IN DAVENPORT
Hot, and dusty, and tired, and sick, and utterly hopeless and wretched,
Ethie looked drearily out from the windows of her room at the hotel,
whither she had gone on her first arrival in Davenport. Her head seemed
bursting as she stood tying her bonnet before the mirror, and drawing on
her gloves, she glanced wistfully at the inviting-looking bed, feeling
strongly tempted to lie down there among the pillows and wait till she
was rested before she went out in that broiling August sun upon her
strange errand. But a haunting presentiment of what the dizziness and
pain in her head and temples portended urged her to do quickly what she
had to do; so with another gulp of the ice water she had ordered, and
which only for a moment cooled her feverish heat, she went from her room
into the hall, where the boy was waiting to show her the way to "the
governor's house." He knew just where it was. Everybody knew in
Davenport, and the chambermaid to whom Ethie had put some questions, had
volunteered the information that the governor had gone East for his
health, and the house, she believed, was shut up--not shut so that she
could not effect an entrance to it. She would find her way through every
obstacle, Ethie thought, wondering vaguely at the strength which kept
her up and made her feel equal to most anything as she followed her
conductor through street after street, onward and onward, up the hill,
where the long windows and turrets of a most elegant mansion were
visible. When asked at the hotel if she would not have a carriage, she
had replied that she preferred to walk, feeling that in this way she
should expend some of the fierce excitement consuming her like an inward
fire. It had not abated one whit when at last the house was reached, and
dismissing her guide she stood a moment upon the steps, leaning her
throbbing head against the door post, and summoning courage to ring the
bell. Never before had she felt so much like an intruder, or so widely
separated from her husband, as during the moment she stood at the
threshold of her home, hesitating whether to ring or go away and give
the matter up. She could not go away now that she had come so far, she
finally decided. She must go in and see the place where Richard lived,
and so, at last, she gave the silver knob a pull, which reverberated
through the entire house, and brought Hannah, the housemaid, in a trice
to see who was there.
"Is Governor Markham at home?" Ethie asked, as the girl waited for her
to say something.
Governor Markham was East, and the folks all gone, the girl replied,
staring a little suspiciously at the stranger who without invitation,
had advanced into the hall, and even showed a disposition to make
herself further at home by walking into the drawing room, the door of
which was slightly ajar.
"My name is Markham. I am a relative of the governor. I am from the
East," Ethelyn volunteered, as she saw the girl expected some
explanation.
Had Hannah known more of Ethelyn, she might have suspected something;
but she had not been long in the family, and coming, as she did, from
St. Louis, the story of her master's wife was rather mythical to her
than otherwise. That there was once a Mrs. Markham, who, for beauty, and
style, and grandeur, was far superior to Mrs. James, the present
mistress of the establishment, she had heard vague rumors; while only
that morning when dusting and airing Richard's room, she had stopped her
work a moment to admire the handsome picture which Richard had had
painted, from a photograph of Ethie, taken when she was only seventeen.
It was a beautiful, girlish face, and the brown eyes were bright and
soft, and full of eagerness and joy; while the rounded cheeks and
pouting lips were not much like the pale thin woman who now stood in the
marbled hall, claiming to be a relative of the family. Hannah never
dreamed who it was; but, accustomed to treat with respect everything
pertaining to the governor, she opened the door of the little
reception-room, and asked the lady to go in.
"I'll send you Mrs. Dobson the housekeeper," she said; and Ethie heard
her shuffling tread as she disappeared through the hall and down the
stairs to the regions where Mrs. Dobson reigned.
Ethelyn was a little afraid of that dignitary; something in the
atmosphere of the house made her afraid of everything, inspiring her as
it did with the feeling that she had no business there--that she was a
trespasser, a spy, whom Mrs. Dobson would be justified in turning from
the door. But Mrs. Dobson meditated no such act. She was a quiet,
inoffensive, unsuspicious, personage, believing wholly in Governor
Markham and everything pertaining to him. She was canning fruit when
Hannah came with the message that some of the governor's kin had come
from the East, and remembering to have heard that Richard once had an
uncle somewhere in Massachusetts, she had no doubt that this was a
daughter of the old gentleman and a cousin of Richard's, especially as
Hannah described the stranger as youngish and tolerably good-looking.
She had no thought that it was the runaway wife, of whom she knew more
than Hannah, else she would surely have dropped the Spencer jar she was
filling and burned her fingers worse than she did, trying to crowd in
the refractory cover, which persisted in tipping up sideways and all
ways but the right way.
"Some of his kin. Pity they are gone. What shall we do with her?" she
said, as she finally pushed the cover to its place and blew the thumb
she had burned badly.
