“Who never loved, ne’er suffered; he feels nothing
Who nothing feels but for himself alone;
And when we feel for others, reason reels,
O’erloaded from her path, and man runs mad.
As love alone can exquisitely bless,
Love alone feels the marvellous of pain--
Opens new veins of torture in the soul,
And wakes the nerves where agonies are born.
Young.
Many a weary hour, on the night of Helen’s departure, did Lotte sit
watching by her little charge while it slumbered, plying her ever-busy
needle in making its clothes, with which it was very scantily provided.
Ever and anon she raised her eyes from her work, to gaze upon the sweet
face of the little hapless innocent, or to listen to its breathing,
soft and low, fearful that it might awake and weep, and she be unable to
pacify it.
After ten o’clock had chimed, she began to find the hours pass slowly
and painfully. Still, however, the child slept, and still she worked on.
At length the deep tone of the church-clock bell gave forth the hour of
one, and she became affrighted at Helen’s absence.
Her eyes ached painfully. She had worked many hours, and had continued
to do so, if only to pass away the lone, long vigil she was keeping.
She had been weeping, too, for she was weak in body, and that created
a depression of spirits which found relief only in tears. She was
harrassed by strange fears and vague doubts. Why, why was Helen so long
away? What could have happened?--some dreadful accident, perhaps--she
thought of nothing but that; for what else would or could keep a young
mother from her first-born in the very commencement of its babyhood. She
grew sick at heart; for if her painful foreboding proved only true, what
would be the result?
Hour after hour came and went; but though she listened to every footfall
as it approached, and believed, until it went past the house, that
it must be that of her late companion, she was disappointed in every
instance. Helen came not.
Once or twice the little babe awoke and cried, but she knelt down by its
side, laid her own soft, innocent cheek close to its little velvet face,
and soothed its low, fretful sobbing again into slumber.
During the long night she was conscious of a strange tremulous motion in
the room.
It was not that she shivered with the cold, or trembled from
nervousness, but the sensation was that of vibration, as though heavy
waggons were perpetually passing along the street, but making no sound.
Several times her attention was aroused by a loud clicking repeated at
intervals. A peculiar, unusual sound it was, but she heeded it little.
She reflected that in the many, many nights she had sat up to work, she
had often heard unaccountable noises.
The blue dawn stole into the room through the window curtains, and
paling the feeble ray of her solitary candle, found her wan and haggard,
alone with the child. And now the little creature, needing nourishment,
awoke, and cried piteously, and would not be pacified. Lotte was greatly
distressed at first, and wept with the child, for she knew not what to
do.
But she remembered that it did not become her in the position of trust
in which she was placed to be faint of heart. It was necessary to be
calm, composed, and collected, in order that she might deliberate upon
the best course to pursue.
She paced the room with the child, and presently remembered that upon
an upper floor there dwelt a young married woman, whose husband, a
house-painter, was away engaged in his business at a gentleman’s mansion
in the country. This young woman, Lotte knew had a child about three
months old, and to her she resolved to go for advice and assistance in
her almost distracting dilemma.
Strange, when she tried to open her room-door, it resisted her strongest
efforts. At first she thought it was locked, but she perceived that at
the top it pressed against the casing forcibly.
With a desperate wrench she forced it open, and made her way up the
stairs, feeling the strange tremulous vibration more than ever. She
found the room-door of the young person she sought much in the same
condition as her own, and she perceived, on effecting a forcible
entrance, that the tenant of the room was hastily dressing herself. She
wore on her features a terrified expression, and when she saw Lotte she
hastily inquired what had brought her there.
In a few brief words Lotte explained the condition in which she had been
left with the infant. The young woman, with motherly instinct, at once
took the child from Lotte, and quickly stilled its cries with nature’s
nourishment, but, as she did so, she said with the same alarmed look in
her eyes--
“What is the matter with the house?”
“The house!” echoed Lotte, every little incident connected with the
sounds she had heard during the night in a moment flashed through her
mind.
“Yes,” returned the young woman, “I seemed to have shaken and rocked
in my bed all night; I have hardly slept a wink until I could bear it
no--hark!”
A low, dull, heavy rumbling crash was plainly heard by both; the house
seemed to swing backwards and forwards, both felt a frightful giddiness
seize them, the flooring seemed to heave up with them, then followed a
dull, heavy boom, and the house seemed to shake to the centre.
