The sunset glory of this January evening still shone over the tops of
the trees upon the high bank of Tyne, leaving a red illumination among
the winter clouds; but low upon the path the evening was gathering
darkly and chilly, settling down upon the ice-cold branches, which
pricked the hasty passenger like thorns, in the black dryness of the
frost. The Kelpie itself was scarcely recognizable in the torpid and
tiny stream which trickled down its little ravine; only the sharp sound
of its monotone in the tingling air made you aware of its vicinity; and
frozen Tyne no longer added his voice to make the silence musical. The
silence was dry, hard, and harsh, the sounds were shrill, the air cut
like a knife. No creature that could find shelter was out of doors; yet
poor little Desirée, vehement, willful, and passionate, with her cloak
over her shoulders, and her pretty uncovered head, exposed to all the
chill of the unkindly air, went rushing out, with her light foot and
little fairy figure, straight as an arrow over Tyne, and came up the
frozen path, into the wood and the night.
One side of her face was still scorched and crimsoned with the fervor of
Aunt Jean’s fire, before which she had been bending; the other, in
comparison, was already chilled and white. She ran along up the icy,
chilly road, with the night-wind cutting her delicate little ears, and
her rapid footsteps sliding upon the knots of roots in the path,
straight up to that height where the Kelpie trickled, and the last red
cloud melted into gray behind the trees. The dubious, failing twilight
was wan among those branches, where never a bird stirred. There was not
a sound of life anywhere, save in the metallic tinkle of that drowsing
waterfall. Desirée rushed through the silence and the darkness, and
threw herself down upon the hard path, on one of the hard knots, beneath
a tree. She was not sorry, in her passionate _abandon_, to feel the air
prick her cheek, to see the darkness closing over her, to know that the
cold pierced to the bone, and that she was almost unprotected from its
rigor. All this desolation was in keeping with the tumult which moved
the willful heart of the little stranger. The prick of the wind
neutralized somewhat the fiery prick in her heart.
Poor little Desirée! She had, indeed, enough to think of--from her
morning’s flush of happiness and dawning love to plunge into a cold
profound of treachery, deceit, and falsehood like that which gaped at
her feet, ready to swallow her up. For the moment it was anger alone,
passionate and vivid as her nature, which burned within her. She, frank,
child-like, and unsuspicious, had been degraded by a pretended love, a
false friendship; had been warned, “for her own sake,” by the
treacherous host whom Desirée hated, in her passion, to say nothing of
her descent or of her mother. For her own sake! and not a syllable of
acknowledgment to confess how well the wily schemer knew who that mother
was. Yet, alas, if that had but been all!--if there had been nothing to
do but to confound Melmar, to renounce Joanna, to shake off the dust of
her indignant feet against the house where they would have kept her in
bondage!--if that had but been all! But Desirée clenched her little
hands with a pang of angry and bitter resentment far more overpowering.
To think that she should have been insulted with a false love! Bitter
shame, quick, passionate anger, even the impulse of revenge, came like a
flood over the breast of the girl, as she sat shivering with cold and
passion at the foot of that tree, with the dark winter night closing
over her. She could almost fancy she saw the curl of Oswald Huntley’s
lip as he heard to-day, on this very spot, that she had a sister; she
could almost suppose, if he stood there now, that she had both strength
and will to thrust him through the rustling bushes down to the
crackling, frozen Tyne, to sink like a stone beneath the ice, which was
less treacherous than himself. Poor little desolate, solitary stranger!
She sat in the darkness and the cold, with the tears freezing in her
eyes, but passion burning in her heart; she cried aloud in the silence
with an irrepressible cry of fury and anguish--the voice of a young
savage, the uncontrolled, unrestrained, absolute violence of a child.
She was half crazed with the sudden downfall, the sudden injury; she
could think of nothing but the sin that had been done against her, the
vengeance, sharp and sudden as her passion, which she would inflict if
she could.
But as poor little Desirée crouched beneath the tree, not even the
vehemence of her resentment could preserve her from the influences of
Nature. Her little feet seemed frozen to the path; her hands were numb
and powerless, and ice-cold as the frozen water beneath. The chill stole
to her heart with a sickening faintness, then a gradual languor crept
over her passion; by degrees she felt nothing but the cold, the sharp
rustle of the branches, the chill gloom of the night, the harsh wind
that blew in at her uncovered ears. Her hair fell down on her neck, and
her fingers were too powerless to put it up. She had no heart to return
to the house from which she fled in so violent an excess of insulted
feeling--it almost seemed that she had no place in the world to go to,
poor child, but this desolate winter woodland, which in its summer
beauty she had associated with her mother. The night blinded her, and so
did the growing sickness of extreme cold. Another moment, and poor
little Desirée sank against the tree, passionless and fainting--the
last thought in her heart a low outcry for her mother, who was hundreds
of miles away and could not hear.
