MARY ROGERS.
It was a cold wintry night, and a February rain was beating against the
windows of the house on the Hill, when Edith was roused from sleep by
Norah, who said:
“If you please, Mrs. Schuyler, Gertie Westbrooke has come all alone from
the cottage in the rain and dark, and says my cousin is dying and wants
to see _you_. She’s very bad, and talking such queer things.”
Scarcely knowing what she was doing, Edith arose and began to dress,
while the colonel followed more leisurely, feeling annoyed at Mary
Rogers for being sick on such a night as this, and sending for his wife,
thereby putting him to great discomfort and inconvenience, for if Edith
went to the cottage he of course must go also. And in a short time they
were in their carriage and driving rapidly down the road toward the
house, where Gertie was anxiously expecting them.
As soon as she delivered her message she ran back through the darkness
and rain, and when the carriage drew up before the gate she stood in the
open doorway, her hair all wet and dripping, and her face pale with fear
as she clutched Edith’s dress, and whispered:
“I’m so glad you have come. She wanted you so much and said there was
something she must tell you. But I’m afraid she can’t now, because she’s
worse. She cannot talk. The doctor is there. I went for him first, and
then back by the Hill. Come quick, please,” and Gertie hurried her on to
the apartment where Mary Rogers lay, her face ashen pale, and her eyes
fastening themselves with a look of intense longing and eagerness upon
Edith as she came in. When a young girl Mrs. Rogers had suffered from an
affection of the heart, which she supposed she had entirely outlived.
Within the last few months, however, it had troubled her at intervals,
and on the night of the severe attack she had told Gertie she was not
well, and gone early to bed. Gertie, who slept upstairs, was awakened,
she said, by loud groans, and hurrying to her auntie’s room she found
her on the floor, where she had fallen in her attempt to strike a light.
Her first words after Gertie helped her back to bed were:
“I am going to die, and I must see Mrs. Schuyler and tell her something.
Go for her quick, and the doctor, too, if you are not afraid.”
She could talk then, but her powers of speech were gone now, and when
Edith went up to her and said: “What can I do for you?” her lips tried
in vain to frame the words she would say, while great drops of sweat
stood upon her face, wrung out by her intense desire to speak. It was
hardly paralysis, or apoplexy either, the doctor said, but a kind of
cross between the two, and while it left her mind perfectly clear, it
took from her the power of utterance, and made her as helpless as a
child.
“Can’t you tell me what it is you wish to say to me?” Edith asked, as
she took the hand which was raised feebly to meet hers.
There was a shake of the head, and Edith continued: “Perhaps you can
write it?”
Another head shake, while the eager eyes went from Edith’s face to
Gertie, and from Gertie back again.
“I think I can guess,” Edith said. “It is about Gertie. You wish to talk
to me of her.”
Then the quivering lips moved, and gave forth a sound which Edith knew
meant “Yes,” and she continued: “You are anxious about her future if you
die?”
Mrs. Rogers waited a moment and then nodded assent, while every muscle
of her face worked painfully as she tried to speak.
“Oh, auntie,” Gertie cried, as she bent over the sick woman, “don’t be
troubled for me. I can take care of myself. I am strong and well and
willing to work. I can find something to do, and everybody will be kind
to me.”
There were tears in Mary’s eyes, and they rolled down her cheeks as she
looked at the brave young girl, who was so sure of finding kindness in
everybody.
Meanwhile Edith had been thinking, and as the result of her thought she
said:
“Mrs. Rogers, will it comfort you to know that if you die Gertie shall
come to live with me, and that I will take care of her?”
Then the quivering lips managed to say: “Yes,” and feeling for Gertie’s
hand Mary put it in Edith’s, and whispered “Yours,” while the sweat
drops on her face grew larger and thicker with her agonizing efforts to
tell what she could not. How hard she tried to make them understand the
secret she had kept so long, and once she took the shawl which lay near
her, and folding it up to look like a child, she held it close to her
bosom as a mother holds her baby, and then with her hand pointed to
Gertie, and from her to Edith, mumbling the one word, “Yours, yours.”
“What does she mean?” Edith asked in great perplexity. “It must be
something about little Jamie,—that you will take care of him perhaps. Is
that it?”
Mrs. Rogers’ “No-o-o” came with a moaning cry, followed at last by the
word “equal,” spoken so plainly that there could be no mistake.
“Equal,” Edith repeated, thoughtfully; and then, as a sudden idea came
into her mind, her face flushed a little, and, remembering the pride and
haughtiness at Schuyler Hill, and the opposition she might have to
encounter, she hesitated a moment before she asked: “You wish Gertie to
come to me as an equal?”
There was a decided nod, and then Edith glanced at the beautiful girl
beside her standing with clasped hands, her head bent forward to listen,
with a look of surprise and wonder in her eyes. That she should go to
Schuyler Hill as anything _but_ an equal had never occurred to her, and
the question hurt her a little, and brought a flush of pride into her
face as she waited Edith’s reply.