Both girls shrieked, for they saw fissures like forked lightning run
down the walls, and at the same moment loud shouts rose up in the
street, mingled with screams and cries for help, and then the house,
though quieter, began again its tremulous motion.
“Merciful Heaven!” gasped Lotte, “a house has fallen down, and this will
fall too!”
“Take my child!” cried the woman, hardly able to speak from a faintness
which had seized her. “Let us run out into the street!”
It was following a natural impulse which had brought every one of the
inmates from their beds, and hurried them into the street too. Lotte,
still holding the woman’s child, found time to snatch up her mantle and
bonnet, before she followed the example of the young woman.
A large number of persons had already assembled. Bricklayers were
speedily at hand, a strong body of police were soon on the spot, and
efforts were at once commenced to clear away the _débris_ of the fallen
house, under which many poor creatures were presumed to be buried.
The house in which Lotte had resided, and from which she had just
escaped, was one of a block of eight. Erected before the Building Act
came into operation, the wonder was, not that they should now have come
down, but that they had not fallen before. The corner house, in its
descent, dragged two others with it, leaving the rest in so tottering
a condition, that none of the residents were allowed to return to them;
men were however, appointed, under the police surveyor, to remove the
most dangerous portions of the quivering walls, and the furniture in the
dwellings, as soon as they were sufficiently supported to admit of men
entering them with safety.
Lotte was thus once more thrown upon the world, under trying and painful
circumstances. Worn out as she was, she did not, however, give way to
helpless despair, but nerved herself for the task she saw she should
have to undergo.
She returned to the young woman, and recovered Helen’s child, which
she pressed to her own gentle bosom, and covered it carefully with her
mantle. She then made her way to the police station, gave a general
description of her little property to the inspector, told him she would
send a person to fetch it, and then made her way at once whither she
knew she should be befriended, and where she could obtain all assistance
in rearing Helen’s child, until Helen came forward to claim it--if she
ever came at all.
Lotte believed that she knew Helen’s true nature; and to know this was
to make her convinced that scarcely anything short of death would
have detained her from her child--that child born under such strange,
mysterious, and unhappy circumstances.
Lotte, it need hardly be said, directed her footsteps to the residence
of Mr. Bantom, or that she was there warmly welcomed; but after
the first few words of greeting, she suddenly alighted upon a full
comprehension of a startling difficulty in her position.
Helen had obtained from her a solemn promise not to disclose that she
had become the mother of a child, unless with her sanction.
When Mrs. Bantom, in her fussiness and gladness at seeing Lotte, drew
aside her mantle to take it off, she discovered the child.
“Dear heart!” she cried, with wondrous surprise; “what a blessed little
babby!”
Then Mrs. Bantom turned her eyes upon Lotte, inquiringly, and on seeing
her thin, alabaster face, she gave a gulp, and uttered an ejaculation.
The instant the worthy, humble creature gave vent thus to the suspicion
that flashed through her mind, Lotte understood her position. It was
impossible to keep down a scarlet flush that covered her neck and face,
or to prevent it dying away, and leaving her face of a deathly hue,
or to help feeling as if she should sink down upon the earth and die,
almost happy in the notion that her spirit should be so released from
this world of care and pain.
Mrs. Bantom noticed the spasm which passed over her features and said
nothing, though she felt sorely--sorely grieved; but she removed Lotte’s
cloak and bonnet, and forced her gently in a chair.
“You are ill, child, and weak,” said the good woman, in a husky voice;
“and don’t ought to be out--in--in---your condition.”
Lotte tried to speak, but her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth.
“Oh, my child--my child!” sobbed out Mrs. Bantom; “my poor motherless
girl--what has happened? Tell me, child--all; I--I--won’t think harshly
of you, nor speak unkindly to you; and I may help you--I may--with God’s
help, I may.”
Poor Lotte! This undeserved suspicion was very hard to hear. She looked
back through her past life, and felt that she ought not to have been
thus mistrusted; but she recollected that Mrs. Bantom knew little more,
of her than that she was a young girl, living quite alone, and was
thus open to temptation, or to be led astray. It was natural she should
harbour such a thought as that which now evidently possessed her mind;
and, however much it might rankle in heart, Lotte forgave her.
