THE FIEND AND THE ANGEL.
The door opened and Virginia Lander passed through. Her face was sad and
pale, violet shadow lay faintly under her eyes, and the long, sweeping
folds of her black dress trailed upon the carpet. How like she was to
the haughty girl who had so lately left that room. The face, the hair,
the carriage the very bearing of the head seemed hers. In everything but
the soul which gives vitality and expression the two girls were
identical. In certain moods, Cora was like her cousin, for at times she
could be sad, regretful, and given up to tender thoughts. Then again, on
rare occasions, Virginia could be indignant, proud, almost imperious;
but that was always under a keen sense of wrong. Then it was that you
could not have told the two girls apart. True, Cora had her own harsh
individuality. The sneer that sometimes curved her red lips downward was
never seen on the sweet mouth of Virginia, and her eyes never knew the
steel-like glitter which sometimes shot through the sleeping venom of
her cousin’s deadly glances. But these startling expressions came but
seldom even on Cora’s face, and it required a sharp observer to mark the
difference. Eunice Hurd _was_ a sharp observer.
“I heard that you were ill, Aunt Lander, and came to help you, if I can
be of use.”
Her voice was low and calm, but no trumpet ever thrilled human nerves as
it disturbed those of Mrs. Lander. A sudden trembling seized upon her
which shook the whole bed. But she made an effort to meet this kindness
with answering affection, and struggling up from her pillows, held out
one shaking hand.
“Thank you—thank you, my—my—”
She could not utter the lying word. Her teeth began to chatter, her lips
turned white.
“You are ill—you suffer—let me bathe your forehead.”
“No, no; do not touch me. It is very kind of you to come, but I am well,
I need no help. Eunice, tell her that I—I—”
Here the wretched woman fell upon her pillows and burst into tears.
“You only make her worse,” said Eunice, with strange gentleness. “It’s
her nerves, they’re all shook to pieces. Jest go out, that’s a good
soul.”
“Let me say one word to her,” persisted Virginia, with sweet firmness.
“Aunt Eliza, do try and compose yourself, I will never harm you; I will
try not to blame you very much. Do not let my presence disturb you so—I
shall never forget how good you were to me once. Look up and see how
much happier I am than—than—”
She was about to say, “than you are,” but checked herself and changed it
into “than you might suppose.”
“Oh, God help us! Can any one be happy in this house?” exclaimed Mrs.
Lander, in an outburst of bitter grief. “I cannot! I cannot! everything
is dust and ashes!”
“Ah! I fear we shall none of us be happy again,” said Virginia, filled
with commiseration by the evident distress of a woman she had once loved
tenderly. “But God is just, and we can trust in him.”
Mrs. Lander started up in her bed. “Do not say that! You intend it as a
reproach, and reproaches are cruel.”
“No, no; I did not mean to reproach any one; only to comfort you a
little if I could. I saw _her_ go down to the depot, and thought that
you might be alone and suffering. But I have only disturbed you.”
“Disturbed her! I should think you had!” answered Eunice, sharply.
“Everything disturbs her, poor cretur. Jest go out, that’s a good soul;
she ain’t herself nohow.”
Virginia went softly out of the room, sad and heavy-hearted. What but
misery came out of the vast property that her father had left? Those who
held it seemed scarcely less unhappy than herself. Through that spacious
mansion, bedded in flowers and swept by perfumed winds, the different
members of the family wandered like unquiet spirits. No one was really
at rest; no two of the Lander blood thoroughly loved each other.
Distrust, and that hatred which springs from suspicion, poisoned the
life that might have been so sweet and luxurious there.
Ellen Nolan met Virginia as she came from Mrs. Lander’s chamber.
“You look ill, dear lady,” she said, lifting her fine eyes to the
disturbed face of her mistress. “Why is it that this sin, in which you
have not participated, should trouble you so?”
“Come with me, Ellen—come with me. The very atmosphere of these rooms
oppresses me. The woods out yonder look so cool and green: there is a
log cabin within them, that I once used to play in. Cora and I have
spent many a happy day there keeping house with our dolls. It is a
quiet, pretty place, and my father loved it. Let us go down there.”
Ellen was ready to go anywhere with her mistress, and glad to feel the
entire freedom promised by those distant woods. So the two girls, in
reality companions rather than lady and servant, went together across
the lawn and into the woods, where the brook made its sweet music under
the rustic bridge and the sunlight came in a maze of golden green
through the hemlock boughs. Virginia entered the log hut and looked
around with a sad, wistful expression of the face.