“Surely, they can make no menial of her,” Edith thought, as she looked
again at the young girl just budding into womanhood, and resolving to
brave everything she said, as if there had never been a doubt in her
mind. “Certainly, Mrs. Rogers, she shall come as an equal, and have
every possible advantage. I promise you that solemnly. Are you
satisfied?”
Mary nodded, while her eyes still wore that look of intense longing, as
if there was something more which she wished to tell. But she could not,
though she kept repeating “_Yours, yours_.”
They could not guess her meaning, and thought her mind was wandering;
but the motion of dissent she made when they hinted as much was a proof
to the contrary.
Very sleepy, and uncomfortable, and a little impatient withal, Colonel
Schuyler waited in the adjoining room, wholly unsuspicious of the
compact which was to affect him so seriously. But Edith did not forget
him, or that it was his right to have something to say on the matter;
and when she saw the sick woman was quiet, she went out to him, and
laying her arm caressingly across his neck, said:
“Howard, I have done something which I trust you will approve. That poor
woman is distressed about leaving Gertie alone, and I have promised that
she shall live with us.”
“Certainly, if you wish it,” the colonel said, thinking of Jamie, and
how much he was attached to Gertie Westbrooke.
“Yes, but that is not all. I have promised to take her as an equal; not
as a servant in any form. I am to treat her and educate her as if she
were my sister. Are you willing, Howard? If not, say so at once, that I
may take back my pledge for if she dies with my promise given, I must
keep it to the letter. Are you willing, Howard?”
He did not know whether he was or not. He only knew that it was very
disagreeable being turned out of bed at midnight and brought through the
storm to this comfortless room, where the fire in the stove did not
burn, and the one candle on the table ran up a huge black wick and
smelled horribly of tallow; and then, to crown all, Edith must ask if he
was willing to take into his family and treat as her sister a little
obscure girl, whose mother took in fluting, and ironing, and mopping,
too, for aught he knew, for a living. Yes, it was hard, and his eyebrows
came together, and his hands went further into his pockets, while he sat
a moment in silence. Then he said:
“Do you wish it very much?”
“Yes, I wish it,” Edith said, “more than I have wished for anything in
years.”
“Then take her,” was the response; and with a kiss of thanks, Edith went
back to the sick-room where Mrs. Rogers was now asleep, with her head
pillowed on Gertie’s shoulder.
But the slumber did not last long, and when the gray, wet wintry morning
looked into the room, Mary Rogers was dead, and what she had tried so
hard to tell Edith Schuyler had not been told. Gertie’s grief at first
was wild and passionate, but Edith comforted her as best she could, and
led her up to her own chamber, the little room where she once had
dreamed of future happiness and then wept bitterly over its ruin.
As she entered the apartment and cast her eye upon the opposite wall,
she started involuntarily, while the words rose to her lips, “How came
_my_ picture here?”
But it was “_La Sœur_,” which Robert, who was in New York for the
winter, had finished and given Gertie permission to hang in her room,
and which at first struck Edith forcibly as a likeness of herself when,
a girl of fifteen, she used to look from the windows of that room for
the coming of Abelard. As she examined it more closely, however, the
likeness faded, and she could not see Heloise Fordham in it as plainly
as she did at first.
“Edith, my dear,—you really must go now. I cannot allow you to remain
any longer,” came from the foot of the stairs, where the colonel was
standing, and with a kiss for the desolate child, and a promise to come
again before the day was over, and to send Norah to stay altogether till
after the funeral, Edith joined her impatient lord and was driven
rapidly home.
Nor did she return as she had promised, for exposure to the damp night
air brought on a severe cold, which confined her to her room, where, on
the day of the funeral, she sat looking wistfully in the direction of
the cottage, where the hearse was standing before the gate, just as it
stood that other day when hers was the only heart which ached for the
burden it took away. It was the Schuyler carriage which took Gertie and
Norah to the grave, and Edith blessed her husband for this kindness to
the girl who was so much to her, and for his thoughtfulness in
requesting his daughters and their governess to attend the funeral. He
did it for her sake, she knew, and Julia knew so, too, and in Edith’s
hearing made some remarks about “the new element which was dragging her
father down.”
As yet she did not know that Gertie was coming to the Hill to live.
Neither did any one, except Mrs. Tiffe, for Edith thought best not to
speak of it during the two or three days when Norah remained at the
cottage looking over her cousin’s effects, packing away her things, and
separating them from Gertie’s.
In a small tin box, which fastened with a spring, they found several
business-like documents, some yellow with age, some fresher-looking, and
among them the papers relating to Gertie’s “forty pounds.” These Norah
kept to give to Colonel Schuyler; then carelessly glancing at a few of
the others, and finding them mostly receipts and papers relating to the
bank, now good for nothing, she proposed to Gertie that they burn them.
But Gertie said, “No, I may want to look at them some time;” so they
were again placed back in the box, which was put away in Gertie’s trunk
and the house was set to rights, and the room which Robert Macpherson
still kept for his studio when he was in Hampstead was left just as it
was, with “_La Sœur_” removed to its old place on the easel, and at the
close of the third day Norah locked the doors, and, with Gertie, passed
out into the street, leaving tenantless the cottage for which Godfrey
had never taken rent since Mrs. Rogers occupied it.