Sea and Shore / A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs"

by Catherine A. Warfield

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It need not for one moment be supposed that the opinions of the author are represented through the extremist Favraud. To her Mr. Bryant stands forth as the high-priest of American poetry.

[2] The tariff.

[3] Since writing the above, the admirable picture of Mr. Healey has filled this void; and those who have seen good copies of this work, executed for and by the order of Louis Philippe, may have a clear idea of that glorious countenance, the like of which we shall not see again.

Perhaps it was from this very personal magnetism of which I have spoken that Healey succeeded better with the portrait of Mr. Calhoun than any of the others he was sent to this country to paint.

[4] It was about this time that Mr. Calhoun made his famous anti-tariff crusade throughout the land, it may be remembered by some of my readers.

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CHAPTER II.

Before leaving the hospitable roof of General Curzon—beneath which I tarried for several days—awaiting the tardy sailing of the packet-steamer Kosciusko, bound for New York, circumstances determined me to leave in the hands of my host a desk which I had intended to carry with me, and which contained most of my treasures. First among these, indisputably, in intrinsic value were my diamonds—"sole remnant of a past magnificence;" but the miniatures of my father and mother, and Mabel, in the cases of which locks of twisted hair—brown, and black, and golden, and gray—were contained and combined (dear, imperishable memorials of vitality in most instances when all the rest was dust and ashes), and the early letters of my parents, together with the carefully-kept diary I had written at Beauseincourt, ranked beyond these even in my estimation.

The cause of this deposit of valuables was simply owing to the unstable lock of my trunk, the condition of which was detected too late to have it repaired before sailing. Madame Curzon had suggested to me the unsafe nature of such custody for objects of price, if, indeed, I possessed such at all. I told her then of my diamonds, and it was agreed between us that these, at least, had better be deposited in the bank of her husband, who would bring them to me himself a few months later—and on reflection I concluded to add my desk, pictures, and papers, to my more substantial treasures. These, at least, I felt assured no accident should throw into the hands of Bainrothe.

On my way to the ship I left the carriage for a moment, in pursuance with this idea, and, followed by King, the bearer of my large and weighty desk, entered the banking-house of my host, and was shown at once, by attentive clerks, to his peculiar sanctum. I told him my errand in a few words.

"Keep it until called for, unless you hear from me in the interval," I had said in allusion to my deposit, for he acknowledged the chances were slight of his leaving home until the following year, notwithstanding Madame Curzon's convictions.

"Called for by whom?" he asked, calmly.

"By Miriam Monfort in person or her order," I replied, laughingly, "This is a mystery that, by-and-by, shall be explained to you."

"I understand something of that already," he rejoined. "Marion has been whispering to the reeds, you know, or Madame Curzon, the same thing nearly; but let us be earnest, as your time is short, and mine precious to-day. Life is uncertain, and, young and strong as you are, or seem to be, you cannot foresee one hour even of the future, or of your own existence. Suppose Miriam Monfort neither comes in person nor sends her order for its restoration—what, then, is to become of this treasure-chest of hers?"

"You shall keep it then," I replied, unhesitatingly, "until my little sister reaches her majority, and cause it to be placed in her own hands, none other—or, stay, let her have it on the day before her marriage, should this occur earlier than the time mentioned, or when she reaches her eighteenth year in any case; but, above all things, be careful."

"So many conflicting directions confuse and mystify me, I confess. Come, let me write down your wishes, and the matter can be arranged formally, which is always best in any case. There, I think I have the gist of your idea," he said a few moments later, as he pushed over to me a slip of paper to read and sign, which done, I shook hands with him cordially, preparing to go. "But your receipt—you have forgotten to take it up!"

"O General Curzon! the whole proceeding seems so ominous," I said, turning back at the door to receive the proffered scrap, which, in another moment, dropped from my nerveless fingers, while these, clasped over my streaming eyes, forgot their office.

"My dear young lady," he remonstrated, "I am shocked. What can have occurred to impress you thus? Not this mere routine of affairs, surely?—Duncan, a glass of water here for Miss Monfort."

"I do not know, I am sure, why I should be so weak for such a trifle," I said, after a few swallows of ice-water had somewhat restored my equilibrium; "but I do feel very dismally about this voyage—have done so ever since I left Beauseincourt. This is the last straw on the camel's back, believe me, General Curzon. You must not reproach yourself in the least—nor me; and now let me bid you farewell once more, perhaps eternally!"

These words of mine were remembered later in a very different spirit from that in which they were then received (one of incredulous compassion)—remembered as are ever the last utterances of the doomed, whether innocent or guilty, in solemn awe and reverential tenderness, not unmingled with a superstitions faith in presentiment.

"Why, you look bluer than your very obvious veil, bluer than your invisible school-marmish stockings, bluer than the skies, or a blue bag, or Madame de Staël's 'Corinne,' or Byron's 'dark-blue ocean,'" said Major Favraud, as he assisted me again into the carriage, where Dr. Durand and Marion awaited me, for, as I have said, we were now on our way to the vessel which was to bear me and my destinies forever from that lovely Southern land in which I had seen and suffered so much.

Dr. Durand looked serious at the sight of my woful aspect, and Marion mutely proffered her vinaigrette, gratefully accepted, as was the good doctor's compassionate silence; but, as usual, Favraud, after having once gotten fairly under weigh, ran on. "What is the use of bewailing the inevitable?" he pursued. "We have all seen your penchant for Curzon, and his for you, for three days past; but Octavia is as tough as lignum-vitæ, I regret to assure you, my dear Miss Harz, and your chance is as blue as your spirits, or the flames of snap-dragon, or Marion's eyes. You will have to just put up with the captain, I fear, for even the doctor there is in harness for life. Southern women, you know, proverbially survive their husbands; and, as the suttee is out of fashion, they sometimes have to marry Yankees as a dernier ressort of desperation! Of course, there are occasional sad exceptions"—looking grave for a moment, and glancing at the black hat-band on the Panama hat he was nursing on his knees, so as to let the breeze blow through his silky, silver-streaked black hair—"but—but—in short, why will you all look so doleful? Isn't it bad enough to feel so?"

"The loveliest fade earliest, we all know," and the tears were in his honest, frivolous eyes, dashed away in the next moment as he exclaimed, eagerly, "Why, there goes the Lamarque equipage, as I live! I had forgotten all about it. The pleasantest woman in Savannah, young or old, is to be your compagnon de voyage, Miss Harz, and the most determined widower on record her escort; a perfect John Rogers of a man, with nine little motherless children, her brother Raguet ('Rag,' as we called him at school, on account of his prim stiffness, so that 'limber as a rag' seemed a most preposterous saying in his vicinity). He is handsome, however, and intelligent, a perfect gentleman, but on the mourners' bench just now, like some others you know of"—heaving a deep sigh. "His wife, poor thing, died last autumn—a pretty girl in her day was Cornelia Huger! I was a little weak in that direction once myself—before—that is, before—O doctor! what a trouble it is to remember!"

And again the small, fleet hand was dashed across the twinkling, tearful eyes of this April day of a middle-aged man of the world—this modern Mercutio—merry and mournful at once, as if there were two sides to his every mood, like the famous shield of story. When we reached the quay the Kosciusko was already getting up her steam, and, in less than an hour afterward, the friends I loved were gone like dreams, the bustle of departure was over, and, with lifted canvas and a puffing engine, we were grandly steaming past the noble forts (poor Bertie's broach and buckle, be it remembered) on our path of pride and power toward the broad Atlantic.

The weather was oppressively hot, and, for the first thirty-six hours, scarcely a breath of wind lifted us on our way, so that the engine, wholly incompetent to the work of both sails and machinery, bore us very slowly on our northward ocean-flight. Indeed, the failure of this engine to do its duty, at first, had sorely disheartened both captain and crew as we found later, for upon its execution and energies, in the beginning, had rested our entire dependence.

On the evening of the second day's voyage, a sudden and violent thunder-storm occurred, not unusual in those latitudes; during the raging of which our mainmast was struck by lightning, and wholly disabled.

The fire was extinguished in the only possible manner, by cutting it away from the decks, letting it gently down upon them, deluging it, so that our mast lay charred and blackened after its bath of sea-water, like a mighty serpent stretched along the ship, from stem to stern, and wrapped loosely in its shrouds. It did us good service later, though not by defying the winds of heaven, nor spreading forth its snowy sails to catch the tropic breezes.

Before many hours, it was destined to ride the waves in a shape that was certainly never intended by those who chose it among many others—taper and stately in its group of firs—to be the chief adornment of a gallant ship, and lift a pointing finger to the stars themselves, as an index of its might, and, with this exception, the hope of those it served—that of a charred and blackened life-raft.

The renewed freshness of the atmosphere, and the joyful upspringing of the breezes, alone remained, at midnight, to tell the story of the recent hurricane.

These tropic breezes came like benevolent fairies, to aid our groaning Titan in his labors.

I can never rid myself for one moment of the idea that an engine really works, with weary, reluctant strength like a genii slave, waiting vengefully for the time of retaliation, which sooner or later is sure to come; or of the visionary notion that a graceful, gliding ship, with all sails set, receives the same pleasure from its own motion and beauty that a snow-white swan must do "as down she bears before the gale," with her white plumage and stately crest.

I think, if ever I am called to give a toast, it shall be "Sail-ships; may their shadows never be less!" They are, indeed, a part of the romance of ocean.

The moon was full, in the balmy summer night that succeeded the tempest, and the ship's quarter-deck was crowded with the passengers of the Kosciusko, enjoying to the utmost, as it seemed, the delicious, newly-washed atmosphere, the moonlit heavens and sea, the exquisitely-caressing softness of the tardily-awakened breezes that filled the white sails of the vessel, and fluttered the silken scarf of the maiden, with the same wooing breath of persuasive, subtle strength.

Around Miss Lamarque, the lady of whom Major Favraud had spoken so admiringly, and to whose kindness he had committed me, a group had gathered, chiefly of the young, not to be surpassed in any land for manly bearing, graceful feminine beauty, gayety, wit, and refinement.

There was Helen Oscanyan, fair as a dream of Greece, in her serene, marble perfectness of form and feature; and the lovely Mollie Cairns, her cousin, small, dark, and sparkling—both under the care of that stately gentleman, their uncle, Julius Sevère, of Savannah; and there were the sisters Percy, twins in age and appearance, with voices like brook-ripples, and eyes like wood-violets, and feet of Chinese minuteness and French perfection—the darlings and only joys of a mother still beautiful, though sad in her widowhood, and gentle as the dove that mourns its mate.

There was the brilliant Ralph Maxwell, whose jests, stinging and slight, just glanced over the surface of society without inflicting a wound, even as the skater's heel glides over ice, leaving its mark as it goes, yet breaking no crust of frost; and there was the poetic dreamer Dartmore, with his large, dark eyes, and moonlight face, and manner of suffering serenity, on his way to put forth for fame, as he fondly believed, his manuscript epic on the "Sorrows of the South."

All these, and more, were there gathering about the leader of their home-society, on that alien deck, as securely as though they were sitting in her own drawing-room at "Berthold," on one of her brilliant reception-evenings.

How could they know—how could they dream the truth—or descry the hidden skeleton at the festival, wreathed in flowers and veiled with glittering, filmy draperies, which yet put forth its bony fingers to beckon on and clutch them?

I too was joyous and unconscious as the rest, and for the first time for many days felt the burden literally heaved rather than lifted away that had oppressed me.

Was I not on my way to him in whose presence alone I lived my true life? and what feeling of his morbid fancy was there that my hand could not smooth away, when once entwined in his? Beauseincourt, and all its shadows, had I not put behind me? The sunshine lay before, and in its light and warmth I should still rejoice, as it was my birthright to do.

I was "fey" that night, as the Scotch say, when an unaccountable lightness of mood precedes a heavy sorrow, which it so often does, as well as the more usual mood, the presage of gloom. I felt that I had the power to put aside all ills—to grapple with my fate, and compel back my lost happiness. Truly my bosom's lord sat lightly on her throne, as of late it had not been her wont to do.

Against my inclination had I been drawn into the current of that youthful gayety, and now my bark floated without an effort on the stream. I was in my own element again, and my powers were all responsive.

The small hours came—the happy group dispersed—not without many interchanges of social compliment, much badinage, and merry plans for the morrow. The monster Sea-sickness had been defied on the balmy voyage, save in the brief interval of tempest, and his victors mocked him, baffled as he was, with their purpose of amusement.

"We shall get up the band to-morrow evening," said Major Ravenel, "and have a dance; the gallop would go grandly here. See what reach of quarter-deck we have! There are Germans on board who play in concert violins and wind-instruments."

"Suppose we dress as sea-nymphs," said Honoria Pyne; "enact a masque for old Neptune's benefit? It would be so complimentary, you know; bring down the house, no doubt, I have a sea-green tarlatan lying so conveniently. Colonel Latrobe looks exactly like a Triton, with that wondrous beard. A little alum sprinkled over its red-gold ground would do wonders in the way of effect—would be gorgeous—wouldn't it, now, Miss Harz?"

"But all that could be done on shore as well, Miss Pyne," I replied, in the way of reminiscence. "It is a pity to waste our opportunities of observation now, in getting up costumes; and, for my part, I confess that I have a wholesome dread of these sea-deities, and fear to exasperate their finny feelings by reducing them to effigies. Thetis is very spiteful, sometimes; and jealous, too, you remember."

Miss Pyne did not remember, but did not mean to be baffled either, she would let Miss Harz know, even if that lady did know more about mythology than herself; and, if no one else would join her, meant to play her rôle of sea-nymph all alone, with Major Latrobe for her Triton in waiting, tooting upon a conch-shell, and looking lovely! At which compliment, open and above-board, poor Major Latrobe, who was over head and ears in love with her, and a very ugly man, only bowed and looked more silly than before, which seemed a work of supererogation.

After the rest were gone, Miss Lamarque and I concluded to promenade on the nearly-deserted deck, in the moonlight, and let the excitement of the evening die away through the medium of more serious conversation. She was a woman of forty-five, still graceful and fine-looking, but bearing few traces of earlier beauty, probably better to behold, in her overripe maturity, than in the unfolding of her less attractive time of bud and blossom. Self had been laid aside now (which it never can be until the effervescence of youth and hope are over). She had accepted her position of old maid and universal benefactress, and sustained it nobly, gracefully. She was thoroughly well-bred and agreeable, very vivacious, astute, and intelligent, rather than intellectual, yet she had the capacity (had her training been different) to have been both of these.

I remember how it chanced that, after a long promenade, during which we had discussed men, manners, books, customs, costumes, and politics, even (that once tabooed subject for women, now free to all), with infinite zest and responsiveness that charmed us mutually, so that we swore allegiance on the strength of this one day's rencontre, like two school-girls or knights of old—I remember how the dropping of her comb at his feet caused Miss Lamarque to pause, compelling me to follow her example, by reason of our intertwined arms, in front of the man at the wheel, as he stooped to raise it and hand it to her with a seaman's bow. His ready politeness, unusual for one in his station, determined us to cultivate his maritime acquaintance, and in a short time we had drawn forth the outlines of his story, simple and bare as this was of incident.

His picturesque appearance had impressed us equally during the day, but until now we had not met in concert about Christian Garth, for such we soon found was the name of our polite pilot.

He was a Jerseyman, he told us, of German descent, married to the girl of his heart, and living on the coast of that adventurous little State, famous alike for its peaches and wrecks.

"Sall had a stocking full of money," he informed us, silver, and copper, and gold, when he married her, for her mother had been a famous huckster—and never missed her post in the Philadelphia market for thirty years, and this was her child's inheritance, and with this money he had fixed up his old hut, till it looked 'e'en a'most inside like a ship-captain's cabin.'

And now Sall wanted him to stay at home, he informed us, with her and the children, but somehow or other he could never tarry long at the hearth, for the sea pulled him like it was his mother, and the spell of the tides was on him, and he must foller even if he went to his own destruction, like them men that liquor lures to loss, or the love of mermaids.

"All land service is dead when likened to the sea," he said, shaking his great water-dog head, and looking out lovingly upon his idol. "But ships a'n't like they oncst was, ladies," he added, "before men put these here heavy iron ingines to work in 'em—it's like cropping a bird's wing to make a river-boat of a ship, and a burning shame to shorten sails till it looks like a young gal dressed in breeches or any other onnatural thing—for a sailing-ship and a full-flowing petticoat always rise up in a true man's mind together—God bless them both, I say."

