THE FAIR RIVALS
How am I changed? My hopes were once like fire;
I loved and I believed that life was love.
How am I lost? How high did I aspire!
Above heaven’s winds, my spirit once did move
All nature by my heart and mind, to make
A paradise on earth, for one dear sake.
I love—but I believe in love no more.
I still aspire—but hope not. And from sleep,
All vainly must my weary brain implore
Its long lost flattery now. I wake to weep,
And sit through the long day, gnawing the core
Of my bitter heart, and like a miser keep—
Since none in what I feel take thought or pleasure—
To my own soul its self-consuming treasure.
_Shelley._
And thus Leda, Baroness Von Bruyin, had told her heart’s history to
Tudor Hereward’s young wife.
No words can describe its effect on Lilith.
She sat in the “gloaming,” silent and motionless, her still, white face
invisible to the lady, who, after finishing her story, fell into
thought, seeming to brood over the past.
This, then—mused Lilith—this peerless, regal beauty was the Miss Von
Kirschberg, the woman whom Tudor Hereward had passionately loved, and by
whom he had been cast off, only on the evening before he had married
her—Lilith—to please his dying father, and to be revenged upon his false
love! Oh! the bitter wrong! the bitter, bitter dishonor of the wrong!
Lilith pressed her hands upon her white face, in an anguish too deep for
tears.
Madame Von Bruyin saw nothing of that in the gloaming. Presently she
spoke again:
“Strange—strange; but since Herr Von Bruyin passed away I seem to
understand his character better than I ever did before! More than ever
before I seem to feel the pure, tender, unselfish love he lavished upon
me, from my earliest infancy, even until the day of his death—‘until the
day of his death?’ What am I saying? Uttering hastily, and with
parrot-like repetition, false, unmeaning words—for there is no death and
no limit to love like his. From his home above, he loves me still. And,
perhaps, when I, too, shall reach that bright world in which there is no
winter and no age, I shall find no disparity between us; but shall see
and love him even as he sees and loves me! And that shall be my comfort
and his reward.”
The baroness spoke tenderly, meditatively, with her beautiful head bowed
upon her hand, and her fair hair, escaped from the widow’s cap, flowing
down over her black-robed shoulders.
Lilith uttered not a word, but she thought:
“This is the woman whom Tudor Hereward denounced as vain, self-seeking,
double-dealing; false to him, false to herself, false to her betrothed,
and all because, to keep her plighted faith, she had rejected him.”
And Lilith, through all her own deep pain, felt a tender sympathy with
the desolate heart of her rival.
At length the baroness spoke again:
“You are very silent, petite. Of what are you thinking?” she softly
inquired.
“Of the story you have told me, madame,” gently replied Lilith.
“And what about it, dear?”
“It is very sorrowful. You are not happy, madame; and perhaps you never
can be, unless, unless—by——”
“By what, my child?”
“By making others happy. You have such great power of doing good, dear
lady!” earnestly replied Lilith.
“What good can I do? I seem of no use in the world!” sighed the
baroness.
“By your great wealth, madame,” modestly suggested Lilith.
“Oh, of course, I subscribe to all worthy charities that are brought to
my notice. Le Grange attends to all that! That is, of course, my bounden
duty, and I try to do it,” said the baroness.
“Yes, I know you are very liberal and very conscientious, but——”
“But what, my dear?”
“There are so many, many cases of great poverty, sickness and suffering
outside of these organized charities! Aged, or ill, men and women, and
little children, suffering in extremity for want of the barest
necessaries of life, helpless and dying for lack of help, even in the
midst of all these organized charities! These do a vast deal of good,
but they cannot do everything! They cannot reach all the suffering!”
“How do you know?” inquired the lady.
“I know from what I see, and hear, and observe in the streets, and from
what I learn when I go into the poorest tenement houses with Aunt
Sophie.”
“Aunt Sophie? Who is she, child?”
“Mrs. Downie. My good landlady. She is a Methodist minister’s widow. She
keeps a plain boarding-house, mostly for young ministers and teachers.
