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."