"To which we cordially say amen, of course," said Miss Lamarque, laughing. "We should have been at a loss, however, Mr. Garth, but for our engine during the dead calm preceding the storm, when our ship's sails flapped so lazily about her masts, and she rocked like a baby's cradle without making progress. It is well the engineer manoeuvred so successfully while we lay fireless on the low rolling waves; but we are speeding along merrily enough now, to make up for it all—I take comfort in that—"

"But not exactly in the right direction, though, to suit my stripe," he said, turning his quid in his mouth us he looked out to leeward, revealing, as he did so, a fine yet rugged profile relieved against the silvery purple sheen of the moonlit sky.

"Do you see that dark object lying beyond" (our eyes mechanically followed his), "so still on the water?" and he indicated it with the pipe he held in one sinewy hand—for the native courtesy of the man had involuntarily proffered us the homage of removing it from his lips, when we addressed him.

"Yes—what is it? a wreck? a whale? a small volcanic island? Do explain, Mr. Garth," said Miss Lamarque.

"Nothing but an iceberg, and we are bearing down upon it rather too rapidly, it seems to me."

And so speaking, he turned his wheel in silence warily.

"But you have the command of the helm, and have nothing to do but—"

"Obey orders," he interrupted, grimly. "Ef the captain was to tell me to run the ship to purgatory, I'd have to do it, you know."

"But surely the captain would not jeopardize the lives of a ship's company, even if he likes warm latitudes, by ordering you to run foul of an iceberg; and, if he did, you certainly would not dare to obey him with the fear of God before your eyes?" remonstrated Miss Lamarque, indignantly. "For my part I shall go to him immediately and desire him to change his course—but after all I don't believe that dingy black thing is an iceberg at all—an old hen-coop rather, thrown over from some merchant-ship, or a vast lump of charred wood. You are only trying to alarm us."

"Ef you was to see it close enough, you would find it to shine equal to the diamond on your hand; but I hope you never will, that's all—I hope you never will, lady! I sot on a peak of that sort oncst myself for three days in higher latitudes than this here—me and five others, all that was spared from the wreck of the schooner Delta, and we felt our convoy melting away beneath us, and courtesying e'en a'most even with the sea, before the merchant-ship Osprey took us off, half starved, and half frozen, and half roasted all at oncst! Them is onpleasant rickollections, ladies, and it makes my blood creep to this day to see an iceberg in konsikence; but a man must do his dooty, whatsomever do betide. It was in the dead of night, and Hans Schuyler had the wheel, I remember, when we went to pieces on that iceberg, all for disregarding; the captain's orders; you see, he meant to graze it like!"

"Graze it!" almost shrieked Miss Lamarque. "Did he think he was driving a curricle? Graze it—Heaven, what rashness!"

"Don't—don't! Mr. Garth," I petitioned; "I shall never sleep a wink on this ship if you continue your narrative."

"Do—do! Mr. Garth," entreated Miss Lamarque, whose penetration showed her by this time that the pilot was only playing on our fears, for want of a better instrument for his skill. "I quite enjoy the idea that you have actually been astride a fragment of the arctic glacier, and that we may perhaps make the acquaintance of a white bear ourselves when we get near our iceberg, or a gentle seal. Wouldn't you like one for a pet, Miss Harz?"

"It is very cold," I said, digressively. "I feel the chill of that fragment of Greenland freeze my marrow. I must go fetch my shawl; but first reassure us, Mr. Garth, if possible."

He laughed. "I have paid you now for making fun of me to-day," he said, saucily. "I saw your drawing of me in your books, and heard the ladies laughing. I peeped as I passed when Myers took the helm, and I wanted to see what all the fun was about; then I said to myself, 'I will give her a skeer for that if I have a chance'—but, all the same, the chill you feel is a real one, for as sure as death that lump of darkness is an iceberg. I have told you no yarn, as you will find out to-morrow when you ask the captain. I'll steer you clear of the iceberg though, ladies, never fear. Hans Schuyler has not got the wheel to-night—you see he was three sheets in the wind anyhow, and the captain says, 'Hans,' says he, 'don't tech another drop this night, or we'll never see another mornin' till we are resurrected,' and so he turned into his hammock and swung himself to sleep—a way he had, for he didn't keer for nothin' where his comfort was concerned, having been raised up in the Injies."

"Come, Miss Lamarque," I interrupted. "I must not hear another word. 'Macbeth doth murder sleep,' and I shall be nervous for a month after this. So, good-night, Mr. Garth, and be sure you merit your first name by taking good care of us while we imitate the example of your worthy captain and 'swing ourselves to sleep,' or rather let the waves perform that office for us. I shall make it my care to-morrow morning early, if you still hold the helm, to show you my sketch, and convince you that it was never made for fun at all, but that it is a real portrait of a very fine-looking seaman, a real viking in appearance, and somewhat better than one at heart, I trust. I shall hope to earn your good opinion instead of ill-will, when you have only seen my sketch."

"You have it already, you have it already, young gal—young miss, I mean," he said, with a wave of the hand, which meant to be courteous, no doubt, but seemed only defiant. "An' this much I kin say without injury to Sall—that I'd rather hear you talk and see you smile, as I has been watchin' of you constant do to-day, than go to the circus in New York, or even to a Spanish bull-fight, or hear a Fourth-of-July oration, or 'tend camp-meetin'—and that's saying no little—an' no iceberg shall come near you while Christian Garth lays a hand upon this helm. But don't be skeered, ladies; no harm will come to the good ship Kosciusko."

"I declare our pilot is quite chivalrous, as far as you are concerned, for I marked his glance, Miss Harz," said Miss Lamarque, archly, as we turned our faces cabinward, under the protection of our helmsman's promised vigilance. "See what it is to be young and pretty, and remark the truth of the old proverb, as exemplified in his case, that 'extremes meet.' Victoria herself is not more independent of me or my position—established facts as both are in the eyes of some—than is Christian Garth. To him, this outsider of the world of fashion, I am only a homely old woman; no prestige comes in to garnish the unvarnished fact—a plain old maid, my dear—with not even the remembrance of beauty as a consolation, nor its remnant as a sign of past triumphs, 'only this and nothing more,' as that wonderful man Poe makes his raven say. We never find our level until we go among people who know and care nothing about us, who have never 'heard of us'—that exordium of most greetings from folks of our own class. It is absolutely refreshing to be so unaffectedly despised and slighted—it does one a world of good, there is no doubt of that, especially when one's grandfather was a Revolutionary notability, and other antecedents of a piece—but men are all alike at heart, only the worldly ones wear flimsy masks, you know, and pretend to adore intellect and ugliness, when beauty is the only thing they care for—all a sham, my dear, in any case."

"Yes, all alike," I repeated, making, as I spoke, one mental entire reservation. "All vain alike, I mean; flatter their vanity ever so little and they are at your very feet, asking 'for more,' like Oliver Twist; more bread for amour propre, the insatiable! It was that sketch of mine that wrought the spell, though unintentionally, of course, and the sly fellow knew very well that it was no caricature—that is, if he peeped, as he pretends—but a tolerably correct likeness that might have satisfied Sall herself. By-the-by, I have a great mind to bestow it upon him as a 'sop for Cerberus,' should her jealousy ever be aroused by your reports of his devotion to me, or admiration rather, most unequivocally avowed, it must be acknowledged. I really had no intention of injuring Sally, and, if you think it best, will make the amende honorable by being as cross as possible to him to-morrow."

"No, no, carry out your first intention and conciliate him; for, remember, he has us in the hollow of his hand. Bestow the picture, by all means, and just as many smiles and compliments as he can stand, or you can afford to squander; for you are worse than a mermaid, Miss Harz, for fascination, all the gentlemen say so; and, as to Captain Falconer—"

"They are malignants," I rejoined, ignoring purposely the last clause of the sentence which I had interrupted; "and you are perfidious to hear them slander me so. I hate fascinating people; they always make my flesh crawl like serpents. The few I have known have been so very base." "Good specimens of 'thorough bass,'" she interpolated, laughing.—"I am sure I am glad I have no attributes of fascination, if a strange old work I met with at Beauseincourt may be considered responsible. Did you ever see it, Miss Lamarque, you who see every thing? Hieronymus Frascatorius tells of certain families in Crete who fascinated by praising, and to avert this evil influence some charm was used consisting of a magic word (I suppose this was typical of humility, though related as literal). This naïveté on the part of the old chronicler was simply impayable, as Major Favraud would say, with his characteristic shrug. One Varius related (you see my theme has full possession of me, and the book is a collation of facts on the subject of fascination of all kinds, even down to that of the serpent) that a friend of his saw a fascinator with a look break in two a precious gem in the hands of a lapidary—typical this, I suppose, of some fond, foolish, female heart. Fire, according to this author, represents the quality of fascination; and toads and moths are subject to its influence, as well as some higher animals—deer, for instance, who are hunted successfully with torches; and he relates, further, that in Abyssinia artificers of pottery and iron are thus fearfully endowed, and are consequently forbidden to join in the sacred rites of religion, as fire is their chief agent. Isn't this a strange, quaint volume, to set before a king? and how do you like my lecture delivered extempore?"

"Oh, vastly! but I did not know that was your style before. Don't cultivate it, dear, if you hope to win manly hearts. Men like to do all the lecturing themselves, and I find it diplomatic to feign profound ignorance on all subjects outside of a bandbox; it delights them so to enlighten us. No wonder they fancy us fools when we feign foolishness so admirably—lapwings that we are!"

"But I never do, in such society. My experience is different from yours. I always pretend to know twice as much as I do, when they are about; it bluffs them off, and they are credulous sometimes as well as ignorant, notwithstanding their boasted acumen."

"Your lamp of experience needs trimming, my pretty Miriam," she said, shaking her head, "if you really believe this. They never forgive superiority, assumed or real; none but the noble ones, I mean; who, of course, are in the minority. Give a pair of tongs pantaloons, and it asserts itself. Trousers, my dear, are at the root of manly presumption. I discovered that long ago. A man in petticoats would be as humble as a woman. This is my theory, at least; take it for what it is worth. And now to sleep, with what heart we may, an iceberg being in our vicinity;" and, taking my face in her hand, she kissed me cordially. "It is very early in our acquaintance for such manifestations to be allowable," she said, kindly, "but I am a sort of spoiled child of society, and dare to be natural. I consider that the best privilege that attaches to my condition, that of the 'bell-wether' of Savannah ton—the universally-accepted bore! You know—Favraud has told you, of course; he always characterizes as he goes."

"He has called you the most agreeable woman in Savannah, I remember, young or old, and was truly glad, on my account, to know that you were on board. Of your brother he spoke very kindly also, even admiringly."

"Oh, yea, I know; but of Raguet there is little question now. His wife's death has crushed him. I never saw so changed a man; he is half idiotic, I believe; and I am with him now just to keep those children from completing the work of destruction. Six little motherless ones—only think—and as bad as they can possibly be; for poor Lucilla was no manager. Isn't it strange, the influence those little cottony women get over their husbands? You and I might try forever to establish such absolute despotism, all in vain. It is your whimpering sort that rule with the waving of a pocket-handkerchief; but poor, dear little woman, she is powerless now; and I suppose the next will be like unto her. Raguet would never look at any thing feminine that hadn't white eyes and pink hair (yellow, I mean, of course)—his style, you know, being dark and stern, he likes the downy, waxy kind. All this is shockingly egotistical; but the question is, who that has a spark of individuality is otherwise? Good-night, again, and may all sweet dreams attend you; for my part, I never dream, being past the dreaming age, and realities fortunately disappear with daylight; even cross children are wheedled into quietness, and servants forget to fidget and giggle; and, for mosquitoes, there are bars. Adieu."

And thus we parted, never to meet again in mutual mood like this!

Yet, had the free agency of which some men boast been ours, we had scarcely chosen to face the awful change—to look into each other's eyes through gathering death-doom!

---

CHAPTER III.

Before my dreaming eyes was the terror of a hungry, crunching tooth, fixed in the vessel's side, that of the iceberg, lying black in the moonlight like a great coal crystal, grimly awaiting our approach, but the reality, as well as the figment, had disappeared when I emerged at sunrise from the suffocating cabin, to the atmosphere of the cool and quiet quarter-deck, which had just undergone its matutinal.

Armed with an orange and a biscuit for physical refreshment, I depended on sea and sky for my mental entertainment; and in my hand I bore a slender scroll, destined as a propitiatory offering to our offended helmsman.

I was glad to find again at the wheel our pilot of yesterday.

"Your iceberg has disappeared, Mr. Garth," I said, as I extended to him the sketch I had made of his noble physique the day before, "and here is a picture for your wife, which she will see was not drawn for fun. Women are sharper than men about such matters. There, I bestow it not without regret." He received my offering with a smile, and nod of his great curly head, opened it, gazed long and seriously upon it, and, with the single word "Good," rolled it up again, and consigned it to some bosom pocket in his flannel shirt, into which it seemed to glide as a telescope into its case, revealing, as he did so, glimpses of a hairy breast, and vigorous chest, more admirable for strength than beauty, certainly.

"I will keep it there," he said, "young miss," pressing it closely against his side with his colossal hand, "until I get safe home to the Jarseys, and to Sall, or go to Davy's locker, one or other, but which it will be, young gal—young miss, I should be saying—is not for me to know."

"Nor for anyone," I rejoined, solemnly; "all rests with God."

"With God and our engineer," he resumed, tersely; "them sails is of little account, now the mainmast is struck away; them floppen petticoats, wat the wind loves to play in and out, layin' along like a lazy lubber that it is, and leaving its work for others to do. It was a noble mast, though, while it stood—and you could smell the turpentine blood in its heart to the very last. It was as limber as a sapling, and never growed brittle, like some wood, with age and dryness. No storm could splinter it, and it would fling itself over into the high waves sometimes, rayther than snap and lash them like a whip. But there it lies, burned with the fire of heaven's wrath, at last, and leaving its fires of hell behind, in the heart of the Kosciusko."

"You have changed your mind on the subject of engines, Mr. Garth, I am glad to see. Truly, ours seems to be doing giant's work; now we are flying, to be sure."

"Rushing, not flying, young lady—that's the word; our wings are little use to-day, you see, such as are left to us. Runnin' for dear life, we'd better say, for that's the truth of the matter, and may the merciful Lord speed us, and have in his care all helpless ones this day!"

The lifted hand, the bared head, the earnest accents, with which these words were spoken, gave to this simple utterance of good-will all the solemnity of a benediction or prayer.

I noticed that, after replacing his tarpaulin, the lips of Garth continued to move silently, then were compressed gravely for a time, while his eye, large, clear, and expressive, was fixed on space.

"Do you still see an iceberg, Mr. Garth? Do you really apprehend danger for us now?" I asked, after studying his countenance for a moment, "or, are you again desirous to try the nerves of your female passengers? I think I must apply to the captain this time for information."

"Yes, danger," he replied, in low, sad tones, ignoring my last remark, or perhaps not hearing it at all—"danger, compared with which an iceberg might be considered in the light of a heavenly marcy. There is a chance of grazing one of them snow-bowlders, or of its drifting away from a ship, when the ripples reach it, or, if the wust comes, a body can scramble overboard, and manage to live on the top of one of them peaks, or in one of their ice-caves, with a few blankets, and a little bread and junk and water, fur a space, so as to get a chance of meetin' a ship, or a schooner; but, when there is something wrong in a ship's heart, there a'n't much hope for rescue, onless it comes from above."

He hesitated, smiling grimly, rolled his quid, crammed his hat down over his eyes, and again addressed himself to his wheel, and, for a few moments, I stood beside him silently.

"The ship is leaking, I suppose," I said, at last, "so that you apprehend her loss, perhaps," and my heart sank coldly within me, as I spoke; "but, if this be true, why does not the captain apprise us? No, you are quizzing me again, and very cruelly this time, very unwarrantably."

Yet I did not think exactly as I spoke, strive as I might to believe the man in jest. Too much solemnity and sorrow both were discernible in his worn and rugged features, hewn grandly as if from granite, to admit of a hope like this. His words were earnest, and some great calamity was in store, I could not doubt, or at least he apprehended such. For some time he replied not, then, slowing pointing to the base of the stricken mainmast, which still showed an elevation of some inches above the deck, he revealed to me the truth without a word.

As my eyes followed his guiding finger, I saw, with terror unspeakable, a thin blue wavering smoke-wreath, float upward from the floor, and, after curling feebly about the truncated mast, disappear in the clear sunlit atmosphere, again to arise from the same point, that of the juncture of the mast and deck, creeping through some invisible crevice, as it seemed to form itself eternally in filmy folds, and successively elude the eye as soon as it shaped to sight. I understood him then. There was fire in the heart of the ship, and I knew the hold was filled with cotton; it was smouldering slowly, and our safety was a question of time alone!

