A WAITING-MAID'S ROMANCE.
"The music of thy voice I heard
Nor wish while it enslaved me;
I saw thine eyes, but nothing feared,
Till fears no more had saved me.
The unwary sailor thus aghast,
The wheeling torrent viewing,
'Mid circling horrors sinks at last,
In overwhelming ruin!"--BURNS.
Hetty Wilkins was bitterly grieved at her dismissal from the service of
Mrs. Winans, and her vanity was wounded by the suggestion that Lindsey
Warwick had been courting her simply to keep up with the movements of
the Winans family and further his own designs.
"Oh, no, madam, he cannot be the same man, I'm sure," she declared
stubbornly.
"But, Hetty, there can be no mistake. My daughter recognized him, and
he declared to my son that he was your lover. Now, my good girl, there
is a reward of ten thousand dollars offered by Senator Winans for
Lindsey Warwick's apprehension. Suppose you earn it by delivering this
wretch up to justice," suggested Mrs. Winans, very much in earnest over
the matter.
So Hetty departed, angry at her dismissal, and firm in the belief that
her lover was innocent of the charges brought against him.
But when Watson Hunter came no more, and her letters to him elicited no
reply, her loving confidence grew faint, and suspicion awakened in her
mind.
"I will find him if I have to employ a detective," she vowed
spitefully.
But for Hetty's strong faith in fortune-tellers, it is likely that her
absconding lover might have eluded her forever, but when a month had
passed in futile efforts she suddenly bethought herself of invoking the
aid of a clairvoyant in her search for the truant.
She had returned to Washington several weeks before, and it was now
the middle of August. On consulting the papers she selected from the
advertisements one in a very obscure locality, and made her way thither
without delay. The mind-reader and clairvoyant, as she called herself,
was located on a dirty little street in a villainous-looking tobacco
shop. When Hetty entered, the slovenly-looking old woman was serving a
customer with cigars, and the maid was startled to find in her the same
woman to whom she had once advised Ethel to apply.
"I want my fortune told," she said in an undertone to the woman.
"Come into the back room, then, and I'll send my son to wait on the
shop."
With her pretty nose in the air, at the vile odors of the place, the
smart maid followed into the back room, where a slovenly man with long
hair and full whiskers was making some drawings at a little table.
"You must wait on the shop while I tell the young lady's fortune," the
woman said to him, and he rose with a muttered word of impatience.
Hetty was not the least interested in the gruff man, and she scarcely
knew why she cast a searching glance upon him.
But when she looked at him she met a glance of startled recognition
that made her foolish heart leap with wild excitement. The next moment
she clutched his arm, crying sobbingly:
"Oh, Watson, Watson, so I've found you at last!"
"The devil!" cried Lindsey Warwick, trying to shake her off, for his
first impulse was to snatch his hat and run.
But Hetty clasped his neck with both arms, and clung to him like a
wild-cat, despite his struggles.
"Let me go! let me go! I don't know you! I'm a stranger to you--that
isn't my name!" he vociferated wildly. "Mother, take her off and hold
her, won't you?"
Thus adjured, the old woman come to his relief, and soon had the pretty
maid a prisoner in her own strong arms.
"What's the matter with you, you little crazy wild-cat?" she demanded
roughly, but Hetty was gazing malignantly at Warwick, who regarded her
with an injured air.
"Young woman, you've made a mistake. I don't know you!" he was saying.
"Oh, don't I, Mr. Lindsey Warwick?" cried Hetty, taking revenge for
her slighted love. "Maybe that ain't your name, neither! Maybe I don't
intend to scream for the police, and give you up to them, and claim the
reward, you villain!"
She was opening her mouth for a prolonged shriek, when a hand was
clapped over it, and Lindsey Warwick cried out laughingly:
"You silly darling, can't you take a joke? Of course my name isn't
Warwick, but Watson Hunter, and I was only teasing you a little to pay
you back for running off from Rosemont and leaving me in the lurch."
Hetty gasped in his clutch and he loosened it gently, seeing that his
falsehoods had begun to bewilder and soften her angry mood.
"Why didn't you write to me when you left Rosemont?" continued the arch
deceiver. "I was down there a day or two after the family packed up to
leave, and I thought you had gone away with them and given me the jilt.
But you won't get away from me again, for we'll go to the preacher this
very day, won't we, dearie?"