MR. WADDY ACCOMPLISHES HIS RETURN
Opposite Mr. Belden’s house, which, about the time of his departure
from Newport, passed into the hands of his creditors, was the old
country place of the Janeway family. It was still in the possession of
the representative of that family, under a different name.
The late Mr. Janeway, though a proud and, as it finally appeared, a
bad man, remembered the inherited debt of his family to the Waddys,
and felt some aristocratic vanity in his tutelage of the young Ira,
our hero. A close intimacy of childish friendship grew up between Mr.
Janeway’s only child and daughter, Mary, and his young protégé. Young
Horace Belden, the handsome son of the next neighbour, Mr. Belden, the
great merchant, was also a companion of Miss Janeway; in fact, the
parents of these two destined them for each other. Adjoining estates,
large fortunes, good blood, beauty on both sides--the two fathers
thought the match a perfect one and the young people were taught to
consider it settled. Something unsettled it. Horace Belden unsettled it
by being himself and that self was, from early years, not a noble one.
He unsettled it in the mind of Mrs. Janeway, as he grew older, by what
he called his flirtation with Sally Bishop, a flaunting girl, daughter
of Mr. Janeway’s ex-coachman.
Belden, however, remained very devoted to Miss Janeway. He loved her as
much as was in his nature, and his pride was fully engaged in winning
her, the great match of the day and his by long convention. As he grew
older and no better, he began to consider this pure young lady as his
bond to purer life and mentally to throw on her the responsibility
of his future intended reformation. She must become his, or he would
revenge his disappointment, his wounded pride, and his failure of her
help and control in his proposed change of character, upon her, upon
society, and upon himself.
It was about this time that Mr. Janeway began to discover that too
great an intimacy was growing up between his protégé, Ira Waddy, and
his daughter. It was well enough while they were children, but the son
of a shopkeeper of Dullish Court, and clerk in the counting-house of
Belden & Co., was not for Miss Janeway, beauty, aristocrat, heiress,
belle. So Mr. Janeway was very distant to Ira Waddy, now a handsome,
high-spirited, quick-tempered, energetic young man, full of generous
candour and kindliness and gratitude to all the Janeways for the happy
and refining influences of their society and their world. The ladies
always took Ira’s part, but this only confirmed Mr. Janeway in his
purpose of making him uncomfortable. At last, this gentleman, finding
one day Ira tête-à-tête with Mary, quarrelled with him openly, and
finally forbade him the house, speaking very ill of his character.
It may have been too late. Whatever had passed between Ira and Miss
Janeway that might fitly be known, Belden knew. Ira Waddy, trustful as
he was true, had given his unreserved confidence to Belden, friend of
the lady and of him.
Miss Janeway was twenty, two years younger than Ira Waddy, when he,
suddenly, one July, fifteen years before this Return of his, went off
to those regions where his namesake river rolls. Five years after, the
crash in her father’s fortunes came. He became an utterly dishonoured
man, financially, morally. He could bear his guilt; not its discovery.
He died, as it was best he should. His daughter, belle and reputed
heiress, did as scores of young ladies of New England have done: she
became a teacher in a school and at last a governess. By-and-by, an
old lover of Mrs. Janeway arrived. His constancy and devotion through
ill-report touched the lady, and she consented to share her distress
and her poverty with his humble fortunes at the West. They did not long
remain humble. Where he owned a farm, there a town sprouted; where a
lot, thither came a railroad demanding a station. His hillsides became
stone quarries; his fields, coal mines. His wealth swelled like a
fungus of the forest. His wife died and he soon followed her, fairly
bullied out of existence by his own stupendous success. His whole
property he bequeathed to his step-daughter on the one condition of a
change of name. He thus, as it were, ceased to be childless and avoided
contributing to the prosperity of his former rival’s family.