Pale, transfixed, frozen, I lifted my eyes to the man, who seemed to represent my fate for the moment. "Was it the lightning?" I asked, after a pause, during which his pitying eye rested on me drearily. "Did the fire occur in that way?"

"Yes, the lightning it was; and God's hand, which sent the shaft direct, alone can deliver us."

I seemed to hear the voice of Bertie speak these words. Things grew confused; I wavered as I stood, lifted my hand to my head; the face of Christian Garth grew large and dim, then faded utterly. I knew no more until I found myself seated on a coil of rope, leaning against the bulwark, while a young girl stood beside me, fanning and bathing my face, and offering me a glass of water.

"You are better now," she said, kindly; "the man at the wheel called me as I was passing, and pointed out your condition, and I led you here, and ran for water. Being up so early is apt to disagree with some people."

"What are these people crawling about the deck for? Is all hope over, or was it only a dream?" I asked.

"Oh, you are quite wild yet from your swoon; it is only the calkers stopping up the seams, one of the captain's queer whims they say; but how they are to dance to-night, those magnificos I mean, without ruining their slippers with this pitch, I cannot see! Thank Goodness! I belong to a church, and am not of this party, and don't care on my own account, nor does the captain, I believe. I was placed under his care at Savannah, and I suppose it is only to stop the ball that—"

She was interrupted by the approach of the officer under discussion, but he passed us gloomily and went on to inspect the workmen so unseasonably employed, as it seemed, in a labor that, save in a case of long voyages, is always performed in port.

His melancholy air, and the preoccupation of his manner, confirmed my worst fears.

Again I sought the Ixion of the vessel, who calmly and stolidly performed his duty as if, indeed, Fate directed, without a change of feature now, or expression.

"Has the captain no hope of rescue, Mr. Garth?"

"Oh, yes; he thinks we shall meet a ship or two between now and noon—we 'most always do, you know"—rolling his quid slowly, and hesitating for a while; "keep heart, keep heart! I had thought from your face you were stronger; besides, the pumps are doing good work in the hold: who knows what may come of it, who knows?"

Alas! alas! I could not rise to the level of this dim hope. "Think of the burning crowd, the sheet of flame, the terrible destruction!" I murmured; "I must go now and apprise those poor wretches below that their time is short; they have a right to know."

His vice-like hand was on my arm. "You do not go a step on such an errand," he muttered. "It is the captain's business; he will 'tend to it when the time comes, for he is a true man, and the bravest sailor on the line. He means to do what's right, never fear. It is my dooty to hold you here until he comes, onless you promise me to be discreet."

"I shall be discreet, never fear—" and his grasp relaxed. I sped me back to the coil of rope on which I had left my young companion, intending to partake with her there my biscuit and orange, so needed now for strength.

I found in her stead (for she had departed in the interval) a delicate-looking young woman, plain and poor, a widow evidently from the style of her shabby mourning and sad expression of face, bearing in her arms a weird and sickly-looking child, evidently a sufferer from spinal disease—an infant as to size, but preternaturally old in countenance.

The steady gaze of its large and serious eyes affected me magnetically—eyes that seemed ever seeking something that still eluded them, and which now appeared to inquire into my very soul.

"Is your little boy ill, madam?" I asked at last; and at the sound of my voice a smile broke over his small, sallow features, lending them strange beauty, but dying away instantly again into an expression of startled suspicion.

"Yes, very ill," she answered, clasping him tenderly as he clung to her suddenly. "He has some settled trouble that no medicine reaches, and you see how small and light he is. Many a twelve months' babe is heavier than he, yet he is three years old come March next, and he is 'cute beyond his years, it seems to me."

"You seem very weak and weary," I rejoined. "I noticed you yesterday with interest, sitting all the time with your boy on your knee. You must need exercise and rest. Go and walk now a little, while you can;" and I stretched my arms for her baby.

To her surprise, evidently, he came to me willingly—attracted, no doubt, by the gleam of the watch-chain about my neck, and still further propitiated by a portion of my orange, which he greedily devoured.

In the mean time the poor, pale mother took a few turns on the quarter-deck, and, disappearing therefrom a moment, returned with a small supply of cakes and biscuits which she had sought in the steward's room.

An inspiration of Providence, no doubt, she thought this proceeding later, which at the moment was only intended to anticipate the delay attendant on all second-class meals.

These cakes, with a pains-taking diligence, if not forethought—peculiar to all feeble animals, squirrels, sick children, and the like—did he one by one cram and compel into my pocket, unconscious as I was at the moment of his miser-like proceeding (instinctive, probably), which later I detected, to his infinite rejoicing. In company with my slender purse, and bunch of useless keys, a pencil, and a small memorandum-book, they remained perdu until that moment of accidental discovery arrived which was to test their value and place it "far above that of rubies."

Light as a pithless nut seemed this little creature in my strong, energetic arms, and yet his mother staggered beneath his weight.

She insisted, however, after a time, on resuming her charge of him, as it was proper she should do, and then sat beside me, delivering herself of a long string of complaints and grievances, after the fashion of all second-rate, solitary people when secure of sympathy.

She overrated my benevolence on this occasion, however. I was lost in painful reverie, and scarcely understood a word of her communication, which I was obliged at last to cut short, for I had resolved, now that my strength was recruited, on the only visible course remaining to me—I would seek Miss Lamarque, confide to her the statement of Christian Garth, relate to her what my eyes had seen, and be guided by her determination and judgment, with those of her brother, a man of sense, I saw, and whose instincts, no doubt, would all be sharpened by the jeopardy of his children.

She was sitting up in her state-room when I knocked at the door, still in her berth, the lower one—from which the upper shelf had been lifted so as to afford her room and air—looking very Oriental and handsomer than I ever had seen her, in her bright Madras night-turban and fine white cambric wrapper richly trimmed.

Her face broke into smiles as soon as she beheld me; and she invited me, in a way not to be resisted, so resolute and yet so kindly was it, to partake with her of the hot coffee her maid was just handing her in bed, in a small gilded cup, a portion of the service on the stand beside her.

"It is our Southern custom, you know, Miss Harz—always our café noir before breakfast, as a safeguard against malaria. To be sure, there is nothing of that sort to be apprehended at sea, but still habits are inveterate; second nature, as the moralists and copy-books say, as if there ever could be more than one. What nonsense these wiseacres talk, to be sure! But there is cream, you see, for those who like it—boiled down and bottled for the use of the children before leaving home—one of Dominica's notions;" and here the smiling maid, with her little, respectful courtesy, tendered me a reviving cup of Miss Lamarque's morning beverage, Mocha, made to the last point of perfection, dripped and filtered over a spirit-lamp by Dominica, the skillful and neat-handed.

"But you are very pale to-day, my child—what on earth can be the matter?—There, Dominica, I thought I heard Florry cry! Go and help Caliste get the children ready for a trot upon deck before breakfast, and don't forget to give each one a gill of cream and a biscuit—or, stay, twice as much for the two elder before they go up. It may be some time before they get their regular morning meal.—They have to wait, you know, Miss Harz, which is such rank injustice where children are concerned. Patience never belongs to unreasoning creatures, unless an instinct, as with animals; men have to learn its lessons through the teachings of experience—that strictest of school-masters. Now, you see, I have my lecturing-cap on, and am almost equal to you or Dr. Lardner in my way. But it takes you to define fascination! I suppose Mrs. Heavyside, however, could help you there—for nothing short of witchcraft could account to me for her elopement with that dreary man! To leave her sweet children, too, as if all the men on earth could be worth to a true mother her teething baby's little toe or finger!"

"Would she never stop—never give one loop-hole for doubt to enter?" I thought.

"But what in the world ails you—has Dunmore, the disconsolate, been making love again? Has Captain Falconer declared himself too soon? and do you hesitate, on account of Miss Moore? Don't let that consideration influence you, I beg, for she is the greatest flirt in Savannah, the truest to the vocation, and I like her for that, anyhow. Whatever a man or woman has to do, let him or her do earnestly. That isn't exactly Scripture, but near enough, don't you think so?" and she laughed merrily.

"I have been on deck this morning," I commenced, "Miss Lamarque, and saw Christian Garth, and—"

"He has been terrifying and electrifying you again with his tale of horrors—there, it is all out. Why, he is as sensational as 'Jane Eyre,' this new English novel I am just reading," drawing it from under her pillow and holding it aloft as she spoke. "Currer Bell is not more mysteriously awful, but Garth is not artistic. I detected his intention by the inconsistency of his expression of face, which bore no part in his narrative, and at once exposed him, you must remember—"

"Oh, yes—but this time—"

"Nonsense, Miriam Harz! the iceberg is gone, I know. Why, what a nervous coward you are, to be sure, with all that assumed bravery! I am twice as courageous, I do believe, despite appearances; I really begin to be of opinion that it is safer to be at sea than on land—now what do you think of that for a heterodoxy?—A second cup? why, of course, and a third, if you want it; I am delighted you like it. These little Sèvres toys are but thimbles, but I always carry them about with me by sea and land, and have for years; I feel as if there were luck in them, not one of the original three has been broken—there—there!—just as I was boasting, too!—never mind, such accidents will occur; but your pretty pongee dress is sadly stained with the coffee; besides, as you dropped the cup, it is your luck, not mine; and I want an odd saucer, anyhow, to feed Desirée out of; she sleeps in that willow basket you see in the corner of the state-room, Miss Harz, and is lazy, like her mistress, of mornings.—Desirée! Desirée! peep out, can't you, now you have your long-desired Sèvres saucer to lap milk from?—She won't touch delft, Miss Harz. She is the most fastidious little creature!"

"Alas! alas!" and I groaned aloud.

"Not taking on about that silly cup, I hope—no; what can it be then, a megrim? No. Well, I can't imagine any thing worse, to save my life. Here, let me read you this, it is fine—it is where Jane Eyre feels herself deserted, and this comparison about 'the dried-up channel of a river' thrills one. Just hear it;" and she was about commencing—

"Not now—not now, Miss Lamarque; stern realities demand our attention. Lay your book aside, be calm, be firm, but listen to me seriously. Christian Garth informs me, nor he alone—my own eyes have done the rest—that the cotton in the hold has taken fire from the lightning yesterday; has been slowly smouldering ever since the mast was struck—and that the ship's hours are numbered!"

"O God! O God!" and she bowed her head upon her clasped and quivering hands. "But, Captain Ambrose—he did not tell you so?" looking up suddenly. "Christian Garth, indeed! his impudence is surprising—another hoax, I suppose," and she tried to smile; "such a coarse creature, too!"

"We shall see, but for the present say nothing; only get up and dress as quickly as you can, but it is important to be very quiet, for fear of causing confusion. I have promised discretion."

"Call Dominica, then, for me, Miss Harz," gasping and stretching forth her arms. "I can do nothing for myself—nothing—I am so weak, so helpless. Yet I must believe he is—you are mistaken!"

"I trust it may prove so. But let me assist you; Dominica is best employed making ready the little ones and giving them food—strengthening them for the struggle. She will be nerveless if she knows the truth, and you are not in a condition to conceal it."

"Just as you will, then. My trunk—will you be so kind as to unlock it and give me out the tray—that picture? After that I can get along alone."

I silently did as she desired, and saw her place a covered miniature about her neck before she arose. Very few minutes sufficed this morning for her toilet—usually a tedious and fastidious one—her dress, her bonnet, her shawl, were hastily thrown on, her watch secured with the few jewels lying upon the night-table; the rest of her valuables were with other boxes in the hold, the repository of all unneeded baggage, and these, of course, she could scarcely hope to save in case of fire, even if lives were rescued.

Then, together, we went out, just in time to join the little troop of young children and nurses on their way to the deck. Miss Lamarque did not reply to their tumultuous greeting, but, silently taking the baby Florry, her namesake, in her arms, kissed her many times. I had told her while, she was dressing, of the smoke-wreaths about the base of the broken mast, and she believed in the testimony my eyes had afforded me far more than in the reports of Christian Garth. We did not encounter Mr. Lamarque when we first went on deck; he had gone forward to smoke, some one said; but Captain Ambrose was standing alone, telescope in hand, and to him we addressed ourselves, quietly.

He seemed startled when I disclosed the result of my observation—for I did not choose to commit the pilot—but he did not attempt to deny the truth of the condition of things, and conjured us both to entire quiet and composure, and, if possible, to absolute silence. The safety of five hundred people, he said, depended on our discretion; the ship might not ignite for days, if at all, he thought, so carefully had the air been excluded from the cotton by the process of tight calking, so as to seal it almost hermetically; indeed, the fire might be wholly extinguished by the pumps, which were constantly at work, pouring streams of water around and through the hold; and a panic would be equal to a fire in any case. Such were his calmness and apparent faith in his own words, that they did much to allay Miss Lamarque's fears. My own were little soothed—I never doubted from the beginning what the end would be.

Mr. Lamarque approached us while the conference with the captain was going on, and, under the seal of secrecy, the condition of affairs was communicated to that gentleman.

I never saw a man so crushed and calm at the same time. His handsome face seemed turned to stone—he scarcely spoke at all, and made no inquiries. I think his mind, like mine, was made up to the worst. Yet he commanded himself so far as to go to the breakfast-table and superintend the meal of his little children, about whom he hung, like a mother-bird who sees the shadow of a hawk above her brood, from that moment until the dénoûment of the drama separated us two forever.

Miss Lamarque and I sat down together on a bench, while the host of hungry passengers crowded down to the cabin at the welcome summons of the bell, and I was aware again of the pale widow and her patient child standing near me.

A sudden thought occurred to me. This woman, more than any one among us, needed the strengthening stimulus of good food, and this meal might be her last on shipboard—on earth, perhaps—for a dull, low, ominous sound began to make itself heard to my ear as soon as the murmur of the crowd subsided.

"Trust me with your child again while you go down and eat your breakfast in my place to-day. It is a whim of mine. I have had coffee with this lady in her state-room, and shall not appear at the table. You may bring me a slice of bread, if you choose, when you come back, and one for baby. Do not refuse me this favor."

Much pleased at my attention, as I could see, she went to the grand first table, with its high-heaped salvers of snowy rolls and biscuit, its delicate birds and fowls, its fragrant coffee and tea, so different from the dregs of the humble board at which her second-class ticket alone entitled her to appear; and, to save her from possible humiliation, I wrote a line to the steward; so she feasted, no doubt, in state.

Again I enacted the rôle of self-appointed nurse to a creature that looked more like a fairy changeling than a flesh-and-blood creation.

"You are a strange woman, Miriam Harz! At such an hour as this, what matters the quality of food?" said Miss Lamarque, sententiously. "After all, what can that invalid and her child be to you in any case? They are essentially common and mean. You never saw them before, and may never see them again."

"In view of such a catastrophe as that before us, all distinctions fade, Miss Lamarque. This is the last meal any one will take on the ship Kosciusko—she is doomed! The woman might as well get strength for the chance of saving herself and child. I doubt whether any second table will be spread to-day!" I spoke with anguish.

"You cannot believe this! Why, after what the captain said, days may go by before any real danger manifests itself! Ships must pass in the interval—many ships may pass to-day, within a few hours, ready for our relief, if needed; and see, the smoke has ceased to curl about your broken main-mast! That shows convincingly that the fire is being gotten under—extinguished, probably."

"Oh, no! no! no! not with that low, terrible roaring in the hold. The fire is gaining strength, and our agony will soon he over."

I sat with, clasped hands and bowed head before her, insensible to her words. I suppose she strove to strengthen me. I think she tried to soothe. Failing in both, she rose and went away, and in her place came Christian Garth, relieved from the helm, and stood a moment beside me.

"Don't be down-hearted, young gal, an' wait for me. Ef the Lord lets me, I will save you, and the old lady, too; that is, ef she is your aunt or mother or near of kin."

I shook my head drearily.

"You have no hope, then, Mr. Garth?"

"Hope? yes; the best of hope—the Christian's hope. God can do any thing He pleases, we all know, and He may stretch forth his hand when all seems dark; but Captain Ambrose is not one to run a risk of that sort, so he has sent me to work upon a raft—one of two he is making for the seamen if the wust comes to the wust. But you see, I have been on lost ships afore now, an' I know there is no larboard nor starboard rules when men are skeered. So I shall make my raft to hold the womenfolk, for the boats will be for the sailors—mark my word—and them that's wise will wait till the press is over and take the rafts."

"There are little children," I said; "six of them belonging to that lady and Mr. Lamarque. Don't forget them, Mr. Garth, and the poor little widow coming now to claim her baby; this miserable little creature I am holding until she breakfasts. Don't lose sight of these, either, in the crowd, if, indeed, we are obliged to have recourse to your raft."