She is very poor, but very charitable, and when she sees a poor, pale,
ragged child on the streets trying to make a few pennies by selling
matches or pins, she often takes such a child to its own home to see for
herself into its circumstances and find out how she can permanently
benefit it. She has adopted and brought up several of these forlorn
children, and settled them respectably in life. She has always one or
two on hand. She has one even now. Oh! if I had only plenty of money I
would found a home for destitute children. I would set Aunt Sophie at
its head with the carte blanche to take in all the needy children that
the home could hold.”
“But there are so many of these asylums, my dear.”
“I know; but there are not enough, else why these poor, little, homeless
and friendless ones in the street?”
“Well, petite, I do not feel just yet quite inspired to found such an
institution, but, before we sail, I will place in your good Aunt
Sophie’s hands a sum of money to aid her charitable work among the
friendless children of the street,” said the baroness.
“Will you? Oh, will you, indeed? If you do, you will make a good heart
so glad!” exclaimed Lilith, with a beaming face.
“I will, indeed! I will send Le Grange to the house with the check
to-morrow,” said the lady.
“Oh! give it with your own hand, dear madame, and you will see what joy
you will bring into the dear woman’s face.”
“I hear what joy I bring into your voice, little one, and I am glad to
hear it,” replied the baroness.
In her deep interest in the subject under discussion, Lilith had for the
moment forgotten her own griefs.
Even Madame Von Bruyin seemed in better spirits as she said, cheerfully:
“We must have lights now, dear.”
She touched the silver timbre on the stand beside her.
An attendant came in and lighted the gas and retired.
Lilith arose from her low position on the hassock at the lady’s feet.
The baroness also stood up, and drawing her companion’s arm within her
own, walked up and down the splendid, illuminated room in silence.
It happened that at each end of this room there was a broad and tall
mirror that reached from floor to ceiling and reflected the two figures
from head to foot—the grand beauty of the Baroness Von Bruyin and the
petite grace of Lilith.
The young wife marked the contrast with a sinking and despairing heart.
In her admiration she greatly exaggerated the power of her rival’s
queenly charms, and in her humility as much underrated the effects of
her own sweet loveliness.
“Ah!” she sighed, from the depths of her desponding spirit. “No wonder
he worships this lady, for she is the crowned queen of beauty! No wonder
he could not love me, for who am I beside her? No more than a little
yellow duckling beside a royal white swan! No! I cannot blame him for
adoring her and not liking me. But oh! he might have let me alone. He
ought not to have married me so lightly and cast me off so easily
because I was a duckling and not a swan. Now I remember that he never
said he loved me. He never professed what he never felt for me. And I
was so blind I never missed that. Because he asked me to be his wife, I
truly thought he loved me, and I did so joyfully consent—letting him see
how happy and how glad I was of the honor he had done me, the delight he
had given me. Oh, the sin of it! Oh, the shame of it! Oh, my angel
mother in heaven, if you had been on earth you would never have let your
child fall into such a trap. You would have taught her; you would have
warned her. Oh, he ought to have been generous; he ought to have
remembered that I had no mother; he ought to have let me alone!”
“What is the matter with you, dear child?” inquired the baroness,
breaking in upon Lilith’s grievous reverie. “You are so absorbed and
distressed that you must be in some great trouble, either for yourself
or for some one else. Can I do anything for you?”
“No, dear madame; nothing. My passing mood was not worth your attention.
A vain regret given to lost treasures, or perhaps only to imaginary
treasures that I never really possessed. I will try to overcome my
tendency to fall into these moods,” answered Lilith, with an effort to
collect herself.
“Some day, my dear, you will tell me of your past life—a short story, it
must be—as frankly as I have told you of mine. I will wait patiently
until then. But, little one, we have talked and mused, and mused and
talked, until the hours have slipped by us unheeded, and now it is so
late that you must either stay all night, or allow me to send for a
carriage at once to take you home.”
