BOOK III.

THE JAPHA MYSTERY.

XXIII.

THE POEM.

“I’ve shot my arrow o’er the house

And hurt my brother.”

—HAMLET.

When Miss Belinda first saw Paula, she did not, like her sister, remark

upon the elegance of her appearance, the growth of her beauty, or the

evidences of increased refinement in the expression of her countenance

and the carriage of her form, but with her usual penetration noted

simply, the sadness in her eye and the tremulous motion of her lip.

“You had then become fond of your cousin?” queried she with

characteristic bluntness.

Paula not understanding the motive of this remark, questioned her with a

look.

“Young faces do not grow pale or bright eyes become troubled without a

cause. Grief for your cousin might explain it, but if you have suffered

from no grief—”

“My cousin was very kind to me,” hurriedly interrupted Paula. “Her death

was very sudden and very heart-rending.”

“So it was;” returned Miss Belinda, “and I expected to see you look worn

and sad but not restless and feverish. You have a living grief, Paula,

what is it?”

The young girl started and looked down. For the first time in her life

she wished to avoid that penetrating glance. “If I have, I cannot talk

of it,” she murmured. “I have experienced so much this past week; my

coming away was so unexpected, that I hardly understand my own feelings,

or realize just what it is that troubles me most. All that I know is,

that I am very tired and so sad, it seems as if the sun would never

shine again.”

“There is then something you have not written me?” inquired the

inexorable Miss Belinda.

“The experiences of this last week could never be written,—or told,”

returned Paula with a droop of her head. “Upon some things our better

wisdom places a stone which only the angels can roll away. The future

lies all open before us; do not let us disturb the past.”

And Miss Belinda was forced to be content lest she should seem to be

over anxious.

Not so the various neighbors and friends to whom the lengthened sojourn

of one of their number in an atmosphere of such wealth and splendor,

possessed something of the charm of a forbidden romance. For months

Paula was obliged to endure questions, that it required all her

self-control to answer with calmness and propriety. But at length the

most insatiable gossip amongst them was satisfied; Paula’s figure was no

longer a novelty in their streets; curiosity languished and the young

girl was allowed to rest.

And now could those who loved her, discern that with the lapse of time

and the daily breathings of her native air, the sad white look had faded

from her face, leaving it a marvel of freshness and positive, if

somewhat spiritualized, beauty. The print of deeper thoughts and holier

yearnings was there, but no sign of blighted hopes or uncomprehended

passions. A passing wind had blown the froth from off the cup, but had

not disturbed the sparkle of the wine. She had looked in the face of

grief, but had not as yet been clasped in her relentless arms. Only two

things could vitally disturb her; a letter from Cicely, or a sudden

meeting in the village streets with that elderly lady who haunted the

Japha mansion. The former because it recalled a life around which her

fancies still played with dangerous persistency, and the latter because

it aroused vain and inexplicable conjectures as to that person’s strange

and lingering look in her direction. Otherwise she was happy; finding in

this simple village-life a meaning and a purpose which her short but

passionate outlook on a broader field, had taught her, perhaps, both to

detect and comprehend. She no longer walked solitary with nature. The

woods, the mountains with all their varying panoply of exuberant

verdure, had acquired a human significance. At her side went the

memories of beloved faces, the thoughts of trusted friends. From the

clouds looked forth a living eye, and in the sound of rustling leaf and

singing streamlet, spake the voices of human longing and human joy.

Her aunts had explained their position to Paula and she had responded by

expressing her determination to be a teacher. But they would not hear of

that at present, and while she waited their pleasure in the matter, she

did what she could to assist them in their simple home-life and daily

duties, lending her beauty to tasks that would have made the eyes of

some of her quondam admirers open with surprise, if only they could have

followed the action of her hands, after having once caught a glimpse of

the face that brightened above them. And so the summer months went by

and September came.

There was to be an entertainment in the village and Paula was to assist.

The idea had come from her aunt and was not to be rejected. In one of

the strange incomprehensible moods which sometimes came upon her at this

time, she had written a poem, and nothing would do but that she must

read it before the assembled company of neighbors and friends, that were

to be gathered at the Squire’s house on this gala evening. She did not

wish to do it. The sacred sense of possession passes when we uncover our

treasure to another’s eyes, giving way to a lower feeling not to be

courted by one of Paula’s sensitive nature. Besides she would rather

have poured this first outburst of secret enthusiasm into other ears

than these; but she had given her word and the ordeal must be submitted

to. There are many who remember how she looked on that night. She had

arrayed herself for the occasion, in the prettiest of her dresses, and

mindful of Ona’s injunction, did not mar the effect of its soft and

uniform gray with any hint of extraneous color. The result was that they

saw only her beauty; and what beauty! A very old man, an early settler

in the village, who had tottered out to enjoy a last glimpse of life

before turning his aged face to the wall, said it made the thought of

heaven a little more real. “I can go home and think how the angels

look,” said he in his simple, half-childish way. And no one contradicted

him, for there was a still light on her face that was less of earth than

heaven, though why it should rest there to-night she least of all could

have told, for her poem had to do with earth and its deepest passions

and its wildest unrest. It was a clarion blast, not a dreaming rhapsody,

that lay coiled up in the paper she held in her hand.

My readers must pardon me if I give them Paula’s poem, for without it

they would not understand its effect and consequent result. It was

called, “The Defence of the Bride,” and was of the old ballad order. As

she rose to read, many of the younger ones in the audience began

cautiously to move to one side, but at the first words, young as well as

old paused and listened where they stood, for her voice was round and

full, and the memory of clashing spears and whirling battle-axes that

informed the war-song which she had heard Bertram play, was with her, to

give color to her tones and fire to her glance.

THE DEFENCE OF THE BRIDE.

He was coming from the altar when the tocsin rang alarm,

With his fair young wife beside him, lovely in her bridal charm;

But he was not one to palter with a duty, or to slight

The trumpet-call of honor for his vantage or delight.

Turning from the bride beside him to his stern and martial train,

From their midst he summoned to him the brothers of Germain;

At the word they stepped before him, nine strong warriors brave and

true,

From the youngest to the eldest, Enguerrand to mighty Hugh.

“Sons of Germain, to your keeping do I yield my bride to-day.

Guard her well as you do love me; guard her well and holily.

Dearer than mine own soul to me, you will hold her as your life,

’Gainst the guile of seeming friendship and the force of open strife.”

“We will guard her,” cried they firmly; and with just another glance

On the yearning and despairing in his young wife’s countenance,

Gallant Beaufort strode before them down the aisle and through the

door,

And a shadow came and lingered where the sunlight stood before.

Eight long months the young wife waited, watching from her bridal room

For the coming of her husband up the valley forest’s gloom.

Eight long months the sons of Germain paced the ramparts and the wall,

With their hands upon their halberds ready for the battle-call.

Then there came a sound of trumpets pealing up the vale below,

And a dozen floating banners lit the forest with their glow,

And the bride arose like morning when it feels the sunlight nigh,

And her smile was like a rainbow flashing from a misty sky.

But the eldest son of Germain lifting voice from off the wall,

Cried aloud, “It is a stranger’s and not Sir Beaufort’s call;

Have you ne’er a slighted lover or a kinsman with a heart

Base enough to seek his vengeance at the sharp end of the dart?”

“There is Sassard of the Mountains,” answered she without guile,

“While I wedded at the chancel, he stood mocking in the aisle;

And my maidens say he swore there that for all my plighted vow,

They would see me in his castle yet upon Morency’s brow.”

“It is Sassard and no other then,” her noble guardian cried;

“There is craft in yonder summons,” and he rung his sword beside.

“To the walls, ye sons of Germain! and as each would hold his life

From the bitter shame of falsehood, let us hold our master’s wife.”

“Can you hold her, can you shield her from the breezes that await?”

Cried the stinging voice of Sassard from his stand beside the gate.

“If you have the power to shield her from the sunlight and the wind,

You may shield her from stern Sassard when his falchion is untwined.”

“We can hold her, we can shield her,” leaped like fire from off the

wall,

And young Enguerrand the valiant, sprang out before them all.

“And if breezes bring dishonor, we will guard her from their breath,

Though we yield her to the keeping of the sacred arms of Death.”

And with force that never faltered, did they guard her all that day,

Though the strength of triple armies seemed to battle in the fray,

The old castle’s rugged ramparts holding firm against the foe,

As a goodly dyke resisteth the whelming billow’s flow.

But next morning as the sunlight rose in splendor over all,

Hugh the mighty, sank heart-wounded in his station on the wall,

At the noon the valiant Raoul of the merry eye and heart,

Gave his beauty and his jestings to the foeman’s jealous dart.

Gallant Maurice next sank faltering with a death wound ‘neath his hair,

But still fighting on till Sassard pressed across him up the stair.

Generous Clement followed after, crying as his spirit passed,

“Sons of Germain to the rescue, and be loyal to the last!”

Gentle Jaspar, lordly Clarence, Sessamine the doughty brand,

Even Henri who had yielded ne’er before to mortal hand;

One by one they fall and perish, while the vaunting foemen pour

Through the breach and up the courtway to the very turret’s door.

Enguerrand and Stephen only now were left of all that nine,

To protect the single stairway from the traitor’s fell design;

But with might as ’twere of thirty, did they wield the axe and brand,

Striving in their desperation the fierce onslaught to withstand.

But what man of power so godlike he can stay the billow’s wrack,

Or with single-handed weapon hold an hundred foemen back!

As the sun turned sadly westward, with a wild despairing cry,

Stephen bowed his noble forehead and sank down on earth to die.

“Ah ha!” then cried cruel Sassard with his foot upon the stair,

“Have I come to thee, my boaster?” and he whirled his sword in air.

“Thou who pratest of thy power to protect her to the death,

What think’st thou now of Sassard and the wind’s aspiring breath?”

“What I think let this same show you,” answered fiery Enguerrand,

And he poised his lofty battle-ax with sure and steady hand;

“Now as Heaven loveth justice, may this deathly weapon fall

On the murderer of my brothers and th’ undoer of us all.”

With one mighty whirl he sent it; flashing from his hand it came,

Like the lightning from the heavens in a whirl of awful flame,

And betwixt the brows of Sassard and his two false eyeballs passed,

And the murderer sank before it, like a tree before the blast.

“Now ye minions of a traitor if you look for vengeance, come!”

And his voice was like a trumpet when it clangs a victor home.

But a cry from far below him rose like thunder upward, “Nay!

Let them turn and meet the _husband_ if they hunger for the fray.”

O the yell that sprang to heaven as that voice swept up the stair,

And the slaughter dire that followed in another moment there!

From the least unto the greatest, from the henchman to the lord,

Not a man on all that stairway lived to sheath again his sword.

At the top that flame-bound forehead, at the base that blade of fire—

’Twas the meeting of two tempests in their potency and ire.

Ere the moon could falter inward with its pity and its woe,

Beaufort saw the path before him unencumbered of the foe.

Saw his pathway unencumbered and strode up and o’er the floor,

Even to the very threshold of his lovely lady’s door,

And already in his fancy did he see the golden beam

Of her locks upon his shoulder and her sweet eyes’ happy gleam:

When behold a form upstarting from the shadows at his side.

That with naked sword uplifted barred the passage to his bride;

It was Enguerrand the dauntless, but with staring eyes and hair

Blowing wild about a forehead pale as snow in moonlit glare.

“Ah my master, we have held her, we have guarded her,” he said,

“Not a shadow of dishonor has so much as touched her head.

Twenty wretches lie below there with the brothers of Germain,

Twenty foemen of her honor that I, Enguerrand, have slain.

“But one other foe remaineth, one remaineth yet,” he cried,

“Which it fits this hand to punish ere you cross unto your bride.

It is I, Enguerrand!” shrieked he; “and as I have slain the rest,

So I smite this foeman also!”—and his sword plunged through his

breast.

O the horror of that moment! “Art thou mad my Enguerrand?”

Cried his master, striving wildly to withdraw the fatal brand.

But the stern youth smiling sadly, started back from his embrace,

While a flash like summer lightning, flickered direful on his face.

