Lily Pearl and The Mistress of Rosedale Part 30

"Her husband!" almost shrieked the miserable woman; "did you say her _husband_?"

"Certainly! Why not? Do you know her? You astonish me by your looks and appearance! Enlighten me, I beseech you, Mrs. Southey!" exclaimed the lady.

The wretched woman tried to speak, but found not the power to do so.

At last she gasped, "I beg your pardon! I am strangely nervous to-day, I confess. It is true, I thought at first that I had seen the lady some years ago, but conclude I must have been mistaken or she would have remembered me. The mother of the one she so much resembles is a very dear friend of mine and her marriage was clandestine and seriously against her parents' wishes. I knew that the news of their reunion would greatly distress them, and so allowed my sympathies to run away with me and frighten you. You will pardon me?" she interrogated, beseechingly, as she laid her hand on her companion's arm.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "DID YOU SAY HER HUSBAND?"]

"Certainly. I do not wonder at your agitation! But really, I think your friend ought not to distress herself about her daughter's choice were it so. Colonel Hamilton is one of our n.o.blest and most heroic officers, and it is now being whispered in military circles that as soon as he is recovered his promotion will be speedy to the rank of brigadier, whether he is ever able to occupy it or not. I wish you would go with me to-morrow and see him. He is certainly one of the finest looking men I ever saw!"

Mrs. Southey, however, declined the honor. She was "too weak and sensitive to endure excitement," as she had given abundant proof during the last hour.

It was true, and the lady accepted the refusal gracefully. "Sometime you must tell me more about this colonel's wife in whom we both are so much interested, will you?" she asked, as they reached the street where was Mrs. Southey's temporary home.

"I shall be happy to keep you informed as to his recovery, and will call as soon as possible after my next visit to the hospital."

"Thank you!" and so they parted.

How little either knew of the emotions or convictions of the other! What a long catalogue of ills were being chronicled in the inner chamber of the guilty soul! It was a slight peep the penetrating eyes caught through the partially opened door ere the power of self-control returned to close it, but no sophistry could dispose of the horrors thus revealed! When again in her room she dropped into an easy chair evidently exhausted.

"Your ride must have been wearisome," suggested her hostess. "You do not look as well as when you went out," she continued, carelessly, raising her eyes from the paper she had in her hand.

"I am not well," was the prompt reply.

"Have you been driven under a halter? One would imagine that justice had been close upon you"; and she turned the page with perfect _sang froid_.

"Be merciful, I beseech you!" was the plaintive wail of her companion.

"I will tell you all! I have not been chased by _justice_ as you intimate, but what is worse--I have seen Lillian and she has seen me!

The carriage stopped while the two friends talked, and all the time her eyes were fixed upon my uncovered face; and to-morrow they meet at the hospital! I know my uncontrollable agitation has betrayed much, and there is little doubt but she will finish what I have so ign.o.bly begun.

Beside this my daughter has found her husband, who is none other than the Colonel Hamilton of whom so much has been said of late! Of course he will aid her in performing what she would never have the strength to accomplish herself!" The head of the wretched mother sank upon her hand, while her whole frame shook with emotion. Her companion had risen and now stood before her.

"The time has come when you must leave!" she said with a tone as ringing and metallic as the clinking of steel when rudely smiting its fellow. "I have the arrangements all made, expecting it would come to this, for, as you are well aware, it would not be very comfortable for the innocent to be found in such bad company!" The tall figure became erect as her keen eyes were fixed upon the face of the speaker, while she continued: "Send your usual message and add in postscript a command to get that horse ready as ordered and brought around at eleven to the spot designated. I have a suit prepared, and at about ten miles there is a friend who will grant you a retreat for the present. I can send you word when you must fly farther. Now I will leave you, for it is nearly six and the order must be written immediately!"

Alone! What dismal horrors haunt the guilty mind when let loose upon itself! A spy! And in the enemy's country, hemmed in by the barriers of war with no way of escape to a land of safety, if such a place could be found! A rebel! And truth all ready to whisper in the ear of offended justice "behold the traitor!"