As soon as she could speak, she said--
“Mrs. Bantom, you wrong me. This child is not mine. At present a mystery
surrounds its birth, which I am not at liberty to explain. I thought,
indeed, Mrs. Bantom, that I should not have had even to say so much to
you; for, of all who know me, I should suspect you of being the last who
could or would think so very ill of me.”
Mrs. Bantom was now all the other way. She was only too delighted to
catch at the very smallest assurance of Lotte’s innocence, and she over
and over again expressed her readiness and desire to be of service
to her, and, in truth, she afforded her assistance she could not have
dispensed with, inasmuch as the good lady had recently presented her
husband with a tenth blessing, and she was, therefore, able to take the
child of Helen Grahame, and nourish it as her own.
At the expiration of a fortnight, Lotte had sufficiently recovered,
by care and self-attention, her strength, and, by the aid and help of
Bantom, to instal herself once more in an apartment of her own--in a
house, which, by the way, she satisfied herself was strongly built, and
not likely to tumble down as soon as she took possession. She had, also,
so far recovered her position, that the persons by whom (through the
instrumentality of Flora Wilton) she had been formerly employed gave her
again, upon application, so much work that she was enabled to employ an
assistant, who could undertake the part of wet nurse as well, for Lotte
would not part with the custody of Helen’s child under any advice,
suggestion, or proposal.
She had heard nothing of Helen. She was wholly at a loss to conjecture
what had become of her, and she meditated one evening a visit to her
house in the Park, with a hope that she might gain some tidings of her.
With her brother as yet she had not communicated, but she had contrived,
through Bantom--who, in his homely way, would perform any meed of
service for her with the greatest cheerfulness, though he was not
altogether a safe agent to employ on secret service--to ascertain that
he was well, though perplexed and grieved at her mysterious absence.
All this time, had she thought of Mark Wilton?
Ah, yes! Not with any notion of a love-passage ever occurring between
them during the vicissitudes and trials of her patiently endured life
of toil, because, whenever such vision presented itself before her, she
chased it away, as a mockery, a delusion, and a snare. No; she thought
not of him as a lover in anticipation. She did not even think, in her
heart, that he looked upon her in any other way than in a spirit of
kindness--with perhaps more earnestness than men commonly look upon a
pleasant female face. But she thought of him as one whom she would,
of all men in the world, have soonest chosen to be her life-companion.
Their stations being widely apart, she knew, or thought she knew, that
an event so instinct with happiness could never, never come to pass.
She would sometimes squeeze her hands together, and sigh very
deeply--some would say bitterly--as she ejaculated--
“How happy I am to think we do not meet! How very happy I ought to be
that I do not see him often--I should so love him. And she who wins him,
how beneficent will Heaven be to her.”
One evening, alone with the child, as she sat bending over it
caressingly, and thinking thus, Mark Wilton stood before her.
She uttered a faint cry and rose to her feet. She knew not whether to
welcome him frankly, or to wait until he spoke.
He recognised her embarrassment, and betrayed some confusion also, for
he saw the child upon her knee. His colour went and came, and his heart
heat violently. He did not look so pleasantly at her as before.
“I must beg to be excused for my intrusion,” he said, in a low grave
tone; “I come, however, to prepare you for a visit from your brother.
Are you prepared to face him?”
There was something in his tone and manner so harsh and changed from the
style in which he had previously addressed her; so different, indeed,
from the expression his face wore when, looking up, her eyes suddenly
encountered his beaming on her, for no other word would fitly give their
expression, that involuntarily she felt hurt and indignant.
A reproach was implied. She felt that she had deserved no reproach--at
least from him. His curtness seemed to her out of place, and if she
refused to think it impertinent, she felt that it was as unjust as it
appeared unkind.
She turned her clear, intelligent eyes upon him, and while a roseate
hue spread itself over her face, she responded to his words by the
monosyllable, uttered in a tone of inquiry--
“Sir?”
Again he looked at the little laughing, dark-eyed babe which she held so
lovingly in her arms, and his blood seemed to freeze in his veins.
“I really,” he said abruptly, “know not how to address you--I suppose by
the married appellative.”
Lotte felt her face and forehead burn as if they were on fire. Her
usually mild eye glittered like a diamond.
“I really cannot see, Mr. Wilton,” she answered, “the slightest
necessity for your afflicting yourself with any supposition concerning
one so humble as myself.”