“How many times _he_ has been with me in this little cabin. It was here
he first taught me to read.”
“Let us sit down and think how he would have wished you to act in this
hard strait,” said Ellen, drawing a splint-bottomed chair to the window
and unfolding a camp-stool for herself. “Surely, if the spirits of the
dead even can visit us, his will be near to guide his child when so
terribly beset!”
“I think he has guided me, Ellen. All the time something whispers me to
wait and let God himself unravel the iniquity which surrounds me. I have
seen Lawyer Stone a second time, and even his sharp intellect fails to
discover any means of redress so long as my aunt persists in the
statement she has made. It seems like madness when I contradict this
statement without a single witness to sustain me.”
“Your aunt is not bad enough to persist in this forever. In her sense of
justice there may yet be hope. She looks miserably, and the servants
tell me is in no respect the woman that she was,” said Ellen.
“Necessity, in this case, may prove the best wisdom. You can do nothing
but wait.”
“Oh! Ellen, my life in this house is one torment. But I cannot leave
it.”
“But where can you go, if it becomes unbearable?”
“Anywhere, so that you and I are alone.”
“But we have no money!”
“Yes, in the drawer of that desk was a box with some gold in it; not
much, but enough to keep us a year or two, with economy, I should think.
Then the pearls and other bits of jewelry are worth something. My poor,
dear father gave me the gold, piece by piece, all through my childhood,
and the box we called my bank. He little thought how precious it might
become to me. But in what way to use it—where to go—Ellen, you are wise,
and have learned something of the world—what could you and I do? We will
live very humbly, work hard, if that is needful. I can do embroidery and
fine needlework.”
Ellen shook her head and sat in restless thought awhile then she looked
up brightly.
“That will never do; thousands of women are dependent on needlework and
starve on it. But, lady, I can work.”
“You, Ellen!”
“Yes, lady, I am weak and crooked, and seem very helpless, but God, in
compensation, my father used to say, has given me a strength here and
here, out of which you and I shall win bread and that independence you
long for.” Ellen touched her heart and her forehead lightly as she
spoke.
“What do you mean, Ellen?”
“I can think—feel—dream—write such things as men and women will take joy
in reading.”
“This you can do, Ellen; I see it in your face, I read it in your words;
sometimes they thrill me with all the sweetness of poetry. Yes, Ellen,
you can write a book—but what can I do?”
“Sing like an angel, dear lady. In all my life I never heard a voice
like yours.”
“But to make that available I must be seen and take rank with opera
singers. There would be no privacy for me.”
“True, true; and that would be terrible. Well, you were not born to
work. Your gold shall keep us a little while independent if you are
compelled to use it. When that is gone, I will do the rest. God will
help us, for he always aids those who try for themselves. While I write
you will sing, thus making a noble voice richer and sweeter. Then, if my
poor effort fails, you will be prepared to make sacrifices. Besides, God
will not drive you to the last resource unless it is good for you.”
“How wisely—how like a woman you talk, Ellen. If we could only go at
once.”
“What prevents us, lady?”
“This, Ellen; Lawyer Stone does not sanction our leaving the house.
While we stay here, he says, the right to possession is a disputed
question. If we go away, it is to surrender all.”
“And we must live here.”
“It is my duty, Ellen. The rights which my father gave me must not be
abandoned weakly. As I would be in duty bound to protect another, I must
protect myself. The property which my father left is a sacred trust to
be used for the good of mankind, as he used it. In her hands it will be
perverted; humanity will gain nothing by it. Even now it gives neither
comfort nor content to any one. Wealth is a wonderful power, Ellen,
either for good or evil. I have thought a great deal of this in our
lonely sea voyage after the ship rescued us. It was a weight upon me,
Ellen, and I prayed for strength to bear this noble responsibility as he
had done. But it is wrested from me.”
“Not altogether, sweet lady. God is just.”
“But for that belief, we should be helpless indeed,” said Virginia,
smiling kindly upon her humble friend. “Ellen, yours is wise counsel; we
must not waste our lives in vain regrets or idle dreaming. That which is
in your brain and my voice shall be worked out faithfully. In this large
house we can live almost solitary lives—you and I. That strange woman,
Eunice, will, I think, help us in this. We will study, practice and
wait.”
“I have often heard my father say that the great secret of success lay
in knowing how to wait and when to act.”