“Oh, thank you, madame. I must go home. Late as it is, Aunt Sophie will
expect me,” said Lilith.
Madame Von Bruyin touched the timbre, and ordered the attendant who
answered the summons to procure a carriage.
While Lilith was putting on her hat and gloves the baroness said:
“You may tell this dear Aunt Sophie of the power I intend to place in
her hands to help the poor little children.”
“Oh, dear madame, how good you are! But I would rather not tell her. I
would rather you should do so first, for the sake of seeing the happy
surprise that will light up her face,” said Lilith.
“Very well, then. You may expect me to-morrow morning at the house,”
said the baroness.
The attendant entered the room and announced the carriage.
“Ask Monsieur Le Grange to be good enough to step here,” said the
baroness.
The man bowed and withdrew.
“Monsieur,” said the baroness, when the old secretary made his
appearance and respectfully saluted the company, “will you do me the
favor to see Mrs. Wyvil home? The carriage waits.”
“With the greatest pleasure, madame,” answered the old gentleman, with
his habitual deep bow, as he gallantly offered his arm to the young lady
to lead her from the room.
The baroness drew Lilith up and kissed her cheek before giving her into
the care of the polite old secretary, who took her in charge, and bowed
himself out of his lady’s presence.
He led Lilith down the stairs, placed her in the carriage, took his seat
by her side, and directed the coachman to drive to Mrs. Downie’s, number
so and so, such a street.
It was so late when they reached their destination that all the lights
were out in the house, except those of the front parlor.
The old Frenchman left the carriage, helped Lilith to alight, and led
her up to the door. Nor did he leave her until his ring was answered and
an old lady appeared to receive the returning guest.
Then he bowed himself down the steps to the carriage and drove off.
“Oh, my dear, I was that uneasy about you; I was thinking of starting
out to the hotel to inquire after you,” said Aunt Sophie, as she went
into the front parlor to turn off the gas.
“Why should you have been uneasy? What harm could have happened to me
even if I had started to come home alone through the streets of a
crowded city?” inquired Lilith, as they went upstairs together.
“What harm? Oh, child, you read the papers, and see how busy the devil
is and how artful his children are. Every once in a while you see an
account of some child or young girl kidnapped and made away with, and I
suppose as there’s many and many a case that never even gets into the
newspapers.”
“I am sorry to hear that, Aunt Sophie; but there was no danger in my
case, for madame sent me home in a carriage, under the care of her aged
secretary.”
“So I saw. So I saw. And she was in the right of it. Well, my dear, it
is after one o’clock, and I think we had better get to bed as soon as we
can,” said the old lady, as they entered the double-bedded chamber,
which they still occupied together.
The room vacated by the minister having been taken by the organist.
Early the next morning, as Aunt Sophie, having got through with the
breakfast, was preparing to go to market, Lilith said to her:
“I cannot walk out with you to-day, dear. I am expecting the Baroness
Von Bruyin, and as I do not know at what hour she may find it convenient
to call, I must stay in until she does.”
“I am awful jealous of that baroness,” said the little old lady, in a
pathetic tone, shaking her little rumpled gray head.
“You need not be. There is no woman in the world I love half so much as
I do you, dear Aunt Sophie,” said Lilith.
“Well, then, why won’t you live long of me always and be my child,
instead of going off to foreign parts with that baroness?”
“Because it would not be right, dear Aunt Sophie.”
“Eh, dear, it’s a tiresome world. What’s that baroness coming here for
to-day?”
“To call on me, and I think she wishes to see you, too, so I shall keep
her till you come back from market.”
“No, you needn’t! I don’t want to see that baroness! That I don’t,” said
Aunt Sophie, as she tied on her little mashed black silk bonnet, which,
like her rumpled fine gray hair, and little baby face, was a part of her
gentle personality.
“But I want you to see her, Aunt Sophie. I think you’d get over your
prejudice against her.”
“No, I shouldn’t! I’m jealous of her. That’s where it is. I’m awful
jealous of her, that I am! But I’ll hurry back from market to see her if
you want me to. And if I have to do that I must hurry away now.”
