THE LAMBERT MANSION.
The Lamberts were a proud family, aristocratic in birth intellect and
breeding. This branch with which our story deals, had added great wealth
to its other possessions by marriage with a rich man’s only daughter.
Mrs. Lambert was not content with a home in the Fifth Avenue, which many
a small monarch might have coveted for a regal palace, but she must have
it altogether different, more superb than her neighbors, unique as well
as magnificent. Mrs. Lambert had led society so long, and travelled so
much, that commonplace things, bought by the yard, and arranged exactly
like every other house of the class, were far beneath her aspirations.
Her stately mansion abounded in beautiful objects, rare and costly,
which she had been years in collecting at every curiosity-shop and
brie-a-brae sale in Europe.
The ground on which the Lambert mansion was built had been a farm, or
rather homestead, when its present mistress was born. As the city throve
and grew around it, that which had been a modest competency became
enormous wealth, in the heart of which she replaced the old homestead
with a palace, and turned the old garden and goodly home lot into a
wilderness of flowers. These grew and bloomed beautifully, in spite of
three or four grand old forest trees which still kept a firm root-hold
in the soil. Standing in front, with those broad steps winding up to the
entrance through their heavy stone balustrades, you saw nothing of the
lovely green paradise that bloomed on the other side of that costly
building. The plate glass windows were so brilliant, the stone work so
elaborate, that an idea of nature took you by surprise.
Leave the avenue only for a minute, turn down the first cross street,
and the bloom, the rich greenness, and rustle of leaves, come upon you
like enchantment. Through them all, you saw sheets of curved glass
rolling downward like sunlit waves of the ocean; and through them come
the splendid glow of blossoming flowers, among which you could see birds
fluttering, and a fountain shooting up diamonds.
This bit of paradise had formerly been old Mr. Lambert’s kitchen-garden,
planted around the edge with currant-bushes, and with a thicket of
feathery fennel rising like a green fountain in the center. Where the
thicket of tea-roses blossomed most richly, he had planted an asparagus
bed and sold the product to market women at the highest price he could
get. That great plot of heliotrope and scarlet geraniums, gave him a
rich harvest of beets and carrots, in the good old days. But of all the
old, thrifty life, there was nothing left save one great white
rose-tree, that still clambered up a green post, and half buried a
pretty wren-house in its sturdy foliage.
This wren-house the old man had devised when he planted the rose on his
daughter’s birth-day, a bit of affectionate sentiment, she could never
force herself to root from the gorgeous splendor of her after life. So
there the rose-tree bloomed, and the wren-house gave forth yearly broods
of young birds, that in their turn built nests, and filled the little
spot with songsters bright and beautiful as the flowers.
Mrs. Lambert was a middle-aged lady now, and the white rose had died
more than once in its main stock since she was born. Still shoots sprang
up from the roots again, and the bush remained itself; while an old, old
man, who had worked on the original homestead, and now lived over one of
the stables, kept the wren-house thatched, and the ground rich around
the old memorial bush, sometimes crying a little as he dug up the earth,
and counted the years since the first slender twig was planted by the
hand so long cold, while he stood and looked on, wondering if the sprout
would take root.
This old man, with hair as white as snow, was in the garden a few days
after the opening of this story, looking weird and strange in all that
bloom as the old white rose itself; this, being out of flower, was
gnarled and rough, having nothing but green leaves to shelter the
wren-house with. Some of its branches had died with age, and with his
withered and trembling hands the old gardener was attempting to cut the
lifeless wood away, a task that went to his heart, for it seemed like
digging his own grave.
As the old gardener hacked at the rough wood, a man, who had been
loitering along the side-walk, stopped, as many a curious person had
done before, and looked in upon the pleasant spot, while his hand held
lightly by one of the iron rails. It was a white, thin hand, but not of
that delicate mould which entire freedom from toil, from the cradle up,
leaves to the possessor. Some time in its owner’s life that hand had
wrought and toiled, though the palm was soft now and the fingers
slender.