Miss Mary Janeway, the governess of Clara and Diana and Julia Wilkes,
became Miss Mary Sullivan, the woman of fortune. She repurchased the
Janeway estate, the house where her happy youth had passed, and it was
there she had received Diana.
Mrs. Cecilia Tootler, in combination with Miss Sullivan, managed the
charities of their neighbourhood. Miss Sullivan, having no incumbrance
of a Thomas Tootler and Cecilia, junior, could superintend also those
preventive charities, the schools, utilising here her own experience.
In the sick-room or the home of the poor, the sorrowful, or the guilty,
these two ladies made themselves welcome. The elder with her deep
experience had learnt what others need of wisest sympathy, and the
younger came like a gleam of cheerful, untarnished hope.
Cecilia in vain endeavoured to persuade her friend to see Sally Bishop.
“She is dying,” said Cecilia. “She is punished for whatever wrong she
may have done. But peace of mind is totally denied her. Remorse is
killing her faster than her disease. All my consolations are vain. She
needs someone better and wiser than I. She needs you.”
“Has she asked for me?” said Miss Sullivan.
“No, not to see you,” replied Cecilia, “but she speaks of you often
with great distress. Do come and see her--perhaps she may have some
explanation to give. Mary, Mary, what is this mystery?”
“Dear Cecilia,” answered Mary, “it is not because Sally Bishop has been
a very bad woman that I avoid her. But she was long ago the willing
and exulting means of proving to me not only her own viciousness, but
the foul treachery and utterly coarse, detestable baseness of heart
and mind of one I trusted as I now trust only God. It was right that
I should know the truth, but I must feel a personal horror of a woman
whose ill-omened duty it was to tell me to despair and lose my faith
and my happiness together. And Sally Bishop did her duty as if it were
a privilege and beheld my misery with vile, vulgar, shameless triumph.
I abhor the thought of her.”
Cecilia said nothing more at the time--indeed, there was nothing
she could say. But as the days passed, Sally Bishop grew hopelessly
worse, and her father kept himself boozy all the while. Horse-jockeys,
pro-slavery judges, gamblers, and collectors of democratic customs
sometimes love their families.
Miss Sullivan had just received Clara’s summons to Diana’s bed of
death; she was preparing to go that evening, when Mrs. Tootler drove up
in haste.
“Sally Bishop cannot live through the day,” said the lady. “She demands
to see you. She has a confession to make. Coming death has absolved her
from a pledge of wicked secrecy.”
And so, by the deathbed, Miss Sullivan, whose best and brightest hopes
had been destroyed by the infamy of this poor, dying wretch, listened
to her confession and pitied and pardoned her. Sally Bishop, vain
and immodest, had nursed in her heart against young Ira Waddy the
bitter spite of a shameless woman scorned. Belden, who was her first
instructor in shamelessness, discovered this, and used his power to
delude her into the joint revenge of the letters. Oh, what carefully
villainous letters Belden made of them! how brutally treacherous! how
vile! Sally Bishop took the correspondence in Ira Waddy’s writing to
Miss Janeway.
“There,” said she, “you heiress, you great lady, that have stolen away
my lover, because you are rich, and are engaged to him without your
father’s knowledge, see what letters he used to write to me and how he
spoke of you and his interviews with you. He ruined me because I loved
him, and made of me what you see in my own letters, and I was willing
that he should marry you because he always promised that I should be
first. But now he is trying to get rid of me. He finds me in the way.”
Miss Janeway read the letters as one reads a fascinating tale of
horror. There could be no doubt of them; hand, style, circumstances--it
was inevitable they were his. Poor, innocent girl--she would afterward
see the world and its treacheries, but never any so base as this. Her
lover, with her maiden kiss upon his lips--agony! to leave her and
write this.
