured as he was to sorrow, from the white anguish of the father's face.

"It is very probable you will get him back; don't give up all as lost," he said, cheerfully.

"I will not," the stern energy of the man asserting itself. "We will follow them on the next steamer, and track every inch of ground till we find him. Every dollar I own shall be expended if necessary. But, oh, Heaven! I cannot—his mother—she is ill, wretched—perhaps death-stricken. I dare not leave here."

"I don't know that it is necessary to follow them," Keene said, doubtfully. "If they get him in Liverpool, he can be sent home in the captain's care. You will not care, I suppose, to punish her. She is probably half insane, and under a natural hallucination that it was her own, and abducted it."

"No, poor creature! she has already suffered enough," said Winans, pityingly.

"Ah, by the way, Winans," here interposed the captain, "why not call and see your wife to-night, and learn if her illness is too serious to admit of your leaving; she may be better, and you at liberty to go. It seems the best thing under the circumstances, in my humble judgment, that you should pursue this woman as speedily as is possible."

"Perhaps so. Then, Mr. Keene, I suppose we can do nothing more till to-morrow. If you will call on me at an early hour in the morning we will discuss the best steps to be taken in the matter."

And there being no more to say on the subject, the detective bowed himself out, leaving the two friends alone together.

"Fontenay, I am afraid to go to her. She would spurn me from her presence; I deserve it."

He strode across the room, and began stirring the coal fire, shaking down the ashes, and tearing open its burning heart, just as wounded love and bitter pain and yearning were sweeping the ashes of pride and jealousy from his, and showing him the living fire that burned undimmed below.

"You can but try," said the gallant captain. "'Faint heart never won fair lady.'"

And Winans resolved to "try."

CHAPTER XIV.
"IN HIS HEART CONSENTING TO A PRAYER GONE BY."

 
"The boon for which we gasp in vain,
If hardly won at length, too late made ours,
When the soul's wing is broken, comes like rain."
 

—Hemans.

 
"Fare thee well! Yet think awhile
On one whose bosom bleeds to doubt thee;
Who now would rather trust than smile,
And die with thee than live without thee."
 

—Moore.

Sitting at her window watching the radiant day hiding its blushes on the breast of night, Lulu Clendenon's heart was full of a strange, aching pain. She had, as Captain Fontenay had told Winans, removed to the hotel where Mrs. Conway had taken rooms, to remain until Mrs. Winans recovered from her attack of impending brain fever.

As yet she had not seen Mrs. Winans, no one being permitted to enter the sick-room excepting those who were in close attendance on the patient; and, truth to tell, Lulu was lonely. She missed Bruce Conway. For many weeks now the twilight hour had been the pleasantest of the day to her, for it had been passed in his company. Now as she sat at the window, cuddled up in a great easy-chair, her cheek pressed down in the hollow of her little white hand, her wistful brown eyes watching the fairy hues of sunset, Lulu was waking to a realization of her own heart.

The little sister that Captain Clendenon had wanted to keep a child forever was a child no longer. Love—the old, old story, old as the world, and yet new and sweet as the blushing flowers of to-day's blossoming—had opened for her the portals of a broader existence, and Lulu was learning the strength and depth of her woman's heart first by its intense aching.

According to the verdict of the world, it is a woman's shame to love unsought; and yet I think that that is scarcely love which waits to be given leave to love. Flowers blossom of their own sweet will, and often as not their sweetest perfume rises under the heedless feet that trample them down. It is much so with the human heart. It gives love, not where it is asked always, but often where it is uncared for and unknown; and the cold steel of disappointment is but to such love as the knife that digs round the roots of our flowers—it makes the fibers strike deeper in the soil of the heart.

 
"Successful love may sate itself away,
The wretched are the faithful."
 

Lulu wished idly that she were floating in ether on the top of that gold-tinged cloud that rose in the far west, wave on wave, over masses of violet, rose, and crimson; or that she might have laid her hot cheek against that white drift that looked like a chilly bank of snow, and cooled the fever that sent its warm flushes over her face.

