MRS. SEYMOUR AND MAGDALEN.
Having locked the door, Magdalen brought a chair to Mrs. Seymour, and
said:
“You are out of breath; sit there, but let me stand. I should suffocate
if I were sitting down. I feel as if a hundred pairs of lungs were
rising in my throat.”
She was paler now than when Mrs. Seymour first met her in the parlor,
and her eyes flashed and sparkled and glowed as only one pair of eyes
had ever done before in Mrs. Seymour’s presence, and for an instant a
doubt of the young girl’s sanity crossed that lady’s mind, and she
glanced uneasily at the door, as if contemplating an escape. But
Magdalen was standing before her, and Magdalen’s eyes held her fast. She
dared not go now if she could, and she asked nervously what Miss Lennox
wanted of her.
“I want you to tell me what it is about the child of whom Mrs. Grey
talks so much. _Was_ there a child born after Alice, say nineteen or
twenty years ago, and did it die, or was it lost; and if so, when, and
how; and was Mrs. Grey here when it was born, or was she somewhere else,
in Cincinnati or vicinity? Tell me that. Tell me all about it.”
Mrs. Seymour was very proud and haughty, and very reticent with regard
to their family matters, especially the matters pertaining to her
brother’s marriage and his wife’s insanity. She never talked of them to
any one except Guy, from whom she had no secrets; and her most intimate
friends, the Dagons and Draggons of New York society, knew nothing
except what rumor told them of the demented woman who made Beechwood a
prison rather than a paradise. How, then, was she startled, and shocked,
and astonished, when this young girl,—this hired companion for her
niece,—demanded of her a full recital of what she had never told her
most familiar friends. Not _asked_ for it, but demanded it as a right,
and enforced the demand with burning eyes and the half-menacing attitude
of one determined to have her way. Ordinarily Mrs. Seymour would have
put this girl down, as she termed it, and given her a lesson in good
breeding and manners, but there was something about her now which
precluded all that, and after a moment she said:
“Your conduct is very strange, Miss Lennox. Very strange indeed, and
what I did not expect from you. I suppose I may be permitted to ask your
right to a story which few have ever heard?”
“Certainly,” Magdalen replied; “question my right as much as you like,
only tell me what I want to know. _Was_ there a child, and did it die?”
“There _was_ a child, and it _did_ die,” Mrs. Seymour said, and
Magdalen, nothing daunted, continued: “How do you know it died? Did you
see it dead? She says she left it in the cars; she told me so to-day.
Oh, Mrs. Seymour, tell me, please what you know about that child before
I, too, go mad!”
Magdalen was kneeling now before Mrs. Seymour, on whose lap her hands
were clasped, and her beautiful face was all aglow with her excitement
as she continued:
“I know a girl who was left in the cars somewhere in Ohio almost
nineteen years ago;—left with a young boy, and the mother, who took the
train at Cincinnati, never came back, and he could not find her. He
thinks she was crazy. She had very black hair and eyes, he said, and was
dressed in mourning. Perhaps it was Mrs. Grey. Did she come from
Cincinnati about that time? It was April, 18—, when the baby I mean was
left in the cars.”
Mrs. Seymour was surprised out of her usual reserve, and when Magdalen
paused for her reply, she said:
“My brother’s wife came from Cincinnati in May, not April; but we
thought she had been a long time on the road. As to its being 18—, I’m
not so sure; but it was nineteen years ago in May, I know, for husband
died the next July, and mother the winter after.”
“And what of the child? And how did it happen that Mrs. Grey was left to
travel alone? Where had she been, and where was Mr. Grey?” Magdalen
asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied, “My brother was in Europe,—sent there
by unhappy domestic troubles at home. Laura had been in Cincinnati, and
came back to Beechwood after the death of her mother and the child, of
whose birth we had never heard.”
“Never heard of its birth!” Magdalen exclaimed. “Then, perhaps, you do
not know certainly of its death. She says she left it in the cars with a
boy, and Roger was a boy; the child I told you of was left with him.”
“Who was that child, and where is she?” Mrs. Seymour asked, and Magdalen
replied, “_I_ am that child, and didn’t you say I reminded you of some
one. Didn’t Guy and Alice and your brother say the same; and I, too, can
see the resemblance to that crazy woman in _myself_.”
Her eyes were full of tears, and as she looked up at Mrs. Seymour her
head poised itself upon one side just as Laura’s had done a thousand
times in the days gone by. Mrs. Seymour was interested now; that
familiar look in Magdalen’s face had always puzzled her, and as she saw
her flushed, and excited, and eager, she was struck with the strong
resemblance she bore to Laura as she was when she first came to
Beechwood, and more to herself than to Magdalen she said:
“It is very strange, but still it cannot be,—though that child business
was always more or less a mystery to me. Miss Lennox,” and she turned to
Magdalen, “would you mind telling me the particulars of your having been
left in the car?”