He was nettled by her glance, and by the manner of her speech.
“It is easy to see,” he said, “that you have fled from your brother to
form some connection of which you were convinced beforehand he would not
approve, and that you still fear to face him by striving to keep your
abode secret from him, or you are under the command to do so of the
base, the contemptible, the--sneaking, the--the d----d scoundrel who has
cajoled you into taking the most unhappy course you have adopted.”
He looked round fiercely, and spoke loudly, as though he anticipated the
individual he had loaded with such strong epithets would step forth to
answer for himself.
Lotte became as white as a sheet, and trembled in every limb. Her lips
quivered so that she could not speak; but she pointed to the door with a
frantic gesture, as if bidding him begone.
“No!” he said, with an angry frown on his flushed brow, “I shall not
begone until I have seen the rascal who has so grossly deceived you.
He shall well explain the motives which have led him to induce you to
descend to such unworthy artifices----”
“Hold!” almost shrieked Lotte, as unconsciously she pressed Helen’s child
to her bosom; an act he noted almost with fury. “How dare you thus speak
to me?--I--I--Mr. Wilton--I would, out of the reverence in which I hold
your gentle sister, for the benefits she has conferred on me--speak to
you with respect--but this outrage--this attack upon me drives me from
myself. I did not expect to be thus cruelly insulted--by--by you.”
A gush of tears checked further utterance, and her voice dropped at the
last word.
Truly in her day-dreams she had never pictured his face turned upon her
with an expression so harsh as that which now it bore; and when in her
imaginings his voice breathed its soft, melodious accents in her ear, it
had no such tone as this. Mark felt his breast aflame, when he saw her
weep, and heard the acknowledgment implied in the reference to himself.
He would have given worlds, even at that moment, to have been enabled
to have folded his arms tenderly round her, and kissed away those tears,
which he had himself brought into her sweet eyes.
But there was the little child, yet close hugged to her bosom. If
she were a wife, he had, he felt, been scandalously cozened out of a
priceless treasure; if she dare lay claim to no such title, he could
never think of her more--unless to loathe her very name.
He assumed a cold manner, although his breast was as a seething caldron,
and recommenced.
“You may place, madam, what interpretation you please upon my language;
and I am equally at liberty to interpret your conduct.----”
“I deny your right to do any such thing!” she interrupted, vehemently;
“you are here unbidden sir. If you bear a message from my brother to me,
I ask of you only to deliver it to me--and to leave me; if you have no
such message, I request you to depart at once?”
“But----” exclaimed Mark, as if to explain.
“I will hear from you, sir, nothing more than my brother’s words, if you
have been entrusted with them,” persisted Lotte, indignantly.
“You shall have them,” said Mark, in a freezing tone; “still, I
imagined, as a friend----
“A friend!” echoed Lotte, bitterly.
“A friend!” roared Mark, with a rather startling emphasis, forgetting
his assumed coldness.
“I loved and esteemed your sister, sir, as a friend,” exclaimed Lotte,
in a tone of earnest feeling. She bit her lips to repress the sob that
gushed up to her throat---“but you----”
“I am answered!” he exclaimed in a low tone as she paused. “I had a weak
and foolish fancy that--but it is dissipated, gone--for ever. I see now
I stand but in the light of a meddlesome intruder, and have no title to
ask from you any explanation of your mysterious conduct.”
“None whatever!” said Lotte firmly.
“Enough, madam,” he returned in an icy tone. “I have but then to say
that your brother having, by means he will himself explain, discovered
your abode, will be here to night to see you.”
Lotte bowed, and remained silent.
Mark twisted his hat round and round, looked at the door and gazed
wistfully at her, but she stood immoveable, she pressed the infant to
her bosom, and she never once raised her eyes to his.
Her face was white as marble, yet he was sure he never saw her look
so handsome--so beautifully interesting. Mark lingered. Could she be a
guilty creature?
It seemed impossible. Yet that child! coupled with her sudden flight,
her continued and inexplicable absence. What other interpretation could
he put upon her conduct?
He gave a slight “Hem,” to clear his voice, and then said--
“You will see your brother when he comes, this evening?”
Her eyelids slightly trembled.
“Why do you ask that question?” she asked, sternly.
“Because,” he returned almost fiercely, “he will not come to you if you
wish him not to do so, for then he will know that he should _not_ come.”