“Yes, a traitor worse than Sassard;” and he pointed down the stair,

“For my heart has dared to love her whom my hand defended there.

While the others fought for honor, I by passion was made strong,

Set your heel upon my bosom for my soul has done you wrong.

“But,” and here he swayed and faltered till his knee sank on the floor,

Yet in falling turned his forehead ever toward that silent door;

“But your warrior hand my master, may take mine without a stain,

For my hand has e’er been loyal, and your enemy is slain.”

A short silence followed the last word, then a burst of applause

testified to the appreciation of her audience, and Paula crept away to

hide her blushing cheeks in the comparative darkness of a little

vine-covered balcony that jutted out from the ante-room. What were her

thoughts as she leaned there! In the subsidence of any great

emotion—and Paula had felt every word she uttered—there is more or

less of shock and tumult. She did not think, she only felt. Suddenly a

hand was laid on her arm and a low voice whispered in her ear,

“Did you write that poem yourself?”

Turning, she encountered the shadowy form of a woman leaning close at

her side and appearing in the dim light that shone on her from the lamps

beyond, an eager image of expectancy.

“Yes,” returned Paula, “why do you ask?”

The woman, whoever she was, did not answer. “And you believe in such

devotion as that!” she murmured. “You can understand a man, aye, or a

woman either, risking happiness and fame, life and death, for the sake

of a trust! Such things are not folly to you! You could see a heart

spill itself drop by drop through a longer vigil than the eight months

watching on the ramparts, and not sneer at a fidelity that could not

falter because it had given its word? Speak; you write of faithfulness

with a pen of fire, is your heart faithful too?”

There was something in these words, spoken as they were in a tone of

suppressed passion, that startled and aroused Paula. Leaning forward,

she endeavored to see the face of the woman who thus forcibly addressed

her, but the light was too dim. The outline of a brow covered by some

close headgear was all she could detect.

“You speak earnestly,” said Paula, “but that is what I like. Fidelity to

a cause, or fidelity to a trust, demands the sympathy and admiration of

all honest and generous hearts. If I am ever called upon to maintain

either, I hope that my enthusiasm will not have all been expended in

words.”

“You please me,” murmured the woman, “you please me; will you come and

see me and let me tell you a story to mate the poem you have given us

to-night?”

The trembling eagerness of her tone it would be impossible to describe.

Paula was thrilled by it. “If you will tell me who you are,” said Paula,

“I certainly will try and come. I should be glad to hear anything you

have to relate to me.”

“I thought every one knew who I was,” returned the woman; and drawing

Paula back into the ante-room, she turned her face upon her. “Any one

will tell you where Margery Hamlin lives,” said she. “Do not disappoint

me, and do not keep me waiting long.” And with a nod and a deep strange

smile that made her aged face almost youthful, she entered the crowd and

disappeared from Paula’s sight.

It was the woman whose nightly visits to the deserted home of the Japhas

had once been the talk and was still the unsolved mystery of the town.

XXIV.

THE JAPHA MANSION.

“Ah what a warning for a thoughtless man,

Could field or grove, could any spot on earth

Show to his eye an image of the pangs

Which it has witnessed; render back an echo

Of the sad steps by which it hath been trod.

—WORDSWORTH.

Unexplained actions if long continued, lose after awhile their interest

if not their mystery. The aged lady who now for many years had been seen

at every night-fall to leave her home, traverse the village streets,

enter the Japha mansion, remain there an hour and then re-issue with

tremulous steps and bowed head, had become so common a sight to the

village eye, that even the children forgot to ask what her errand was,

or why she held her head so hopefully when she entered, or looked so

despondent when she came forth.

But to Paula, for reasons already mentioned, this secret and persistent

vigil in a forsaken and mysterious dwelling, was fraught with a

significance which had never lost its power either to excite her

curiosity or to arouse her imagination. Many a time had she gone home

from some late encounter with the aged lady, to brood by the hour upon

the expression of that restless eye which in its wanderings never failed

to turn upon her own youthful face and linger there in the manner I have

already noted. She thought of it by night, she thought of it by day. She

felt herself drawn to that woman’s suffering heart as by invisible

cords. To understand the feelings of this desolate being, she had even

studied the face of that old house, until she knew it under its every

aspect. Often in shutting her eyes at night, she would perceive as in a

mirror a vision of its long gray front, barred door and sealed windows

shining in the moon, save where the deep impenetrable shadows of its two

guardian poplars lay black and dismal upon its ghostly surface. Again

she would behold it as it reared itself dark and dripping in a blinding

storm, its walls plastered with leaves from the immovable poplars, and

its neglected garden lying sodden and forlorn under the flail of the

ceaseless storm. Then its early morning face would strike her fancy. The

slow looming of its chimney-tops against a brightening sky; the gradual

coming out of its forsaken windows and solemn looking doors from the

mystery of darkness into the no less mystery of day; the hint of

roselight on its barren boards; the gleam of sunshine on its untrodden

threshold; a sunshine as pure and sweet as if a bride stood there in her

beauty, waiting for admission into the deserted halls beyond. All and

everything that could tend to invest the house and its constant visitor

with an atmosphere of awe and interest, had occurred to this young girl

in her daily reveries and nightly dreams. It was therefore with a thrill

deep as her expectation and vivid as her sympathy, that she recognized

in her eager interlocutor and proposed confident, the woman about whose

life and actions rested for her such a veil of impenetrable mystery. The

thought moved her, excited her, and made the rest of the evening pass

like a dream. She was anxious for the next day to come, that she might

seek this Mrs. Hamlin in her home, and hear from her lips the tale of

devotion that should mate her own simple but enthusiastic poem.

When the next day did come, it rained, rained bitterly, persistent and

with a steady drive from the north east, that made her going out

impossible. The day following she was indisposed, and upon the

succeeding afternoon, she was engaged in duties that precluded all

thought of visiting. The next day was Sunday, and Monday had its own

demands which she could not slight. It was therefore well nigh a week

from the night of the entertainment, before the opportunity offered for

which she was so anxious. Her curiosity and expectation had thus time to

grow, and it was with a determination to allow nothing to stand in her

way, that she set out from home in a flood of mild September sunshine,

to visit Mrs. Hamlin. But alas, for resolutions made in a country

village prior to the opening of a church fair! She had scarcely gone a

dozen steps before she was accosted by one of the managers, a woman who

neither observes your haste, nor pays any attention to your possible

preoccupation. Do what she could, she found it impossible to escape from

this persistent individual until she had satisfied her upon matters

which it took a full half hour to discuss, and when at last she

succeeded in doing so, it was only to fall into the hands of an aged

deacon of the church, whose protecting friendship it were a sin to

wound, while his garrulous tongue made it no ordinary trial of patience

to stand and listen. In short the best part of the afternoon was gone

before she found herself at the door of Mrs. Hamlin’s house. But she was

not to be deterred by further hesitation from the pursuit of her object.

Rapping smartly on the door, she listened. No stir came from within.

Again she rapped and again she listened. No response came to assure her

that her summons had been heard. Surprised at this, for she had been

told Mrs. Hamlin was always at home during the afternoon, she glanced up

at the church clock in plain view from the doorstep, and blushed to

observe that it was six o’clock, the hour at which this mysterious woman

always left her house, to accomplish her vigil at the Japha mansion.

“What have I done?” thought Paula, and felt a strange thrill as she

realized that even at that moment, the woman with the eager but restless

eyes, was shut within the precincts of that deserted dwelling, engaged

in prayer, perhaps wet with tears, who knows? The secret of what she did

in that long and quiet twilight hour had never been revealed. Leaving

the little brown house behind, Paula found herself insensibly taking the

road to the Japha mansion. If she could not enter it and share the watch

of the devoted woman who had promised her her confidence, she could at

least observe if the windows were open or the blinds raised. To be sure

she ought to be at home, but Miss Belinda was indulgent and did not

question her comings and goings too closely. An irresistible force drew

her down the street, and she did not hesitate to follow the lead of her

impulse. No one accosted her now, it was the tea hour in most of these

houses and the streets were comparatively deserted. The only house whose

chimneys lacked the rising smoke, was the one towards which her

footsteps were tending. She could descry it from afar. Its gaunt walls

from which the paint had long ago faded, stared uncompromisingly upon

her in the autumn sunshine. There was no welcome in its close shutters

with their broken slats from which hung tangled strips of old rags—the

remnants of some boy’s kite. The stiff and solemn poplars rose grim and

forbidding at the gate once swung wide to the fashion and gallantry of

proud ladies and stalwart gentlemen, but now pushed aside solely by the

hand of a tremulous old woman, or the irreverent palm of some daring

school-boy. From the tangled garden looked forth neither flower nor

blossoming shrub. Beauty and grace could not thrive in this wilderness

of decay. A dandelion would have felt itself out of place beneath the

eye of that ghostly door, with the sinister plank nailed across it, like

the separating line between light and darkness, right and wrong, life

and death. What loneliness! what a monument of buried passions outliving

death itself!

Paula paused as she reached the gate; but remembering that Mrs. Hamlin

was accustomed to enter the house by a side door, hurried around the

corner and carefully surveyed the windows from that quarter. One of the

shutters was open, allowing the flame of the setting sun to gild the

panes like gold. She did not know then nor has she been able to explain

since, what it was that came over her at the sight, but almost before

she realized it, she had returned to the gate, opened it, threaded the

overgrown garden, reached the door which she had so frequently beheld

the aged woman enter and knocked.

Instantly she was seized with a consciousness of what she had done, and

frightened at her temerity, meditated an immediate escape. Drawing the

folds of her mantle about her form and face, she prepared to fly, when

she remembered the look of entreaty with which this woman had said on

that night of their conversation, “Do not disappoint me! Do not keep me

long in suspense!” and moved by a fresh impulse, turned and inflicted

another resounding knock on the door.

The result was unlooked-for and surprising. To the sound from within of

a quick passionate cry, there came a hurried movement, followed by a

deep silence, then another hasty stir succeeded by a longer silence,

then a rush which seemed to bring all things with it, and the door

opened and Mrs. Hamlin appeared before her with a countenance so pallid

with expectancy, that Paula instinctively felt that in some unconscious

way, she had loosened the bonds of an uncontrollable emotion, and was

drawing back, when the woman with a quick look in her shrouded face,

exultantly caught her hand in hers, and drawing her over the threshold,

gasped out in a delirium of incomprehensible joy:

“I knew you would come! I knew that God would not let you forget!

Fifteen years have I waited, Jacqueline! fifteen long, tedious,

suffering years! But they all seem like nothing now! You have come, you

have come, and all that I ask, is that God will not let me die till I

realize my joy!”

The emotion with which she uttered these strange words was so

overpowering, and her body seemed so weak to stand the strain, that

Paula instinctively put forth her hand to sustain her. The action

loosened her cloak. Instantly the eyes that had been fixed upon her with

such delirious rapture grew blank with dismay, a frightful shudder ran

through the woman’s aged frame; she tore at the cloak that still

enveloped the young girl’s shoulders, and pulling it off, took one view

of the fresh and beautiful countenance before her, and without uttering

a word, fell back in a deep and deadly swoon upon the floor.

“O what have I done?” cried Paula, flinging herself down beside that

pale and rigid figure; but instantly remembering herself she leaped to

her feet and looked about for some means to resuscitate the sufferer.

There was a goblet of water on a table near by. Seizing it, she bathed

the face and hands of the woman before her, moaning aloud in her grief

and dismay, “Have I killed her! O what is this mystery that brings such

a doom of anguish to this poor heart?”

But from those pallid lips came no response, and feeling greatly

alarmed, Paula was about to rush from the house for assistance, when she

felt a tremulous pull upon her skirt, and turning, saw that the glassy

eyes had opened at last and were now gazing upon her with mute but

eloquent appeal.

She instantly returned. “O I am so sorry,” she murmured, sinking again

upon her knees beside the suffering woman. “I did not know, could not

realize that my presence here would affect you so deeply. Forgive me and

tell me what I can do to make you forget my presumption.”

