The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals Part 17

After her clothes were dry, the old woman lighted her candle and began to examine the house. The parlor was almost empty, and a gust of wind took her candle as she opened the door, flaring back the flame into her face. The wind came from a broken pane of gla.s.s in the oriel window, through which a branch of ivy, and the long tendril of a Virginia creeper had penetrated, and woven themselves in a garland along the wall. A wren had followed the creeping greenness and built her nest in the cornice, from which she flew frightened, when a light entered the room.

The old woman went out disappointed. The thing she sought was not there; perhaps it had been utterly destroyed. The man who had promised to keep it sacred, lay sleeping up yonder in the graveyard. How could she expect strangers to take up his trust? But if the object she sought could not be found, what was the use of liberty to her. The one aim of her life would be extinguished. She took up the candle and mounted a flight of narrow stairs which led to the chambers.

They were all empty except one small room, where she found an iron bedstead, on which some old quilts and refuse blankets were heaped.

Behind this bed, pressed into a corner, was an old chair, covered with dust.

When she saw this, the light shook in her hand. She sat down upon the bedstead, and reaching the candle out, examined the old chair, through its veil of cobwebs. It was the same. How well she remembered that night when her own hands had put on that green cover.

The chair was broken. One of its castors dropped to the floor as Mrs.

Yates drew it from the corner, and the carved wood-work came off in her hand; the cushion was stained and torn in places, but this dilapidation she knew had not reached her secret.

She took the chair in her arms and carried it down to the kitchen. Some of the bra.s.s nails dropped loose on the stairs, but she took no heed of them. All she wanted was some instrument with which she could turn the ricketty thing into a complete wreck. In the drawer of a broken kitchen table she found an old knife, with the blade half ground away. This she whetted to an edge on the hearth, and directly the little bra.s.s nails flew right and left, a ma.s.s of twisted fringe lay on the hearth, when the old woman stood in a cloud of dust, holding the torn rep in her hand. It dropped in a heap with the fringe, then the inner lining was torn away, handsful of hair were pulled out from among the springs, and that casket with a package of papers rustled and shook in the old woman's hands.

Mrs. Yates trembled from head to foot. It was many long years since she had touched heavy work like that, and it shocked her whole frame.

The dull monotony of sewing upon prison garments had undermined all her great natural strength. She sat there panting for breath, and white to the lips. The excitement had been too much for this poor prison woman.

She sat like a dazed creature, looking down into the casket which lay open in her lap, with ten thousand rainbow fires leaping out of it, as the blaze in the chimney quivered and danced and blazed over the diamonds. That morning the old woman had crept out of prison in her moth-eaten garments, and a little charity money in her bosom. Now a fortune blazed up from her lap.

There was money, too, a purse heavy with sovereigns, dropped there from the gold contained in that malachite box, from which all her awful sorrows had sprung. She gathered up these things in the skirt of her dress and sat brooding over them a long time, while the fire rose and crackled, and shed warm floods of light all around her, and the rain poured down in torrents. She was completely worn out at last, and thought itself became a burden; then her head fell back upon the ruined cushions of the chair, which held her in a half-sitting position, as the heaviest sleep that ever came to mortal eyes fell upon her.

Still the rain poured down continually upon the roof and overran the gutters in torrents. Up from the darkness of a hollow near by, the rush and roar of a stream, swollen into a torrent, came through the beating storm like a heavy ba.s.s voice pouring its low thunders through a strain of music. The great elm tree at the end of the house tossed its streaming branches, and beat them upon the roof, till a host of warriors seemed breaking their way through, while the old vines were seized by the wind and ripped from the sides of the house, as the storm seizes upon the cords of a vessel, and tears them up into a net work of tangled floss.

The old woman who had left her stone cell in the prison for the first time in fourteen years, heard nothing of this, but lay half upon the floor half on the broken chair, with the broad blaze of the fire flashing over her white hair, and kindling up the diamonds in her lap to a bed of living coals. She was perfectly safe with those treasures, even in that lonely house, for in the pouring rain no human being was likely to go about from his own free will. But one poor fellow, whose child was desperately sick, did pa.s.s the house, and saw the blaze of a fire breaking through a window, where the shutters were dashing to and fro on their hinges, and found breath to say, as he sped on in search of a doctor:

"So the cedar cottage has got another tenant at last. I wonder who it is?"

When the man went by to his work, the next morning, he saw the shutters swaying to and fro yet, and wondering at it, went into the enclosure, in hopes of meeting some of the new inmates; but everything was still, the doors were fastened, and through the kitchen window he saw nothing but a heap of ashes on the hearth, and an old chair, torn to pieces, standing before it.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE OLD COUNTESS.

When the old countess of Ca.r.s.et threw out her flag from the battlements of Houghton castle, it could be seen from all the country around, for the grim old pile was built upon the uplands, and the gray towers rose up from the groves of the park like the peaks of a mountain.

