Mabel's Mistake Part 69

The day on which General Harrington was buried, the funeral procession pa.s.sed by the house in which Lina had lived during her painful sojourn in the city. As it went by, a woman rushed to and fro in the house, uttering the most piteous cries, and tearing at everything within her reach. From that little fairy-like conservatory she had torn down the blossoming vines, and broken the plants, crowning herself fantastically with the trailing garlands, and trampling the blossoms beneath her feet with bursts of wild laughter, alternated with groans, that seemed to rend her heart asunder. As the funeral cortege went by, these groans and shrieks of laughter aroused the neighborhood. Some members of the police entered, and took the maniac away.

It was a year after General Harrington's death, a steamer was pa.s.sing through a channel of the East River, leaving Blackwell's Island on the left. Sitting upon the deck was a bridal party: that morning had made Lina, Ralph Harrington's wife. James Harrington had given her away, having first richly endowed the young couple, and Mabel made one of the wedding party.

Upon the sh.o.r.e near the end of Blackwell's Island, stands that most painful appendage to a lunatic asylum, the mad-house; looming over the water like a huge menagerie, in which wild animals are kept. Through the iron lattices, which gird in the granite walls of this building, you may at any time see the maniacs roaming to and fro, sometimes in sullen silence, sometimes shrieking out their fantasies or their rage to the winds as they whistle by, and the waters that flow on forever and ever, unconscious of the miserable secrets given to their keeping.

As the boat containing the bridal party swept by the mad-house a beautiful but most fiendish face looked out between these bars; a clenched hand was thrust through, and a storm of terrible curses hailed after Mabel and her newly married children. But the boat swept calmly by, leaving them behind. Mabel saw the clenched hand, but the curses rushed by her in one confused wail, which touched her only with gentle compa.s.sion; for she little thought that Zillah, the woman who, in seeking her life, had murdered her husband, was hurling these fiendish anathemas after her.

So in her happiness, for Mabel was happy then--she turned away from the mad-house, touched with momentary gloom and, taking James Harrington's arm moved to the other side of the boat, and leaning upon him watched the sun go down. Thus, with the rich twilight falling softly around them, these two n.o.ble beings drifted into their new life.

THE END.