"Where is my strength? My pride?" she murmured, as she arose and walked across the room. "How I tremble! The gallows! What a reward for my persevering and arduous labors! I understand it!"

Then her mind wandered to the story of a German monarch who caused the executioner to blow his death-blast before the door of his brother's palace. "Ah, you tremble," said the king, "when the prospect of temporal death is so near; but look a little farther and behold the eternal pangs of the soul! How now? Does the sight appall thee? Go to thy home, my brother, the king desires not thy life; but remember the errors of a temporal death and shun the horrors of the second!"

"If I had done this! O, Lillian, Lillian my child! You cannot see your mother at this hour, and it is well! The first--yes the second death is for such as I!"

"I shall do no such thing!" she exclaimed aloud at last as she reseated herself by the window. "The horse perish with its rider! I want neither; I swear it! This hateful business stops here! O wretched, wretched woman that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Was not that in the Bible? Ah, I remember! The voice that has been silent for many years once repeated those words in my hearing when his hour had come. The Bible! I will go to Philadelphia. Mrs. Cheevers will not turn me from her door for--for--she is a Christian! Pride? Away with it! O the curse of a false ambition!"

The shadows of twilight fell noiselessly about her, spreading over the bent figure a pall of tender sympathy. Then she arose, lighted the gas and hurriedly threw into her trunks the plain, rich wardrobe of the elegant "English lady," and locking them prepared to go out. She had remembered that the northern train left the depot at eight, and she was going upon it! She pa.s.sed out without interruption, and in a half hour the drayman was standing in the hall ready to be shown where the trunks were waiting. "This way," called Mrs. Southey; "you will need help for they are large."

"Where are you going?" asked the lady of the house with great astonishment, opening the parlor door. "Surely you are not going to tear yourself away so abruptly? How lonely I shall be without my aristocratic English guest! But do tell me, where are you going?"

"Out of death unto life," was the quick reply. "This way! Do not mar the railing"; and the two men pa.s.sed on with the last trunk. "Forty minutes before train time, I believe?" she interrogated as she stepped forward to close the door. "Yes, madam"; and she turned to the bewildered woman who was silently gazing at her.

"Well, I am going," she said calmly; "it matters not to you where, but remember this! If there is a path for such as I back to womanhood I am determined to find it!" A cynical laugh was her only response.

"Nevertheless, it is true! The miseries of the last few days have completed the grave into which I have cast my pride and ambitions; would that the bitter memories of the past could be buried with them! But I must go. Farewell--do not wait to attempt your own rescue until the quicksands have swallowed you up; again farewell!"

Her companion did not speak, but turned coldly away, while Mrs. Belmont, with a heart lighter than it had been for many months, tripped down the steps. New resolutions had taken possession of her soul, and with them had entered a ray of cheering light. The door had been thrown ajar for the spirit of penitence, but how dark the long closed chamber appeared, how ghostly the spectral memories that crouched among its shadows! The "broken and contrite heart" had not as yet opened the windows to the glories of the noonday sun of righteousness; and the door was reclosed, and upon the outside the new resolves were laid with trembling hands.

She was Mrs. Belmont again--the mistress of Rosedale, and nevermore would she stoop to fraud or ignominy! Her daughter would come to her and ask for the mother-love her disobedience had forfeited, and she would humbly grant it! Colonel Hamilton was not one to be ashamed of; and then the dark night at the seash.o.r.e, the cry of the abducted Lily rolled its burden of remorse close where the new resolutions were lying, and she trembled as the engine whistled its frightful alarm--something was on the track! "O G.o.d! What if Thy anger should fall upon me, where O where shall the sinner appear?" burst from her lips as she covered her face with her hands.

"There is no danger," shouted the brakeman at last; "the track is clear." And with folded hands she rode on breathing freely once more.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER XXIX.

A NIGHT UPON THE BILLOWS.