"Pray rayther that it may float us all to safety," he said, sternly, "for your best chance of being saved will be on that raft, if matters go as I think they will. Trust me, for I will come;" and he passed away just before the little widow came to my side again.

"I came up as soon as I could, to relieve you. I know how cross baby is when he gets restless, and I was afraid you might tire of him. See! I have brought his bread, and this waiter of tea and toast for you; now you must take a mouthful."

She knew nothing of our danger, it was plain. "Did you leave the other passengers at table?" I asked; "the captain, was he there?"

The question was never answered, for the attention of my interlocutor was riveted now, as was my own, on the companion-way, from which a wild and frightened-looking crowd was densely emerging, with a confused hum of voices that announced their recognition of their impending danger. The change of age, of pain, of woe, seemed sealed upon each aspect, as one by one, and phantom-like, in rapid succession, those who had so lately gone down to feast returned to the upper day, like grim ghosts coming from a church-yard carnival.

It was a sight to stir the stoutest spirit.

At the close of the repast, the captain had announced the truth, to his passengers, and followed them now to enjoin them to firmness and efficiency, both so greatly needed at this crisis.

Mounted on the capstan, he addressed them briefly, and not without influence. Such was the power of his simple and manly bearing over these distracted souls, that even the wildest listened with decorum.

This was no immigrant-ship, loaded with stolid or desperate men, insensible of high teachings, and alone desirous of personal safety. Yet the universal instinct asserted itself, and for the time courtesies were set aside, and family affections were all that were regarded.

Miss Lamarque, pale, yet collected, now stood surrounded by the children of her brother, leaning upon his arm while the captain spoke. Husbands and wives were together, sisters and brothers, servants and their masters—each group revealed its several household affinities. We only were alone—the dreary little widow, whose name I never knew, and Miriam Monfort; and on natural principles we clung together.

It is true that Miss Lamarque, by many signs, implored me to come to her, but I would not. It was like intruding on a bed of death, I felt, to break through ties of blood at such a time, by thrusting a foreign presence amid devoted relatives; and I was too proud, or perhaps too selfish, to intrude where I must be secondary, unless I took away another's rights.

The captain had promised, in his brief address, to protect his passengers to the utmost of his power—leaving the result with God. He had entreated them to be calm, and to preserve order—so essential to safety; had mentioned his confidence that a ship must pass before the catastrophe could possibly occur; but added that, to prepare for the worst, he had ordered the construction of two rafts—one for the use of the seamen, the other for the reception of food and necessaries.

His plan was to attach these to the larger boats, and so provide against want; in the certainty, however, that on such a route relief must soon present itself, in the shape of ship or steamer.

He called on all able to abet his exertions to present themselves forthwith, so that universal safety might be insured; not only by making the rafts, but the securing of food upon them, and comforts for the women and children, who represented so large a portion of the passengers. He answered for the fidelity of his seamen with his life. There was not one among them, he knew, who would lift a finger to disobey him. He said these words in conclusion:

"And now, if there is any one present sufficiently imbued with the grace of God to fix the anxious minds of these voyagers in prayer, such at least of them as are powerless otherwise to aid our exertions, let him appear and minister to their tribulation. This task is not for me, although the holiest. My duties call me elsewhere."

So adjured, a man, whose wild, fanatical appearance had given rise to the rumor that the famous "Lorenzo Dow" was on board, sprang on a bulkhead, and commenced to exhort the crowd about him, from which a file of pale, determined-looking men was slowly emerging to join the seamen at the other end of the vessel in their efforts for the public weal. But many lingered, either overcome and paralyzed by the stringency of circumstances, or unequal to exertions from personal causes—aged men, women, and children, chiefly—and to these the frenzied speaker continued to address his words of exhortation and warning.

Such a tirade of terrible objurgation I felt was entirely out of place in a scene like this, and calculated to excite the worst passions of the human mind, instead of persuading it to serenity and submission, so essential now; for to me the captain's last words represented the final grace of the preacher, when, with closed eyes and outspread hands, he dismissed his flock from the temple at the close of the services. From that vessel and all that concerned it we were virtually enfranchised from that moment—dismissed to destruction, so to speak, by fire or flood, or rescue from beyond, as the case might be, to life or death, as God willed—for the ship's mission was accomplished.

I shrank as far as possible from the wild, waving arms, the frenzied eyes, the gaunt and wolfish aspect, the piercing, agonized voice of the fanatic, who had assumed to himself the solemn office of soul-comforter in a time of extremity. I saw from a distance his long, lank figure writhing like a sapling in a storm, as it overtopped the crowd; but his words were lost on my ear, and I sat leaning back against the bulwark with folded hands, absorbed in my own thoughts, when a young girl, bursting from the throng, came and threw herself down before me, and buried her face in my lap, convulsed with sobs. When she looked up, I recognized the young person who had bathed my face in the morning during my partial swoon—a fair and lovely-looking girl of about eighteen years, pallid and ill now with excitement.

"Oh, it is so terrible!" she cried; "I cannot—cannot bear it, and he says we are all hopelessly lost unless we have repented; that there is no death-bed salvation; and this is our death-bed, you know, for the Spanish ship passed us without stopping, and we scarcely hope to see another. O cruel, cruel fiends! to pretend they did not understand our signals, and leave us to destruction."

And she clasped her hands in mute and bitter despair—no actress was ever so impressive.

"We must make up our minds to the worst," I said, as calmly as I could. "Then, if God sees fit to deliver us, we shall be all the more thankful. You must not believe what this ignorant and panic-stricken man tells you. Think of the thief on the cross whom Christ pardoned in dying."

"Then you hope to be permitted to see God! You dare to hope this?" she asked, gazing into my very eyes, so closely did she come to me.

"Oh, surely in his own good time! I have done nothing so very wicked, I hope, as to exclude me from my Father's face forever—have you? Now, don't be frightened; speak calmly."

"I don't know—I don't know. I should be afraid not to call myself desperately wicked at such a time; he says we all are, you know. We are all miserable sinners."

"It is very abject to talk and feel thus, and I don't believe that God approves of it," I said, indignantly. "He gives us self-respect, and commands us to cherish it. Such abasement is unworthy of Christian souls. It is very bitter to die, as young as we are; but, if we have done our best to serve Him, we need—we ought not to be afraid to meet our God."

She clung to my outstretched hand. She strengthened my spirit by the fullness of her need. The feeble widow with her child, too, crept close to me, weeping and trembling.

"Do not leave me," she entreated; "let us stay together to the very last."

"Nay, that may be a long time," I answered, smiling feebly, and nerved for the first time to encouragement; "for the captain will do his best to save his passengers—the women especially, I cannot doubt; and see what bounteous provision he is making for their support!"

And I pointed to the piles of flour and sugar barrels, the boxes of crackers and of hams, of figs and raisins, the hampers of wine and ale, which were profusely piled on the quarter-deck ready for lowering to the rafts.

"He means to take care of us, you see, by the permission of Providence," I said, almost strengthened by this dependence, "and we will remain calmly together, and drink whatever cup God offers us—humbly, I hope." Yet, even as I spoke, my heart rebelled against the fiat of my fate, and the young life within me rose up in fierce conflict with its doom.

At this moment of bitter strife of heart, Mr. Dunmore, the youthful poet of whom I have already spoken, stood before me.

"I have found you at last," he said, "deputed as I am to do so by Miss Lamarque. It is a point of honor with her to care for you personally in this crisis. You know Major Favraud placed you under her care; besides that, her regard for you impels this request. She bids me say—"

I interrupted him hastily.

"This is no time for ceremonials, truly, Mr. Dunmore; yet, had family concurrence been perfect, it seems to me that her brother might have undertaken this mission. I have no wish to thrust myself undesired into any household circle at such a crisis."

"He is wholly absorbed with his children."

"As he ought to be, Mr. Dunmore, and, when the time of peril comes, it is of their needs alone that he will and must think, I am alone in this vessel, as I shall remain. I did not leave Savannah under Miss Lamarque's care. She is very generous, very considerate, but I will not embarrass her motions, nor yours, nor any one's. It is the duty of Captain Ambrose to see to the welfare of his female passengers. I shall not be forgotten among these—"

He stood before me with his knightly head uncovered, his handsome face as calm as though he were a guest at a festival instead of a patient and interested watcher at a funeral-pyre. His birth, his breeding, his genius even, asserted themselves in that mortal hour. He was calm, collected, serious, but not afraid.

"The peril will be great to all, of course," he said, quietly, "but no gentleman will prefer his own safety to that of the most humble and desolate woman on the ship. To you, Miss Harz, I devote my energies to-day, to you and these ladies of your party, whoever they may be—," bowing gently as he spoke. "I may fail in delivering you from danger, but it shall not be for want of effort on my part. Believe my words, I have less care for life than most people, and now let me offer you my escort through that maddened crowd (the rest may follow closely), to reach Miss Lamarque."

"No, Mr. Dunmore, I must remain just where I am, I have promised myself to do so; this is much; and these unhappy women—they, like myself, are alone, or seem to be. Should you see fit to do so, and be willing to be so encumbered, you can return after a lapse of time; but make no point of this, I entreat you. I think that Captain Ambrose will observe good order and save his helpless ones first. You know he promised this—"

There was a moment's pause, and movement of eye and hand, and then he spoke again, very softly:

"Yes, and much more that can never be fulfilled, for already the cabin is in flames, the companion-way is closed, and the fire in the hold is making fearful headway. I have heard the seamen have sworn to secure the boats; you are strong and resolute—be prepared for the very worst." Then, speaking in his usual tone, he added: "Since the banner of Spain passed near enough to show us the rampant lions and castles on its crimson shield, and yet made no sign, I have had little hope of rescue from a ship. It was ominous!"

"Not intended, then," I said, eagerly. "Oh, I am glad of this, at least, for the honor of human nature."

"A strange consideration at such a time! You are a study to me, Miss Harz; yours is not apathy, like mine, but true courage, even in this death-struggle, and I will save you if I can, for you have a noble soul!"

All further dialogue was cut short by the wild shout that rose from the crowd, the delusive cry of "A sail, a sail!" and Dunmore rushed with the rest to descry its myth-like form, if possible. It was some moments before hope again died down to a flat level of despair.

Too remote for signal or trumpet was that distant, white-winged vessel gliding securely on its path of peace, unconscious of the extremity of the mighty steamer it distinguished dimly, no doubt, by the aid of telescopes.

However this might have been, for the second time on that day of direst exigency, a ship went by, observed yet unobserving.

Fainter and fainter grew the accents of the fierce, fanatical preacher; his excitement forsook him as the danger became more and more imminent.

The crowd broke into groups. Pale, stern men, with rigid features, who had been employed aiding in the construction of the rafts, returned now to the sides of their wives and children.

Through a vista on the deck I discerned Miss Lamarque, sitting quietly with her youngest nursling in her arms, beside her brother. His children and slaves were gathered around her knees. Dunmore was giving her my message, I could not doubt, from the glances she cast in my direction, as he stood near by. I knew that he would soon turn to come again, but my resolution was fixed.

Captain Ambrose, with a face grown old in half a day, gray, abstracted, wretched, passed and repassed me several times, telescope in hand.

Ralph Maxwell on the round-house kept constant watch, his attitude dauntless, his face uplifted and keen, field-glass in hand. His West-Point training stood him in good stead now. Captain Falconer, a naval officer, had returned to the side of Miss Oscanyan, the woman he had loved hopelessly for years, and, before the scene closed between us forever, I saw him clasp her to his bosom; so that trying hour had for some high spirits is crowning consolations, its solace and reward, and, whatever else was in store, the martyrdom of love was over.

An eager hand caught my shawl. "He is coming back, coming to persuade you to leave us," said the young girl; "but you have promised not to part from us, and I feel that God will remember us if we remain together firm and fast, we three."

Then the pale widow spoke in turn: "Let me stay beside you too," she entreated; "it makes me feel stronger, I am so desolate—" and she bowed her head and wept.

I would have said in the strange, calm bitterness that possessed my soul: "What value has life to you and your deformed one? Poor, widowed, sickly, and despised, why should you wish to live? Why encumber me?"

But thoughts like these were not for human utterance now, and we sat together, hand locked in hand for a time, waiting for the end, as men may wait in years to come, when the earth is gray with sin, for the coming of the fiery comet that they know is destined to consume them.

For was not this ship our world, penned in as we were on every side, and separated from all else by an ocean inexorable and illimitable as space, and were not we likewise looking forward to a fiery doom—our finite, perhaps final, day of judgment?

I could understand then, for the first time, how condemned criminals feel—well, strong, yet dying! I knew how Walter La Vigne, the self-doomed, had felt, and some passages of Madame Roland's appeal rose visibly before me, as if written on the air rather than in my memory. I had read the book at Beauseincourt, and it had powerfully impressed me; and this, I remember, was the passage that swept across my brain:

"And thou whom I dare not name, wouldst thou mourn to see me preceding thee to a place where we can love one another without wrong—where nothing will prevent our union—where all pernicious prejudices, all arbitrary exclusions, all hateful passions, and all tyranny, are silent? I shall wait for thee, then, and rest!"

So centred were my dying thoughts on Wentworth—so calmly did I await the great change that men call sudden death!

All this time—a time much briefer than that I have taken in recounting my sensations—the glorious summer's sun, the sun of morning, was bathing the sea; the ship, with beauty, and a soft, fresh breeze, was fanning every pallid brow with a caressing, silken wing, that seemed to mock its wretchedness.

I thought not once of Christian Garth. I had ceased to strain my eyes for a distant sail, to seek to compromise with my fate or make conditions with my Creator. Dunmore was forgotten. I was composed to die—not resigned. These things are different; a bitter patience possessed me that I felt would sustain me to the end, but I was not satisfied that my doom was just or opportune.

"Farewell, sweet, young, vigorous life!" I moaned aloud. "Farewell, Miriam! It will not be thou, but a phantom, that shall arise from dead ashes! Farewell, dear hand, that hast served me long and well!" and I kissed my own right hand. I had not known until that moment how truly I loved myself. "Sister, lover, farewell! Mother, father, receive me! Gentle Constance, reach forth thy guiding hand and lead me to my parents! Wentworth, remember me! Saviour, my soul is thine!"

I bowed my head. I had no more to say. Unwilling I was to die—afraid I was not; for, as I sat there, my whole life swept before me, as it is said to do before the eyes of the drowning, and rapidly as one may sweep the gamut on a piano with one introverted finger, and I saw myself as though I had been another. I had done nothing to make me afraid to meet my God; so, with closed eyes, I lingered in the shadow, conscious of nothing save exceeding calm, when the grasp of my gentle friend of the moment aroused me to a sense of what was occurring, and I saw, with horror indescribable, the fierce flames leaping from the deck, heard the hoarse shouts, beheld the lurid surging of an agonized and despairing multitude! But above all rang the clear, trumpet-tones of Captain Ambrose, soon to sink in death:

"To the boats—to the boats! but save the women first—the children—as ye are Christian men! So help ye, mighty God!"

I heard later how signally this noble charge was disregarded; how utterly self triumphed over generosity and duty; and how, in enforcing the example all should have followed, Captain Ambrose lost his valiant, valuable life. But this was thought nothing of then, and I sat patiently down to perish!

---

CHAPTER IV.

It was sunset when I first felt able to sit up beneath the awning of sails which provident hands had stretched above the central platform reserved for the occupancy of the women and children, spread thick with mattresses on the raft, and look about me understandingly.

We were riding smoothly over the long, low, level billows of that summer sea, sustained beyond their reach on what seemed a rude barn-floor, composed as this was of the masts, booms, and yards, roughly lashed together by tarred ropes, no longer needed on the destined ship, and which had been assigned by the captain for that purpose to Christian Garth.

A mast was erected in the front of this hastily-constructed raft, on three sides of which were breastworks, with strong, loose ropes attached, so that those who clung to this refuge might support themselves with comparative safety, or rather have a chance for life, when our "floating grave" should hang suspended perpendicularly on the steep side of a mountain-billow, or drift beneath it.

Just below, and surrounding the small, elevated platform on which I found myself when I revived, stretched on a slender mattress by the side of my feeble widow and her moaning child, were rows of barrels, firmly fastened by cleats, so as insure, to some degree, not only the preservation of our food and water, but to form a sort of bulwark of protection for those who occupied the central portion of the raft.