What could she do? Die--and all the lovely sounds of nature that
she had learned to love with him from childhood said to her, “die
drearily.” But it was dreary life that was to be hers and slow-coming
patience in her desolate retirement from the world, and experience of
domestic shame and shame-crushed life and disgraced death in a darkened
household and strict poverty and unaccustomed labour, and by all this
a character forming--another woman than the gay, impetuous, proud,
loving girl of days flattered by fulness of prosperity. Another in all
but loving, and now she must love no more one she could not forget,
who had fled when he learnt from her cold letter that his falseness to
her was known, she could not sully her pen to tell him how, nor she, a
pure woman, hear or speak or think of him more. Love!--what could she
ever love again with anything more than quiet interest--she the pale
schoolmistress, lonely as that betrothed Mary of the first Ira Waddy,
preserver of her grandfather at Bunker Hill?
So this pale schoolmistress was calm and patient and learnt by her own
wrong (the only teaching) to hate all wrong and to know it under any
specious guise of quietism; and having something much to pardon in her
own life, she grew to pardon other ruined lives. She saw how easily
sorrow may become despair. A nobler woman she was becoming all these
years, but still solitary; loving the many, but lonely of the few to
love, until she found in Clara and Diana worthy objects of the closest
and tenderest affection.
And now, almost forgetting the wrong this poor dying victim of Belden’s
villainy had done her, in the sweet pleasure of forgiveness and the
dear passion of reviving love, Miss Sullivan must go to the deathbed of
her she called daughter, whose sad story she knew. She called Cecilia
and resigned to her the dying woman, now at peace.
“I cannot tell you now, dear Cecilia,” she said. “I must go. I must
think of what I have heard. Only, believe me, she has made me happy,
happy again as a child. God forgive her, as I do.”
She went to her house by the same paths where her brilliant youth had
walked; through the gate where she had so often stood for moments of
the shy and lingering tenderness of parting; under the ancient elms
whose gracefulness had drooped over her and her exiled lover in many
a moonlight of pensive hopefulness. The glory had come back again.
The freshness of youth and everlasting springtime was over all the
world. She need never again force herself to say that it was good and
beautiful; a brightness of transfiguring hope went before her and
revealed beneath the drifting away of grey dimness and tearful mists
the light of beauty unchangeable and goodness infinite.
Miss Sullivan was to depart on the same journey that Diana had made
with such hopeful joy of heart. She had one little act of preparation
to do. She took the Testament, her own childish gift, which she had
found still the talisman of life to a drowning man, and pressing it
very tenderly to her lips, she hung it about her neck. Its touch sent a
warm thrill of longing to her fondly waking heart and, with the thrill,
a blush shot youth again through her cheeks.
“God willed,” she said, “that I who had driven him into exile should be
there at his return. How could I not know and feel that one who still
in drowning and in death clung to this precious talisman of purest
Life, could never be what lies had made me deem him?”
And she went on her journey to be with sorrow and death; but with a joy
that no chance of any dying, to-day or to-morrow, could take away. Her
joy was of eternity, for she had learnt that love such as hers can
never be born and grow and be, unless it is founded upon fullest truth
and worthiest worth and most honourable honour in the heart of him she
loved--and truth and worth and honour are imperishable and eternal.
In those weeks, while Mr. Waddy was chasing sullenly to overtake
revenge, Diana was dying among her tender friends--Clara, forlorn
of her noble sister, for whom earth was not found worthy; Dunstan,
Endymion, watching, while night after night, the deity of his life and
of his heaven fading, perished slowly away until, one violet dawn, she
was not. But the sun came up and shone upon his path of manly duty, and
he will bravely walk therein, conscious that a beautiful spirit is near
him and will never vanish from the sky of his visions.
* * * * *
Ira Waddy was on his return from the West. Revenge had passed away from
his heart. He had seen his enemy die horribly, but not by his hand.
Death had risen up terribly between him and murder. Merited revenge
had overtaken the guilty, but had not chosen him for executioner.
