A Changed Heart Part 45

Midge's florid face turned ashen gray with terror; a vague, nameless, dreadful fear, that brought cold beads of sweat out on her brow. Betsy Ann had no need to back in alarm; it was not anger that blanched the homely face, and her ears were in no danger of being boxed.

"Which way did she take?" she asked, her very voice husky with that creeping fear.

"She went straight along," Betsy Ann replied, "as if a going to the sh.o.r.e."

It was the answer Midge had expected, but the hands fastening her shawl shook so, as she heard it, that she could hardly finish that operation.

"Go to Mr. Blake!" she said; "run for your life, and tell Mr. Val to hurry to the beach, and fetch a lantern. Tell him I am afraid something dreadful has happened."

She hurried off herself, as she spoke, heedless of the invalid up-stairs, of las.h.i.+ng rain, and driving wind, and black night. Heedless of all but that terrible fear, Midge hurried through the storm to the sh.o.r.e.

In the next day's issue of the Speckport Spouter, the following item appeared:

"MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE!--Yesterday evening, about seven o'clock, Miss Nathalie Marsh quitted her residence in Cottage Street, without informing her friends where she was going, and has not since been heard of. Upon the discovery of her absence, search was made along the sh.o.r.e, in which direction she was seen to go, and a c.r.a.pe vail, recognized as belonging to Miss Marsh, found on the old wharf at the end of Cottage Street. The vail had been caught by a spike projecting from the wharf, immediately above the water. It is feared that a dreadful accident has happened, and the young lady has been drowned. She had been ill and a little delirious some time before, and we presume wandered down to the old wharf, a most dangerous place at all times, and particularly so on a dark and stormy night, such as last night was, and fell in. Any intelligence of her will be thankfully received, and liberally rewarded, by her afflicted friends. The young lady was dressed in deep mourning, and might easily be recognized by the luxuriant abundance of her golden hair."

Speckport read this paragraph over its breakfast coffee and toast, and was profoundly shocked thereby. And so poor Miss Marsh had drowned herself! They had expected as much all along--she was not the girl to survive such disgrace! But it was very dreadful; and they wouldn't wonder to hear next that the poor bereaved mother had died of a broken heart. They hoped the body would be recovered--it would be a melancholy consolation to her friends, not to say to her enemies, who would then be out of doubt as to her fate. People went past the house in Cottage Street with the same morbid curiosity that had driven them to Redmon after the murder, and stared at the closed blinds and m.u.f.fled knocker, and thought of the wretched mother lying within, whose footsteps were even then crossing the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Two weeks pa.s.sed, and these charitable wishes were not fulfilled. The mother of Nathalie still lay ill unto death, and still faithfully waited on by Midge and Miss Jo. It was toward the close of the second week that Val received a note from the coroner of a fis.h.i.+ng-village, some ten miles up the coast, informing him that, the day previously, the body of a woman answering the description of Miss Marsh had been washed ash.o.r.e, that an inquest had been held, and a verdict of "Found drowned"

returned. If the missing girl's friends would come immediately they might be able to identify the corpse.

Before noon, after the receipt of this missive, Mr. Val Blake was bending over the corpse of the drowned woman, as it lay in its rough deal coffin in the village dead-house. Before sunset he was back in Speckport, and bore the deal coffin and its quiet contents to No. 16.

Great St. Peter Street. The slender girlish form, the mourning dress, the long fair hair, were not to be mistaken, though what had been the face was too horrible to look upon. Val turned away from what had once been so beautiful, with a shudder; and thought of the Duke of Gandia, made a saint by a similar sight. Before morning, the deal coffin was inclosed in another of rosewood, and a grave dug in Speckport Cemetery.

The funeral was an unusually quiet and solemn one, though there was no requiem ma.s.s for the soul of the departed offered up in the cathedral--why should there for a wretched suicide, forever lost?