Very rapidly Magdalen repeated the story of her desertion as she had
heard it from Roger, while Mrs. Seymour listened intently and seemed a
good deal moved by the description given of the mother.
“Was there nothing about you by which you might be identified? That is,
did they keep no article of dress?” she asked, and Magdalen sprang up,
exclaiming, “Yes,—the dress I wore; a crimson delaine, dotted with
black. I have it with me now.”
“A crimson delaine, dotted with black,” Mrs. Seymour repeated, while her
hands began to tremble nervously and her voice to grow a little
unsteady. “There was _such_ a dress in Laura’s satchel; baby’s dress,
she told us, and Alice has it in her drawer.”
“Get it, get it, and we will compare the two,” Magdalen cried, and
seizing Mrs. Seymour’s hand she dragged rather than led her to the door
of Alice’s room; then, going hastily to her trunk, she took from it the
dress which she had worn to Millbank. “Here it is,” she cried, turning
to Mrs. Seymour, who came in with another dress, at sight of which
Magdalen uttered a wild exultant cry, while every particle of color
faded from Mrs. Seymour’s face, and her eyes wore a frightened kind of
look. _The dresses were alike!_ The same material, the same size, the
same style, except that Mrs. Seymour’s was low in the neck, while
Magdalen’s was high, and what was still more confirmatory that they had
belonged to the same person, the buttons were alike, and Magdalen
pointed out to the astonished woman the same peculiarity about the
button holes and a portion of the work upon the dresses. The person who
made them must have been left-handed, as was indicated by the hems where
left-handed stitches would show so plainly.
“I am astonished, I am confounded, I am bewildered, I feel like one in a
dream,” Mrs. Seymour repeated to herself.
Then she dropped panting into a chair, and wiping the perspiration from
her face, continued:
“The coincidence is most remarkable; the dresses _are_ alike; and still
it is no proof. Was there nothing else?”
“Yes. Do you recognize this? Did you ever see it before?” Magdalen said,
holding up the little locket which had been fastened about her neck when
she came to Millbank.
Mrs. Seymour took it in her hands and examined it closely, then passed
it back with the remark, “I never saw it before, to my knowledge.”
“But the initials, ‘L. G.’—did you notice those?” Magdalen continued,
and then Mrs. Seymour took the locket again, and glancing at the
lettering whispered rather than said aloud:
“‘L. G.’ That stands for Laura Grey. It may be. I wish Arthur was here,
for I don’t know what to think or do.”
“You can at least tell me about the child,” Magdalen persisted, and Mrs.
Seymour, who by this time was considerably shaken out of her usual
reticence and reserve, replied, “Yes, I can do that, trusting to your
honor as a lady never to divulge what I may tell you of our family
affairs. My brother always had a _penchant_ for pretty faces, and while
he was young had several _affairs du cœur_ which came to nothing. When
he was forty, or thereabouts, he went to Cincinnati, where he stayed a
long time, and at last startled us with the announcement of his marriage
with Laura Clayton, a young girl of seventeen, whose beauty, he said,
surpassed anything he had ever seen. She was not of high blood, as we
held blood, he wrote, but she was wholly respectable, and pure, and
sweet, and tolerably well educated, and he wanted us to lay aside our
prejudices and receive her as his wife should be received. I was in
favor of doing so, though perhaps this feeling was owing in part to my
husband’s sensible reasoning and partly to the fact that I did not live
here then and would not be obliged to come in daily contact with her. My
home was in New York, and so I only heard from time to time of the
doings at Beechwood. It transpired afterward that Laura’s mother was a
widow, who lived much by herself, without relatives and only a few
acquaintances. She had come from New Orleans the year before, and bought
a house and quite a large lot of land in the suburbs of Cincinnati.
There was Spanish blood in her veins, and it shows itself in Laura. The
mother did some plain sewing for Arthur, who in that way saw the
daughter and finally married her against her mother’s wishes. I think
Mrs. Clayton was a sensible woman, or perhaps she feared that Arthur
only sought her daughter’s ruin; for she tried to keep them apart, and
so made the matter worse and drove them into a clandestine marriage.