The woman shook her head, her lips moved and she struggled vainly to

rise. Paula immediately lent her the aid of her strong young hand and in

a few minutes, Mrs. Hamlin was on her feet. “O God!” were her first

words as she sank into the chair which Paula hastily drew forward, “that

I should taste the joy and she be still unsaved!”

Seeing her so absorbed, Paula ventured to glance around her. She found

herself in a large square room sparsely but comfortably furnished in a

style that bespake it as the former sitting-room of the dead and buried

Japhas. From the walls above hung a few ancient pictures. A large

hair-cloth sofa of a heavy antique shape, confronted the eye from one

side of the room, an equally ancient book-case from the other. The

carpet was faded and so were the curtains, but they had once been of an

attractive hue and pattern. Conspicuous in the midst stood a large table

with a well-trimmed lamp upon it, and close against it an easy chair

with an upright back. This last as well as everything else in the room,

was in a condition of neatness that would have surprised Paula if she

had not been acquainted with the love and devotion of this woman, who in

her daily visits to this house, probably took every pains to keep things

freshened and in order.

Satisfied with her survey, she again directed her attention to Mrs.

Hamlin, and started to find that person’s eyes fixed upon her own with

an expression of deep, demanding interest.

“You are looking at the shadows of things that were,” exclaimed the old

lady in thrilling tones. “It is a fearful thought to be shut up with the

ghost of a vanished past, is it not? That chair by your side has not

been sat in since Colonel Japha rose from it twelve years ago to totter

to the bed where he breathed his last. It is waiting, everything is

waiting. I thought the end had come to-night, that the vigil was over,

the watch finished, but God in his wisdom says, ‘No,’ and I must wait a

little longer. Alas in a little while longer the end will be here

indeed!”

The despondency with which she uttered these last words showed where her

thoughts were tending, and to comfort her, Paula drew up a chair and sat

down by her side. “You were going to tell me the story of a great love

and a great devotion. Cannot you do so now?”

The woman started, glanced hastily around, and let her eyes travel to

Paula’s face where they rested with something of their old look of

secret longing and doubt.

“You are the one who wrote the poem,” she murmured; “I remember.” Then

with a sudden feverish impulse, leaned forward, and stroking back the

waving locks from Paula’s brow, exclaimed hurriedly, “You look like her,

you have the same dark hair and wonderful eyes, more beautiful perhaps,

but like her, O so like her! That is why I made such a mistake.” She

shuddered, with a quick low sob, but instantly subdued her emotion and

taking Paula’s hand in hers continued, “You are young, my daughter;

youth does not enjoy carrying burdens; can I, a stranger ask you to

assist me with mine?”

“You may,” returned Paula. “If it will give you any relief I will help

you bear it willingly.”

“You will! Has heaven then sent me the aid my failing spirits demand?

Can I count on you, child? But I will ask for no promise till you have

heard my story. To no one have I ever imparted the secret of my life,

but from the first moment I saw your fair young face, I felt that

through you would come my help, if help ever came to make my final

moments easier and my last days less bitter.” And rising up, she led

Paula to a door which she solemnly opened. “I am glad that you are

here,” said she. “I could never have asked you to come, but since you

have braved the dead and crossed this threshold, you must see and know

the whole. You will understand my story better.”

Taking her through a dark passage, she threw wide another door, and the

parlors of the vanished Japhas opened before them. It was a ghostly

vision. A weird twilight scene of clustered shadows brooding above

articles of musty grandeur. In spite of the self-command learned by her

late experiences, Paula recoiled, saying,

“It is too sad, too lonesome!” But the woman without heeding her,

hurried her on over the worm-eaten carpet and between the time-worn

chairs and heavy-browed cabinets, to the hall beyond.

“I have not been here, myself, for a year,” said Mrs. Hamlin, glancing

fearfully up and down the dusky corridor. “It is not often I can brave

the memories of this spot.” And she pointed with one hand towards the

darkened door at its end, whose spacious if not stately panels gave no

hint to the eye of the dread bar that crossed it like a line of doom

upon the outside, and then turning, let her eye fall with still heavier

significance upon the broad and imposing staircase that rose from the

centre of the hall to the duskier and more dismal regions above.

“A brave, old fashioned flight of steps is it not! But the scene of a

curse, my child.” And unheeding Paula’s shudder, she drew her up the

stairs.

“See,” continued her panting guide as they reached a square platform

near the top, from which some half dozen or more steps branched up on

either side. “They do not build like this nowadays. But Colonel Japha

believed in nothing new, and thought more of his grand old hall and

staircase, than he did of all the rest of his house. He little dreamed

of what a scene it would be the witness. But come, it is getting late

and you must see her room.”

It was near the top of the staircase and was fully as musty, faded and

dismal as the rest. Yet there was an air of expectancy about it, too,

that touched Paula deeply. From between the dingy hangings of the bed,

looked forth a pair of downy pillows, edged with yellowed lace, and

beneath them a neatly spread counterpane carefully turned back over

comfortable-looking blankets, as one sees in a bed that only awaits its

occupant; while on the ancient hearth, a pile of logs stood heaped and

ready for the kindling match.

“It is all waiting you see,” said the old lady in a trembling voice,

“like everything else, just waiting.”

There was an embroidery frame in one corner of the room, from which

looked a piece of faded and half completed work. The needle was hanging

from it by a thread, and a skein of green worsted hung over the top,

Paula glanced at it inquiringly.

“It is just as she left it! He never entered the room after she went and

I would never let it be touched. It is just the same with the piano

below. The last piece she played is still standing open on the rack. I

loved her so, and I thought then that a few months would bring her back!

See, here is her bible. She never used to read it, but she prized it

because it was her mother’s. I have placed it on the pillow where she

will see it when she comes to lay her poor tired head down to rest.” And

with a reverent hand the aged matron drew the curtains back from the

open bed, and disclosed the little bible lying thick with dust in the

centre of the nearest pillow.

“O who was this you loved so well? And why did she leave you?” cried

Paula with the tears in her eyes, at sight of this humble token.

The aged lady seized her hand and hurried her back into the room below.

“I will tell you where I have waited and watched so long. Only be

patient till I light the lamp. It is getting late and any chance

wanderer going by and seeing all dark, might think I had forgotten my

promise and was not here.”

XXV.

JACQUELINE.

“The cold in clime are cold in blood,

And love as scarce deserves the name,

But mine is like the lava flood

That burns in Etna’s breast of flame.”

—BYRON.

“There are some men that have the appearance of being devoid of family

affection, who in reality cherish it in the deepest and most passionate

degree. Such a man was Colonel Japha. You have doubtless heard from your

cradle what the neighbors thought of this stately, old fashioned

gentleman. He was too handsome in his youth, too proudly reticent in his

manhood, too self-contained and unrelenting in his age, not to be the

talk of any town that numbered him among its inhabitants. But only from

myself, a relative of the family and his housekeeper for years, can you

learn with what undeviating faith and love he clung to the few upon whom

he allowed his heart to fasten in affection. When he married Miss Carey,

the world said, ‘He has chosen a beauty, because fine manners and a

pretty face look well behind the Japha coffee-urn!’ But we, that is,

this same young wife and myself, knew that in marrying her he had taken

unto himself his other half, the one sweet woman for whom his proud

heart could beat and before whom his stately head could bow. When she

died, the world exclaimed, ‘He will soon fill her place!’ But I who

watched the last look that passed between them in the valley of the

shadow of that death, knew that the years would come and the years would

go without seeing Colonel Japha marry again.

“The little babe whom she left to his care, took all the love which he

had left. From the moment it began to speak, he centered in its tiny

life all the hope and all the pride of his solitary heart. And the Japha

pride was nearly as great as the Japha heart. She was a pretty child;

not a beauty like her mother or like you, my dear, who however so nearly

resemble her. But for all that, pretty enough to satisfy the eyes of her

secretly doting father, and her openly doting nurse and cousin. I say

secretly doting father. I do not mean by that that he regarded her with

an affection which he never displayed, but that it was his way to lavish

his caresses at home and in the privacy of her little nursery. He never

made a parade of anything but his pride. If he loved her, it was enough

for her to know it. In the street and the houses of their friends, he

was the strict, somewhat severe father, to whom her childish eyes lifted

at first with awe, but afterwards with a quiet defiance, that when I

first saw it, made my heart stand still with unreasoning alarm.

“She was so reserved a child and yet so deeply passionate. From the

beginning I felt that I did not understand her. I loved her; I have

never loved any mortal as I did her—and do; but I could not follow her

impulses or judge of her feelings by her looks.

“When she grew older it was still worse. She never contradicted her

father, or appeared in any open way to disobey his commands, or thwart

him in his plans. Yet she always did what she pleased, and that so

quietly, he frequently did not observe that matters had taken any other

direction, than that which he had himself ordained. ‘It is her mother’s

tact,’ he used to say. Alas it was something more than that; it was her

father’s will united to the unscrupulousness of some forgotten ancestor.

“But with the glamour of her eighteen years upon me, I did not recognize

this then, any more than he. I saw her through the magic glasses of my

own absorbing love, and tremble as I frequently would in the still scorn

of her unfathomable passion, I never dreamed she could do anything that

would seriously offend her father’s affection or mortify his pride. The

truth is, that Jacqueline did not love us. Say what you will of the

claims of kindred, and the right of every father to his childrens’

regard, Jacqueline Japha accepted the devotion that was lavished upon

her, but she gave none in return. She could not, perhaps. Her father was

too cold in public and too warm in his home-bursts of affection. I was

plain and a widow; no mate for her in age, condition or estate. She

could neither look up to me nor lean upon me. I had been her nurse in

childhood and though a relative, was still a dependent; what was there

in all that to love! If her mother had lived—But we will not dwell on

possibilities. Jacqueline had no mother and no friend that was dear

enough to her, to teach her unwilling soul the great lesson of

self-control and sacrifice.

“You will say that is strange. That situated as she was, she ought to

have found friends both dear and congenial; but that would be to declare

that Jacqueline was like others of her age and class, whereas she was

single and alone; a dark-browed girl, who allured the gaze of both men

and women, but who cared but little for any one till—But wait, child. I

shall have to speak of matters that will cause your cheeks to blush. Lay

your head down on my knee, for I cannot bear the sight of blushes upon a

cheek more innocent than hers.”

With a gentle movement she urged Paula to sit upon a little stool at her

feet, pressed the young girl’s head down upon her lap, and burying the

lovely brow beneath her aged hands, went hurriedly on.

“You are young, dear, and may not know what it is to love a man.

Jacqueline was young also, but from the moment she returned home to us

from a visit she had been making in Boston, I perceived that something

had entered her life that was destined to make a great change in her;

and when a few weeks later, young Robert Holt from Boston, came to pay

his respects to her in her father’s house, I knew, or thought I did,

what that something was. We were sitting in this room I remember, when

the servant-girl came in, and announced that Mr. Holt was in the parlor.

Jacqueline was lying on the sofa, and her father was in his usual chair

by the table. At the name, Holt, the girl rose as if it had suddenly

thundered, or the lightning had flashed. I see her now. She was dressed

in white—though it was early fall she still clung to her summer

dresses—her dark hair was piled high, and caught here and there with

old-fashioned gold pins, a splendid red rose burned on her bosom, and

another flashed crimson as blood from her folded hands.

“‘Holt?’ repeated the Colonel without turning his head, ‘I know no such

man.’

“‘He said he wished to see Miss Jacqueline,’ simpered the servant.

“‘Oh,’ returned the Colonel indifferently. He never showed surprise

before the servants—and went on with his book, still without turning

his head.

“I thought if he had turned it, he would scarcely sit there reading so

quietly; for Jacqueline who had not stirred from her alert and upright

position, was looking at him in a way no father, least of all a father

who loved his child as he did her, could have beheld without agitation.