The pretty lip trembled a little, and Lulu felt as if she wanted to go home, like a tired and weary child, to her mother.

Mrs. Conway's light footsteps, as she entered softly, startled her from her painful reverie. She roused up into a more dignified posture, and inquired touching the state of the young patient.

"She has been delirious to-day, but is now for the time being quite rational, though still and silent. I want to take you to see her, my dear. You will have to help nurse her (we cannot leave her solely to the care of that nurse and the doctor—it would be cruel), and it is better to have her get acquainted with you now, and accustomed to seeing you about her room. You can come now, if you please, dear. I have spoken to her of you, and she will be prepared to see you."

Lulu rose from her easy-chair, shook out her tumbled skirts, trying to shake off a portion of her heart's heaviness at the same time, and smoothing her dark braids a little, followed her friend.

But her heart rose to her throat as they crossed the threshold of the sick-room, and stood in the presence of a woman who had always been such an object of interest to her.

The fading winter sunshine glimmered into the apartment and shone on Norah, where she sat, grave and anxious-looking, at the side of the low French bed, whose sweeping canopy of lace thrown back over the top revealed the form of Grace Winans lying under the silken coverlet, like some rare picture, her cheeks flushed scarlet with fever, the white lids drooping over her brilliant eyes, her arms thrown back over her head, her small hands twisted in the bright drift of golden hair that swept back over the embroidered pillow.

"Dear Grace," Mrs. Conway said, softly, "this is my young friend, Lulu, Mrs. Winans, Miss Clendenon."

Slowly the sweeping lashes lifted, and the melancholy gaze dwelt on Lulu's face, but the lips that opened to speak only trembled and shut again in that set, firm line with which proud women keep back a sob. One little hand came down from over her head, and was softly laid in Lulu's own. As it lay there, warm, feverish, fluttering like a wounded bird, the young girl's heart swelled with a throb of passionate sympathy.

She bent impulsively and pressed her cool, dewy lips on the fevered brow of the other, while she registered a vow in her unselfish soul, that she would stand between Grace Winans and every sorrow that effort or sacrifice of hers could avert.

How potent is the spell of sympathy! The light pressure of those soft lips touched a chord in Grace's tortured heart that never in after years ceased to vibrate. Her husband had spoken truly in saying that she had no intimate woman-friend, but it was scarcely her fault. Her nature was a singularly pure and elevated one; the majority of the women she knew had few feelings in common with her, and she was too much superior to them not to be an object of envy rather than a congenial friend to most. She had found a kindred spirit at last in the sister of Willard Clendenon; and if the shifting current of fate had ordered her life otherwise than what it was—had she married Willard Clendenon, maimed, comparatively poor, unskilled in the current coin of worldly compliment though he was, she would have found her soul-mate. But these strange mistakes lie scattered all along the path of life, and it is true that matches, if made in heaven, sometimes get woefully mismatched coming down.

"Her fever is getting higher," Mrs. Conway said, as she anxiously fingered the blue-veined wrist.

It rose higher and higher; delirium set in, and in restless visions the young mother babbled of her lost child; she was seeking him—seeking him everywhere, through the wide, thronged avenues of Washington, the long corridors of the capitol, the dull, narrow streets of Norfolk, by the moonlit shores of Ocean View; and the red light of a meteor in the sky was blinding her so that she could not see; and when it faded she was in darkness—and now burning reproaches scorched the sweet lips with their fiery breath, and Paul Winans' name was whispered, but with inexpressible bitterness. The impression on her mind, strengthened by his words at their last interview, was that he had intentionally secreted her baby to punish her in some sort for what seemed to him faults in her. He had struck a blow at her heart where it was most vulnerable; she had told him it would be her death, and he had wanted her to die; and this dismal refrain haunted her fevered slumbers through long hours. In vain Norah cooled the burning head with linen strips, holding masses of powdered ice; the white arms tossed restlessly, the lips still babbled incoherent grief and anger; the physician came, watched her for an hour, went through the formula of prescribing, and shaking his head and promising to see her in the morning, went his way; and the hours went on—it was ten o'clock, and quieter slumbers seemed to fall upon the worn-out patient; she talked less incoherently, tossed and moaned less often.