The young girl, of whom I have spoken as having attached herself to me during the last moments of my stay on shipboard, and an old negro woman, whose crooning hymns made a strange accompaniment to the dashing waters, and whose stolid tranquillity seemed to reproach my anguish, were our only companions on the sort of dais assigned to his female passengers by Christian Garth.

The man himself, to whom we owed our deliverance, stood near his primitive mast, trimming his sail carefully, and looking out with his far-reaching, sagacious ken over the waste of waters, into which the blood-red, full-orbed sun seemed dipping, suddenly, as for his night-bath.

A few of the common passengers of the Kosciusko, and a knot of the seamen, comprising not more than twenty souls, composed the groups, scattered about the roughly yet securely lashed raft, silent and observant all, as men who face their doom are apt to be.

I looked in vain for one familiar face, and for a moment regretted that I had been withheld, as by some spell, for whose weird influence I could never sufficiently account, from having cast my destiny with theirs, who were so much nearer to me in station and congeniality of spirit than those around me. With Miss Lamarque's hand locked in mine, I should have vied with her, I felt, in cheerful courage; and the knightly calmness of Dunmore might have sustained my drooping, fainting soul. These were my peers, and, with them, I should have been better content to be tried.

But the white squall, which had in no way affected us (so small and partial was the sphere of its influence), had sufficed to separate ours irretrievably from our companion-raft, and the squadron of boats that had promised not to forsake as. And now the eye of agony was strained in vain over the weltering waste, for a vestige of those refugees from the Kosciusko—buried, perhaps, a thousand fathoms deep, by their sudden visitors, beneath the waves of that deadly Atlantic sea.

Tears rained over my face as I thought of this probability, and, hopeless as I was of rescue, the almost certain fate of my companion-voyagers fell over me like a pall. "Better, perhaps—far better had it been"—I thought so then—"had we all perished together in that terrific sheet of flame that rose up like a dividing barrier between us at the last. Fit emblem of the final day of doom. Our trials were but begun. What more remained? God in heaven only knew!"

And rapidly, and in panoramic succession, all the fearful adventures of raft and boat that I had ever read of, or heard related, passed across my mind, ending with that latest, and perhaps the most fearful of all—the wreck of the Medusa!

The night came down serene and beautiful. As the sun disappeared in ocean, up rose the full-orbed moon—crimson and magnified by surrounding vapors—that to the practised eye portended future tempest, calm as the ocean and the heavens then seemed.

The constellations, singularly distinct and splendid, had the power to fix and fascinate my vision—never felt before—as they shone above me, clear and crystalline as enthroned in space—judges, and spectators, cold and pitiless as it seemed to me, in the strangeness and forlornness of my condition—Arcturus, and the Ursas, great and little, and Lyra, and the Corona Borealis, Berenice, and Hydra, and Cassiopea's chair; these and many more. I marked them all with a calm scrutiny that belongs to terror in some phases. The stars seemed mocking eyes that night—smiling and safe in heaven—the moon, a cold and cruel enemy with her vapory train, so grandly sailing across the cloudless heaven—so careless of our fate—the wreck of a ruined world as many deem her—veiling in light her inward desolation.

A faint and vapory comet lurked on the horizon—like a ghastly messenger—scarcely discernible to the human eyes, yet vaguely ominous and suggestive—a spirit-ship it might be—watching in silence to hear away the souls of those lost at sea!

There was deep stillness—unbroken, save by the lapping and plashing waters. Even the crooning hymns of the old negro woman had died away; and the moans of the suffering child, and the sobs of the weary mother, and the eager exclamations of Ada Greene (for such I learned was the name of my young companion), were, for a season, lost alike in sleep.

Food had been distributed—prayer had been offered—all seemed favorable so far to our preservation. We were on the track of voyage—the pathway of ships—and the sea was tranquil as a summer lake; up to this point, the arm of God had been extended over us almost visibly. Would He forsake us now? I questioned thus, and yet I could not, dare not, hope as others hoped!

The morning came; I woke, aroused by Salva's song, from troubled sleep; and, as I rose to a sitting posture, a troop of sea-birds that had been swooping overhead, fled with a fiend-like screaming.

The mother and child were already consuming their scant allowance of food. Ada Greene was standing self-poised, swaying like a slender reed with the motion of the raft, so as never to lose her balance, like a young acrobat, with her folded arms, her floating hair, and fair Aurora face, uplifted to the day.

Over the raft were scattered groups of men taking their morning meal; but, as before, the stalwart form of Christian Garth was at the helm, or rather, mast and rudder merged in one, which he controlled with calm, sagacious power.

"Is there a ship in the distance, that you gaze so earnestly?" I asked of the young girl as I put back my hair that had clustered thickly over my face in my uneasy slumber, and followed eagerly the direction of her eyes.

"Oh! no; only a school of dolphins; but it is so pretty! Some came quite near just now; the men were harpooning them; but if we had them we could not cook them, you know, on this miserable contrivance."

"One we should be very grateful for, Ada, since it is all that lies between us and destruction!" I answered, sorrowfully, for the levity of her spirit grieved and shocked me.

"I don't know about that; I think we might as well have gone down at once as stay here, and be roasted and starved. How hot it is to-day! What would I not give for a good glass of ice-water! Don't look so shocked; we shall be saved, of course. I am not the least afraid about that, for Mr. Garth says we must see a ship before evening. Don't you mark the flag flying at the mast-head? He brought it on board on purpose, so that they might not mistake our country (the packets, I mean), and give us the go-by as that Spanish vessel did! But they do say that was a pirate; and that, instead of sitting on a plank, we should have been walking a plank by this time, had they rescued us. I'm rather glad they didn't, though, after all—things couldn't be much worse than they are, could they, now?—There, I came very near falling, I declare!"

The moans of the sick woman at my side became almost constant toward noon; and she was obliged to surrender her infant wholly to my charge, for the hæmorrhage of the day before had returned, and she was fast drifting into unconsciousness. "Water, water!" was the only intelligible cry that left her lips, and that we had to give was warm and brackish, from the occasional lapping of the sea against the barrels, into which it oozed insensibly.

The sun shone down hot and brazen, from the lurid heavens, covered with filmy clouds, so equally overspreading it that a thin, gray veil seemed to interpose between us and its scorching rays, scarcely tempering them by its diaphanous medium.

Beneath it lay the sea, like a copper shield, smooth and glowing, seething like a boiling caldron, with its level foam, for the long, low-rolling billows lifted themselves but lazily from Ocean's breast, and assumed no distinctness of form or motion. Not the faintest breeze came to relieve the stifling closeness of the atmosphere, or lift the collapsed sail, or furled flag, that clung around our mast. The air shimmered visibly around us, as though undergoing some transformation from the heat, some culinary process, through which it was to be rendered unfit for human lips to breathe. Birds flew low and heavily around the raft, as though their wings met such resistance as fish find in water, alighting occasionally to pick up languidly morsels of rejected food.

Still the old negro's crooning hymns went on, recommenced with morning light. To my sad heart, the refrain bore a mournful significance:

"In the land of the New Jerusalem
There shall be no more sea."

She sat, a wrinkled hag, with a leering, repulsive face, with her feet planted firmly on her mattress, her knees elevated, her long, ape-like arms closely embracing these—her fingers, strung with brass and silver rings, intertwined with snake-like flexibility.

On her head was the inevitable bright-colored handkerchief, the badge of her race, or rather of her condition in those days, and she wore the decent, blue-cotton frock, which marked her for a plantation-negro. Large hoops were in her flat, enormous ears, that seemed to suspend her shoulders as they touched them, drawn up and narrowed as these were, even beyond their natural hideousness, by her attitude, one which she maintained as stolidly as a dervish.

"You must help us," I said, at last, when the crisis came, and affairs waxed desperate. "You must take the child, at least, and care for him. See, it requires two persons to sustain his dying mother—one to wet her lips, one—"

"'Deed, honey," she interrupted, coolly, "you must 'scuse me dis oncst; I has jus' as much to do as I kin posomply 'complish, in keepin' of myself dry, comfable, and singin' ob my hyme-toones. We has all to take our chances dis time, an' do for our own selves, black and white; an' I don't see none ob my own white folks on dis raf', wich I is mighty proud of. Dar, now! I does b'leve dat is a ship sail way off dar. Does you see it, honey?"

And she pointed to a large white gull, skimming the main at some distance. Disgusted with her selfishness, I vouchsafed her no farther notice at the time, and her crooning went on during the whole period of the bitter death-struggle of that poor sufferer, whose name I never knew, but whose little, deformed waif, the orphan of the raft, remained my heritage.

"You will take care of him," she had said to me, in her last conscious moments, "my baby-boy, my little—" the name died on her lips, and she never spoke again.

When she was dead, Christian Garth caused her to be wrapped in sail-cloth, weighted with chains, and, with a brief prayer, consigned to the deep. His superstitious sailor's fears rebelled against the idea of keeping a corpse on board one moment longer than necessary, so the rites of sepulture were speedily accomplished.

When I remonstrated, feebly enough it is true, for exhaustion was supervening on long-sustained effort, at his haste, which, even under the circumstances, seemed to me indecent, he coolly spoke of it as a measure essential to the good of all.

Talismanic as were these words on such occasion, mine were the lips that murmured the brief prayer, a portion of the solemn Episcopal grave-service that I chanced to remember, above the poor, pale corpse, even while my weary arms inclosed the struggling child, who, understanding nothing of the truth, would fain have plunged after his mother into depths unknown.

A low, long roll of thunder smote on the ear, like a message to the ocean, from the heavens above, as we saw the waters close greedily over the form of our dead passenger. The men who had launched the body from the raft looked up and listened fearfully, and Christian Garth hastened to trim his sail.

It was sunset now, and the clouds gathered so rapidly about the sun, that he sank empalled in purple to his watery bed, leaving no trace behind to mark his faded splendor.

A sudden breeze sprang up, infinitely refreshing at first to soul and sense, and again the thunder lumbered and crashed about us. The billows heaved and leaped like steeds just freed from harness, tossing their white manes; the raft shuddered and reeled with a deadly, sickly motion, like a creature in strong throes, plunging with frantic suddenness into the troughs of the waves at one moment, as if impelled by fear, then rallying to their summits, only to cast itself wildly down again.

All was confusion, dire and terrible. Then burst the storm upon us—rain, wind!

I was conscious of clutching, with one hand, a rope which strained and swayed desperately, while with the other I grasped the affrighted baby to my breast.

Ada Greene and the old negro woman clung together, hanging to the same cord of safety, flung to them, to all of us, by the hand of Christian Garth.

The barrels strained and groaned, and broke from their fastenings; the awning was wrenched from its mooring, and swept away; the bitter brine broke over us and choked our cries; the anguish of death was upon as without its submission. We struggled instinctively to breathe, to live; we grappled desperately with circumstances; we fought against our doom.

Suddenly the sea dropped to rest—the storm was spent; a low, sighing, soughing gale swept around our nucleus of despair, and the surging of the sea was like a bitter funeral-wail. The air grew cold and chill; one vast, pall-like cloud enveloped the whole face of the unpitying heavens, that seemed literally "to press down upon our very faces like a roof of black marble."

No moon, no stars, were visible; we had no light of any kind, nor could we ascertain the damage done until the cold, gray morning broke in gloom and rain upon us. Then it was made plain to us that our food had all been swept overboard—together with six seamen and five of the passengers. There remained on the raft only three shuddering women and a little child—and a handful of weary and discouraged men, sustained and led to a sense of duty by the dauntless master-spirit of one alone—the presence of Christian Garth, indomitable through, all hardships. So it had fared with us for six-and-thirty hours of our experience on "our floating grave."

We had been washed from our little platform, which ordinarily lifted us above the lapping of the sea during the prevalence of the storm—and we regained it now, glad to repose even on the sea-soaked mattresses bereft of awning. By the mercy of God some glutinous sea-zoophytes had been tangled among them, and by the help of the brine-soaked biscuit in my pocket (crammed there, it may be remembered, as a precious hoard for a time of dire necessity, on the morning of the fire, by the small, cunning fingers of the sickly child), we breakfasted, or rather broke our fast—we four, the child, the negress, Ada Greene, and I—and life was aroused again in every breast by means of a briny morsel.

"A cup of coffee would not be amiss just now," said the girl, laughing, "but the Lord knows we can wait."

There was a strange, bright light in the eyes of the young girl as she spoke these words, and she was arraying her hair coquettishly with some bunches of sea-weed, which had been cast up by the storm, and from which the eager, famishing lips of the little boy had been permitted to suck the gluten before discarding the skeleton stems.

That hair was in itself a grace and glory—rippling from crown to waist in sheeny, golden splendor, fine as silk, and glossy as the yellow floss threads of pale, ripe Indian-corn—beautiful, even in its dishevelled and drenched condition, as an artist's dream. Devoid as it was of regular beauty, the face beneath, with its clear blue eyes, red lips, and pure complexion, the pink and white that reminds one of a sweet-pea or ocean-shell, had struck me as very lovely from the first; nothing to support this ground work of excellence had I discovered, however, either in the form of the head, which was ignoble, or the expression of the face, which was both timid and defiant, or the tones of the voice, which were shrill and harsh by turns—yet, as my fellow-voyager and sufferer, I was interested in this young creature, not forgetting, either, her attention during my pending swoon, of which mention has been made.

"I am going to the party, whatever the preacher may say, and whether Captain Ambrose wills it or no. I am under his care and protection, you see, to go to New York to my aunt, Madame Du Vert, the famous milliner, and I am to learn her trade. Her name is Greene, so they call her Du Vert, to make out that she is French—vert is green, in French, you see; or so they tell me. Now, Captain Ambrose is a church-member, too, and he does not want dancing on his ship, and so he made the calkers pitch the deck—that was to break up the ball, you know; but don't tell any one this for the 'land's sake,'" drawing near to me and whispering strangely, with her forefinger raised—"or all those proud Southern people would pitch into me—pitch, you understand?" and she laughed merrily—"their white satin slippers and all!"

"You must not talk so, Ada;" and I took her hand, which was burning.

"Why not? Who are you, to prevent me? I am as good as you any day—or Miss Lamarque either, or any of those haughty ones—though my father was a negro-trader. Well, whose business was that but God's? If He don't care, who need care?—An't I right, old mammy?" appealing to the ancient negress, who had suspended her croon to listen.

"Yes, indeed—that you is, honey; right to upholden your own dad—nebber min' what he did to serbe the debble. But you looks mighty strange, chile, outen your eyes. Wat dat you sees ober dar—is it a ship, gal?—or must we—" and her voice sank to a mutter—"must we fall back on dis picaninny, to keep from starvation?—"

I understood her dreadful suggestion even before the words fully left her cannibal lips, exposing her yellow fangs; from the glance of her cruel eye in the direction of the child, and the working of her long, crooked talons, rather than fingers, writhed like knotted serpents; I understood them with an instinct that made me clutch him closely to my breast, and narrowly watch his enemy from that hour until the time when my brain failed and my eyes closed in unconsciousness, and with the determination to plunge with him into the sea rather than devote him to such a fate or yield to such an alternative as this wretch in human form had more than hinted—even should the animal instinct, underlying every nature, presume to dictate to reason at the last!

We could but die—that was the very worst that Fate had in store for us—but die in the body! How infinitely worse that the soul should perish through the selfish sensuousness of cannibalism, which would degrade life itself below dissolution, even if preserved by such means!

"I am ready now to go to Captain Ambrose for assistance," said Ada Greene, poising herself before me, and having surrendered or forgotten her first idea, evidently, in the new mania of the moment. "Of course, he does not intend to leave us here to perish, and he is in the next cabin—but a step; see how easily I can get to him, and I shall be back before you can say 'Presto!'"

As nimbly as a sea-gull runs upon the sand, the young creature flew across the now level raft toward the sea, but a strong hand clutched her as she was about to step overboard, and compelled her back to her place on the platform, where, bound with cords, she lay raving, until sleep or unconsciousness mercifully supervened to spare me the spectacle of her agony, which no human power could alleviate.

Hours passed before this "consummation devoutly to be wished" took effect, and, at the end of that time, my reeling brain, my fainting energies, warned me that I, too, was probably approaching some dreadful crisis. With a view to the refreshment its waters could possibly afford my head, I crept quietly from the platform on which the old negro woman held enforced guard over the insensible form of Ada Greene, and, still clasping the poor helpless one, so mysteriously thrust upon my tender mercies, to my bosom, I gained the edge of the raft, unnoticed by Christian Garth, who might otherwise have apprehended me in turn, and borne me back to my allotted precincts, and hung above the ocean, so as to suffer its cooling spray to fall unceasingly across my burning forehead.