And the dear little woman folded her rusty Canton crape shawl across her
bosom and left the room.
Lilith set the bed-chamber in order and then went down to the front
parlor to await the coming of Madame Von Bruyin.
But it was twelve o’clock before the baroness arrived. Aunt Sophie had
come home from market and “fixed herself up” to receive the great lady,
by putting on her Sunday gown, a thin, rusty black silk, and tying a
bobbinet fichu crookedly around her neck, but she could not sit in state
to receive her visitor. She was too busy overseeing the cook get dinner
for the boarders.
“Besides, what does she want to see me for, I would like to know?” she
asked herself.
So she was shelling peas in the kitchen when word was brought to her
that there was a lady in the parlor waiting to see her.
She put the pan of peas on the table, took off her “check” apron, shook
down her dress and went upstairs to see the visitor.
She found a tall, beautiful woman, dressed in deep mourning, the black
crape vail thrown back, revealing a fair face, with delicately blooming
cheeks, large, soft, violet eyes, and rippling golden hair, just visible
under the borders of her widow’s cap.
Gentle Aunt Sophie was won, despite herself, by the sweet, pensive smile
with which the lady received her own rather cold greeting, when Lilith
had introduced the parties to each other.
After some little preliminary conversation about the early setting in of
summer; the unusual warmth of the weather for only the last week in May;
the prospective sea voyage in June, and the probability of fair winds
and good weather, the main object of Madame Von Bruyin’s visit was
artfully introduced.
It required some tact on the part of the baroness and her young
companion to deal with a woman as shy, jealous and peculiar as the
minister’s widow, under such circumstances as these.
But when Madame Von Bruyin briefly explained that the news of Mrs.
Downie’s mission among the street children had awakened her own interest
to a very great extent, and had inspired her with a wish to serve
them—which, owing to her swiftly approaching embarkation to Europe, she
could not personally carry out—and when she begged as a great personal
favor that Mrs. Downie would act as her almoner, with carte blanche to
use the donation according to discretion, and ended by placing a check
for a thousand dollars in Aunt Sophie’s hands—
Well, she, good soul, did not utter one word of thanks!
But her whole form vibrated and her face beamed with joy and
thankfulness. Tears of joy filled her eyes as she faltered, almost
inarticulately:
“Oh! how much good you will do with all this, madame! How much good you
will do!”
“If so, it will be through your hands, dear friend,” replied the
baroness, rising to take leave.
Mrs. Downie, with the most old-fashioned, time-out-of-mind hospitality,
would have pressed her to stay to dinner, to stay to tea, to spend the
whole evening, but the baroness smiled, pleaded a pressure of
engagements, and departed.
“She’s good! she’s mighty good. But, oh! what a sinner I am. For I’m so
awful jealous of her, all the same. But I can’t help it, and it’s all
because of you, honey,” said Aunt Sophie, as soon as she was left alone
with Lilith. “I must get the brethren to pray for me,” she added.
From that memorable evening on which Madame Von Bruyin had told her own
heart history to Lilith Hereward, the two friends were drawn closer
together in sympathy and affection.
It was strange that Hereward’s young wife, though she admired her
husband’s first love so excessively, and underrated her own self so
humbly, yet felt no great jealousy of her rival.
Perhaps it was because Tudor himself had been the first to tell her of
that first love, that mad though “brief infatuation,” as he had called
it; and because, on referring to its object, he had spoken of her only
in terms of contempt and displeasure; so, at any rate, for this cause or
for that, Lilith, on cool reflection, saw no cause to be jealous of her
beautiful rival. She felt even some compassion for her, as for a
fellow-sufferer from Hereward’s great injustice—for had not Hereward
denounced her as a false woman, a self-seeker, a double-dealer, a
coquette, a traitress, a jilt? And all because Leda Von Kirschberg,
after having promised her hand, discovered that she had a heart, and
tried to do her duty between the two!