“Your father was a wise, good man, Ellen.”
Ellen Nolan’s eyes filled with tears, and in her sweet humility she took
Virginia’s hand and kissed it.
“Hark, I hear some one coming,” said the young lady. “Look out, Ellen,
and see who it is.”
Ellen looked out of the little window and saw a man coming up the path
by the brook. He stood in the shadow of the bridge a moment, cast one
glance at the cabin, and retreated hastily. Ellen did not see his face
clearly, but the figure was that of a young person, tall and elegant.
“It is some traveller from the tavern below here, I fancy,” said
Virginia when Ellen told her what she saw. “We must go away; this place
was solitary enough while _he_ lived, but everything is changed now.”
Ellen looked a little anxiously after the man. His air and figure seemed
familiar to her and brought the brother she loved so much to her mind,
by some unconscious train of association.
“Yes,” she said at last, with more cheerfulness than was usual to her,
“let us go now. But what a lovely place this would be to write in, so
cool and shadowy, it seems almost like the green light of a wilderness.”
Virginia smiled and shared the poetic love of nature which beamed in
those honest eyes with that kindred sympathy which makes letters and
music twin arts.
“How I wish we could gather up the murmurs which come up from the brook
and the mysterious shivering of the leaves in one melody,” she said. “I
have tried more than once and failed.”
“Try again,” answered the hunchback, hopefully, “over and over again;
that is the way in which genius accomplishes itself, my father often
said. If you have an idea, work it out. When God gives a thought, he
gives the capacity for developing it. Gold never comes from the mine
without hard labor. Toil and thought go hand in hand.”
“Your father must have been a strangely thoughtful man,” said Virginia,
looking with tender affection on the hunchback.
“He was—he was!” answered Ellen. “I love to think his sayings over in
the night; I love to feel them starting up like blossoms in my own
heart. He was a good man, was my father. I know how he lived—you saw how
he could die.”
“The inheritance he has left you, Ellen, is better far than gold.”
“Yes, because it is a part of himself.”
“Still he was, from your account, a practical man.”
“I think that genius which is not practical may be called by some other
name—insanity perhaps. He used to say so, and I believe it. The great
geniuses of the age, those who will live and breathe through all time,
are, at least in this age, eminently practical men. It is small minds
that affect eccentricity.”
It was a study to watch those young lips uttering thoughts and sayings
that seemed so much beyond her years; but Virginia was right, Ellen had
received an inheritance of thought from her father with a memory which
treasured every saying of his as a miser hoards his gold. What seemed to
be precocity in her sprang out of the intense love she had borne for
him. When she spoke of him or his thoughts the light would deepen and
kindle in her eyes; her white forehead expanded and the expression of
her mouth grew beautiful to look upon.
“How deeply you have thought of these things,” said Virginia, stealing
an arm fondly over Ellen’s shoulder. “Sometimes it seems to me as if
nothing could make you unhappy.”
“Is any one in this world altogether unhappy, I wonder? When God has
made the earth so beautiful and filled it with so many sources of
comfort, no human soul should be really miserable. Then the thoughts of
that other world, to which your father and mine have gone, fills the
future with noble sources of aspiration. While love exists in this world
and travels on through eternity, linking humanity with the divine, what
present trouble should rob a firm heart of its energies and its hopes?”
“I love to hear the father’s thoughts on the child’s young lips, but it
makes me almost afraid of you, Ellen,” exclaimed Virginia, smoothing the
bright hair of her protégé with a kindly touch of the hand.
“Not of me, lady; you cannot be afraid of me while I love you so
dearly.”
Speaking thus lovingly to each other the young girls left the cabin and
walked slowly towards the house.
“It is strange, but this seems really like my home, now that she is
away,” said Virginia, looking towards the house, whose pillars rose
white and symmetrical from the green of the lawn and shrubbery. “I
breathe more freely.”
“Carry out your idea of living by ourselves, and this nervous feeling,
which holds the very breath in one’s bosom, will pass away. This life of
ours gives too much time for thought.”
“Yes, yes, we will go to work,” answered Virginia, made cheerful by the
idea. “There is music in my throat, and thought in this brain of yours.”
“These are our mines, and we must work them,” said Ellen. “Perhaps it
was for this God allowed that wicked girl to steal your inheritance. Who
knows?”
By this time the two girls had reached the house and disappeared behind
the white pillars with their arms around each other, happier than they
had been for months.