How the circ.u.mstances of life throw us about! Now, upon the revolving wheel, we are raised high above our fellows, where, from our dizzy elevation, we look about us with a sense of giddiness lest we fall; then with sudden revolution we descend while those upon the low grounds are carried up. Change! Change!

Our little circle of actors in the present drama were on the "wheel,"

but not one experienced more disagreeable sensations in its turnings than did Mrs. Belmont, the once haughty mistress of Rosedale. Hers was not alone in the experience of external disagreeables; but in her soul, where the continual revolvings of the corresponding whirlings of good resolutions and evil pa.s.sions, which the hand of avarice was turning.

Poor soul; with only such a power to govern its weal or woe!

Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d lingered about the maelstrom where her darling had disappeared from sight many weeks, loth to believe that she would not rise again to bless and cheer her loneliness. "She was so like me," she would repeat over and over again; "the same restless ambitions, the same longings after something her hand could never reach! And now she is gone! I could bear it if the beautiful casket, emptied of its treasure had been left for my stricken heart to cherish and lay away in its bed of flowers under the green gra.s.s; but to lose all but the memory of her uncertain fate! This is the darkest cloud of all. Then what will Willie, the poor struggling cripple, say? How shall I ever meet him."

The shadows deepened in the home of the St. Clair's, and none rejoiced more when the husband bore his weeping wife back to her Virginia life than did the sympathizing Mrs. Mason. "It was dreadful," she said to her mother, after the good-byes were over; "but as we could not help it became a trifle monotonous,--this petting and soothing."

"Well, as for me, I would give a pretty large sum to know the whole of that transaction," remarked Mr. St. Clair, one day as the whole matter was being talked over. "There is a wheel within a wheel or I am mistaken. These old eyes are not so very blind when they have their spectacles on."

"I do wish you would never again throw out one of your wild and foolish 'perhaps so's!" exclaimed the wife pettishly. "I should not be surprised if your cousin should bring you before the courts for slander."

The husband threw up his broad hands high above his head while a merry peal of laughter rang through the apartment.

"Only to think, wife! Slander! I tell you there are chapters in that woman's life that she would not like to have me or any one else be fumbling over, and there is not much danger that she will ever turn the leaves for my especial benefit."

"You are too bad; the mother of Lillian Belmont ought to be above such insinuations, Mr. St. Clair!"

"That is a fact, but she is not, and there is where the too bad comes in"; and the merry laugh again resounded.

Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d reached her home in safety. It was a fine old residence, standing back from the highway, nearly hidden from the pa.s.ser by because of the large wide-spreading trees with which it was surrounded; yet the broadly-paved walks that branched off in every direction as they wound around among the cool shadows of the overhanging branches were delightfully inviting to the weary traveler who looked in upon them. The mistress of that pleasant retreat now, however, walked with languid step up the winding path to the house with a heavy heart. The darker shades of an overhanging gloom oppressed her. On the portico the servants were collected to give her welcome, and as she took the tawny hand of each in her own, said, "You too will miss your young mistress. You loved her, Jenny,--she will make no more turbans for you, Phebe--and poor little Pegs! who will fix his kite or teach him how to spin his top?"

"Whar is she Missus?" asked Phebe, with the great tears rolling down her ebony cheeks, and several other voices chimed in "Dar--dar--Missus, whar is she?"

"Dead! Swallowed up by the big sea, and we shall see her no more!" She pa.s.sed on, for Mr. g.a.y.l.o.r.d had taken her arm and was leading her into the long drawing-room, where he bade her stop her prating and making a simpleton of herself.

"It might as well be she as any one," he continued, noticing the look of distress on the pale face; "Seldom could there be found a young lady of her attractions who would break fewer hearts by disappearing than would she. But I am sorry for you. There was a little more color in your face, and a slight return of the former sprightliness in your manner while she was with you. But she is gone, Mrs. g.a.y.l.o.r.d, and what is the use of throwing misery over every one who crosses your path because of it? If you must pine away the few attractions you have left out of your life, why, do it silently and alone."