From some instinctive prompting I had lashed the poor, frail baby to my girdle with the scarf of knotted silk I wore about my neck, and, wan and exhausted, he lay upon my shoulder tranquilly as any Indian papoose might do on its mother's breast. A branch of sea-weed floated past as I looked down—some gracious mermaid's gift, perhaps, extended by her invisible fingers to greet our famishing lips—and I caught it eagerly, dividing the welcome nutriment with the perishing child, now patient from weakness and instinctive consciousness, perhaps, of the entire uselessness of cries and tears.

Whether the weed was a sort of ocean-hasheesh, or wholesome aliment, I never knew, but certain it is that, from the moment its juices passed my lips, a strange and delightful quietude stole over my weary senses, fast lapsing, as these had seemed, into unconsciousness when I left my place to seek the ocean's brink.

The rays of the declining sun seemed for a moment centred on one spot, immediately before my impending face, supported as this was on one hand, and my sight followed their lance-like rays to the very floor of ocean!

As the waters of the Red Sea divided for the passage of Moses and the Israelites, so seemed these to part for my mental eyes, sundered as they were by a golden sword of infinite splendor.

That power which neither pain nor peril can subdue had possession of me now, and, above all, the bitter circumstances that surrounded me, and, in the face of danger and of death, imagination asserted her supremacy. My dream was not of passing ship or harbor gained, or rich repast, or festival, or clustered grapes and sparkling wines, like other sufferers from shipwreck, fevered with famine, frenzied with despair; but hasheesh or opium never bestowed so fair, so strange a vision as that which, in my extremity, was mercifully accorded to me.

My eyes pursued the sea-shaft to its base, as a telescope conducts the mortal gaze to revel in the stars. Merman and mermaid, nereid and triton, were there, rejoicing in the sunbeams thus poured upon them through this subtle conduit of ocean, as do the motes of summer in her rays; but soon these disappeared, a motley crowd, confused and joyous, leaving the vision free to pierce the depths, glowing with golden light, in search of still greater marvels.

Then I saw outspread before me the streets, the fanes, the towers, the dwellings, of a vast, deserted city, one of those, I could not doubt, that had existed before the flood, and which had lain submerged for thousands of centuries; the fretwork of the coral-insect was over all (that worker against time, so slow, so certain), in one monotonous web of solid snow.

Statues of colossal size, and arches of Titanic strength and power, adorned the portals, the pass-ways, the temples of this metropolis of ocean, guarded as were these last by the effigies of griffin and dragon, and winged elephant and lion, and stately mastodon and monstrous ichthyosaurus, all white as gleaming spar.

Gods and demi-gods of gigantic proportions and majestic aspect were carved on the external walls of the windowless abodes and fanes; and, from the yawning portal of one of these, a temple vast as Dendera's self, came forth, fold after fold, even as I seemed to gaze, the monstrous sea-serpent of which mariners dream, more huge, more loathly, than fancy or experience ever yet portrayed him. I still behold in memory the stately, fearful head, with its eyes of emerald fire and sweeping, sea-green mane, as it reared its neck for a moment as if to scale the ladder the sunbeams had thrown down when first emerging from its temple-cavern; and, later, the mottled, monstrous body, as coil after coil was gradually unwound, until it seemed at last to lie in all its loathsome length for roods along the silent, shell-paved streets—the scaly monarch of that scene of human desolation!

I recall the feeling of security that upheld me to look and to observe every motion of the reptile of my dream.

"He cannot come to me here," I thought. "The ark is sacred, and God's hand is over it; besides, I hear the singing of the priests, and the dove is about to be cast forth! Will the raven never come back? Oh, the sweet olive-branch! It falls so lightly! We are nearing the mountain now, and we shall soon cast anchor!"

Then, among choral chants of joy and thanksgiving, I seemed to sleep. How long this slumber lasted, or whether it came at all, I never knew. It is a loving and tender thing in our Creator to decree to us this curtain of unconsciousness when nerve and strength would otherwise give way beneath the intensity of suffering—a holy and gentle thing for which we are not half thankful enough in oar estimate of blessings.

My sleep, or swoon, shielded me from long hours of agony, mental and physical, that must have become unendurable ere the close. As it was, I knew no more after the sea-shaft closed with its wondrous and mysterious revelations (which I yet recall with marveling and admiration, as we are wont to do a pageant of the past), until aroused from lethargy by the hand and voice of Christian Garth.

It was night. I saw the glimmer of the moonlight on the seas, a tranquil, balmy night; but some dark object was interposed between me and the stars which, I knew, were shining above, and the raft lay motionless upon the waters. I was aware, when my senses returned temporarily, that the bow of a mighty vessel was projected above our frail place of refuge, and that we were saved. The dove had come at last!

When or how we were lifted to the deck of the ship I knew not, for, having partially revived, I soon drifted away again into profound lethargy and entire unconsciousness, which for a time seemed death.

---

CHAPTER V.

A woman sat sewing near my berth in the state-room in which I found myself; a fan, lying on a small table at her side, betokened in what manner she had divided her attentions—between her needle and her helpless charge. I thought, indeed, that I had felt its soft plumes glide gently across my face in the very moment of my awakening, in the first amazement of which I but dimly comprehended the circumstances that surrounded me.

"What brought this stranger to my pillow? Who and what was she? Where was I!" These were my mental queries at the first. Then, as the truth gradually dawned over my sluggish and bewildered brain, I lay quietly revolving matters, and noticed my self-constituted nurse, and my surroundings, with the close yet careless observation of a child.

The woman, on whom my gaze was earliest fixed (while her own seemed riveted on the work upon her knee), was of middle age or beyond it, of medium size, of square and sturdy make, and homely to the very verge of ugliness. She was dressed plainly, if not commonly, in black, but there was a general air of decency about her that seemed to place her beyond the sphere of servitude. She wore spectacles set in tortoise-shell frames, and she wore her iron-gray hair straight back behind small, funnel-shaped ears, and gathered into the tightest knot behind. Her head was flat and narrow at the summit, though broad at and above the base of the brain. Her forehead, wide yet low, was ignoble in expression. The mouth, shaped like a horseshoe, was curved down at the corners, and was full of sullen resolution. The nose, pinched, yet not pointed, showed scarcely any nostril, and might as well have been made of wood, for any meaning it betrayed. Her eyebrows were short, wide, rugged, and irregular, though very black; the cast-down eyes, of course, so far inscrutable.

She was shaping a flimsy, black-silk dress, and doing it deftly, though it was a marvel to me how hands so stiff and cramped as hers appeared to be could handle a needle at all.

On one of these gnarled and unlovely fingers she wore a ring which, in the idleness of the mood that possessed me, I examined listlessly. It was an old-fashioned and slender circle of gold, so pale that it looked silvery, such as in times long past had commonly been used either for troth-plight or marriage-vows, surmounted by two small united hearts of the same dull metal by way of ornament. Mrs. Austin, I remembered, possessed one, the aversion of my childhood, that seemed its counterpart.

My weary eyes wandered from her at last, to take in the accessories of my chamber, tiny as this was, and I saw that against the wall were hanging a gentleman's greatcoat and hand-satchel. Cigars and books were piled on the same table which held the spool and scissors of my companion, and a pair of cloth slippers, embroidered with colored chenilles and quilted lining, of masculine size and shape, reposed upon the floor. A cane and umbrella were secured neatly in a small corner rack. There were no traces, I saw, of feminine occupancy beyond the transient implements of industry alluded to.

Suddenly, in their languid, listless roving, my eyes encountered those of my attendant fixed full upon me, while a smile distorted the homely, sallow face, disclosing a set of yellow teeth, sound, short, and strong, like regular grains of corn.

In those eyes, in that mouth and saffron teeth, lay the whole power and character of this repulsive and disagreeable physiognomy.

Those feline orbs of mingled gray and green, with their small, pointed pupils, were keen, vigilant, and observing beyond all eyes it had ever before or since been my lot to encounter. After meeting their penetrating glance I was not surprised to hear their possessor accost me in clear, metallic tones, that seemed only the result of her gift of insight, and consistent with it.

"You are awake and yourself again, young lady, I am glad to see! You have slept very quietly for the last few hours, and your fever is wellnigh broken. Will you have some food now? You need it; you must be weak."

"Yes, very weak; but not hungry at all. I do not want to eat. Just let me lie quietly awhile. It is such enjoyment."

She complied silently and judiciously with my request.

After a satisfactory pause, during which I had gradually collected my ideas, I inquired, suddenly:

"How long is it since we were lifted from the raft, and where are the other survivors?"

"All safe, I believe, and on board, well cared for, like yourself. It has been nearly two days since your raft was overhauled. This was what the captain called it," and she smiled.

"The baby—where is he? I hope he lived."

"Yes, he is at last out of danger, and we have obtained a nurse for him. He would only trouble you now; but it is very natural you should be anxious about him."

"Yes, he was my principal care on the raft, and I do not wish to lose sight of him. When I am better, you must let him share my room until we reach our friends."

"Oh, certainly!" and again she smiled her evil smile. "No one, so far as I know of, has any right or wish to separate you; but, for the present, you are better alone."

"Yes, I am strangely weak—confused, even," and I passed my hand over my blistered face and dishevelled hair with something of the feeling of the little woman in the story who doubted her own identity. Alas! there was not even a familiar dog to bark and determine the vexed question, "Is this I?"

Helpless as an infant, flaccid as the sea-weed when taken from its native element, feeble in mind from recent suffering, broken in body, I was cast on the mercies of strangers, ignorant, until they saw me, of my existence, yet not indifferent to it, as their care testified.

"You will take some food now," said the woman, kindly. "Your weakness is not unfavorable, since it proves the fierce fever broken; but you must hasten to gather strength for what lies before you. We shall be in port to-morrow."

I put away the spoon with an impatient gesture. "I cannot; it nauseates me but to see it, to think of it. Strength will come of itself."

"Oh, no; that is impossible. Besides, the doctor has ordered panada, and I am responsible to him for your safety. Come, now, be reasonable. This is very nice, seasoned with madeira and nutmeg."

Making a strong effort to overcome my repugnance, I received one spoonful of the proffered aliment, then sank back on my pillow, soothed and comforted, not more by the unexpectedly good effects of the compound, than the associations it conjured up, of my sick childhood, of Mrs. Austin, and of Dr. Pemberton.

"Ah! you smile; that is a good sign," said the woman; "favorable every way. We shall have no more delirium now, I hope; no more 'bears and serpents' about the berth; no more calls for 'Bertie' and 'Captain Wentworth,' and you will soon be able to tell us all about yourself and your people—all we want to know."

I most have lapsed again into reverie rather than slumber, from which I was partly aroused by whispering voices at the door, one of which seemed familiar to me. Yet this fact or fancy made little impression on me at the moment, feeble and wretched as was my will, undiscriminating as were my faculties.

And when the door opened, and a lady entered, I did not seek to inquire about her interlocutor. Respectfully rising from her seat beside me, my companion left it vacant for her, to whom she introduced me as her mistress, and stood, work in hand, sewing beneath the skylight, while the new-comer remained in the state-room.

A handsome woman, tall and fashionably attired, apparently between thirty and forty years of age, square faced, dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked, and with curling hair, approached me with uplifted hands and eyebrows as I lay gazing calmly upon her; for my food and slumber together had strengthened and revived me wonderfully in the last few hours, and my senses were again collected.

"Awake, and herself again, as I live, even if we cannot say yet truthfully 'clothed and in her right mind.'—Eh, Clayton?" with a sneering simper; "and what eyes, what teeth, to be sure! Then the dreadful redness is going away, though the skin will scale, of course; but no matter for that; all the fairer in the end. And what a special mercy that her hair is saved!—You have to thank me for that, young lady. I would not let the ship's doctor touch a strand of it—not a strand. 'One does not grow a yard and a half of hair in a month, or a year, doctor,' I observed, 'and a woman might as well be dead at once, or mad, or a man, as have cropped hair during all the days of her youth.' I had a fellow-feeling, you see! I have magnificent hair myself, child, as Clayton well knows, for it is her chief trouble on earth, and I would almost as lief die as lose it."

"Yes, indeed, Lady Anastasia's hair is one of her chief attractions," observed the sympathizing Clayton, behind her chair.

"So Sir Harry Raymond thought, my dear"—addressing me—"when I married him, ten years ago; and so somebody else thinks just now, for I am tired of my widowhood, and intend taking on the conjugal yoke again as soon as I reach—"

"New York," interpolated Mrs. Clayton, hastily and emphatically; clearing her throat slightly, by way of apology, perhaps, for her officiousness.

"And you shall stand bridesmaid, my dear. Yes, I am determined on it; so never make great eyes at me. There is a little bit of romance about me that will strike out in spite of all my worldliness; and it will be so pretty to have an 'ocean-waif' for an attendant—it will read so well in the papers! I suppose, when you reach your friends, there will be no difficulty about a dress, and all that sort of thing, meet for the occasion—a very splendid one, I assure you—conducted without regard to expense; for my fiancé is very rich, I hear, and my own jointure was a liberal one."

"You do me a great honor," I murmured, conventionally rebelling inwardly at the suggestion.

"Oh, not at all!" was the gracious rejoinder. "I see at a glance, in spite of your misfortunes, that you are one of us, which is not what I say to everybody. True blood will show under all circumstances, though there is such an improvement. Did any one ever see the like before? Why, my dear, you were blistered and black when we picked you up, and afterward sienna-colored; now you are almost a beauty!"

"I am better—much better, and have a great deal to be thankful for, I feel," I contented myself with murmuring.

"Of course you have. It was just a chance with you between our ship and death, you know. By-the-by, what name shall we give our 'treasure-trove?'"

"Miriam for the present, if you please. This is no time nor place for ceremony."

"Well, Miriam it shall be," she repeated with laughing eyes (hers were of that sort which close and grow Chinese under the pressure of merriment and high cheekbones combined). "Miriam, I like the name—there is something grand about it."

"But how shall we know where to find your friends when we get to port?" asked my first attendant. "We must know more than your Christian name for such a purpose. You must place confidence in us, you must indeed!"

"Be patient with me," I entreated. "I am much too feeble yet to give you the details that may be necessary. When we reach New York, you shall know every thing: or is it, indeed, to that place this ship is bound?"

"I thought you knew all about your destination by this time," replied Lady Anastasia Raymond. "Yes, yes, New York of course!" and again she laughed. "Didn't you hear Clayton say so?"

Just then a sharp tap at the door was answered by Lady Anastasia, who went quickly from beneath the curtain hung across it (in consideration, no doubt, of the privacy my illness enjoined), but not before I had caught once, and this time clearly, the tones of a voice that thrilled to my life, the same that had haunted my delirious fancy, I now remembered, through the last four-and-twenty hours.

I rose to my elbow impulsively, only to fall back again utterly exhausted.

"Who was that speaking?" I asked, feebly; "can it be possible—" and I wrung my hands.

"It was the ship's doctor," interrupted the woman I had heard called Clayton by her mistress. "He had not time to do more than inquire about you, I suppose, there are so many ill in the steerage; but he has been very kind and will probably return."

"I hope so," I rejoined; "I should like to realize that voice as his. It has haunted me very disagreeably in my dreams, and the tones are those of an old, old acquaintance, one I should be sorry to see here."

"I do not believe you have an acquaintance on the ship," she said, simply, "Under the circumstances any such person would certainly have discovered himself; your situation would have moved a heart of stone."

"But it is sometimes wise for the wicked to lie perdu," I murmured, and conjecture was busy in my brain. "I should be glad, too, to see the captain of this vessel at his earliest convenience," I added, after a pause.

"Will you be so good as to apprise him in person of my earnest wish? It would be a real charity."

"Oh, certainly; but I am afraid he cannot come to-night. It is nearly evening now, and he never leaves the deck at this hour, nor until very late."

"To-morrow, then, I must insist on this interview, since I reflect about it for several reasons."

"To-morrow he shall come," she said, sententiously; "and now try and sleep again. It is very necessary you should gather strength, for we shall be in port shortly, when all will be confusion."

I went to sleep, I remember, murmuring to myself: "The hands were the hands of Jacob, but the voice was the voice of Esau;" and my bewildered faculties found rest until the morning's dawn.

After a hasty toilet made by the careful hands of Mrs. Clayton, a matutinal visit made by Mrs. or Lady Raymond, who always rose early as she informed me, and a cup of tea, very soothing to my prostrated nerves, the potentate of the Latona was duly announced.