It was the glance of a tigress waiting for the sight of an inconsiderate

move, in order to spring. It was wild unconstrainable joy, eying a

possible check and madly defying it. I shuddered as I looked at her eye,

and sickened as I perceived a huge drop of blood ooze from her white

fingers, where they unconsciously clutched a thorn, and drop dark and

disfiguring upon her virgin garments. At the indifferent exclamation of

her father, her features relaxed, and she turned haughtily towards the

girl, with a veiling of her secret delight that already bespoke the

woman of the world.

“‘Tell Mr. Holt that I will see him presently,’ said she, and was about

to follow the girl from the room when I caught her by the sleeve.

“‘You will have to change your dress,’ said I, and I pointed to the

ominous blot disfiguring its otherwise spotless white.

“She started and gave me a quick glance.

“‘I have a skin like a spider’s web,” cried she. ‘I should never meddle

with roses.’ But I noticed she did not toss the blossom away.

“‘Who is this Mr. Holt?’ now asked the Colonel suddenly turning, the

servant having left the room.

“‘He is a gentleman I met in Boston,’ came from his daughter’s lips, in

her usual light and easy tones. ‘He is probably passing through our town

on his way to Providence, where I was told he did business. His call is

no more than a formality, I presume.’ And with an indifferent little

smile and nod, she vanished from the room, that a moment before had been

filled with the threat of her silent passion. The Colonel gave a short

sigh but returned undisturbed to his book.

“In the course of a few minutes Jacqueline came back. She had changed

her dress for one as summerlike as the other, but still finer and more

elaborate. She looked elegant, imperious, but the joy had died out from

her eyes, and in its place was another expression incomprehensible to

me, but fully as alarming as any that had gone before. ‘Mr. Holt finds

himself obliged to remain in town over night, and would like to pay his

respects to you,’ said she to her father.

“The Colonel immediately rose, looking very grand as he turned and

surveyed his daughter with his clear penetrating eye.’

“‘You have a lover, have you not?’ he asked, laying his hand on her bare

and beautifully polished shoulder.

“An odd little smile crossed her lip. She looked at her hands on which

never a ring shone, and coquettishly tossed her head. ‘Let the gentleman

speak for himself,’ said she, ‘I give no man his title until he has

earned it.’

“Her father laughed. A lover was not such a dreadful thing in his eyes

provided he were worthy. And Jacqueline would not choose unworthily of

course—a Japha and his daughter! ‘Well then,’ said he, ‘let us see if

he can make good his title; Holt is not a bad name and Boston is not a

poor place to hail from.’ And without more ado, they hurried from the

room. But the light had all died out from her face! What did it mean?

“At tea time I met the gentleman. He had evidently made his title good.

I was not only favorably impressed with him but actually struck. Of all

the high-bred, clear-eyed, polished and kindly gentlemen who had sat

about the board since I first came into the family in Mrs. Japha’s

lifetime, here was surely the finest, the handsomest and the best; and

surprised in more ways than one, I was giving full play to my relief and

exhilaration, when I caught sight of Jacqueline’s eye, and felt again

the cold shudders of secret doubt and apprehension. Smile upon him as

she would, coquet with him as she did, the flame and the glory that drew

her like an inspiration to her feet when his name was announced, had

fled, and left not a shadow behind. Had he failed in his expressions of

devotion? Was he hard or cold or severe, under all that pleasant and

charming manner? Had the hot soul of our motherless child rushed upon

ice, and in the shock of the dreadful chill, fallen inert? No, his looks

bespake no coldness; they dwelt upon Jacqueline’s lovely but inscrutable

face, with honest fervor and boundless regard. He evidently loved her

most passionately, but she—if it had not been for that first moment of

unconscious betrayal, I should have decided that she cared for him no

more than she did for the few others who had adored her, in the short

space of her incomprehensible life.

“The mystery was not cleared up when she came to me that night with a

short, ‘How do you like my lover, Margery?’ I was forty years her

senior, but she always called me Margery.

“‘I think he is the finest, most agreeable man I ever met,’ said I. ‘Is

he your lover, Jacqueline? Are you going to marry him?’

“She turned about from the vase which she was denuding of its flowers,

and gave me one of her sphinx-like looks. ‘You must ask papa,’ said she.

‘He holds the destinies of the Japhas in his hand, does he not?’

“‘Does he?’ I involuntarily whispered to myself; following the steady

poise of her head and the assured movements of her graceful form, with a

glance of doubt, but loving her all the same, O loving her all and ever

the same!

“‘Your father is not the man to cross you when the object of your

affections is as worthy as this gentleman. He loved your mother too

fondly.’

“‘He did?’ She had turned quick as a flash and was looking me straight

in the eyes.

“‘I never saw such union!’ I exclaimed, vaguely remembering that her

mother’s name had always seemed to have power to move her. ‘There was no

parade of it before the world; but here at their own fireside, it was

heart to heart and soul to soul. It was not love it was assimilation.’

“The young girl rose upon me like a flame; her very eyes seemed to dart

fire; her lips looked like living coals; she was almost appalling in her

terrible beauty and superhuman passion. ‘Not love!’ she exclaimed, her

every word falling like a burning spark, ‘not love but assimilation! Yet

do you suppose if I told my father that my soul had found its mate; my

heart its other half; that this, _this_ nature,’ here she struck her

breast as she would a stone, ‘had at last found its master; that the

wayward spirit of which you have sometimes been afraid, was become a

part of another’s life, another’s soul, another’s hope, do you suppose

he would listen? Hush!’ she cried, seeing me about to speak. ‘You talk

of love, what do you know of it, what does he know of it, who saw his

young wife die, yet himself consented to live? Is love a sitting by the

fire with hand locked in hand while the winter winds rage and the

droning kettle sings? Love is a going through the fire, a braving of the

winter winds, a scattering of the soul in sparks that the night and the

tempest lick up without putting out the germ of the eternal flame.

Love!’ she half laughed; ‘O, it takes a soul that has never squandered

its treasure upon every passing beggar, to know how to love! Do you see

that star?’ It was night as I have said and we were standing near an

open window. ‘It has lost its moorings and is falling; when it descries

the ocean it will plunge into it; so with some natures, they soar high

and keep their orbit well, till an invisible hand turns them from their

course and they fall, to be swallowed up, aye swallowed up, lost and

buried in the great sea that has awaited them so long.’

“‘And you love—like this—’ I murmured, quailing before the power of

her passion.

“‘Would it not be strange if I did not,’ she asked in an altered voice.

‘You say he is everything noble, handsome and attractive.’

“Yes, yes,’ I murmured, ‘but—’

“She did not wait to hear what lay behind that but. Picking up her

flowers, she hastily crossed the room. ‘Did my young mother shriek from

joy, when my father’s horses ran away with them along that deadly

precipice at the side of the Southmore road? To lie for a few maddening

moments on the breast of the man you love, earth reeling beneath you,

heaven swimming above you, and then with a cry of bliss to fall heart to

heart, down the hideous gap of some awful gulf, and be dashed into

eternity with the cry still on your lips, that is what I call love and

that is what I—’

“She paused, turned upon me the whole splendor of her face, seemed to

realize to what an extent her impetuosity had lifted the veil with which

she usually shrouded her bitterly suppressed nature, and calming herself

with a sudden quick movement, gave me a short mocking courtesy and left

the room.

“Do you wonder that for half the night I sat up brooding and alive to

the faintest sounds!

“Next day Mr. Holt called again, and a couple of weeks after—long

enough to enable Colonel Japha to make whatever inquiries he chose as to

his claims as a gentleman of means and position—sent a formal entreaty

for Jacqueline’s hand. I had never seen Colonel Japha more moved. His

admiration for the young man was hearty and sincere. From a worldly

point of view, as well as from all higher standpoints, the match was one

of which he could be proud; and yet to speak the word that would

separate from him the only creature that he loved, was hard as the

cutting off an arm or the plucking out of an eye. ‘Do you think she

loves him?’ asked he of me with a rare condescension of which he was not

often guilty. ‘You are a woman and ought to understand her better than

I. Do you think she loves him?’

“After the words I had heard her speak, what could I reply but, ‘Yes,

sir; she is of a reserved nature and controls her feelings in his

presence, but she loves him for all that, with the intensest fervor and

passion.’

“He repeated again, ‘You are a woman and you ought to know.’ And then

called his daughter to him.

“I cannot tell what passed between them, but the upshot of it was, that

the Colonel despatched an answer to the effect that the father’s consent

would not be lacking, provided the daughter’s could be obtained. I

learned this from Jacqueline herself who brought me the letter to post.

“‘You see then, that your father understands,’ said I.

“Her rich red lip curled mockingly, but she did not reply.

“Naturally Mr. Holt answered to this communication in person. Jacqueline

received him with a fitful coquetry that evidently puzzled him, for all

the distinguishing charm which it added to a beauty apt to be too

reserved and statue-like. She however took his ring which blazed on her

finger like a drop of ice on congealed snow. ‘I am engaged,’ she

murmured as she passed by my door, ‘and to a Holt!’ The words rang long

in my ears; why?

“She desired no congratulations; she permitted nothing to be said about

her engagement, among the neighbors. She had even taken off her ring

which I found lying loose in one of her bureau drawers. And no one dared

to remonstrate, not even her father, punctillious as he was in all

matters of social etiquette. The fact is, Jacqueline was not the same

girl she had been before she gave her promise to Mr. Holt. From the

moment he bade her good-bye, with the remark that he was going away to

get a golden cage for his bride, she began to reveal a change. The cold

reserve gave way to feverish expectancy. She trod these rooms as if

there were burning steels in the floors, she looked from the windows as

if they were prison bars; night and day she gazed from them yet she

never went out. The letters she received from him were barely read and

tossed aside; it was his coming for which she hungered. Her father

noticed her restless and eager gaze, and frequently sighed. I felt her

strange removed manner and secretly wept. ‘If he does not amply return

this passion,’ thought I, ‘my darling will find her life a hell!’

“But he did return it; of that I felt sure. It was my only comfort.

“Suddenly one day the restlessness vanished. Her beauty burst like a

flame from smoke; she trod like a spirit that hears invisible airs. I

watched her with amazement till she said ‘Mr. Holt comes to-night,’ then

I thought all was explained and went smiling about my work. She came

down in the afternoon clad as I had never seen her before. She wore one

of her Boston dresses and she looked superb in it. From the crown of her

head to the sole of her foot, she dazzled like a moving picture; but she

lacked one adornment; there was no ring on her finger. ‘Jacqueline!’

cried I, ‘you have forgotten something.’ And I pointed towards her hand.

“She glanced at it, blushed a trifle as I thought, and pulled it out of

her pocket. ‘I have it,’ said she, ‘but it is too large,’ and she thrust

it carelessly back.

“At three o’clock the train came in. Then I saw her eye flash and her

lip burn. In a few minutes later two gentlemen appeared at the gate.

“‘Mr. Holt and his brother!’ were the words I heard whispered through

the house. But I did not need that announcement to understand Jacqueline

at last.”

XXVI.

A MAN’S JUSTICE AND A WOMAN’S MERCY.

“Fair is foul and foul is fair.”

—MACBETH.

“Have you ever seen a man whose instantaneous effect upon you was

electrical; in whose expression, carriage, or manner, there was

concealed a charm that attracted and interested you, apart from his

actual worth and beauty? Such a one was Mr. Roger Holt, the gentleman I

now discerned entering the gate with Jacqueline’s lover. It was not that

he was handsome. He could not for one moment bear any comparison with

his brother in substantial attraction, and yet when they were both in

the room, you looked at him in preference to the other, and was vexed

with yourself for doing so. He seemed to be the younger as he was

certainly the smaller; yet he took the lead, even in coming up the walk.

Why had he not taken it in the deeper and more important matter? Was it

because he did not love her?

“I was not present when Jacqueline greeted her guests and presented Mr.

Roger Holt to her father. But later in the day I spent a half hour with

them and saw enough to be able to satisfy myself as to the falsity of my

last supposition. Never had I seen on a human countenance the evidences

of a wilder passion than that which informed his features, as he sat in

the further window of the parlor, presumably engaged in admiring the

autumn landscape, but really occupied in casting short side-long glances

at Jacqueline, who sat listening with a superb nonchalence, but with a

restless gleam in her wandering eye, to the genial talk between her

acknowledged lover and the Colonel. I half feared he would rise from his

seat, and flinging himself before her, demand then and there an

explanation of her engagement.

