A Changed Heart Part 46

"I forget the name," said the actress, indifferently; "it is a French vaudeville, written expressly for us. I am Ninon, a flower-girl, with two or three songs to sing. Will you come?"

"Thank you, I should like to go. It keeps me from thinking for a few hours, and that in itself is a blessing. What a miserable, worthless piece of business life is! I think I shall buy twenty cents worth of laudanum, some of these days, in some apothecary-shop, and put an end to it altogether."

The jarring, reckless tone had returned, and was painful to hear. The actress sewed, steadily on, replying not.

"It is well enough for those girls," Miss Wade said; "those rough, noisy, factory girls, brawny arms, and souls that never rise above a beau or silk dresses; but for me and for you, who were born ladies--it is enough to drive us mad! Look at me!" she cried, rising to her feet; "look at me, Miss Johnston! Do I look like one born for a drudge? Do I look like the women who fill this house?"

Miss Johnston looked up at the speaker, doing a little private theatrical tragedy, with her pale, quiet face, unmoved. Perhaps she had grown so used to tragedy that it had become stale and wearisome to her; and the regal figure drawn up to its full height, the white face, and flaring eyes, disturb her no more in her poor room, than Lady Macbeth, in black velvet, with blood on her hands, did on the theatrical boards.

"No," she said, "you are not at all like the factory-hands, Miss Wade.

I never doubted you were born a lady."

"And a lady, rich and happy, flattered and courted, I should have been yet, but for the villainy of a man. My curse upon him, whether he be living or dead."

She began pacing up and down the floor, like any other tragedy-queen.

Miss Johnston, finding it too dark to sew, arose, lit a candle, stood it on a wooden box that did service for a table, and composedly pursued her work.

"How was it?" she asked; "is it long ago?"

"Long!" exclaimed Miss Wade; "it seems hundreds of years ago; though I suppose scarcely seven have really pa.s.sed since he fled, taking all he possessed with him, and leaving my mother and I to beg, or starve, or die, if we pleased. Of all the villains Heaven ever suffered to pollute this earth, I think Philip Henderson was the worst!"

"Philip Henderson!" Miss Johnston repeated, looking up from her work; "was that the name of the man who defrauded you?"

"He was my step-father--the villain! My own father I do not recollect--he died in my infancy, leaving my mother wealthy--the possessor of half a million nearly. She had married this man Henderson before I was three years old; and I remember how pleased I was when he first came, with the little baby-sister he brought me--for he was a widower with a child not two years old. Shortly after my mother's second marriage, we left Rochester, where I was born. Mr. Henderson purchased, with my mother's money, of course, for he had none of his own, a magnificent place up at Yonkers--a house like a castle, and magnificent grounds. Everything was in keeping; the furniture, pictures, and plate superb; a whole retinue of servants; the fastest horses and finest carriages in the country. It is like a dream of fairy-land to me now to look back upon. Olly and I (his daughter's name was Olive), as we grew up, had a governess, and masters in the house, and played in bright silk dresses among the pastures, and fountains, and graperies of our palace-like home. The place was filled with company all the summer through--nothing but b.a.l.l.s and soirees, and dressing and dancing, and fetes champetre; and in the winter, Mr. and Mrs. Henderson came down to the city, leaving us in charge of the housekeeper and governess. It is a very pleasant thing, no doubt, spending money as freely as if it were water; but, unfortunately, even half a million of dollars will not last forever. Mr. and Mrs. Henderson, and their two daughters--for I pa.s.sed as his child, too, and scarcely knew the difference myself--were all the fashion for nearly ten years, and then the change began to come. I was only thirteen, and not old enough to understand the stormy scenes between Henderson and my mother--her pa.s.sionate reproaches of his folly and extravagance, his angry recrimination, and the ominous whisperings of the servants. Suddenly the crash came--Henderson had fled, taking Olly with him, and the few thousands that yet remained of our princely fortune. He was over head and ears in debt; the creditors seized everything--house, furniture, plate, and all--and my mother and I were penniless. Miss Johnston, the shock killed her. She had always been frail and delicate, and she never held up her head after. She was buried before a month pa.s.sed; and I, at the age of thirteen, was alone in the world, and a pauper. But a child of that age cannot realize misery as we can in after-years. I was fully conscious of present discomfort, but of the future I never thought. My mother had left Yonkers immediately after the creditors' seizure, too keenly sensitive to remain a beggar where she had once reigned a queen, and came here to the city. She came here to an old servant of hers, to whom she had been a kind friend in other days, and the woman did not forget it. She was comfortable enough with her husband and two children, and she kept me and sent me to learn the business I now work at. I remained with her nearly six years, realizing more and more every day what I had lost in losing wealth. She is dead now. Her husband is married again and gone to California, and I am here, the most miserable creature, I believe, in all this great desert of a city."

She had been walking up and down all the time, this impetuous Miss Wade, with rapid, excited steps, speaking in a rapid, excited voice, a fierce light flaring in her large angry eyes. The actress had finished her work; it lay on her lap now, her quiet hands folded over it, her quiet eyes following the pa.s.sionate speaker.

"Wade, I suppose," was her first remark, "was your own father's name.

When did you adopt it?"