Mother and sister Clarissa were here then. Clarissa was never married,
and from her I learned the most I know about the trouble. She deeply
regretted afterward the course they pursued toward Laura, whom they did
not understand, and whose life they made so wretched with their coldness
and pride. She was naturally high-spirited, but she bore patiently for a
long time whatever they laid upon her and tried, I believe, to please
them in all things. Clarissa herself told me that the girl never really
turned upon them, except as her eyes would sometimes blaze with anger,
until Alice was born, and mother wanted her put out to a wet nurse, who
lived so far away that for Laura to see her baby every day was
impossible. Then she rebelled openly, and there was a terrible scene,
but mother carried her point, as she usually did when she had Arthur
where she could talk to him. Laura fought like a tigress when the last
moment came, and mother took the baby from her by force, and then locked
her in her room for fear she would go down to the river and drown
herself, as she threatened to do. Arthur was in New York, or I think he
would have interfered when he saw how it affected Laura. I was sorry for
the poor girl when I heard of it from Clarissa. I had lost a dear little
baby and could sympathize with Laura. I think it makes a woman harder
and less considerate not to have a husband or children of her own, and
Clarissa had neither.”
Mrs. Seymour forgot that her mother had both husband and children, and
that therefore the thing which would excuse Clarissa could not be
applied to her. But Magdalen did not forget it, and her fists were
involuntarily clinched as if to smite the hard old woman who had torn
Laura’s baby from her.
“Does Alice know this?” she asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied, “She does
not, of course. There could be no reason for harrowing up her feelings
with a recital of the past, and I hardly know why I am telling _you_ the
story so fully as I am.”
“Never mind, go on;” Magdalen exclaimed eagerly, and Mrs. Seymour
continued:
“After the baby went away a kind of melancholy mood came over Laura and
she would sit for hours and even days without speaking to any one; then
she would have fits of crying, and again was irritable and quarrelsome,
so that it was a trial to live with her. After two or three months she
ceased to speak of her child, and when Arthur offered to take her to see
it flew into so fierce a passion that he took the next train to New York
and left her with mother.
“It was a habit of his to go away from anything disagreeable, and most
of his time was spent from home. He was always very fickle. To possess a
thing was equivalent to his tiring of it, and even before Alice’s birth
he was weary of his young wife; and so matters went on from bad to worse
till Alice was nearly a year old, and Arthur began to talk of going
abroad, while Laura proposed a separation, or that she should be allowed
to go to Cincinnati while her husband was away. They would all be
happier, she said; and his mother and Clarissa favored the plan. Arthur
consented, and went with her himself to Cincinnati, and settled a yearly
allowance upon her, and at her mother’s request bought three or four
vacant lots which adjoined hers and were for sale, and which she wanted
to hold so as to prevent shanties from being built upon them.”
“And didn’t Mrs. Grey see her baby before she went?” Magdalen asked, and
Mrs. Seymour replied:
“Yes, once. It was brought to the house, but she took little notice of
it, and said it belonged to the _Greys_, not to _her_. We think now she
was crazy then, though they did not suspect it at the time. She
expressed no regret whatever when Arthur left her, but on the contrary
seemed relieved to have him go. He sailed for Europe the next week, and
was gone a year and a half, or more. Laura wrote to him quite regularly
at first, but never held any communication with Beechwood. After a while
there was a break in her letters, and when at last she wrote she told
him something of which he had no suspicion at the time of his leaving
home. He ought to have come back to her then, but he did not, though he
sent her money and advised her to return to Beechwood. This she would
not do. She preferred to stay with her mother, she said; and he heard no
more from her for three or four months, when she wrote a few hurried
lines, telling him her baby _Madeline_ died when she was four weeks old,
and adding that she presumed he would not care, as it would save him the
trouble of taking the child from her as he had taken Alice. That roused
him a little to a sense of his duty, and he wrote kindly to her and told
her he was sorry, and advised her again to return to Beechwood, where he
said he would join her. To this she did not reply for a long time, and
when at last she wrote she said that her mother was dead, and that after
visiting a friend she was going back to Beechwood. The next he heard
from her she was here at Beechwood, where she had arrived wholly
unexpected by mother and Clarissa, who did not know that she was coming,
and who judged that she must have been weeks on the road. Her baggage
was lost, and she had nothing with her but a little satchel, in which
was a child’s dress and a few other articles. She was dressed in black,
and told them her mother was dead, but said nothing of the child of
whose birth they had never heard, she having insisted that Arthur should
not tell them of it. She was very quiet for a few days, never speaking
unless spoken to, and then she did not always answer. Occasionally they
heard her muttering to herself, ‘One is dead, and one is safe. They will
never find it,—never,’ but what she meant, they could not guess.
“Alice was spending a few days with her foster-mother up the river, and
did not return till Laura had been home a week. In all that time she had
never mentioned her child, and when at last she came, and Clarissa said
to her, ‘Your baby is here, Laura. Would you like to see her?’ she
sprang to her feet and her eyes glared like a maniac’s.