“But beyond the impatience of those short burning glances, he controlled

himself well, and it was Jacqueline who moved at last.

“I saw the purpose growing in her eyes long before she stirred. The face

which had been a mystery to me from her cradle, was in the presence of

this man, like an open page which all might read. Its letters were

flame, but that did not make them any less clear. I felt her swaying

towards him, before an eyelash trembled or a quiver shook her tall form.

He may have understood her purpose also, for his eye wandered towards

the open piano. She rose like a queen.

“‘Mr. Roger Holt is a singer,’ said she in passing her father, ‘I am

going to ask him to give us one of the old ballads you profess to like

so much.’

“The conversation at once ceased. The Colonel who made no secret of his

fondness for music, turned at once towards the stranger, with an

expression of great courtesy. Instantly that gentleman rose, and meeting

the request of his hostess with a profound bow, proceeded at once to the

piano. ‘He will not leave it till he has spoken to her,’ thought I. Nor

did he, for that very moment as they stood turning her music over, I

perceived his lips move in a hurried question, to which she as briefly

responded, whereupon he caught up a sheet of music from the pile, and

flinging back his head with a victorious smile, began to sing.

“Had I known what lay behind his words, I would have braved everything

rather than have allowed him to utter a note in that room which had once

rung with the carols of Jacqueline’s mother. But what could I guess of

the possible evil underlying the natural ebullition of unrestrained

passion that from some cause of pride or pique, had met with a strange

inexplicable check. So I sat still, shuddering perhaps, but quiet in my

corner; while the haunting tones of his strange and thrilling voice,

rose and fell in the most uncanny of Scottish love songs. Nor did I do

more than wonder with all my agitated soul, when at the conclusion

Jacqueline came back, and pausing beside the man to whom she had given

her troth, looked down in his beaming face and smiled with that overflow

of delight, which she dared not bestow upon his brother.

“Another little incident of that hour remains engraven upon my memory.

She had been showing to the gentlemen a rare plant that stood in the

front parlor window, and was dilating upon its marvels, when Mr. Robert

Holt, her accepted lover, took in his clasp the small white hand

wandering so invitingly among the leaves of the huge palm, and glancing

at the finger which should have worn his ring, looked inquiringly into

her face.

“‘O,’ said she, interrupting her little speech to draw away her hand,

‘you miss your diamond? I have it, sir. It lies very safe in my pocket;

it is a beautiful gem, but _your ring does not fit me_.’

“The way she said those words and the air with which she tossed back her

head, must have made one heart in that room beat joyously, but it did

not reassure me or subdue my secret apprehension.

“‘Not fit!’ her lover responded; and begged her to allow him to try it

on and see, but she shook her head with wilful coquetry, and turning to

the piano, commenced singing a gay little song that was like silver

bells, shaken by a sudden and mighty tempest.

“Even the Colonel felt the change in his daughter, though he never

guessed the cause, and came and went during the evening that followed,

with certain odd sighs that made my heart ache with strange forebodings.

Only her lover was unconscious, or if he felt the new and wayward force

and fire in her manner, attributed it to his own presence and

unspeakable devotion. Mr. Roger Holt, on the contrary, thoroughly

understood it. Though he was strangely calm, as calm now as he had

previously been alert and fiery, he never lost a gleam of her eye in his

direction, or a turn of her form towards the chair where he sat. But the

smile with which he contemplated her was not pleasant to me. It was

informed with self-consciousness, and a certain hard triumph, that made

it almost sinister. ‘She has given her hand to the true man,’ I mused,

‘wherever her heart may be. But had she given it?’ I began to doubt as I

began to muse. With that uncontrollable will of hers, she was capable of

anything; did she intend to break with Robert, now that she had seen

Roger? I detected no signs of it beyond the evident delight they took in

each other’s presence. They were guilty of no further conversation of a

secret or intimate character, and when with the striking of the clock at

ten, Mr. Robert Holt rose to leave, his brother followed without any

demur, even preceding him in his departure and limiting his farewell to

a short brotherly pressure of Jacqueline’s fair hand.

“But much may be conveyed in a pressure, or so I began to think as I

heard the low laugh that rippled from Jacqueline’s lips as she turned to

go up to her room; and if I had been her mother—

“But that is not what you want to hear. Enough that I did not follow

her, that I did not even acquaint Colonel Japha with my fears, that

indeed I did nothing but lie awake, praying and asking what I ought to

do. There had been so little said; there had been so little done. A

word, a sentence between them, the interchange of a couple of songs,

and—What else that I could communicate to another?

“A week, two weeks passed, and her look of wilful happiness did not fly.

She was flooded with notes from her accepted lover, whose handwriting I

had learned by this time to distinguish, but not one, so far as I could

learn, from any other source; yet her feet tripped lightly through the

house, and her form had a rich grace in its every movement, that bespoke

a mind settled in some deep joy or quiet determination. I felt the

impenetrability of a secretly cherished hope, whenever I looked at her.

If I had not known to the contrary, I should have said that her

prospective marriage had become to her a dream of unfathomable delight.

Whence then came this rapture? Through what communication was born this

secret hope? I could not guess, I could only watch and wait.

“Meanwhile some random guesses at the truth had been made by the

neighbors. Jacqueline had a lover. That lover was a gentleman; but the

Colonel was critical; he had refused his consent and the young people

had parted. Such was the talk, begotten perhaps by the persistency with

which Jacqueline remained in the house, and the almost severe look with

which Colonel Japha trod the streets of his native village, which he

soon felt would lose all their charm in the departure of his only child.

I scarcely ventured out more than Jacqueline; for I have but little

control over my feelings and did not know what I would do, if any one

should closely press me with questions.

“The unexpected discovery that our pretty young servant girl was in the

habit of stealing into Jacqueline’s room late at night, was the first

thing that startled me into asking whether or not my supposition was

true, that Jacqueline received no messages from Mr. Robert Holt. And

scarcely had I become certain that a clandestine correspondence was

being carried on between them through the medium of this girl, then the

climax came, and knowledge on my part and secrecy on hers availed no

longer.

“It was a day in October. The stoves had been put up in the house, and

seeing Jacqueline roaming about the halls, in a renewed fit of that

strange restlessness which had affected her the day before Mr. Roger

Holt’s visit, I went into her room to light a fire, and make everything

look cheerful before dusk. I found the atmosphere warm, and going to the

stove, discovered that a fire had been already kindled there, but had

gone out for want of fuel. I at once commenced to rake away the ashes,

in order to make preparations for a new one, when I came upon several

scraps of half burned paper.

“Jacqueline had been burning letters. Do you blame me for picking out

those scraps and hastening with them to another room, when I tell you

they were written in a marked and characteristic hand that bore little

or no resemblance to that of her accepted lover, and that the words

which flashed first upon my eye were those ominous ones of _my wife_!

“They were three in number, and while more or less discolored and

irregular, were still legible. Think child with what a thrill of horror

and sharp motherly anguish, I read such words as ‘Love you! I would

press you in my arms if you were plague-stricken! The least turn of your

head makes my blood cringe, as if a flame had touched me. I would follow

you on my knees, if you led me round the world. Let me see Robert take

your hand again and I will—’

“‘Forget you! Do we forget the dagger that has struck us? I am another

man since—’

“‘I will have you if Robert goes mad and your father kills me. That I am

burdened with a wife, is nothing. What is a wife that I do not—’ ‘You

shall be my true wife, my—’

“‘To-night then, be ready; I will wait for you at the gate. A little

resolution on your part, and then—’

“I could read no further. The living, burning truth had forced itself

upon me, that Jacqueline, our darling, our pride, the soul of our life,

stood tottering upon the brink of a gulf horrible as the mouth of hell.

For I never doubted for an instant what her answer would be to this

entreaty. In all her past life, God pity us, there had been no tokens of

that immovable hold on virtue, that would save her in such an extremity

as this. Nevertheless, to make all sure, I flew back to her room, and

tearing open bureau drawers and closet doors, discovered that her

prettiest things had been sent away. She was going, then, and on that

very night! and her father did not even know she was untrue to her

betrothed lover. The horror of the situation was too much for me; I

faltered as I left her room, her dainty, maidenly room, and actually

crouched against the wall like a guilty thing, as I heard the sound of

her voice singing some maddening strain in the parlors below. What

should I do? Appeal to her, or warn her father of the frightful peril in

which his honor and happiness stood? Alas, any appeal to her would be

useless. In the glare of this awful revelation I had come to a full

comprehension of her nature. But her father was a man; he could command

as well as entreat, could even force obedience if all other methods

failed. To him, then, must I go; but I had rather have gone to the rack.

He was so proud a man! Had owned to such undeviating trust in his

daughter’s honor, as a Japha and his child! The blow would kill him; or

daze him so, he might better have been killed. My knees shook under me,

as I traversed the hall to his little study over the parlor, and when I

came to the door, I rather fell against it than knocked, so great was my

own anguish, and so deep my terror of his. He was a ready man and he

came to the door at once, but upon seeing me, drew back as if his eye

had fallen upon a phantom.

“‘Hush!’ said I, scarcely knowing what I uttered; and going in, I closed

the door and latched it firmly behind me. ‘I have come,’ said I in a

voice that made him start, ‘to ask you to save your daughter. She is in

deadly peril; she—’ a strain of her song came in at that moment from

the staircase. She was ascending to her room. He looked at me in a doubt

of my sanity.

“‘Not physical peril,’ I stammered, ‘but _moral_. She loves madly,

unreasonably, and with a headlong passion that laughs at every obstacle,

a man whom neither you nor heaven can look upon with aught but

execration. She—’

“‘Mrs. Hamlin!’—How well I remember his cool, calm voice, so deliberate

in his impressive moments, so deliberate now, when perhaps she was

donning hat and shawl for her elopement—‘You are laboring under a great

mistake. Instead of execrating Mr. Holt, I admire him most profoundly.

Since the time has come for me to give up my daughter, I know of no one

to whom I would rather surrender her.’

“‘But Mr. Holt is not the man,’ I cried, half wild in my fear and

desperation. ‘Do you remember the gentleman who came with him on his

last visit? He called him his brother, and he is I believe, but—’

“The way he turned his grand white forehead towards me at that, made

every fibre in my being quiver. ‘Jacqueline does not love _him_!’

exclaimed he. How sharp his voice, how changed his eye! I shrank back,

trembling as I bowed my head, thinking of the word yet to be said.

“‘But he won’t compare—’ he went on with a severe intonation. ‘Besides

her honor is engaged. You are dealing in fancies, Mrs. Hamlin.’

“I tore out of my breast the scraps of paper which had enlightened me so

horribly, and held them towards him; then bethought myself, and drew

back. ‘I have proof,’ said I; ‘but first I must tell you that Jacqueline

is not as good a girl as you have thought her. She is not her mother’s

child in the qualities of love and honor. She is destined to bring a

great woe upon your head. In her passion for this man, she has forgotten

your trust in her, the incorruptibility of your name, the honor of your

house. Be strong, sir, for God is about to smite you in your tenderest

spot.

“Ah, with what pride he towered upon me! this white-haired, stately

gentleman before whom I had hitherto held my breath in admiring awe;

towered upon me though his face was ghostly pale and his hand trembled

like an aspen as he held it out!

“‘Give me the papers you hold there,’ cried he. ‘Either you are gone

mad, or else—Who wrote these lines?’ he demanded, glancing down upon

the hard, firm scrawl that blackened the bits of paper I had given him.

“‘Mr. Roger Holt,’ I returned unhesitatingly. ‘I found those bits in

Jacqueline’s stove. Her clothes have been sent away, sir,’ I continued

as I saw his face grow fixed above the scraps he consulted. ‘Twilight is

coming on and—Mr. Roger Holt is a married man!’

“‘What!’