Mr. Val Blake, with no sentimentality about him, and not over straight-laced either, in some things, was yet a generous, good-hearted fellow in the main, and placed a white marble cross over the dead girl's grave. Some very good people were rather scandalized by the act. A cross over the grave of a suicide!--it was sacrilege. But Mr. Blake did not care much what good people or bad people thought or said of his actions; and did just as he pleased, in spite of their teeth. So the white cross remained gleaming palely in the spectral moonlight, and casting its solemn shadow over the grave in the suns.h.i.+ne. It bore no inscription--what inscription could be placed over such a grave?--only the name "Nathalie." Her story was told, her life ended, the world went on, and she was forgotten! O sublime lesson of life! told in three words: Dead and forgotten!

So, while Charley skulked in dark places, a hunted criminal, with a price on his head, and his mother lay still hovering on that narrow boundary that divides life and death, morning sunlight and noonday shadows brightened and darkened around that pale cross in the cemetery, and the night winds sighed over Nathalie's grave.

CHAPTER XXI.

MRS. b.u.t.tERBY'S LODGINGS.

The bleak blasts of a raw March afternoon swept through the city streets, cold and piercing, driving the dust in whirlwinds blindingly into the eyes of all it encountered.

In spite of the cold and the piercing wind, Broadway was not empty--Is Broadway ever empty, I wonder?--and business-men, b.u.t.toned up to the chin in overcoats, and with caps drawn over their frosty noses, tore along like comets, to home and dinner; ladies in silks, and velvets, and furs, swarm down the pave to meet them, and young and old, rich and poor, jostled and elbowed, and pushed and trod on one another's heels and toes, as usual in that thronged thoroughfare.

Moving among the ceaseless sea of human life, continually ebbing and flowing in Broadway, came a young woman, walking rapidly. I say "young woman" advisedly, for she was not a lady. Her black dress was gray and dingy, and frayed round the bottom; her black cloth mantle was of the poorest texture and simplest make, and her black straw bonnet was as plain and untrimmed as bonnet could be, and who could be a lady in such array as that? To a good many of the Broadway loungers, who devote their manly intellect to picking their teeth in front of first-cla.s.s hotels, and stare at society going by for a living, her face was well known. It was a face not likely to pa.s.s unnoticed--not at all to be pa.s.sed in a crowd; and more than once some of these expensively-got-up loafers had condescended to follow the young woman with the "deuced fine eyes;" but the black figure flitted along as if shod with the shoes of swiftness, and these languid admirers soon gave up the chase in despair.

I don't think she ever was conscious of this attention; she walked steadfastly on, looking straight before her, never to the right or left, her shawl drawn closely around her tall, slight figure, as much alone as if she had been on Peter Wilkins's desert island. To a home-sick stranger in New York, I wonder if Broadway, at the fas.h.i.+onable hour, is not the loneliest and dreariest of places? Hundreds of faces, and not one familiar or friendly countenance among them; not one smile or glance of recognition to the lonely and heart-weary brother or sister jostled about in their midst. The men and women who pa.s.sed might have been a set of automatons, for all the interest the young person dressed in shabby mourning appeared to take in them, as she hurried on with that rapid step and that darkly-sullen face. For I am sorry to say this heroine of mine (and she is that) wore a look of habitual sullenness that was almost a scowl, and something fierce lay latent behind the flas.h.i.+ng of those brilliant eyes, and bitter and harsh in the compressed lips. A pa.s.sing physiognomist, not over-choice in his phrases, meeting her once in the street, had carelessly observed to a friend walking with him, that "there was a spice of the devil in that girl;" and perhaps the girl herself might have agreed with him, had she heard it.