"Maybe she don't mean to stay long; she didn't bring no baggage," Hannah
said, and thus reassured, Mrs. Dobson rolled down her sleeves and tying
on a clean apron, started for the reception-room, where Ethie sat like
one stupefied, or one who walks in a dream from which he tries in
vain to waken.
This house, as far as she could judge, was not like that home on the
prairie where her first married days were spent. Everything here was
luxurious and grand and in such perfect taste. It seemed a princely
home, and Ethie experienced more than one bitter pang of regret that by
her own act she had in all probability cut herself off from any part or
lot in this earthly paradise.
"I deserve it, but it is very hard to bear," she thought, just as Mrs.
Dobson appeared and bowing respectfully, began:
"Hannah tells me you are kin to the governor's folks,--his cousin, I
reckon--and I am so sorry they are all, gone, and will be yet for some
weeks. The governor is at a water cure down East--strange you didn't
hear of it--and t'other Mr. Markham has gone with his wife to Olney,
and St. Paul, and dear knows where. Too bad, ain't it? But maybe you'll
stay a day or two and rest? We'll make you as comfortable as we can. You
look about beat out," and Mrs. Dobson came nearer to Ethelyn, whose face
and lips were white as ashes, and whose eyes looked almost black with
her excitement.
She was very tired. The rapid journey, made without rest or food
either, save the cup of tea and cracker she tried to swallow, was
beginning to tell upon her, and while Mrs. Dobson was speaking she felt
stealing over her the giddiness which she knew was a precursor
to fainting.
"I am tired and heated," she gasped. "I could not sleep at the hotel or
eat, either. I will stay a day and rest, if you please. Rich--Governor
Markham will not care; I was traveling this way, and thought I would
call. I have heard so much about his house."
She felt constrained to say this by way of explanation, and Mrs. Dobson
accepted it all, warming up at once on the subject of the house--that
was her weak point; while to show strangers through the handsome rooms
was her delight. No opportunity to do this had for some time been
presented, and the good woman's face glowed with the pleasure she
anticipated from showing the governor's cousin his house and grounds.
But first the lady must have some dinner, and bidding her lay aside her
bonnet and shawl and make herself at home, she hurried back to the
kitchen and dispatched Hannah for the tender lamb-chop she was going to
broil, as that was something easily cooked, and the poor girl seemed so
tired and feeble.
"She looks like the Markhams, or like somebody I've seen," she said,
never dreaming of finding the familiar resemblance to "somebody she had
seen" in the picture hanging in Richard's room.
What she would have done had she known who the stranger was is doubtful.
Fortunately she did not know; but being hospitably inclined, and feeling
anxious to show the governor's Eastern relatives how grand and nice they
were, she broiled the tender lamb, and made the fragrant coffee, and
laid the table in the cozy breakfast-room, and put on the little silver
set, and then conducted her visitor out to dinner, helping her herself,
and leaving the room with the injunction to ring if she wanted anything,
as Hannah was within hearing. Terribly bewildered and puzzled with
regard to her own identity, Ethie sat down to Richard's table, in
Richard's house, and partook of Richard's food, with a strange feeling
of quiet, and a constantly increasing sensation of numbness and
bewilderment. Access to the house had been easier than she fancied; but
she could not help feeling that she had no right to be there, no claim
on Richard's hospitality. Certainly she had none, if what she had heard
at Clifton were true. But was it? There was some doubt creeping into her
mind, though why Richard should wish to build so large and so fine a
house just for himself alone she could not understand. She never guessed
how every part of that dwelling had been planned with a direct reference
to her and her tastes; that not a curtain, or a carpet, or a picture had
been purchased without Melinda's having said she believed Ethie would
approve it. Every stone, and plank and tack, and nail had in it a
thought of the Ethie whose coming back had been speculated upon and
planned in so many different ways, but never in this way--never just as
it had finally occurred, with Richard gone, and no one there to welcome
her, save the servants in the kitchen, who, while she ate her solitary
dinner, feeling more desolate and wretched than she had ever before felt
in her life, wondered who she was, and how far they ought to go with
their attentions and civilities. They were not suspicious, but took her
for what she professed to be--a Markham, and a near connection of the
governor; and as that stamped her somebody, they were inclined to be
very civil, feeling sure that Mrs. James would heartily approve their
course. She had rung no bell for Hannah; but they knew her dinner was
over, for they heard her as she went back into the reception-room, where
Mrs. Dobson ere long joined her, and asked if she would like to see
the house.
"It's the only thing we can amuse you with, unless you are fond of
music. Maybe you are," and Mrs. Dobson led the way to a little
music-room, where, in the recess of a bow window a closed piano
was standing.