“I never saw such a look flash from a human face as that which darted

from his at that terrible moment. I thought he would have fallen, but he

only dropped the papers out of his hand. ‘Heaven forgive us!’ murmured

I, calmed by a sight of his misery, into some semblance of of

self-control, ‘but we have never understood Jacqueline. She is not to be

led, sir, by principles or duty. She loves this man, and love with her

is a stormy wind, capable of sweeping her into any abyss of contumely or

suffering. If you would save her, kill her love; the death of her lover

would only transform her into a demon.’

“He looked at me as if I had told him the world had come to an end. ‘My

Jacqueline!’ he murmured in a low, incredulous voice of the tenderest

yearning. ‘My Jacqueline!’

“‘Oh!’ I shrieked, torn by my anguish for him and the terror of her

escaping while we were yet talking, ‘God knows I had rather have died

than contaminate her by such words as I have uttered. She is dear to me

as my soul; dearer to me than my life. I have a mother’s feeling for

her, sir. If to fling myself headlong from that window, would delay her

feet from going down the stairs to meet her guilty lover, I would gladly

do it. It is her danger makes me speak. O sir, realize that danger and

hasten before she has taken the irrevocable step.’

“He started like a man pricked by a sudden dart. ‘She is going—you

believe she is going to meet him?’

“‘I do,’ said I.

“He gave me a terrible look and started for the door. I hurriedly picked

up the scraps that had fallen to the floor, and rushed around by an

inner passage-way to my own little room, hiding my head and waiting as

for the crash of a falling avalanche. Suddenly a cry rose in the hall.

“There are some sounds that lift you unconsciously to your feet. Dashing

out of my room, I detected the face of the servant-girl whom I have

before mentioned, looking out of her door some distance down the

corridor. Hastening towards her, I uttered some words about her being a

busy-body, and thrusting her inside her room, locked the door upon her.

Then I hastened with what speed I might to the front of the house, and

coming out upon the grand staircase, met a sight that shook me to the

very soul. You have been up the stairs; you know how they branch off to

left and right from the platform near the top. The left branch led in

those days to Colonel Japha’s room, the right to the apartments occupied

by Jacqueline and myself. Coming upon them, then, as I did from my side

of the house, I found myself in full view of the opposite approach, and

there on the topmost step I beheld Colonel Japha, standing in an

attitude of awful denunciation, while half way down the staircase, I

beheld the figure of Jacqueline, hindered in her gliding course towards

the front door by the terrible, ‘Stop!’ whose echo had reached me in my

room and caused me to rush quaking and horrified to this spot. I leaned

back sick and horror-stricken against the wall. There was no mercy in

his voice: he had awakened to a full realization of the situation and

the pride of the Japhas had made him steel.

“‘You are my child!’ he was saying. ‘I have loved you and do still; but

proceed one step farther towards the man that awaits you at the gate,

and the door that opens upon you, _shuts_ never to open again!’

“‘Colonel!’ I exclaimed, starting forward; but he heard me no more than

he would a fly buzzing or a bird singing.

“‘I desire it to shut; I have no wish to come back!’ issued from the set

white lips of the girl beneath us. ‘There is no such charm for me in

this humdrum house, that I should wish to exchange life with the man I

adore, for its droning, spiritless existence!’ And she lifted her foot

to proceed.

“‘Jacqueline!’ I shrieked, leaning forward in my turn, and holding her

by my anguish, as I never believed she could be held by anything,

‘Think, child, think what you do! It is not life you are going to but

death. A man who can take a young girl from her father’s house, from her

lover’s arms, from her mother’s grave, from the shrine of all that is

pure and holy, to dash her into a pit of all that is corrupt, loathsome

and deadly, is not one with whom you can _live_. You say you adore him:

can one adore falsehood, selfishness and depravity? Does hypocrisy win

love? Can the embraces of a serpent bring peace? Jacqueline, Jacqueline,

you are yet pure; come back to our love and our hearts, before we die

here in our shame at the head of the stairs, where your mother was

carried out to her grave!’

“She trembled. I saw the hand that clutched the banister loosen its

grip; she cast one quick look behind her, and her eyes flashed upon her

father’s face; it was set like a flint.

“‘If you come back,’ cried he, leaning towards her, but not advancing a

step from where he stood, ‘you must come back of your own free will. I

will hold no creature prisoner in my house. I must trust you implicitly,

or not at all. Speak then, which shall it be?’ And he raised his hand

above his head, with a supreme and awful gesture, ‘a father’s blessing

or a father’s curse?’

“‘A father’s curse, then! since you command me to choose,’ rang out from

her lips in a burst of uncontrollable passion. ‘I want no blessing that

separates me from _him_!’ And she pointed towards the door with a look

that, defiant as it was, spoke of a terrible love before which all our

warnings and entreaties were but as empty air.

“‘Curses then upon your head, slayer of a family’s honor, a father’s

love, and a mother’s memory! Curses upon you, at home and abroad! in the

joy of your first passion and in the agony of your last despair! May you

live to look upon that door as the gateway to heaven, and find it shut!

May your children, if you are cursed with them, turn in your face, as

you are turning now in mine! May the lightning of heaven be your candle,

and the blackness of death your daily food and your nightly drink!’ And

with a look in which all the terrors he invoked, seemed to crash

downward from his reeling brain upon her shrinking terror-crouched head,

he gave one mighty gasp and fell back stricken to the floor.

“‘God!’ burst from her lips, and she rushed downwards to the door like a

creature hunted to its quarry. I saw her white face gleam marble-like in

the fading light that came in from the chinks about the door. I saw her

trembling hand fumbling with the knob, and rousing from my stupor,

called down to her with all the force of a breaking heart,

“‘Jacqueline, beware!’

“She turned once more. There was something in my voice she could not

withstand. ‘I do not hope to keep you,’ cried I, ‘but before you go,

hear this. In the days to come, when the face that now beams upon you

with such longing, shall have learned to turn from you in weariness, if

not distaste, when hunger, cold, contumely and disease shall have

blasted that fair brow and seared those soft cheeks, know, that although

a father can curse, a woman who loves like a mother can forgive.’ The

father cries, ‘Once go out of that door and it shuts upon you never to

open!’ ‘Once come to _that_ door, say I,’ pointing in the direction of

the house’s other entrance, ‘and if I live and if I move, it shall open

to you, were you as defiled and wretched and forsaken as Magdalen.

Remember! Each day at this hour will I watch for you, kneeling upon its

threshold. In sickness or in health, in joy or in sorrow, in cold or in

heat. The hour of six is sacred. Some one of them shall see you falling

weeping on my breast!’

“She gave me a quick stare out of her wide black eyes, then a mocking

smile curled her lips, and murmuring a short, ‘You rave!’ opened the

door, and rushed out into the falling dusk. With a resounding clang like

the noise of a stone rolled upon an open grave, the great door swung to,

and I was left alone in that desolated house with my stricken master.

XXVII.

THE LONE WATCHER.

“Hark! to the hurried question of Despair,

Where is my child?—and Echo answers—Where?”

—BYRON.

“Colonel Japha recovered from his shock, but was never the same man

again. All that was genial, affectionate and confiding in his nature,

had been turned as by a lightning’s stroke, to all that was hard, bitter

and suspicious. He would not allow the name of Jacqueline to be spoken

in his presence; he would listen to no allusion made to those days when

she was the care and perplexity, but also the light and pleasure of the

house. Men are not like women, my child; when they turn, it is at an

angle, the whole direction of their nature changes.

“Perhaps the news that presently came to us from Boston may have had

something to do with this. It was surely dreadful enough; Jacqueline’s

perfidy had slain her lover. Mr. Robert Holt, the cultured, noble,

high-souled gentleman, had been found lying dead on the floor of his

room, a few days after the events I have just related, with a lady’s

diamond ring in his hand and the remnants of a hastily burned letter in

the grate before him. He had burst a blood-vessel, and had expired

instantly.

“This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the

reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of

Jacqueline’s history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and

the story of her lover’s death was not generally known, while the fact

of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with

the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which

neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny.

“My child, you have a brow like snow, and a cheek like roses; you know

little of life’s sorrows and little of life’s sins. To you the skies are

blue, the woods vernal, the air balmy; the sad looks upon men’s and

women’s faces, tell but shallow tales of the ceaseless grinding of grief

in their pent up souls. But you are gentle, and you have an imagination

that goes beyond your experience; perhaps if you pause and think, you

can understand what a tale could be told of the weeks and months and

years that now followed, without hint or whisper of the fate of her who

had gone out from amongst us with the brand of her father’s curse upon

her brow. At first we hoped, yes, _he_ hoped,—I could see it in his

eyes when there came a sudden ring at the bell,—that some sign of her

penitence, or some proof of her existence, would come to relieve the

torture of our fears, if not the shame of our memories. But the door

that closed upon her on that fatal eve, had shut without an echo. While

we vainly waited, time had ample leisure to carve the furrows of age as

well as of suffering on the Colonel’s once smooth brow, and to change my

daily vigil into a custom of despair, rather than of hope. Time had also

leisure to rob us of much of our worldly goods and to make our continued

living in this grand old house, an act that involved constant care and

the closest economy. That we were enabled to preserve appearances to the

day that beheld the Colonel laid low by the final stroke of his dread

disease, was only due to the secret charity of a certain gentleman, who,

declaring he was indebted to us, secretly supplied me with means of

support.

“But of all this you care little.

“You had rather hear about the evening watch with its hopeful assurance,

‘Yet another day and she will be here,’ to be followed so soon by the

despairing acknowledgement, ‘Yet another day and she has not come!’ or

of those dark hours when the Colonel lay blank and white upon his

pillow, with his eyes fixed on the door which would never open to the

beating of a daughter’s heart, while the gray shadow of an awful

resolution deepened upon his immovable face. What that resolution was I

could not know, but I feared it, when I saw what a sternness it gave to

his eye, what a fixedness to his set and implacable lip; and when in the

waning light of a certain December afternoon, the circle of neighbors

about his bed gave way to the stiff and forbidding form of Mr. Phelps, I

felt a thrill of mortal apprehension and only waited to hear the short,

‘It shall be done,’ of the lawyer to some slowly whispered command of

the colonel, to rise from my far off corner and stand ready to accost

Mr. Phelps as he came from the bedside of the dying man.

“‘What is it?’ I asked, rushing up to him as he issued forth into the

hall, and seizing him by the arm, with a woman’s unreasoning

impetuosity. ‘I have nursed his daughter on my knee; tell me, then, what

it is he has ordered you to do in this final moment?’

“Mr. Phelps for all his ungainly bearing, is not a hard-hearted man, as

you know, and he doubtless saw the depth of the misery that made me

forget myself. Giving me a look that was not without its touch of

sarcasm, he replied, ‘The colonel has made me promise, to see that a

plank is nailed across the front door of this house, after his body has

been carried out to burial.’

“A board across the front door! His anger then was implacable. The

withering curse that had rung in my ears for ten years, was to outlive

his death! With a horrified groan, I pressed my hands over my eyes and

rushed back. My first glimpse of the Colonel’s face showed me that the

end was at hand, but that fact only made more imperative my consuming

desire to see that curse removed, even though it were done with his

final breath. Drawing near his bedside, I leaned down, and waiting till

his eye wandered to my face, asked him if there was nothing he wished

amended before his strength failed. He understood me. We had not sat for

so long, face to face across the chasm of a hideous memory, without

knowing something of the workings of each other’s mind. Glancing up at

his wife’s portrait which ever faced him as he lay upon his pillow, his

mouth grew severe and he essayed to shake his head. I at once pointed to

the portrait.

“‘What will you say to her when she meets you on the borders of heaven?’

I demanded with the courage of despair.’ She will ask, ‘Where is my

child?’ And what will you reply?’

“The fingers that lay upon the coverlid moved spasmodically; he eyed me

with a steady deepening stare, awful to meet, fearful to remember. I

went on steadily; ‘She has gone out of this house with your curse; tell

me that if she comes back, she may be greeted with your forgiveness.’