Down town and west of Broadway, there is a certain unfas.h.i.+onable locality, known as Minetta Street. The houses are tall and dingy, and swarm with dirty children and noisy mothers; and it is dark and narrow, and utterly unknown on Fifth Avenue and Madison Square. Among the tall and dingy houses--all so much alike that they might have been cast in a mold--there is one with a white board in the front window of the ground-floor, bearing, in black letters, the name "Mrs. b.u.t.terby," and beneath this legend, "Lodgings." And in this bleak, windy twilight of this cold March day, the young woman dressed in black turns into Minetta Street, and walks into Mrs. b.u.t.terby's with the air of one having the right; for she is one of Mrs. b.u.t.terby's lodgers, this young person, and a lodger of some consequence, not only to the house, but to the whole street. And for this reason--she has a piano in her room! An old and battered piano, it is true, for which she only pays four dollars per month; but still it is a piano, and the wonderful harmonies her fingers evoke from its yellow keys, transfix Minetta Street with amazement and delight. She has the best room in Mrs. b.u.t.terby's house, the first floor parlor, front, and there is the faded remains of a Brussels carpet on the floor and a yellow-painted washstand in the corner, two cane-seated chairs, with three legs between them, a little table, with an oilcloth cover, and a sheet-iron stove; and these elegant luxuries all of which she has for the stipend of three dollars per week. There is a bed, too, and a small trunk, and the battered little high-backed piano, and there is almost room to turn round in the s.p.a.ce which they leave. There is nothing like this elegant apartment in all Mrs. b.u.t.terby's house, and the other lodgers look into it with envious and admiring eyes. They are all young ladies, these lodgers--young factory-ladies, and young ladies in the dressmaking, and pantmaking, and vestmaking, and capmaking, and bookbinding lines of business, not to speak of an actress, a real actress, who performed in a Broadway theater, and whom they look upon with mingled awe and envy. But they like her better than they do the first-floor lodger, whom they unite in hating with a cordial hatred that would have delighted Dr. Johnson. They are all young ladies, but they stigmatize her as "that young woman," "that stuck-up thing," and would like to scratch those bright eyes of hers out of her head, though she never did anything to them in her life.

They knew very little about her, either Mrs. b.u.t.terby or her fair lodgers, although she had been two months in the house, except that her name was Miss Wade, that she earned her living as an embroideress, and that she put on a great many unnecessary airs for a New York seamstress.

She embroidered slippers, that were pictures in themselves, on rich velvets and silks, with floss and Berlin wool, and spangles, and beads; and cobweb handkerchiefs, that might have been the wonder of a Brussels lace-maker. She worked for a fas.h.i.+onable Broadway establishment, who asked fabulous prices for these gems of needlework, and who doled out a miserable pittance to the pale worker, whose light glimmered far into the night, and who bent over the glistening fabric in the gray and dismal dawn. They heard all this in the house, and nothing more; for, except to the landlady, she had never, scarcely, exchanged a word with a soul in it--with one exception--she had spoken to the actress, who occupied the room above her own, and who was nearly as cold and unsociable as herself. "Birds of a feather," the young ladies said, when Mrs. b.u.t.terby told how Miss Wade had been in Miss Johnston's room (the actress was Miss Johnston, in every-day life, and Miss St. John on the bills), sewing spangles and gold braid on Miss Johnston's theatrical robes, and how Miss Johnston had taken Miss Wade to the theater, and had made her stay and take tea with her in her own room. No human being of the "earth earthy," can quite live without any one to speak to; the heart must turn to some one, let it be ever so proud and self-sustained, and the actress was made of less coa.r.s.e and rough clay than the young factory-ladies, who went dirty and hoopless all the week, and flaunted in gaudy silks on Sunday.

Up in her own room, Miss Wade took off her bonnet, and sat down to work with her mantle still on, for the fireless apartment was peris.h.i.+ngly cold. She had sat there for nearly an hour, and the cheerless March gloaming was falling drearily on Minetta Street, when there was a shambling footstep on the stairs, a shuffling, slip-shod, down-at-the-heel tread in the hall, and a rap at her door. Miss Wade, work in hand, opened it, and saw her portly landlady smiling in the doorway.

"Miss Johnston's compliments, Miss, and would you please to step up to her room, she says. Bless my heart! ain't you got no fire on, this peris.h.i.+ng evening?"

"It was too much trouble to light it," Miss Wade said, shutting and locking her room-door, and going along the dark and dirty hall, up a dark and dirty staircase, into another hall, darker and dirtier still, and tapping at the first door she met.