“‘Baby was hid,’ she said. ‘Baby was gone where they could not find it.’
“Then her mood changed, and she raved for the baby till Alice was
brought to her; but that only made her worse, and she became perfectly
furious, telling them this was not the baby whom she had lost, and whom
she insisted upon their finding.
“Clarissa wrote at once to Arthur, who hastened home, finding his mother
and sister at their wit’s end, and his wife raving mad, and calling
continually for the baby she had lost, or hid. That was her constant
theme—‘lost, or hid, or left somewhere.’ Arthur did his best to soothe
her, telling her the baby was dead, and asking if she did not remember
writing to him about it. But it did no good. Her reply was always the
same: ‘One is dead, and one is not.’
“For hours she would sit repeating these words in a kind of moaning,
half sobbing way, ‘one is dead, and one is not;’ and never from that
time has she known a rational moment. Hunting out Alice’s cradle, she
took it to her room, and rocked it day and night, saying her lost baby
was in it, and raving fearfully if the family made a noise in the room.
“This annoyed Arthur terribly. He likes quiet, and ease, and luxury,
and, as he could not have these in his own house, he sought them
elsewhere, and has travelled almost over the world. Twice Laura has been
in a private asylum. She was there all the time we were abroad; but
after our return Alice begged so hard for her to be allowed to come to
Beechwood, that Arthur brought her back, and will never move her again.
“Mother died the winter after Laura’s return, and Clarissa the year
following. As my husband was dead, and I alone in the world, I came here
to care for my brother and Alice. Poor girl! Her life has been a sad
one, though she knows nothing, or comparatively nothing, of the early
domestic trouble between her parents, and how her mother was received at
Beechwood.”
Mrs. Seymour paused here, and Magdalen, who had listened eagerly, asked,
“If that child which died when it was four weeks old had lived, how old
would it have been when Mr. Grey came home?”
Mrs. Seymour could hardly tell, for the reason that in her letter to her
husband Laura did not give the date of its birth but as nearly as they
could judge it must have been nine or ten months old, possibly more.
“Yes,” Magdalen said; “and the dress in the satchel,—did it never occur
to you that it could not have been made for a four weeks’ old baby. It
was meant for a larger child. And did you never think there might be a
meaning in the words, ‘One is dead, and one is not,’ Mrs. Seymour?” and
Magdalen grew more earnest and vehement. “There must have been two
children instead of one,—twins, one of whom died and the other she left
in the cars. I know it, I believe it. I shall prove it yet. She has
always talked to me of two, and one she said was Madeline and one was
Magdalen, and Mr. Irving told me that the woman in the cars called me
something which sounded like Magdalen. Don’t you see it? Can’t you
understand how it all might be?”
Mrs. Seymour was confounded and bewildered, and answered faintly, “Oh, I
don’t know; I wish Arthur was here.”
“I am going to him,” Magdalen exclaimed, starting to her feet,—“going at
once, and have him help me solve this mystery. Alice must not know till
I come back, and not then, if I fail. I shall start for Cincinnati
to-morrow. A woman can oftentimes find out things which a man cannot. Do
you think your nephew will go with me?”
She talked so fast, and with so much assurance, that Mrs. Seymour was
insensibly won to think as she did and assent to whatever she suggested;
and the result was that in less than half an hour’s time Guy, who had
been invited up to Magdalen’s room, had heard the whole of the strange
story. _He_ believed it, and indorsed Magdalen at once, and hurrahed for
his new cousin, and winding his arm around her waist waltzed with her
across the room, upsetting his Aunt Pen’s work-basket, and when she
remonstrated he caught her in his other arm and took her with him in his
mad dance. Exhausted, panting, and half indignant at her scapegrace
nephew, Auntie Pen released herself from his grasp, and after a time
Magdalen succeeded in stopping him, but he kept fast hold of her hands,
while she explained what she wanted of him, and asked if he would go
with her.
“Go with you? Yes, the world over, _ma belle_ cousin,” he said, and
greatly to the horror of prim Mrs. Penelope, he sealed his promise to
serve her with a kiss upon her brow.
Mrs. Seymour was shocked, and half doubted the propriety of sending
Magdalen off alone with Guy; but Magdalen knew the kiss was given to
Alice as her possible sister rather than to herself, and so did not
resent it.
They were to start the next day, but it was not thought best to let
Alice know of the journey until morning. Then they told her that a
matter of importance, which had recently come to Magdalen’s knowledge,
made it necessary for her to go to Cincinnati, and that Guy was going
with her. Alice knew they were keeping something from her, but would not
question them, and without a suspicion of the truth she bade Magdalen
and Guy good-by, and saw them start on their journey to Cincinnati.