"A gentleman to see Mrs. Conway," was announced by the subdued voice of a servant at the door.

Supposing that it was her nephew, she glided softly out, returning in ten minutes, to find Grace feebly tossing again and staring with wide-open eyes at every object in the dimly lighted room. She bent over her and tried to fix her wavering attention.

"My dear, will you see your husband? Senator Winans desires an interview with you."

Something in the name seemed to fix and hold her wandering thoughts. She half-lifted herself, resting on her elbow and sweeping her hand across her brow.

"My husband—did you say that?"

"Yes; listen, dear. He has come to see you, and is waiting in the parlor. May I bring him in? Will you see him?"

A flash of hope in the fever-bright violet eyes, a hopeful ring in the trembling voice:

"The baby—he has brought the baby?"

"No, not yet; he hopes to soon," taking the small hands and softly caressing them with hers, "indeed, you are mistaken, Gracie, in thinking, dear child, that he is deceiving you in this matter. He is in great distress, longs to tell you so, and to try to comfort you; say that you will see him."

"No, not I; you do not know him—he is so cruel. Oh, my poor heart!" clasping her hands across her heaving breast, "He has come to triumph in my anguish, to laugh at the wreck he has made of my life."

"Not so, Gracie, dear little one, he has come to sympathize with you—won't you let him come?"

"No, no, never!" rising straight up and shaking herself free of Mrs. Conway's detaining hand, the delirium clouding her brain again. "Oh, never till he comes to me with our baby in his arms will I look upon his face again. Tell him this, and say that if he entered that door I would most surely spring from that window rather than look on his face with its smile of triumph at my suffering."

She fell back, exhausted and quite delirious now, and Mrs. Conway turned with a heavy heart to carry the ill tidings to the man who waited in the next room. She was spared that pain. The clear, bell-like voice, sharpened by anger and scorn that was strange to that gentle spirit, had penetrated the next room, and he knew his doom and felt it to be just, as he stood in the middle of the floor, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed on his breast, a perfect picture of humiliation and despair.

"I have heard," he said, with a ghastly smile, as her fingers touched his arm.

"My poor boy!" she said.

"It is just," he said, in a whisper of intense pain. "God knows I merit worse at her hands, but, all the same, it goes hard with me—the worse because, as I told you just now, I leave for Europe to-morrow in quest of our child. Oh! Mrs. Conway, take care of her while I am gone. Don't—don't let her die!"

"She shall not die," said Lulu's soft, low tones, as she glided into the room and up to his side. "I will—we all will—do everything to keep her for you until you come back to make her happiness your chief care in life hereafter. She must not, will not, die!"

He looked up, caught her hand, and touched it gratefully to his lips.

"God bless you for those words, Miss Clendenon! You always come with renewed life and promises of hope. Oh! watch over her well, I entreat you; and, oh! teach her, if you can, to think less harshly of me. May God forgive me for my folly and wickedness to her, and give me a chance to retrieve the past by the future."

The two ladies looked at each other, deeply moved.

"I am coming back at the very earliest possible day after I recover my child," he went on; "but never till then. I have heard my doom from her own lips." Then he stopped, too deeply pained for words, and with only a heart-wrung "good-by," was gone.

"The next time you will seek me," she had said, at their last fatal interview.

There are many thoughtless words spoken that afterward seem like prophecies.

Mrs. Conway and Lulu went back to the room where they were doomed to watch for many long weeks yet to come over the sick-bed where life and death were waging fierce warfare over a life-weary, reckless victim. But the "balance so fearfully and darkly hung" that a touch may turn the scale toward "that bourne whence no traveler returns," wavered, and dropped its pale burden back into the arms of those who loved her; and, shadowy, wasted, and hopeless, Grace Winans took up the cross of her life again, with all the sunshine gone out of it, the only comfort left to her bruised heart that "comfort scorned of devils"—that comfort that is "sorrow's crown"—"remembering happier things."