At first Ethelyn did not observe it closely; but when the housekeeper
opened it, and pushing back the heavy drapery, disclosed it fully to
view, Ethie started forward with a sudden cry of wonder and surprise,
while her face was deathly pale, and the fingers which came down with a
crash upon the keys shook violently, for she knew it was her old
instrument standing there before her--the one she had sold to procure
money for her flight. Richard must have bought it back; for her sake,
too, or rather for the sake of what she once was to him, not what
she was now.
"Play, won't you?" Mrs. Dobson said. But Ethie could not then have
touched a note. The faintest tone of that instrument would have maddened
her and she turned away from it with a shudder, while the rather
talkative Mrs. Dobson continued: "It's an old piano, I believe, that
belonged to the first Mrs. Markham. There's to be a new one bought for
the other Mrs. Markham, I heard them say."
Ethie's hands were tightly locked together now, and her teeth shut so
tightly over her lips that the thin skin was broken, and a drop of blood
showed upon the pale surface; but in so doing she kept back a cry of
anguish which leaped up from her heart at Mrs. Dobson's words. The
"first Mrs. Markham," that was herself, while the "other Mrs. Markham"
meant, of course, her rival--the bride about whom she had heard at
Clifton. She did not think of Melinda as being a part of that household,
"and the other Mrs. Markham," for whom the new piano was to be
purchased--she thought of nothing but herself, and her own
blighted hopes.
"Does the governor know for certain that his first wife is dead?" she
asked, at last, and Mrs. Dobson replied:
"He believes so, yes. It's five years since he heard a word. Of course
she's dead. She must have been a pretty creature. Her picture is in the
governor's room. Come, I will show it to you."
Mrs. Dobson had left her glasses in the kitchen, so she did not notice
the white, stony face, so startling in its expression, as her visitor
followed her on up the broad staircase into the spacious hall above, and
on still further, till they came to the door of Richard's room, which
Hannah had left open. Then for a moment Ethelyn hesitated. It seemed
almost like a sacrilege for her feet to tread the floor of that private
room, for her breath to taint the atmosphere of a spot where the new
wife would come. But Mrs. Dobson led her on until she stood in the
center of Richard's room, surrounded by the unmistakable paraphernalia
of a man, with so many things around her to remind her of the past.
Surely, this was her own furniture; the very articles he had chosen for
the room in Camden. It was kind in Richard to keep and bring them here,
where everything was so much more elegant--kind, too, in him to redeem
her piano. It showed that for a time, at least, he had remembered her;
but alas! he had forgotten her now, when she wanted his love so much.
There were great blurring tears in her eyes, and she could not
distinctly see the picture on the walk which Mrs. Dobson said was the
first Mrs. Markham, asking if she was not a beauty.
"Rather pretty, yes," Ethie said, making a great effort to speak
naturally, and adding after a moment: "I suppose it will be taken down
when the other Mrs. Markham comes."
In Mrs. Dobson's mind the other Mrs. Markham only meant Melinda, and she
replied:
"Why should it? She knows it is here. She knew the other lady and liked
her, too."
"She knew me? Who can it be?" Ethie asked herself, remembering that the
name she had heard at Clifton was a strange one to her.
"This, now, is the very handsomest part of the whole house," Mrs. Dobson
said, throwing open a door which led from Richard's room into a suite of
apartments which, to Ethie's bewildered gaze, seemed more like fairyland
than anything real she had ever seen. "This the governor fitted up
expressly for his wife and I'm told he spent more money here than in all
the upper rooms. Did you ever see handsomer lace? He sent to New York
for them," she said, lifting up one of the exquisitely wrought curtains
festooned across the arch which divided the boudoir from the large
sleeping room beyond. "This I call the bridal chamber," she continued,
stepping into the room where everything was so pure and white. "But,
bless me, I forgot that I put on a lot of bottles to heat: I'll venture
they are every one of them shivered to atoms. Hannah is so careless.
Excuse me, will you, and entertain yourself a while. I reckon you can
find your way back to the parlor."
Ethelyn wanted nothing so much as to be left alone and free to indulge
in the emotions which were fast getting the mastery of her. Covering her
face with her hands, as the door closed after Mrs. Dobson, she sat for a
moment bereft of the power to think or feel. Then, as things became more
real, as great throbs of heat and pain went tearing through her temples,
she remembered that she was in Richard's house, up in the room which
Mrs. Dobson had termed the bridal chamber, the apartments which had been
fitted up for Richard's bride, whoever she might be.