For many a long year that broad flag had streamed like a meteor over the intense greenness of oaks and chestnuts; for, when the head of the house was at home, the crimson pennant was always to be seen floating against the sky, and over that sea of billowy foliage. The old lady of Houghton had not been absent from the castle in many years, for she was a childless woman, and so aged, that a home among her own people was most befitting her infirmities and her pride.

One day, as the sun was going down behind those ma.s.sive castle towers, filling the sky so richly with gold and crimson, that the red flag was lost among its fiery billows, an old woman stood on the highway, with a hand uplifted to shade her eyes, as she searched for the old flag.

There was dust upon her leathern shoes and on the black folds of her alpaca dress, for she had walked from the railway station, and the roads were dry.

"Ah, how the trees have grown!" she said, mournfully, dropping her hand.

"I never, never thought to be so near Houghton and not see the flag. Is my lady dead?"

The old woman was so distressed by the thought, that she sat down on a bank by the wayside, and over her came that dry, hard foreboding, which forbids tears to old eyes, but holds the worn heart like a vise. Thus, with her eyes fixed on the dusty road, she sat till all those bright clouds melted into the coming night; then she looked up and saw the great red flag streaming out against a sea of purplish gray, as it had done when she was a girl, seventy years ago.

"My lady is alive. She is there. Oh! my G.o.d! make me thankful!" she exclaimed, standing up in the road. "Through all, I shall see her again."

So she moved on, carrying a leathern travelling bag, worn and rusty, in her feeble hand. Along the highway, up to the gates of that n.o.ble park, she travelled with the slow, toilsome step of old age; but when she came to the gates they were closed, and her voice was so feeble that it failed to reach the lodge, from which she could see lights gleaming through the twinkling ivy leaves.

In patient disappointment the old woman turned from the gate, and walked on half a mile farther, for she knew of a small public house where a night's lodging could be obtained. She reached this low stone building after dark, and entered it quietly, like a gray ghost.

It was a strange guest to enter that tap-room, with her dusty garments and her old satchel. The villagers, who were taking their beer comfortably, lifted their eyes in astonishment at her sudden appearance, and they rounded with wonder, as she pa.s.sed through the room and entered the kitchen naturally, as if she had belonged to the premises all her life.

No one in the house remembered the old woman. A curly-headed girl named Susan, had flitted like a bird about that kitchen the last time she had entered it, and now, when a man's voice called out "Susan!" she started and looked around in a dazed way, expecting the bright eyed girl would come dancing through the door. But instead appeared an elderly woman, with quant.i.ties of coa.r.s.e black hair, smoothed under her cap. A linen ap.r.o.n, large and ample, protected her stuff dress, and a steel chatelaine, to which were suspended scissors, a needle case and tiny money box rattled at her side.

"Well, what is to do now, Stephen?" said the landlady, brushing some crumbs from her ap.r.o.n, for she had been cutting bread.

"Not much, only look sharp. Here is an old body just come off the tramp.

Ah, there she sits. See to her while I mind the bar, for she seems a little above the common, and is quiet."

The landlord sank his voice as he made the communication, and, after a glance at the old woman, went back to his guests, while the matron addressed Mrs. Yates.

"Ye will be wanting something, no doubt. Will it be tea or a cup of ale posset?"

The old heart in that bosom stirred with a tender recollection of long ago, as this almost forgotten dish was mentioned, a dish so purely English, that she had never once heard it mentioned in her American life.

"I will thank you for a posset," she said, taking off her bonnet and smoothing her milk-white hair with both hands. "It is long since I have tasted one."

"Yes," answered the landlady, "there is more refreshment in a cup of warm posset, than in quarts of tea from China. Wait a bit and you shall have one of my own making; the maids never will learn how to curdle the milk properly, but I am a rare hand at it, as was my mother before me."

"Aye, a good housewife was your mother," said the old woman, as tender recollections stirred in her bosom, "for now I see that it is little Susan."

"Little Susan, and you know of her? That was what they used to call me when I was a la.s.s, so high."

"But now, what is the name you go by?"

"What name should a woman go by but that of her own husband? You have just seen the master. The neighbors call him Stephen Burke."

"What, the son of James Burke, gamekeeper at the castle?"

"Why, did you know him, too?"

"Aye, that did I. A brave young fellow he was, and every one at the castle up yonder--"

The old woman checked herself. She had not intended to make herself known, but old recollections had thronged upon her so warmly, that it seemed impossible to keep silent.

"You speak of the castle as if you knew about it," said the landlady, eyeing her askance.

"And no wonder," answered the old woman; "people have told me about it, and I was in the neighborhood years ago, when you were a slip of a la.s.s."

It was strange, but this old woman, since her entrance to that room, had fallen back upon phrases and words familiar to her lips once, but which had not made any part of her speech for years. There was a home sound in them that warmed her heart.

"Did ye ever know any of them up yonder?" asked the landlady, as she placed a broad porringer before the fire, and poured some milk into it.