Something in the face, which looked over the iron railing, seemed to
interest the old man, who paused with his knife half through the wood of
the rose-bush, and shading his eyes, took a keen survey of its features.
As if impelled by some mysterious attraction, the old gardener left his
knife sticking in the wood, and moved with slow difficulty toward the
iron railing, exactly as if the man had summoned him. Indeed, it almost
seemed as if he had done so, for the moment those hobbling steps paused
the stranger began to ask questions, which the old man, usually so grim
and crusty with persons he did not know, answered with prompt respect.
“A beautiful garden this,” said the stranger, gently, meeting the old
man’s gaze with a look that had something anxious in it.
“Well, yes, I should think so. It has been a growing a good many years,
and from the first was rich.”
“Are you the gardener?”
“What, I? Of course. What else should I be, if not the madam’s gardener?
I, who helped her to dig up her first little flower-bed when she wasn’t
more than so high.”
Here the old man bent down a little, and measured off the empty space
about to the level of his rheumatic knees.
“But you seem a very old man to work at all.”
“Do I? Well, it isn’t any hard work I do. There is a boy out there by
the green-house that keeps himself busy obeying my orders, and he gets
along pretty well considering.”
Here the old man pointed to a tall, stalwart laborer, some thirty-five
years of age, who really did the work of the place, and whom the old man
considered as a boy.
“I’m not so old as to want help, you know,” continued the old gardener;
“but the madam——”
“I think you said she had lived here from a child?”
The stranger’s voice was hoarse and constrained, as he interrupted the
old man with this question.
The gardener brushed back the gray hair from his ears, as if something
in the voice bewildered him; then he answered,
“Why, everybody here knows that. The big wooden house is gone, but that
heap of stone stands over the old cellar, and _she_ lives like a queen
where her father died. The great difference is, she picks roses where he
sold leets and carrots; and them green-houses stand just where his
pigpens were. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“But you have not told me who the lady is?”
“Not told you? Ha! ha! As if everybody didn’t know Mrs. Lambert.”
“The lady is married, then?”
These words fell heavily, like drops of lead, from the stranger’s white
lips, and his hand, which clasped the railing, tightened spasmodically
around the iron.
“Married! Why that was years and years ago. She went across the seas to
some foreign countries after her father died, and came back with a
husband and a son.”
“Her son?”
“Lord a mercy! No! Step-child—a first rate shaver by Mr. Lambert’s first
wife; but she don’t seem to know the difference. He’ll get every cent
she’s worth, and that’s a heap of money, I tell you. But there she goes
down the back walk toward the green-house, you can see her white dress
through the bushes.”
The stranger grasped the iron spikes with both hands now, and the face,
which looked over them, was white as death.
“Let me in! Let me pass through!” he exclaimed, looking wildly around
for a gate.
“Well, I should rather think not; no trespassers ever get in to tread
down the madam’s flowers. She wouldn’t allow it. Halloo! what are you
about?”
The stranger had discovered a gate upon the latch, and opening it, much
to the old man’s surprise, passed into the garden.
“Stop there! Hold on, I say!”
The stranger did not even hear this quivering protest, but walked
swiftly across the garden and entered a green-house, that rose in its
midst like a mammoth bird-cage of rolling glass, choked up with leaves
and blossoms. Beneath an acacia-tree, covered with soft, yellow
blossoms, stood a lady, with her white arm uplifted, gathering a spray
of the delicate plant, which she was about to group with a quantity of
moss-roses and heliotrope, which she had plucked in the open air. She
dropped her hand in amazement as a strange man entered the green-house,
and the branch she had half broken rustled slowly back to its place.
“Elizabeth!”
The lady started. A cry that rose to her lips as her name was uttered,
broke into something like a sob, and she seemed about to escape.
“Elizabeth!”
She turned now, trembling, white, shrinking with dread, and looked into
the man’s face.
“You—you——”
Her blanched lips could utter no more, she seized the acacia by its
stem, and the trembling of her arm shook down the blossoms like rain
upon her bowed head.