And as he turned his face again eastward, he was glad for this--glad
that the weight of blood, which he would have assumed unshrinkingly,
was spared him. With this storm of deadly-meaning pursuit, with its
dark sullenness, unillumined until the final thunder-bolt fell--with
this closing crash, all the long accumulating bitterness passed away
from Ira Waddy’s nature. Heaven was clear and cloudless over him. All
mysteries were swept away. It was a new dawn, and a glorious. And
he hastened eastward, every moment, long as it seemed, bringing him
nearer, nearer----
He had left poor Budlong under the wise and kind protection of Peter
Skerrett. And there was another, a woman, who would not leave the old
man’s bedside, but was there a silent, humble nurse, often bursting
into bitter tears, when he inarticulately murmured to her feeble
words, which only her quickened ears could construe into intentions of
forgiveness.
To arrange Mr. Budlong’s affairs at Newport, and his own, Mr. Waddy
passed that way on his eastward journey. He arrived, as is usual, in
the fresh morning. It was still early autumn, but Vanity Fair had
struck its booths, taken down its _étalage_, and gone into winter
quarters. The season had ended sadly; everyone was saddened for Diana.
Her inspiring beauty had been the brilliant presence that made this
summer brighter than any remembered summer. There was many a dry old
beau who, stimulated by the thought of her into a brief belief that he
could be young, ardent, frank, and brave again, found himself looking
with moistened eyes at the places she would illumine no more and
feeling that a glory and a hope had passed away.
It would have all seemed rather dreary to Mr. Waddy, walking there
alone, but no desolate spot of desert earth is dreary to a man who
feels the warmth of his own happiness making gardens sun-shiny,
roseate, wherever he treads. Not drearily, then, but full of sad
sympathy, Mr. Waddy went toward the house of his gentle kinsman and
friend; thinking most of Clara, now so widowed by the death of one
dearer than a sister.
“I will ask her who is this Miss Sullivan, whom Granby spoke of as
their governess,” he said, because his heart was full of gratitude.
“Perhaps it may prove that she and my kind friend are one, and I can
discover her residence and thank her suitably.”
He avoided the main entrance to his kinsman’s grounds, and took a
narrow, winding path, hedged with rich, close growth of arbor vitæ. At
last he reached the house, and passed into the library to wait. As he
entered, a graceful figure in black disappeared through another door.
She had evidently been sitting solitary reading, for the leaves of a
little book on the table were still fluttering. It had a look somehow
familiar. Mr. Waddy stepped toward the table and picked it up.
It was his own Testament, gift of childish friendship confirmed by
after love, companion of all his better moments, and talisman of safety
to his wide-wandering, bewildered life.
He raised the time-worn, tear-worn, wave-worn volume to his lips and,
sitting down, covered his face with his hands, and yielded for a moment
to the need of happy tears.
He was aroused by a gentle touch upon his shoulder. He turned. It was
his old love; his love unforgotten, through all those years of desolate
exile, and now--now, his own love forever.
And this was the full Return of Mr. Ira Waddy.
THE END
* * * * *
=“The impression on the reader is so strong that he finds his grip on
the book grow strained in spite of himself.”=--_Boston Transcript._
[Illustration]
In the Dwellings of the Wilderness
By C. BRYSON TAYLOR
With two decorations in color. 12mo, $1.25
Most readers will class this as a ghost story, but it is so plausibly
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_N. Y. Globe_:--“To strike a note of weird horror, and to sustain that
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_Boston Beacon_:--“A tale of mystery and cumulative interest
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Henry Holt and Company
Publishers (VIII ’04) New York
=2d printing of “a book of extraordinary interest as a study from the
inside of the ‘inwardness’ of a genius.=”--_Times Saturday Review._
The Diary of a Musician
Edited by DOLORES M. BACON
With decorations and illustrations by CHARLES EDWARD HOOPER and H.
LATIMER BROWN.
12mo. $1.50 net. (By mail $1.62.)
A picture of the soul of a genius, naïvely unconscious of the
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“Especially interesting; ... many amusing situations.”--_Public
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.