Our ship's master was a tall, gaunt, sandy-haired man, with steady gray eyes, hard features, and enormous hands and feet, the first freckled and awkward, the last so long as very nearly to span the space between his seat (a small Spanish-leather trunk) and the berth I reposed in. He entered without his hat; and the swoop of the head he made to avoid the entanglement of the curtain was supposed to do double duty, and serve as a bow to the inmate of his state-room as well, for his I supposed it to be at the time, and he did not contradict me.

"I hope you find yourself comfortable, marm, on board of my ship."

"And in your state-room, captain!" I interrupted promptly.

"Wall, you see it all belongs to me, kinder," he said, after seating himself, as he rubbed his huge, projecting knees, plainly indicated through his nankeen trousers, with his capacious, horny hands. "I'm not very particular, though, where I sleep on shipboard, but at home there's few more so."

"I thought a captain was more at home on shipboard than anywhere else," I pursued mechanically; "such is the theory at least."

"Oh, not at all, not at all; when he has a snug nest on land, with a wife and children waiting to receive him. You might as well talk of a man in the new settlements bein' more at home in his wagon than in his neat, hewn-log cabin."

"A very good simile, captain, and one that kills the ancient theory outright. Let me thank you, however, before we proceed further, for all the kindness and attention I have received in this floating castle of yours, both from you and others. I hope and believe that my companions in misfortune have fared as well."

"Wall, they have not wanted for nothing as far as I knew—the poor baby in particular;" and, as he spoke, he roughed his hair with one hand and smiled into my face a huge, honest, gummy smile, inexpressibly reassuring.

"The man is hideous and repulsive," I thought; "but infinitely preferable, somehow, to the specimen of English aristocracy and her maid who have constituted themselves so far my guardian angels"—a twinge of ingratitude here, which I resented instantly by settling my patriotic prejudices to be at the root of the thing, and rebuking my mistrust sternly though silently. "Yet that voice—how could I be mistaken?" and again I addressed myself to the task before me, having gotten through all preliminaries.

While I sat hesitating as to what I should say, so as to both guard against and conceal my suspicions from the captain's scrutiny, if, indeed, he might be supposed to possess such a quality, I observed that he drew from his pocket a long slip of newspaper, in which he appeared to bury himself for a time, when not glancing furtively at me, as if waiting impatiently for the coming revelation.

"I have sent for you, Captain Van Dorne," I said, at last, in very low and even tones, not calculated to reach outside ears, however vigilant, and yet not suppressed by any means to whispers—"I have sent for you," and my heart beat quickly as I spoke, "not merely to thank you for your hospitable kindness, but because I wish, for reasons that I cannot now explain, to place myself under your especial care until I reach my friends."

"Certainly, certainly; but you air among your friends already if you could only think so," he answered, evasively, still caressing his potato knees with large and outspread hands.

"Do not for one moment deem me unmindful of much kindness, or ungrateful to those who have bestowed it," I hastened to explain. "Yet I cannot deny that a fear possesses me that among your passengers may be found one whom I esteem, not without sufficient cause, my greatest enemy."

"Poor thing! poor thing! what put such a strange fancy into your head? An enemy in my ship! Why, there is not a man on board who would not cut off his right hand rather than harm one hair of your poor, witless, defenseless head! There was not a dry eye on the deck when you and the rest wuz lifted from the raft!"

"I understand this prevalence of sympathy for misfortune perfectly, and honor it; yet I have heard a voice since my immurement in this cabin which must belong"—and I whispered the dreaded name—"to Mr. Basil Bainrothe!"

As I spoke I eyed him steadily, and I fancied that his cheek flushed and his eye wavered—that clear and honest eye which had given him a high place in my consideration from the moment I met its gaze.

"You must have been delirious-like when you conceited you heerd that strange voice," he said, presently. "I'll send you my passenger-list if you choose, and you can read it over keerfully. I don't think you'll find that name, though, in its kolynms," shaking his head sagaciously.

"Captain Van Dorne, do you mean to say there is no such passenger in your ship's list as Basil Bainrothe?" I asked, desperately.

"That's what I mean to say."

"Give me your honor on this point. It is a vital one to me. Your honor!"

He hesitated and looked around. Just at this moment of apparent uncertainty, a slight tap was heard on the ground-glass eye above us that threw a sullen and unwilling light upon the scene of our interview. It seemed to nerve him strangely.

"On my word of honor, as an American seaman, I assure you that the name of Basil Bainrothe is not on the ship's list at this present speaking;" and, as he spoke, he held up his right hand, adding, as he dropped it, doggedly, "Ef the man's on board I don't know it!"

"It is enough—I believe you, Captain Van Dorne. And now I want to ask you, as a parting grace, to convey me yourself to the Astor House, and place my watch" (detaching it from my neck as I spoke) "in the hands of the proprietors as a proof of my honest intentions. For yourself, I shall seek another opportunity."

"Not at all—not at all!" he interrupted. "Keep your watch, young lady. No such pledge will be required by them proprietors; and, as to myself, if it had not been for this paper," drawing from his pocket, and flattening on his knees as he spoke, the slip I had before observed, then glancing at me sharply, "I could never have believed that such a pretty-spoken, pretty-behaved young creetur could have been non com. But pshaw! what am I talking about? This paper is as old as last year's krout! You don't keer nothing about seeing of it, do you, now?" and he crumpled it in his hand.

"Not unless it concerns me in some way, Captain Van Dorne," I said, coldly. His manner had suddenly become offensive to me, and I longed to see him depart, having transacted my affairs, as far, at least, as I deemed it prudent to insist on such transaction.

"It may be," I added, "that, on reaching the port of New York, a friend or friends who expected me on the Kosciusko may be in waiting to receive me; that is, if the fate of that vessel be not already known. In that case, I shall not be obliged to avail myself of your services, and will acquaint you; but, otherwise, promise that you will conduct me from the ship yourself, either to the hotel or to your wife, as you prefer."

"Wall, I promise you," he said, doggedly, as he prepared literally to undouble his long frame before executing another dive beneath my door-guarding drapery, and with this brief assurance I was fain to rest content.

At all events, I was reassured on one subject—those honest eyes, that frank if ugly mouth had no acquaintance with lies, or the father of them, I saw at once; and the voice of the ship's doctor had for the nonce deceived my practised ear, overstrung by suspicion—enfeebled by suffering.

So I rested calmly until the afternoon, with Mrs. Clayton sewing silently by my side, when with a little tap Lady Anastasia (or Mrs. Raymond, as she declared she preferred to be called by "Americans") entered, bearing a basket in her hand, and wearing on her head a Dunstable bonnet simply trimmed, which she came, she said, to place, along with other articles of dress, at my disposal.

It had not occurred to me before that, in order to go on shore respectably clad, some attire very different from a bed-gown would be essential, and I could but feel grateful for such proofs of unselfish consideration on the part of strangers, pitying both my indigence and imbecility, and so expressed myself.

In accordance with their generous intentions, I submitted myself to be arrayed by Mrs. Clayton and her mistress: first, in the flimsy black silk gown now completed, on which I had seen my attendant working when I first unclosed my eyes after long unconsciousness, and the measure of which she had taken, while I lay in this condition, as coolly in all probability as an undertaker measures a corpse for its shroud; secondly, in a cardinal of the same material, a wrapping cut in the shape in vogue at that period; thirdly, in certain loosely-fitting boots and gloves with which I was fain to cover up my naked feet and blistered hands in forma pauperis; and, lastly, in the collarette and cuffs provided by the economic and considerate Lady Anastasia, composed of cotton lace! The Dunstable bonnet was hung upon a peg in readiness, and I was kindly counseled to lie still, "accoutred as I was," and exhausted by means of such accoutrement as I felt, until evening should find us riding in our harbor.

Then there was a little, low consulting at the door with the renowned "ship's doctor," who positively refused to approach me because he had just come from a case of ship-fever in the steerage, which he feared to communicate to one in my precarious state, but who sent in his imperative orders that I should have soup and sherry-cobbler forthwith, and try and build up my strength for the time of debarkation—speaking in a low, growling voice divested of its former clearness, but still strangely resembling that of Basil Bainrothe!

"The poor man is so fagged out," said Mrs. Clayton, as she brought in my broth and wine, "that his very voice is changed. He is a good soul, and has shown you great interest. Some day you must send him a present, that is, if you are able; but just now all you have to think of is getting safe ashore. Lady Anastasia will go to her friends, probably, or to those of the gentleman she is engaged to; but I do not mean to forsake you until I see you better, and in good hands."

I know not how it was that my heart sank so strangely at this announcement. The woman was kind—tender, even—and had probably saved my life, and yet her presence to me was a punishment worse than pain, a positive evil greater than any other.

"I shall go to the Astor House," I faltered. "The captain has promised me his escort thither."

"Yes, yes, I know, he has told me all about it; but your friends may not be in waiting, and it is simply our duty to see you in their hands. And now drink your sangaree. See, I have broken a biscuit in the glass, and it is well seasoned with lemon and nutmeg. There, now, that is right; a few spoonfuls of soup, and you will feel strengthened for your undertaking. I will sit quietly in the corner until you have your rest."

"No, I prefer to see Christian Garth before I try to sleep—the man who steered our raft—and the young girl he saved, and the baby—let them all come to me, and we will go on shore together."

I spoke these words with a sort of desperation, as though they contained my last hope of justice or protection from a fate which, however obscurely, seemed to threaten me, as we feel the thunder-storm brooding in the tranquil atmosphere of summer.

"Christian Garth!" she repeated, looking at me over her tortoise-shell spectacles, and, quietly drawing out a snuffbox of the same material, she proceeded to fill her narrow nostrils therewith. "Why, that shaggy-looking old sailor, and the girl, and the old negro woman and child, went on shore at daylight this morning. He hailed a Jersey craft, and they all left together. It is perfectly understood, though, that the child is to be returned to you if you desire its company, but, if I were situated as you are, and sure of its safety, I would never want to see it again. It would be better off dead than living anyhow, under the circumstances, poor, deformed creature—better for both of you."

The words came to me distinctly, yet as if from an immense distance, and I seemed to see the small chamber lengthening as if it had been a telescope unfolding, and the sallow woman with her hateful smile and tightly-knotted, brindled hair seated in diminished size and distinctness at its farthest extremity.

So had I felt on that fearful night when Evelyn had made her revelation and received mine, and I did not doubt, even in my sinking state, that I was under the influence of a powerful anodyne.

"Call the ship's doctor—I am dying!" were the last words I remember to have articulated; then all was dark, and hours went by, of deep, unconscious sleep.

It was night when I felt myself drawn to my feet, and roused to life by the repeated applications of cold water to my face, "The anodyne was over-powerful," I heard Mrs. Raymond say. "It is a shame to tamper with such strong medicines."

"Oh, she has strength for any thing!" was Clayton's rejoinder. "I never saw such a constitution—and he knew what he was doing."

"No doubt of that.—But, dear Miss Miriam, do speak to me. I am so frightened at your lethargic condition.—I declare I am sorry I ever consented to have any thing to do with this matter! See how she stands. I cannot think it was right, Clayton, I cannot, indeed; I dislike the whole drama."

"Do be quiet! She is coming to herself fast, and what will she think of such expressions? You never had any self-control in your life, and you are playing for great stakes now." These last words in a hoarse whisper.

"Nonsense! mother."

"Again! How often must I warn you?"

"Well, Clayton, then, now and forever."

"Here! rouse up, little one! We are fast anchored in port, and the captain is waiting for us, for we go part of the way together, and our escorts have all failed us—yours and mine. Nice fellows, are they not?"

I sat up and looked about me bewildered; yet I had heard distinctly every word spoken in the last few minutes, and remembered them for future observance, without having had the power to move or articulate a remonstrance.

"Now, drink this strong coffee, and all will be well again," said Clayton, putting a cup of the smoking beverage to my lips, which I swallowed eagerly, instinctively. The effect was instantaneous, and I was able to speak and stand, as well as hear and comprehend, while my bonnet was being tied on, and my throat muffled in a veil, by the dexterous fingers of Lady Anastasia.

When this process was completed, she stooped down and kissed me, and I felt a hot tear fall upon my cheek as she rose again. In the next moment I was clinging to the captain's arm, with a spasmodic feeling of relief for which I could ill account. We passed across the plank which connected the ship with the shore in utter darkness, guided by a twinkling light far ahead, borne by a seaman, reached the dusky quay, with its few flaring lamps, made dim by drizzling rain and summer mist, and before many minutes we paused before one of a long line of coaches.

The captain handed me in, then, standing before the open door, seemed to await the coming of some other person before taking his own place—the dreaded Clayton, I knew; but I could not remonstrate against what seemed an ordinary courtesy, and perhaps a step suggested by his innate notions of propriety.

At any other time I might have agreed with him; but, feeble as I was, and still bewildered, my whole object seemed to be to escape from the sphere and power of those women, who had been most kind to me, yet whom I instinctively dreaded and abhorred.

They came together, the mother and daughter, in their travesty of mistress and maid—enough of itself to excite suspicion of foul play—and climbed up the rickety steps of the hackney-coach, rejoicing over their victim. It mattered not; the captain would make the fourth passenger, and in his shadow I felt there were strength and security.

"What are you waiting for, Captain Van Dorne?" I had just feebly asked, as the door snapped-to, and the driver mounted his box. A hand was thrust through the window for all reply, and a card dropped upon my lap, which I hastened to secure in the depths of my pocket. By the merest chance, I found it there on the morrow, and later I comprehended its import, so mysterious to me at the moment of perusal.

"My poor young lady, you must forgive me for disappointing you, and hidin' the truth, for your own sake. May God bless and restore you, and bring you to a proper sense of his mercies, is the prayer of your servant to command,

JOSEPH VAN DORNE."

My frame of mind was a very different one when I read this scrawl, from that which bewildered and oppressed me on that never-to-be-forgotten night of suffering and distress, both mental and physical. Formed of those elements which readily react, courage and calmness had returned to me before I read the oracle of our worthy shipmaster; for, in spite of his disastrous dealing with me on that occasion, misguided as he was by others, I have reason to so consider him.

But now the influence of the drug that had been given me so recently, doubtless through want of judgment, by the ship's doctor, was felt in every nerve; and, as the carriage rolled up the stony quay, I clung convulsively to Mrs. Raymond, and buried my face and aching forehead in her shoulder, with a strange revulsion of feeling.

"You dread the darkness," she said, kindly, putting her arm around me as she spoke; "but it is only for a time; we shall soon come out into the open lamplight of—"

"Broadway, New York," interrupted Clayton, sententiously; "a very poor sight to see, to one who has lived abroad. Have you ever crossed the waters, Miss Miriam? But I see you are quite faint and overcome. Here, smell this ether, that the ship's doctor put up expressly for your use, and recommended highly as a new restorative much in fashion in Paris."

Had the ship's doctor no name, then, that they never mentioned it, and that he spoke in a demon's voice? His doses I had proved, and was resolved to take no more of them, and I pushed away the phial, whose cold glass nose was thrust obtrusively against my own—pushed it away with all my strength, fast ebbing away as this was, even as I made the effort.

The cruel potion had possession of me, and entered into every fibre of my brain through the avenues prepared for it by the treacherous anodyne; so that, enervated and intoxicated, I yielded passively, after a brief struggle, to the power of the then newly-invented sedative, called chloroform.

When the carriage stopped, or whither it transported me, or who lifted my insensible form to the chamber prepared for me, I know not—never knew. There was a faint reviving, I remember; a process of disrobing gone through by the aid of foreign assistance (whose, I recognized not), then I slumbered profoundly and securely through the entire night, to recover no clearness of perception until a late hour on the following morning.

---

CHAPTER VI.

I awoke, as I had done of old, after one of my lethargic seizures, from a deep, unrefreshing slumber, with a lingering sense about me of drowsiness and even fatigue.

I found myself lying on a broad, canopied bedstead, the massive posts of which were of wrought rosewood, bare of draperies, as became the season, save at the head-board, behind which a heavy curtain was dropped of rose-colored damask satin.

Of the same rich material were composed the tester and the lightly-quilted coverlet, thrown across the foot of the bed, over a fine white Marseilles counterpane.

The chimney immediately opposite to me, as I lay, was of black marble, and, instead of graceful Greek caryatides, bandaged mummies, or Egyptian figures, supported the heavy shelf that surmounted the polished grate. In the centre of this massive mantel-slab was placed a huge bronze clock, and candelabra of the same material graced its corners.

In either recess of this chimney rosewood doors were situated, one of which stood invitingly ajar, disclosing the bath-room, into which it opened, with its accessories of white marble.

The other, firmly closed, seemed to be the outlet of the chamber—its only one—with the exception of the four large Venetian windows, two on either side of me as I lay, the sashes of which, warm as the season was, were drawn closely down.