"I never counted on this," she whispered, as she paced up and down the
range of rooms, from the little parlor or boudoir to the dressing room
beyond the bedroom, and the little conservatory at the side, where the
choicest of plants were in blossom, and where the dampness was so cool
to her burning brow.
It did not strike her as strange that Richard should have thought of all
this, nor did she wonder whose taste had aided him in making such a
home. She did not wonder at anything except at herself, who had missed
so much and fallen into such depths of woe.
"Oh, Richard!" she sighed, as she went back to the bridal chamber. "You
would pity me now, and forgive me, too, if you knew what I am suffering
here in your home, which can never, never be mine!"
She was standing now near the low window, taking in the effect of her
surroundings, from the white ground carpet covered with brilliant
bouquets, to the unrumpled, snowy bed which looked so deliciously cool
and inviting and seemed beckoning the poor, tired woman to its embrace.
And Ethie yielded at last to the silent invitation, forgetting
everything save how tired, and sorry, and fever-smitten she was, and how
heavy her swollen eyelids were with tears unshed, and the many nights
she had not slept. Ethie's cheeks were turning crimson, and her pulse
throbbing rapidly as, loosing her long, beautiful hair, which of all her
girlish beauty remained unimpaired, and putting off her little gaiters,
she lay down upon the snowy bed, and pressing her aching head upon the
pillows, whispered softly to her other self--the Ethelyn Grant she used
to know in Chicopee, when a little twelve-year-old girl she fled from
the maddened cow and met the tall young man from the West.
"Governor Markham they call him now," she said, "and I am Mrs.
Governor," and a wild laugh broke the stillness of the rooms kept so
sacred until now.
In the hall below Hannah overheard the laugh, and mounting the stairs
cast one frightened glance into the chamber where a tossing, moaning
figure lay upon the bed, with masses of brown hair falling about the
face and floating over the pillows.
Good Mrs. Dobson dropped one of the jars she was filling when Hannah
came with her strange tale, and leaving the scalding mass of pulp and
juice upon the floor, she hastened up the stairs, and with as stern a
voice as it was possible for her to assume, demanded of Ethelyn what she
was doing there. But Ethie only whispered on to herself of divorces, and
governors' wives-elect, and bridal chambers where she could rest so
nicely. Mrs. Dobson and Mrs. Dobson's ire were nothing to her, and the
good woman's wrath changed to pity as she met the bright, restless eyes,
and felt the burning hands which she held for a moment in her own. It
was a pretty little hand--soft and white and small almost as a child's.
There was a ring upon the left hand, too; a marriage ring, Mrs. Dobson
guessed, wondering now more than ever who the stranger was that had thus
boldly taker possession of a room where none but the family ever came.
"She is married, it would seem," she said to Hannah, and then, as
Richard's name dropped from Ethelyn's lips, she looked curiously at the
flushed face so ghastly white, save where spots of crimson colored the
cheeks, and at the mass of hair which Ethie had pushed up and off from
the forehead it seemed to oppress with its weight.
"Go, bring me some ice-water from the cellar," Mrs. Dobson said to
Hannah, who hurried away on the errand, while the housekeeper, left to
herself, bent nearer to Ethelyn and closely scrutinized her face; then
stepping to Richard's room, she examined the picture on the wall, where
the hair was brushed back and the lips were parted like the lips and
hair in that other room where the stranger was.
Mrs. Dobson was a good deal alarmed--"set back," as she afterward
expressed it when telling the story to Melinda--and her knees fairly
knocked together as she returned to the sick-room, and bending again
over the stranger asked, "Is your name Ethelyn?"
For an instant there was a look of consciousness in the brown eyes, and
Ethie whispered faintly:
"Don't tell him. Don't send me away. Let me stay here and die; it won't
be long, and this pillow is so nice."
She was wandering again, and satisfied that her surmises were correct,
Mrs. Dobson lifted her gently up, and to the great surprise of Hannah,
who had returned with the ice, began removing the heavy dress and the
skirts so much in the way.
"Bring some of Mrs. Markham's night-clothes, and ask me no questions,"
she said to the astonished girl, who silently obeyed her, and then
assisted while Ethelyn was arrayed in Melinda's night-gown and made more
comfortable and easy than she could be in her own tight-fitting dress.
"Take this to the telegraph office," was Mrs. Dobson's next order, after
she had been a few moments in the library, and Hannah obeyed, reading
as she ran:
"DAVENPORT, August--.
"To MRS. JAMES MARKHAM, Olney:
"There's a strange woman sick here. Please come
home. "ELINOR DOBSON."
The way was open for the dispatch, and in less than half an hour the
operator at Olney was writing out the message which would take Melinda
back to Davenport as fast as steam could carry her.