Lotte seemed to feel that she should fall into an hysterical paroxysm if
this interview were to be prolonged. Yet her pride would not suffer
her to yield, or to make an observation which would take the form of an
admission either for or against herself.
“I shall be at home,” she observed, laconically.
“Which is to imply that he may come or remain away at his own
inclining?” said Mark between his teeth.
She bowed her head without reply.
He gave one wild glance at her.
“Guilty and hardened!” he muttered, and rushed from the room.
She sank half-lifeless upon the sofa.
Mark, with furious haste, made his way to the office of Lotte’s brother,
and with a kind of incoherent burst of strange remarks, informed him
that he had had an interview with his sister.
“Did she say she wished to see me?” inquired Charley, with a full
certainty of an affirmative reply.
“No,” returned Mark, shortly.
Charley looked at him with wondering eyes.
“Had she a fe--female--a young lady with her?” he inquired, expecting
that the presence of Helen Grahame might have been the occasion of her
reservation.
“No,” returned Mark, in the same voice; “she had a child in her arms.”
He strode abruptly away as he concluded.
Charley staggered back. A bullet through his body could not have
inflicted upon him a greater shock.
A thousand conjectures flashed through his mind; and he paced his room
in perturbed agony. Who could give him an inkling of her betrayer?--for
that she had been basely betrayed he was sure. He could think of no one
to aid him but Vivian, and him he knew not where to find.
Yet he did meet with him, and that while on his frenzied way to see his
sister.
In a few hurried, agonized words, he told Hal, who was unacquainted with
Lotte’s absence, of his discovery of her abode, of Mark’s visit and its
result.
“I know Lotte,” said Hal, with marked impressiveness, and a knitted
brow. “I know and esteem Mark Wilton also. I have occasion to do so,
Charley; but he or any man had better think well ere they utter
one sentence or half a word to defame Lotte’s truth or purity in my
hearing.”
“Do you not think, then----”
“For shame, Charley. By Heaven I would stake my life upon her virtue and
her innocence!”
“But Mark----”
“Is hasty, impetuous--forms his conclusions too rashly. You are about
to visit her--judge for yourself. There may be some mystery hanging over
her movements, but she can, she will explain all. I would hazard all
I might ever hope for in this world that you will prove her only like
golden ore--the purer for the fiery ordeal she may have had to undergo.”
“God bless you, Hal, for those comforting words! they have relieved my
heart of much bitter agony,” cried Charley, fervidly.
“Ay!” responded Hal, shrugging his shoulders, “but you should have had
faith in Lotte. She deserves it if ever one of her sex did. I am on my
way to meet Mark Wilton, and it shall go hard but I disabuse his mind of
any false notions he may have taken into his head.”
Charley wrung his hand.
“I heard that you were going abroad, Hal; is this true?” he asked.
“It was my intention,” he said, hastily; “it may be necessary yet. A
singular event has, however, occurred to detain me for the present in
England, and of which I am not at liberty now to speak, but you will,
no doubt, some day hear; and if you should not--well my fate will be of
little consequence then to anybody--least of all to myself.”
He waved his hand hurriedly, and hastened away.
Charley watched him for a moment, thoughtfully, and then he proceeded to
his sister’s quiet and humble lodging.
On reaching the house he found the street door ajar, and he entered
without noise. Previous inquiries had made him acquainted with the room
she occupied, and he stole up to it silently.
Her room-door was partly open, and lie peeped in.
He saw Lotte seated at work upon the sofa. At her knee was a bassinet,
in which lay a sleeping child.
A pang shot through his frame, and every limb quivered.
Lotte looked paler and thinner than when last they parted, and she
seemed to have been weeping. She did not raise her eyes from her work,
but her needle went swiftly and continuously.
He glided into the room and stood before her; she heard him not, nor did
she see him.
In a low tone he said--
“Lotte!”
She started, rose up with her face towards him, and remained motionless;
but she bent upon him an intensely appealing look, which seemed to ask
him to look down through her eyes to her heart and read her soul.
He did gaze into their clear depths, then he turned his eyes upon the
child; once more he looked into her luminous orbs shining upon him like
stars, and he opened wide his arms.
“My dear sister!” he exclaimed, with deep emotion.
From her bosom burst an hysterical cry. She sprang forward and laid
her head upon his breast, sobbing as though her poor sorely tried heart
would break.