The cold was still growing sharper and keener as the last glimmer of
daylight faded out of the skies. She might have slid down into the
frozen Tyne, as she had imagined her enemy, or she might have perished
in her favorite path, in the cold which was as sharp as an Arctic frost.
But Providence does not desert those poor, suffering, wicked children
who fly to death’s door at the impulse of passion as Desirée did. A
laborer, hastening home by the footpath through the Melmar woods,
wandered out of his way, by chance, and stumbled over the poor little
figure lying in the path. When the man had got over his first alarm, he
lifted her up and carried her like a child--she was not much more--to
Melmar, where he went to the side door and brought her in among the
servants to that great kitchen, which was the most cheerful apartment in
the house. The maids were kind-hearted, and liked the poor little
governess--they chafed her hands and bathed her feet, and wrapped her in
blankets, and, at last, brought Desirée to her senses. When she came
alive again, the poor, naughty child looked round her bewildered, and
did not know where she was--the place was strange to her--and it looked
so bright and homely that Desirée’s poor little heart was touched by a
vague contrasting sense of misery.
“I should like to go to bed,” she said, sadly, turning her face away
from the light to a kind housemaid, who stood by her, and who could not
tell what ailed “the French miss,” whom all the servants had thought
rather too well-used of late days, and whose look of misery seemed
unaccountable.
“Eh, Missie, but ye maun wait until the fire’s kindled,” said the maid.
Desirée did not want a fire--she had no desire to be comforted and
warmed, and made comfortable--she would almost rather have crept out
again into the cold and the night. Notwithstanding, they carried her up
stairs carefully, liking the stranger all the better for being sad and
in trouble and dependent on them--and undressed her like a child, and
laid her in bed in her little room, warm with firelight, and looking
bright with comfort and kindness. Then the pretty housemaid, whom
Patricia exercised her tempers on, brought Desirée a warm drink and
exhorted her to go to sleep.
“What made ye rin out into the cauld night, Missie, without a thing on
your head,” said Jenny Shaw, compassionately; “but lie still and keep
yoursel’ warm--naebody kens yet but us in the kitchen, or Miss Joan
would be here; but I thought you would like best to be quiet, and it
would do you mair good.”
“Oh, dear Jenny, don’t let any one know--don’t tell them--promise!”
cried Desirée, half starting from her bed.
The maid did not know what to make of it, but she promised, to compose
the poor little sufferer; and so Desirée was left by herself in the
little room, with the warm fire light flickering about the walls, and
her little hands and feet, which had been so cold, burning and prickling
with a feverish heat, her limbs aching, her thoughts wandering, her
heart lost in an ineffable, unspeakable melancholy. She could not return
to her passion, to the bitter hurry and tumult of resentful fancies
which had occupied her out of doors. She lay thinking, trying to think,
vainly endeavoring to confine the wandering crowd of thoughts, which
made her head ache, and which seemed to float over every subject under
heaven. She tried to say her prayers, poor child, but lost them in an
incoherent mist of fancy. She fell asleep, and awoke in a few minutes,
thinking she had slept for hours--worse than that, she fell half asleep
into a painful drowse, where waking thoughts and dreams mingled with and
confused each other. Years of silence and unendurable solitude seemed to
pass over her before Jenny Shaw came up stairs again to ask her how she
was, and the last thing clear in Desirée’s remembrance was that Jenny
promised once more not to tell any one. Desirée did not know that the
good-hearted Jenny half slept, half watched in her room all that night.
The poor child knew nothing next day but that her limbs ached, and her
head burned, and that a dull sense of pain was at her heart. She was
very ill with all her exposure and suffering--she was ill for some time,
making a strange commotion in the house. But no one had any idea of the
cause of her illness, save perhaps Aunt Jean, who did not say a word to
any one, but trotted about the sick-room, “cheering up” the little sick
stranger and finding out her wants with strange skill in spite of her
deafness. All the time of Desirée’s illness Aunt Jean took not the
slightest notice of Oswald Huntley--she was doubly deaf when he
addressed her--she lost even her sharp and lively eyesight when he
encountered her on the stair. Aunt Jean did not know what ailed Desirée
besides the severe cold and fever which the doctor decided on, but the
old woman remembered perfectly at what point of their conversation it
was that the little girl rushed from her side and fled out of the
house--and she guessed at many things with a keen and lively penetration
which came very near the truth. And so Desirée was very ill, and got
slowly well again, bringing with her out of her sickness a thing more
hard to cure than fever--a sick heart.