"Only when I came here. The name of Henderson had long been odious to me, but the family I lived with was too accustomed to it to change."

"And have you never heard from this man Henderson or his daughter since?"

"I have heard of them, which is as good; and, thank G.o.d! retribution has found them out! They are both dead--he committed a forgery, and shot himself to escape the consequences; and Olly--she was always a miserable, puling, sickly thing--died in a hospital. They have been made an example of, thank Heaven! as they deserved to be."

She uttered the impious thanksgiving with a fierce joy that made the actress recoil. But her mood changed a second after; she stopped in her walk, the darkly-sullen look settling on her face again, and stared blankly at the flaring candle, dripping tears of fat over the candlestick. So long she stood that the actress rose and began folding up the flower-girl's dresses, preparatory to starting for the theater.

"Are you going?" Miss Wade asked, coming out of her moody reverie.

"Yes, when I have had a cup of tea--it is drawing down stairs at Mrs.

b.u.t.terby's fire. Will you not take another?"

"No, thank you; I can't eat. I will wait here while you take it."

There was a newspaper on the bed. Miss Wade took it, and sat down to read whilst she waited. The actress left the room, returning a moment or two after, with a small snub-nosed teapot and a plate of b.u.t.tered toast.

She was standing at a little open pantry pouring out the tea, when she suddenly laid down the teapot, and turned round to look at her companion. It was not an exclamation Miss Wade had uttered, it was a sort of cry; and she was holding the paper before her, staring at it in blank amaze.

"What is the matter?" Miss Johnston inquired, in her calm voice.

Miss Wade looked up, a sudden and strange flush pa.s.sing over her colorless face.

"Nothing," she said, slowly. "That is--I mean I saw the--the death of a person I knew, in this paper."

She held it up before her face, and sat there while the actress drank her tea and ate her toast, never moving or stirring. Miss Johnston left the pantry, put on her bonnet and shawl, and took up her bundle as if to go.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Wade," she said, "but it is time for us to go."

Miss Wade arose, with the paper still in her hand. Two bright spots, all unusual there, and which strong excitement alone could bring, burned on either cheek, and a strange dusky fire shone in her eyes.

"I do not think I will go to the theater to-night, Miss Johnston," she said. "My head aches. I will take this paper, if you will let me, and read it in my room for a little while, and then go to bed."

The actress a.s.sented, looking at her curiously, and Miss Wade pa.s.sed down the dark stairs to her own room. There was a lamp on the table, which she lit, then she locked the door; and with that same red spot on each cheek, and that same bright light in each eye, sat down with the paper to read. But she only read one little paragraph among the advertis.e.m.e.nts, and that she read over and over, and over again. The paper was the Montreal True Witness, some two or three weeks old, and the paragraph ran thus:

"INFORMATION WANTED.--Of Philip Henderson or his heirs. When last heard from he was in New York, but is supposed to have gone to Canada. He or his descendants will hear of something to their great advantage by applying to John Darcy, Barrister-at-Law, Speckport."

CHAPTER XXII.

THE HEIRESS OF REDMON.

It is three days by steamer and rail-cars from New York to Speckport; but as steam never traveled half as fast as story-tellers, we are back there in three seconds. Dear, foggy Speckport, I salute thee!

In a grimy office, its floor freshly sprinkled, its windows open to admit the March-morning sunshine, in a leathern-covered armchair, before a littered table, Mr. Darcy, barrister-at-law, sits reading the morning paper. It is the "Daily Snorter," and pitches savagely into the "Weekly Spouter," whose editor and proprietor, under the sarcastic t.i.tle of "Mickey," it mildly insinuates is an ignorant, blundering, bog-trotting ignoramus, who ought still to be in the wilds of Connemara planting potatoes, instead of undermining the liberty of this beloved province, and trampling the laws of society under his ruthless feet, by a.s.serting, as he did yesterday, that a distinguished member of the Smasher party had been found lying drunk in Golden Row, and conveyed in that unhappy state to his residence in that aristocratic street, instead of to the watch-house, as he should. Much more than this the "Daily Snorter," the pet organ of the Smasher party, had to say, and the anathemas it fulminated against "that filthy sheet," the "Spouter," and its vulgar, blockheaded, addle-pated editor, was blood-curdling to peruse. Mr. Darcy was deep in it when the office door opened, and Mr. Val Blake lounged carelessly in. Mr. Darcy looked up with a nod and a laugh.

"Good morning, Blake! Fine day, isn't it? I am just reading this eulogy the 'Snorter' gives you."

"Yes," said Mr. Blake, mounting the back of a chair as if it were the back of a horse, and looking the picture of calm serenity. "Severe, is it? Who do you suppose I had a letter from last night?"

"How should I know?"

"You won't faint, will you? It was from Charley Marsh!"

Mr. Darcy dropped the "Snorter," and stared.

"Char--ley Marsh! It's not possible, Blake?"

"Yes, it is. I am on my way to Cottage Street at this present writing, to tell his mother."

"Well, this is an astonisher! And where is the boy?"

"You'd never guess. A captain in the Southern army."

"You don't say so! How did he ever get there?"

"You see," said Val, "it's a long letter, and he explains everything.