"Come in!" a feminine voice said, and Miss Wade went in accordingly. It was a smaller chamber than her own, and far less sumptuously furnished, with no fine fragments of Brussels on the bare floor, no piano in the corner, no yellow washstand, or oilclothed table. Its one dim window looked out on that melancholy sight, a New York backyard, and the gray and eerie dusk stole palely in, and the wild spring wind rattled the rickety cas.e.m.e.nt. But it had a fire, this poor little room, in a little ugly black stove, and, sitting in the one chair the apartment boasted of, crouching over the heat, in a strange and wretched position, was the room's mistress. A poor, faded, pallid creature, young, but not youthful, with sharp cheekbones, and sunken eyes. She was wrapped in a plaid shawl, but she looked miserable and s.h.i.+very, and crouched so low over the stove, that she nearly touched it. Sundry gaudy garments, all tinsel and spangles and glitter, lay on the bed, with two or three wigs keeping them company, a rouge-pot, and a powder-box. These were her stage-dresses; but, looking at her, as she sat there, you would as soon think of seeing a corpse tricked out in that ghostly grandeur as she.

She rose up as her visitor entered, with a pale smile of welcome, and placed the chair for her. There was a certain quiet grace about her that stamped her, like Miss Wade herself, G.o.d help her! as "one who had seen better days." But she was far more fragile than the seamstress. Whatever she had once been, she was nothing but a poor, wasted shadow now.

"Mrs. b.u.t.terby said you sent for me," Miss Wade remarked, taking the chair, and looking with a certain eagerness in her great eyes. "You spoke to the manager, I suppose?"

Miss Johnston, who had seated herself on a wooden footstool, did not look up to meet that eager, anxious gaze.

"Yes," she said, "but, I am sorry to say, I have been disappointed. The company was full, he said, and he wanted no more novices. He would not have taken me, had it not been at the earnest solicitation of a friend, and there was no room or need for any more."

The sullen look that had left Miss Wade's face for a moment returned, and a dark gloom with it. She did not speak; she sat with her brows drawn into a moody form, staring at the ugly little black stove.

"A friend of mine, though," the actress went on, "who has considerable influence, has promised to try and get you a situation in some other theater. I told him you would certainly be successful, and rise rapidly in the profession. I know you possess all the elements of a splendid tragic actress."

If we might judge by the darkly-pa.s.sionate face and fiercely-smoldering eyes, the young woman who sat so gloomily staring straight before her, was capable of acting a tragedy in real life, quite as fast as on the stage. There was a certain recklessness about her, that might break out at any moment, and which told fate and poverty had goaded her on to desperation. When she spoke, her words showed she had neither heard nor heeded the actress's last remark.

"And so goes my last hope," she said, with slow, desperate bitterness; "the last hope of being anything but a poor, starved, beggarly drudge all the days of my life! I am a fool to feel disappointed. I might know well enough by this time, that there is nothing but disappointment for such a wretch as I!"

The reckless bitterness of this speech jarred painfully on the hearer's nerves. Miss Johnston looked at her half-pityingly.

"There is no need to despair," she quietly said; "the friend of whom I have spoken will be successful, and I am certain you will be a great actress yet. With me it is different. I will never rise above mediocrity."

"You don't seem to care much," said Miss Wade, looking at her pale, still face.

"I don't," said the actress, in the same quiet way.

"Have you no ambition at all, then?"

"No!"

She did not say it indifferently, but in a tone of hard endurance. Miss Wade's large eyes were fixed curiously on her face.

"I think," she said, "you have seen a great deal of trouble, and that it has crushed the ambition out of you. You were never born to be one of Mrs. b.u.t.terby's lodgers! Pardon me if I am impertinent."

"You are not," the actress said, neither denying nor acknowledging the charge. "Whatever I once was, I am Mrs. b.u.t.terby's lodger now, and a poor actress, who must sew the spangles on her own dress."

She took off the bed a short pink gauze skirt, and a bunch of tinsel braid, and began the womanly work of sewing, with her swift fingers.

"Are you to wear that to-night?" asked Miss Wade.

"Yes; it is the dress of a flower-girl."

"What is the play?"