Still that awful stare which changed not. ‘I have watched and waited for

her every day since her departure,’ I whispered, ‘and shall watch and

wait for her, every day until I die. Shall a stranger’s love be greater

than a father’s?’ This time his lips twitched and the grey shadow

shifted, but it did not rise. ‘I had sworn to do it,’ I went on. ‘When

you lay there at the top of the stairs, smitten down by your first

shock, I told her, come sickness, come health, I should keep a daily

vigil at that door of the house which your severity had not closed upon

her; and I have kept my word till now and shall keep it to the end. What

will you do for this miserable child of whose being you are the author?’

“With indescribable anxiety I paused and watched him, for his lips were

moving. ‘Do for her?’ he repeated.

“How awful is the voice of the dying! I shivered as I listened, but drew

near and nearer, that I might lose no word that came from his stony

lips.

“‘She will not come,’ gasped he, with an effort that raised him up in

bed, and deepened that horrible stare, ‘but—’

“Who shall say what he might have uttered if Death’s hand had delayed a

single instant, but the inexorable shadow fell, and he never finished

the sentence.

“My child, these are frightful things for you to hear. God knows I would

not assail your pure ears with a tale like this, if it were not for the

help and sympathy I hope to gain from you. Sin is a hideous thing; the

gulf it opens is wide and deep; well may it be said to swallow those who

trust themselves above its flower-hung brink. But we who are human, owe

something to humanity. Love stops not because of the gulf; love follows

the sinner with wilder and more heart-breaking longing, the deeper and

deeper he sinks into the illimitable darkness. Ten years have passed

since we laid the Colonel away in the burying-place of all the Japhas,

and dutiful to his last request, nailed up the front door of his

speedily to be forsaken mansion. In all that time my watch has remained

unbroken in this house, which by will he had left to me, but which I

secretly hold in trust for her. The hour of six has found me at my post,

sometimes elate with hope, sometimes depressed with repeated

disappointments, but whether hopeful or sad, always trustful that the

great God who Himself so loved all sinners, that He gave the life of His

Son to rescue them, would ultimately grant me the desire of my heart.

But the decrepitude of age is coming upon me, and each morning I leave

my bed, with growing fear lest my infirmities will increase until they

finally overcome my resolution. Child, if this should happen, if lying

in my bed I should some day hear that she had come back, and failing to

find the lamp burning and the welcome ready, had gone away again—But

the thought is madness. I cannot bear it. A sinner, lost, degraded,

suffering, starving, perhaps, is wandering this way. She is hardened and

old in guilt; she has drunk the cup of life’s passions and found them

corrupting poison; all that was lovely and pure and good has withdrawn

from her; she stands alone, shut off by her sin, like a wild thing in a

circle of flame. What shall touch this soul? The preacher’s voice has no

charm for her; good men’s advice is but empty air. God’s love must be

mirrored in human love, to strike an eye so unused to looking up. Where

shall she find such love? It is all that can rescue her; love as great

as her sin, as boundless as her degradation, as persistent as her

suffering. Child—”

“I know what you are going to say,” suddenly exclaimed Paula, rising up

and confronting Mrs. Hamlin with a steady high look of determination.

“In the day of your weakness or illness you want some one to unlock the

door and light the lamp. You have found her!”

XXVIII.

SUNSHINE ON THE HILLS.

“If I speak to thee in Friendship’s name,

Thou think’st I speak too coldly;

If I mention Love’s devoted flame,

Thou say’st I speak too boldly.”

—MOORE.

The story told by Mrs. Hamlin had a great effect upon Paula, not only on

account of its own interest and the promise it had elicited from her,

but because of the remembrances it revived of Mr. Sylvester and her life

in New York. Any vision of evil or suffering, any experience that roused

the affections or awakened the sensibilities, could not fail to recall

to her mind the forcible figure of Mr. Sylvester as he stood that day by

his own hearthstone, talking of the temptations that assail humanity;

and any reminiscence of him must necessarily bring with it much that

charmed and aroused. For a week, then, she felt the effect of a great

unsettlement. Her village home appeared a prison; she longed to run,

soar—anything to escape; the horizon was full of beckoning hands. A

brooding melancholy settled upon her reveries; the prospect of a life

spent in the narrow circle to which she had endeavored to re-accustom

herself, became unendurable.

Thus it is with us. We slide in a groove and seem happy, when suddenly a

book we read, a story we hear, an experience we encounter, shakes us out

of our content, and makes continuance in the old course a violation of

the most demanding instincts of our nature.

In the full tide of this unrest, Paula went out for a solitary walk on

the hills. Nature can soothe if she cannot satisfy. Then the day itself

was one to make the soul glad and the heart rejoice. As the young girl

trod the meadows, she wondered that she could be sad. Earth and air were

so full of splendor. Nature seemed to be in league with the angels of

light. September stood upon the earth like a goddess of might and glory.

Every tint of green that variegated the mountain-side, wooed the eye

with suggestions of unfathomable beauty. A bough of scarlet flame lit

here and there amid the verdure, served to illuminate the woods as for

the passage of a king; and not Solomon in all his glory ever wore an

aspect more sumptuous than the flowers that flecked the meadow and

fringed the hardy roadside with imperial purple. A wind was blowing, a

keen but kindly breeze, laden with sweetness and alert to awaken Æolian

airs from the boughs of whistling beech and alder. Even the low field

grasses seemed to partake in the general cheer, and nodded to each other

with a witching and irresistible abandon. Had a poet been at her side,

or any one capable of divining the hidden things of nature, what a

commentary to all their united thoughts she would have found in the

delicious tremble of the laughing leaves, in the restless music of the

runaway brooks, in the lowly crickets with their single song, in the

cloud-haunting birds with their trailing melodies, and in all the roll

and rumble of earth’s commingled noises. Alluring as was the book of

nature, she could not read it alone. She felt the lack of a loving hand

to turn the page. “Is it that I am lonely!” she murmured.

The thought deepened her trouble. Coming down from the hillside, she

entered a skirting of woods that ran along by the river. Here she had

always found peace and some of her richest treasures of thought. Through

this opaline archway she had walked with her fancies, like Saint

Catherine with her lily. It was sacred to all that was sweet and deep

and pure within her. “Lonely!” she whispered; “I will not be lonely. To

some God gives years of happy companionship; to others but a day. Shall

one complain because it has fallen to his portion to have the lesser

share? I will remember my one day and be glad.”

“My one day!” She caught herself at the utterance and literally started

at the suggestion it offered. There was but one person whom she had seen

but for a day. Could she have been thinking of him?

With a flush deep as the autumn leaves she carried, she was hurrying on,

when suddenly in the opening before her, a shadow fell, and a mellow

voice exclaimed in her ear,

“Do I meet Miss Fairchild in her native woods?”

It was Clarence Ensign.

The surprise was very great and it took her a moment to steady herself.

She had felt so assured that she should never see him or any other of

her New York friends again. Had not Cicely written that he had gone

West, soon after her own departure from New York. With a deepening of

his voice Mr. Ensign repeated the question.

At once the day seemed to acquire all it had hitherto lacked. Looking

up, she met his eye fixed admiringly upon her, and all that was merry,

lightsome and gay within her, leaped at once to the surface. Ignoring

his question with smiling abandon, she exclaimed,

“What shall be done to the man who delights in surprises and startles

timid maidens without a cause?”

“He shall be held in captivity by the hand of his denouncer, until he

has sued for pardon and obtained her generous forgiveness,” returned he,

holding out his palm.

She barely touched it with her own. “I see that your repentance is

sincere, so your pardon shall be speedy,” laughed she.

“Your discrimination is at fault, I never felt more impenitent in my

life. I am a hardened wretch, Miss Fairchild, a hardened wretch! But you

do not ask me from what corner of the earth I have come. You take me too

much for granted; like the chirrup of a squirrel, let me say, or the

whistle of a bullfinch. But perhaps you think I inhabit these woods?”

“No; but a day like this is so full of miracles, why should we be

astonished at one more! I suppose you came on the train, but should not

be surprised to hear you started, like Pluto, from the earth. Anything

seems possible in such a sunshine.”

“You are right, and I have sprung from the earth. I have been buried

five mortal months in a law-suit out west, or else I should have been

here before. I hope my delay has made me none the less welcome.”

He was holding back a branch as he spoke, and his eyes were on a level

with hers. She felt caught as in a net, and struggled vainly to keep

down her color. “No,” said she, “welcome is a guest’s due, whether he

come early or late. I should be sorry to be lacking in the duties of a

hostess, though my drawing-room is somewhat more spacious than cosy,”

she continued, looking around on the fields into which they had emerged,

“and my facilities for bespeaking you welcome greater than my power to

make you comfortable.”

“Comfort is a satisfaction of the mind, rather than of the body. I am

not _un_comfortable, Miss Fairchild.” Then as he stooped to relieve her

of half her burden of trailing leaves and flowers, he exclaimed in a

matter-of-fact tone, “Your aunt is a notable woman, Miss Fairchild, I

admire her greatly.”

“What!” said she, “you have been to the cottage? You have seen Aunt

Belinda?”

“Of course,” laughed he, “or how should I be here? You have been sent

for, Miss Fairchild, and I am the humble bearer of your aunt’s commands.

But I forget, the practical has nothing to do with such a day. I am

supposed to have sprung from the ground, and to know by instinct, just

in what nook you were hiding from the sunlight. Very well. I acknowledge

that instinct is sometimes capable of going a great way.”

But this time her ready answer was lacking. She was wondering what her

aunt would think of this sudden appearance of a stranger whose name she

had never so much as mentioned.

“It is a pleasant rest to stand and look at a view like that, after a

summer of musty labor,” said he, gazing up the river with a truly

appreciative eye. “I do not wonder you carry the charm of the wild woods

in your laugh and glance, if you have been brought up in the sight of

such a view as that.”

“It has been my meat and drink from childhood,” said she, and wondered

why she wanted to say no more upon her favorite theme.

“Yet you tell me you love the city?”

“Too much to ever again be happy here.”

It was a slip for which her cheek burned and her lids fell, the moment

after. She had been thinking of Mr. Sylvester, and unconsciously spake

as she might have done, if he had been at her side, instead of this

genial-hearted young man. With a woman’s instinctive desire to retrieve

herself, she hurriedly continued, “Life is so full and large and deep in

a great town, if you are only happy enough to meet those who are its

blood and brain and sinew. One misses the rush of the great wheel of

time in a spot like this. The world moves, but we do not feel it; it is

like the quiet sweep of the stars over our heads. But in the city, days,

weeks and months make themselves felt. The universe jars under the feet

of hurrying masses. The story of the world is being written on pavement,

corridor, and dome, so that he who runs may read. One realizes he is

alive; the unit is part of the multiple. To those who are tired, God

gives the rest of the everlasting hills, but to those who are eager, he

holds out the city with its innumerable opportunities and incentives.

And I am eager,” she said. “The flower blooms on the mountain, and its

perfume is sweet, but the chariot sings as it rushes, and the noise of

its wheels is music in my ears.”

She paused, turned her face to the breeze, and seemed to forget she was

not alone. Clarence Ensign eyed her with astonishment; he had never

heard her speak like this; the earnest side of her great nature had

never been turned towards him before, and he felt himself shrink into

insignificance in its presence. What was he that he should pluck a star

from the heavens, to buckle on his breast! Wealth and position were a

match for beauty great as hers, and a kind heart current coin all the

world over, for a gentle disposition and a loving nature; but for

this—He turned away and in his abstraction switched his foot with his

cane.

“Then it was in New York that I met Cicely,” exclaimed Paula.

He shook off his broodings, turned with a manful gesture, and met her

sweet unfathomable eye, so brilliant with enthusiasm a moment ago, but

at this instant so softly deep and tender.

“And the friendship of Miss Stuyvesant is a precious thing to you?” said

he.

“Few things are more so,” was her reply.

He bit his lip and his brow grew lighter. After all, great souls

frequently cling to those of lesser calibre, provided they are true and

unflawed. He would not be discouraged. But his tone when he spoke had

acquired a reverence that did not lessen its music. “You are, then, one

of the few women who believe in friendship?”

“As I believe in heaven.”

Looking at her, he took off his hat. Her eye stole to his serious

countenance. “Miss Stuyvesant is to be envied,” said he.

“Are friends so rare?”

“Such friends are,” said he.

She gave him a bright little look. “Had you been with Miss Stuyvesant,

and she had expressed herself as I have done, you would have said, ‘Miss

Fairchild is to be envied,’ and you would have been nearer the truth

than now. Cicely’s friendship is to mine what an unbroken mirror is to a

little racing brook. It reflects but one image, while mine—” She could

not go on. How could she explain to this stranger that Cicely’s heart

was undivided in its regard, while hers owned allegiance to more than

her bosom friend.

“If I were with Miss Stuyvesant now,” he declared, too absorbed in his

own ideas to notice the break in hers, “I should still say in face of

this friendship, ‘Miss Stuyvesant is to be envied.’ I have no mind for

more than one thought to-day,” exclaimed he, with a look that made her

tremble.

There are some men who never know in what field to stay the current of

their impetuosity: Clarence Ensign did. He said no more than this of all

that was seething in his mind and heart. He felt that he must prove

himself a man, before he exercised a man’s privilege. Besides, his

temperament was mercurial, and never remained long under the bondage of

a severe thought, or an impressive tone of mind. He worshipped the

lofty, but it was with tabor and cymbal and high-sounding lute. A climb

over the stile at the foot of the hill was enough to restore him to

himself. It was therefore with merry eyes and laughing lips that they

approached the house and entered Miss Belinda’s presence.

There are some persons whose prerogative it is to carry sunshine with

them wherever they go. Clarence Ensign was one of these. Without an

effort, without any display of incongruous hilarity, he always succeeded

by the mere joyousness of his own nature, in calling forth all that was

bright and enjoyable in others. When therefore they stepped into the

quaint old-fashioned parlor, all prepared to receive them, Paula was not

surprised to perceive it brighten, and her aunts’ faces grow cheerful

and smiling. Who could meet Clarence Ensign’s laughing eye and not

smile? What did astonish her, however, was the sight of an elegant

basket of hot-house lowers perched on a table in the centre of the room.

It made her pause, and cast looks of inquiry at the demure countenance

of Miss Abby, and the quietly satisfied expression of her more

thoughtful aunt.

“A remembrance from the city!” said Mr. Ensign gracefully. “I thought it

might help to recall some happy hours to you.”

With a swelling of the heart which she could not understand, she leaned

over the ample cluster of roses and heliotrope. She felt as though she

could embrace them; they were more than flowers, they were the visible

emblem of all she had missed, and for which she had longed these many

months.

“I seem to receive the whole in the part,” said she.

He may or may not have understood her, but he saw she was gratified, and

that was sufficient. The afternoon flew by on wings of light. Miss

Belinda, who was not accustomed to holidays, but who thoroughly

appreciated them when they came, entered into the conversation with

zest; while Miss Abby’s unconscious expressions of pleasure were too

_naïve_ not to add to, rather than detract from the general enjoyment.

The twilight, with its good-bye, came all too soon.

“I have a request to make before I go,” said Mr. Ensign. He was standing

alone with Paula in the embrasure of the window, a few moments before

his departure. “When we see a flower nodding on a ledge above our heads,

we long for it; I have heard you talk of friendship, and a great desire

has seized me. Miss Fairchild will you be my friend?”

She gave him a startled glance that, however, soon settled into a mellow

radiant look of sympathy and pleasure.

“That is asking for something which if I hesitate to accord, it is

because the word, ‘friend,’ carries with it so much,” said she, with a

sweet seriousness that disarmed her words of any latent sting they might

otherwise have contained.

“I know it,” he replied, “and I am very bold to ask it upon so slight an

acquaintance; but life is short and real treasure is so scarce. You will

not deny me, Miss Fairchild?” Then seeing her look down, hastily

continued, “I have acquaintances by the score—friends who style

themselves thus, by the dozen, but no _friend_. I want one; I want you

for that one. Will you be it? I shall be jealous though, I warn you,” he

went on, with a cropping out of his mirthful nature; “I shall not be

pleased to observe the circle widened indefinitely. I shall want my own

place and no one else in my place.”

“No one else can fill the place once given to a friend. Each one has his

own niche.”

“And I am to have mine?” His look was firm, his eye steadfast.

“Yes,” she breathed.

With a proud stooping of his head, he took her hand and kissed it. The

action became him; he was tall and well made, and gallantry induced by

feeling, sat well upon him. In spite of herself, she thought of old-time

stories of the Norse chivalry; he stood so radiant and bent so low.

“I shall prize my friend at her queenly value,” said he; and without

more ado, uttered his farewell and took his departure.

* * * * *

“Paula!”

The young girl started from a reverie which had held her for a long time

enchained at that fast darkening window, and hastily looking up,

perceived her Aunt Belinda standing before her, with her eye fixed upon

her face, with a kind but searching glance.

“Yes, aunt.”

“You have not told me who this Mr. Ensign is. In all the letters you

wrote me you did not mention his name, I think.”

“No, aunt. The fact is, I did not meet him until a few days before I

left, and then only for an evening, you might say.”

“Indeed! that one evening seems to have made its impression. Tell me

something about him, Paula.”

“His own countenance speaks for him better than I can, aunt. He is good

and he is kind; an honest young man, who need fear the eye of no one. He

is wealthy, I am informed, and the son of highly respected parents. He

was first presented to me by Miss Stuyvesant, whose friend he is,

afterwards by Mr. Sylvester. His coming here was a surprise to me.”

Miss Belinda’s firm mouth, which had expanded at this dutiful response,

twitched with a certain amused expression over this last announcement.

Eying her niece with unrelenting inquiry, she pursued, “You have not

been happy for the last few weeks, Paula. Our life seems narrow to you;

you long to fly away to larger fields and more expansive skies.”

With a guilty droop of her head, Paula stole her hand into that of her

aunt’s.

“I do not wonder,” continued Miss Belinda, still watching the flushing

cheek and slightly troubled mouth of the lovely girl before her. “I once

breathed other air myself, and know well what charms lie beyond these

mountains. In giving you up for awhile, I gave you up forever, I fear.”

“No, no,” whispered the young girl, “I am always yours wherever I go.

Not that I am going away,” she hastily murmured.

Her aunt smiled and gently stroked her niece’s hand. “When the time

comes, I shall bid you God speed, Paula. I am no ogress to tie my dove’s

wings to her nest. Love and the home it provides are the natural lot of

women. None feel it more than those who have missed both.”

“Aunt!” Paula was shocked and perplexed. A breaking wave full of doubts

and possibilities, seemed to dash over her at this suggestion.

“Young men of judgment and principle do not come so many miles to see a

youthful maiden, without a purpose,” continued her aunt inexorably. “You

know that, do you not, Paula?”

“Yes; but the purpose may differ in different cases,” returned the young

girl hurriedly. “I would not like to believe that Mr. Ensign came here

with the one you give him credit for—not yet. You trouble me, aunt,”

pursued she, glancing tremulously about. “It is like opening a great

door flooded with sunshine, upon eyes scarcely strong enough to bear the

glimmer sifting through its cracks. I feel humiliated and—” She did not

finish, perhaps her thought itself was incomplete.

“If a light comes sifting through the cracks, I am satisfied,” said her

aunt in a lighter tone than common. And she kissed her niece, and went

smiling out of the room, murmuring to herself,

“I have been over-fearful; everything is coming right.”

There are moments when life’s great mystery overpowers us; when the

riddle of the soul flaunts itself before us unexplained, and we can do

no more than stand and take the rush of the tide that comes sweeping

down upon us. Paula was not the girl she was before she went to New

York. Love was no longer a dreamy possibility, a hazy blending of the

unknown and the fancied; its tale had been too often breathed in her

ear, its reality made too often apparent to her eye. But love to which

she could listen, was as new and fresh and strange, as a world into

which her foot had never ventured. That her aunt should point to a

certain masculine form, no matter how attractive or interesting, and

say, “Love and home are the lot of women,” made her blood rush back on

her heart, like a stream from which a dam has been ruthlessly wrenched

away. It was too wild, too sudden; a friend’s name was so much easier to

speak, or to contemplate. She did not know what to do with her own

heart, made to speak thus before its time; its beatings choked her;

everything choked her; this was a worse imprisonment than the other.

Looking round, her eye fell upon the flowers. Ah, was not their language

expressive enough, without this new suggestion? They seemed to lose

something in this very gain. She liked them less she thought, and yet

her feet drew near, and near, and nearer, to where they stood, exhaling

their very souls out in delicious perfume. “I am too young!” came from

Paula’s lips. “I will not think of it!” quickly followed. Yet the smile

with which she bent over the fragrant blossoms, had an ethereal beauty

in it, which was not all unmixed with the

“Light that never was on land or sea,

The consecration and the poet’s dream.”

“He has asked to be my friend,” murmured she, as she slowly turned away.

“It is enough; it must be enough.” But the blossom she had stolen from

the midst of the fragrant collection, seemed to whisper a merry nay, as

it nodded against her hand, and afterwards gushed out its sweet life on

her pure young breast.

XXIX.

MIST IN THE VALLEY.

“The true beginning of our end.”

—MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.

Mr. Ensign was not slow in developing his ideas of friendship. Though he

did not venture upon repeating his visit too soon, scarcely a week

passed without bringing to Paula a letter or some other testimonial of

his increasing devotion. The blindest eye could not fail to remark

whither he was tending. Even Paula was forced to acknowledge to herself

that she was on the verge of a flowery incline, that sooner or later

would bring her up breathless against the dread alternative of a decided

yes or no. Friendship is a wide portal, and sometimes admits love; had

it served her traitorously in this?

Her aunt who watched her with secret but lynx-eyed scrutiny, saw no

reason to alter the first judgment of that mysterious, “It is all coming

right,” with which she viewed the first symptoms of Paula’s girlish

appreciation of her lover. If eyes and lips could speak, Paula was

happy. The mournful shadows which of late had flitted with more or less

persistency over her face, had vanished in a living smile, which if not

deep, was cloudlessly radiant; and her voice when not used in speech,

was rippling away in song, as glad as a finch’s on the mountain side.

Miss Belinda was therefore very much astonished when one day Paula burst

into her presence, and flinging herself down on her knees, threw her

arms about her waist, crying,

“Take me away, dear aunt, I cannot, dare not stay here another day.”

“Paula, what do you mean?” exclaimed Miss Belinda, holding her back and

endeavoring to look into her face. But the young girl gently resisted.

“I have just had a letter from Cicely,” she returned in a low and

muffled voice. “She has seen Mr. Sylvester, and says he looks both wan

and ill. He told her, too, that he was lonely, and I know what that

means; he wants his child. The time has come for me to go back. He said

it would, and that I would know when it came. Take me, aunt, take me to

Mr. Sylvester.”

Miss Belinda, to whom self-control was one of the cardinal virtues,

leaned back in her chair and contemplated the eager, tear-stained face

that was now raised to hers, with silent scrutiny. “Paula,” said she at

last, “is that your only reason for desiring to return to New York?”

A flush, delicate as it was fleeting, swept over the dew of Paula’s

cheek. She rose to her feet and met her aunt’s eye, with a look of

gentle dignity. “No,” said she, “I wish to test myself. Birds that are

prisoned will caress any hand that offers them freedom. I wish to see if

the lure holds good when my wings are in mid-heaven.”

There was a dreamy cadence to her voice as she uttered that last phrase,

that startled her aunt. “Paula,” exclaimed she, “Paula, don’t you know

your own heart?”

“Who does?” returned Paula; then in a sudden rush of emotion threw

herself once more at her aunt’s side, saying, “It is in order to know

it, that I ask you to take me away.”

And Miss Belinda, as she smoothed back her darling’s locks, was obliged

to acknowledge to herself, that time has a way of opening, in the stream

of life, unforeseen channels to whose current we perforce must yield, or

else hopelessly strand upon the shoals.