The furniture of this spacious chamber to which, as if by the touch of a magician's wand, I found myself transported, was throughout solid and of elegant forms, consisting as it did of armoire, toilet-table, bookcase, étagère, writing and flower stands, tables and chairs, of the richest rosewood.

At the foot of my bed was placed a console, supporting a huge Bible and Prayer-book, bound alike in purple velvet, emblazoned with central suns of gold—an arch-hypocrisy that was not lost on its object. Freshly-gathered flowers were heaped in the vases of the floral stands, filling the close, cool room with an overpowering fragrance. The carpet of crimson and white seemed to the eye what it afterward proved to the foot—thick, soft, and elastic; and harmonized well with the rich, antique, and consistent furniture.

The sort of microscopic scrutiny that children manifest seemed mine—in my unreasoning, half-convalescent state; and for a time I observed all that I have described with a listless pleasure, difficult to analyze, a sort of dreamy acceptance of my condition, the very memory of which exasperated me, later, almost to self-contempt.

A crimson cord hung at one side of my bed, continued from a bell-wire at some distance, the tassel of which I touched lightly, and, at the very first signal, Mrs. Clayton appeared through the hitherto only unopened door, to know and do my bidding.

The clock on the mantel-shelf struck nine as she stood beside me, and made respectful inquiries concerning my wants and condition; understanding which, she disappeared, to return a few minutes later, followed by an ancient negress, bearing a silver waiter.

I recognized in this sable assistant (or thought I recognized at a glance) my companion in shipwreck; but, upon making known my convictions, was met with a prompt denial by the sable dame herself, who, shaking her head, gave me to understand, in a few broken words, that she "no understood English—only Spanish tongue!"

Her dress—handsome and Frenchified—her Creole coiffure, and the long gray locks that escaped from her crimson kerchief bound over her ears, as well as her more refined deportment, did indeed seem to discredit my first idea, which came at last (notwithstanding these discrepancies) to be fixed, and proved one link in the long chain of duplicity I untangled later.

At the time, however, I gave it little thought, but partook with what appetite I might of the choice and delicate repast provided for me, in this truly princely hotel, whose fame I discovered had not been over trumpeted. On my previous visits to New York, the Astor House had been unfinished, and had made in its completion a new era certainly in the "tavern-life" of that inhospitable city of publicans. When the delicious coffee and snowy bread, the eggs of milky freshness, the golden butter, the savory rice-birds, the appetizing fish, had each and all been merely tasted and dismissed, and the exquisite China, in which the breakfast was served, duly marveled at as an unprecedented extravagance on the part even of John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Clayton came to me with kindly offers of assistance in the performance of my toilet, still a matter of difficulty in my feeble hands.

My long hair, yet tangled and clogged with sea-water, was to be at last unbound and thoroughly combed, cleansed, and oiled, so that the black and glossy braids, that had been my chief personal pride, might again be wound about my head in the old classic fashion.

Then came the bath, with its reviving, rehabilitating process, and lastly I assumed with the docility of a baby or a pauper the clean and fragrant linen and simple wrapper that had been mysteriously provided for me by the Lady Anastasia again, I could not doubt.

"All this must end to-day," I said, "when really clothed and in my right mind." I requested writing-materials and more light to work by, and composed myself to write to Dr. Pemberton (once again, I knew, in Philadelphia), and request his assistance and protection in getting home safely, and, if need be, in tracing Captain Wentworth.

"I suppose Captain Van Dorne has been too busy to call," I observed, carelessly, as I prepared to commence my letter, "and Mrs. Raymond too happy, probably, in getting safe to shore and her lover, to think of me."

"They have both inquired for you," said Mrs. Clayton, as she arranged pen, ink, and paper, before me, with her usual precision, while a grim, sardonic smile lingered about her features; "several have called, but none have been admitted."

"Who have called, Mrs. Clayton! Give me the cards immediately. I must, must know," I rejoined, eagerly, pausing with extended hand to receive them.

"Oh, there were no cards, and such as want to see you can come again. There, now! write away, and never trouble your mind about strange people. Have you sufficient light?"

And, as she spoke, she touched a cord which set at right angles with the lower one the upper inside shutter of another window as she had adjusted the first.

I wrote two hasty notes, one on further consideration to Captain Wentworth himself, who might, after all, be at that very time in that same hotel—"Quien sabe?" as Favraud used to say with his significant shrug, which no Frenchman ever excelled or Spaniard equalled (albeit they shrug severally).

My spirits rose with every word I wrote, and, when I got up from my chair after sealing and directing my letters, a new and subtle energy seemed to have infused itself through my frame. "There, I have finished, Mrs. Clayton," I said, putting aside the implements I had been using. "Now go, if you please, and bring to me the proprietor of this hotel. I will give him my letters myself, since I have other business to transact with him," and I laid my watch and chain on the table before me, ready for his hand, not having lost sight of my early resolution. "But, stay—before you go, be good enough to open the lower shutters and throw up the windows. Cool as the weather is in this climate, I stifle for air, and this close atmosphere, laden with fragrance, grows oppressive. Who sent these flowers, by-the-by, Mrs. Clayton? or do they belong to the magnificence of this idealized hotel?" She made no reply to any thing I had been saying.

By this time, however, she had lowered the upper sashes of the windows about a foot, and the fresh air of morning was pouring in, curling the paper on the centre table and dispersing the noisome fragrance of the flowers, in which I detected the morbid supremacy of the tuberose and jasmine.

"I want to see the streets, the people," I said, approaching one of the windows; "this artistic light is not at all the thing I need. I have no picture to paint, not even my own face;" and, finding her unmoved, I undertook to do the requisite work myself.

The sashes were shut away below by inside shutters, which resisted all my efforts to stir them. After a moment's inspection, I perceived that they were secured by iron screws of great strength and size; not, in short, meant to be moved or opened at all. Again I essayed to shake them convulsively one after the other—as you may sometimes see a tiger, made desperate by confinement, grapple with the inexorable bars of his cage, though certain of failure and defeat.

Overpowered by a sudden dismay that took entire possession of me, I sank into one of the deep fauteuils that extended its arms very opportunely to receive me, and sat mutely for a moment, while anguish unutterable, and conjecture too wild to be hazarded in speech, were surging through my brain.

"I am too weak, I suppose, to open these shutters," I said at last, feebly. "Be good enough to do it for me, Mrs. Clayton, or cause it to be done immediately."

Was it not strange that up to this very moment no suspicion had clouded my horizon since I woke in that sumptuous room?

"I cannot transcend my orders by doing any thing of the kind," she said quietly, yet resolutely, as she pursued her avocation, that of dusting with a bunch of colored plumes the delicate ornaments of the étagère carefully one by one.

"Your authority! Who has dared to delegate to you what has no existence as far as I am concerned?" I asked indignantly. "I will go instantly."

"You cannot leave this chamber until you receive outside permission," she interrupted, firmly planting herself at once between me and the door through which I had seen her enter. "You must not think to pass through my chamber, Miss Miriam. It is locked without, and there is no other outlet."

"Woman!" I said, grasping her feebly yet fiercely, by the arm. "Look at me! Raise those feline eyes to mine, if you dare, and answer me truthfully: What means this mockery! Why have you been forced on me at all? Where is Captain Van Dorne? What becomes of his promises? What house is this in which I find myself a prisoner? Speak!"

"You can do nothing to make me angry," she rejoined, calmly. "I know your condition, and pity and respect it, but I shall certainly fulfill my part of this undertaking. Captain Van Dorne recognized you as Miss Monfort by the description in the newspaper, as did my mistress, and for your own welfare we determined to secure you and keep you safe until the return of Mr. Bainrothe and your sisters from Europe. They will be here shortly, and all you have to do is to be patient and behave as well as you can until the time comes for your trial;" and she cast on me a menacing look from her green and quivering pupils, indescribably feline.

My trial! Great Heaven! did they mean to turn the tables, then, and destroy me by anticipating my evidence? I staggered to a chair and again sat down silent confounded. "Where am I, then!" I feebly asked at length.

"In the establishment of Dr. Englehart," she made answer, "a private madhouse."

"God of heaven! has it come to this?" I covered my eyes with my hands and sobbed aloud, while tears of pride and passion rained hotly over my cheeks. This outburst was of short duration. "I will give them no advantage," I considered. "My violence might be perverted. There are creatures too cold and crafty to conceive of such a thing as natural emotion, and passion with them means insanity. Thank God, the very power to feel bears with it the power of self-government, and is proof of reason. I will be calm, and if my life endures put them thus to shame."—"You say that I am in the asylum of Dr. Englehart?" I asked, after a pause, during which she had not ceased to dust the furniture and arrange the bed in its pristine order, speckless, with lace-trimmings, pillow-cases smooth as glass, and sheets of lawn, and counterpane of snow. "If so, call my physician hither; I, his patient, have surely a right to his prompt services."—"It is just possible," I thought, "that interest or compassion may, one or both, still enlist him in my cause—I can but try."

A slight embarrassment was evidenced in her countenance as I made this request. It vanished speedily.

"He is absent just at this time," she answered, quickly. "When he returns I will make known your wish to him, if, indeed, he does not call of his own accord."

"Be done with this shallow farce," I exclaimed, harshly. "It shames humanity. Acknowledge yourself at once the faithful agent of a tyrant and felon, or a pair of them, and I shall respect you more. Confess that it was the voice of Basil Bainrothe I heard at my cabin-door, and that Captain Van Dorne was imposed upon by that specious scoundrel, even to the point of being conscientiously compelled to falsehood.

"I deny nothing—I acknowledge nothing," she said, deliberately. "You and your friends can settle this between yourselves when they arrive. Until then, you need not seek to tamper with me—it will be useless; and I hope you are too much of a lady to be insulting to a person who has no choice but to do her duty."

She could not more effectually have silenced me, nor more utterly have crushed my hopes. Yet again I approached her with entreaties.

"I hope you will not refuse to mail my notes, even under these trying circumstances," I said, extending them to her.

"You can ask Dr. Englehart to do so when he comes," he answered, gently; "for myself, I am utterly powerless to serve you beyond the walls of this chamber."

"And how long is this close immurement to continue?" I asked again, after another dreary pause. "Am I not permitted to breathe the external air—to exercise? Is my health to be unconsidered?"

"I know nothing more than I have told you," she replied. "I am directed to furnish you with every means of comfort—with books, flowers, clothing, musical instrument, even, if you desire it; but, for the present, you will not leave these walls, and you will see no society. The doctor has decided that this is best."

"And whence did he derive his authority?"

"Oh, it was all arranged between him and Mr. Bainrothe, your guardeen" (for thus she pronounced this word, ever hateful to me), "long ago; before he went to France, I suppose. Captain Van Dorne had nothing to do but hand you over."

"Captain Van Dorne! To think those honest eyes could so deceive me!" and I shook my head wofully.

When I looked up again from reverie, Mrs. Clayton had settled herself to work with a basket of stockings on her knees, which she appeared to be assorting assiduously.

There she sat, spectacles on nose, thimble on twisted finger, ivory-egg in hand, in active preparation for that work, woman's par excellence, that alone rivals Penelope's. Surely that assortment of yellow, ill-mated, half-worn, and holey hose, was a treasure to her, that no gold could have replaced, in our dreary solitude (none the less dreary for being so luxurious). I envied her almost the power she seemed to have to merge her mind in things like these; and saw, for the first time in my life, what advantages might lie in being commonplace.

It was now nearly the end of July. My birthday occurred in the middle of September. I thought I knew that, as soon as possible after my majority, Mr. Bainrothe's conditions would be laid before me.

I could not, dared not, believe that my captivity would be lengthened beyond that time. I resolved that I would condone the past, and go forth penniless, if this were exacted in exchange for liberty at the end of a month and a half from this time.

Six weeks to wait! Were they not, in the fullness of their power, to crush and baffle me! Six weary years! For, during all this time, I felt that the unexplained mystery that weighed upon my life would gather in force and inflexibility. Death would have seemed to have set its seal upon it, in the estimation of Captain Wentworth, as of all others. He would never know that the sea, which swallowed up the Kosciusko, had spared the woman he loved, nor receive the explanation that she alone could give him, of the mystery he deplored.

Before I emerged from my prison, he might be gone to the antipodes, for aught I knew, and a barrier of eternal silence and absence be interposed between us. So worked my fate! These reflections continued to haunt and oppress me, by night and day, and life itself seemed a bitter burden in that interval of rebellious agony, and in that terrible seclusion, where luxury itself became an additional engine of torture.

Days passed, alternately of leaden apathy and bitter gloom, varied by irrepressible paroxysms of despair. Whenever I found myself alone, even for a few moments, I paced my room and wept aloud, or prayed passionately. There were times when I felt that my Creator heard and pitied me; others when I persuaded myself his ear was closed inexorably against me.

I suffered fearfully—this could not last. The accusation brought against me by my enemies seemed almost ready to be realized, when my body magnanimously assumed the penalty the soul was perhaps about to pay, and drifted off to fever.

Then, for the first time, came the man I had until then believed a myth, and sat beside me in the shadow, and administered to me small, mystic pellets, that he assured me, in low, husky whispers, and foreign accent, would infallibly cure my malady—my physical one, at least; as for the mind, its forces, he regretted to add, were beyond such influence!

For a moment, the wild suspicion intruded on my fevered brain that this leech was no other than Basil Bainrothe himself, disguised for his own dark purposes; but the tall, square, high-shouldered form that rose before me to depart (taller, by half a head, than the man I suspected of this fresh deception), and the angular movements and large extremities of Dr. Englehart, dispelled this delusion forever. After all, might he not be honest, even if a tool of Bainrothe's?

I took the sugared minature pills—the novel medicine he had left for me—faithfully, through ministry of Mrs. Clayton's, and was benefited by them; and, when he came again, as before, in the twilight, I was able to be installed in the great cushioned chair he had sent up for me, and to bear the light of a shaded lamp in one corner of the large apartment.

Dr. Englehart approached me deferentially, and, without divesting himself of the light-kid gloves which fitted his large hands so closely, he clasped my wrist with his finger and thumb, and seemed to count my pulses.

"Ver much bettair," was his first remark, made in that disagreeable, harsh, and husky voice of his, while he bent so near me that the aroma of the tobacco he had been smoking caused me to cough and turn aside.

Still, I could not see his face, for the immense bushy whiskers he wore, nor his eyes, for the glasses that covered them, nor his teeth, even, for the long, fierce mustache that swept his lips; and when, after a brief visit, he rose and was gone again, there remained only in my mind the image of a huge and hairy horror—a sort of bear of the Blue Mountains, from the return of which or whom I fervently hoped to be delivered.

"Send him word I am better, Mrs. Clayton," I entreated; "I cannot see him again, he is so repulsive; and, if you have a woman's heart in your breast, never leave me alone with him, or with Mr. Bainrothe, when he calls, for one moment—they inspire me equally with terror indescribable," and I covered my face to hide its burning blushes.

"Look up, Miss Monfort, and listen to me," said Mrs. Clayton, at last, regarding me keenly, with her warped forefinger uplifted in her usual admonitory fashion, but with an expression on her face of interest and sympathy such as I had never witnessed there before. "A new light has broken just now upon my understanding; I can't tell how or whence it came, but here it is," pressing her hand to her brow; "I believe you have been misrepresented to me—but that is neither here nor there. I shall watch you closely and faithfully until we part—all the more that I do not believe you any more crazy than I am; I half suspected this before, but I know it now." She paused, then continued: "I should have to tell you my life's secret if I were to explain to you why Mr. Bainrothe's interests are so dear to me, so vital even, and I will not conceal from you that I knew your guardeen's good name depends on your confinement here until you come of age. After that it will only be necessary for you to sign a few papers, and all will be straight again—no harm or insult is designed. To these I would never have lent myself in any way—ill as you think of me. And as long as we continue together I will guard your good name as I would do that of my own dear daughter—that is, if I had one. You shall receive no visitor alone."

She spoke with a feeling and dignity of which I had scarcely believed her capable, shrewd and sensible as I knew her to be, and far above the woman she called her mistress, in a certain retenu of manner and delicacy of deportment, usually inseparable from good-breeding.

I could not then guess how acceptable, to her and the person she was chiefly interested in, were these signs of my aversion for Basil Bainrothe, and what sure means they were of access to the only tender spot in the obdurate heart of Rachel Clayton.

Certain it is that, from these expressions, I derived the first consolation that had come to me in my immurement, and from that hour the solemn farce of keeper and lunatic ceased to be played between us two.

From such freedom of communication on my jailer's part, I began to hope for additional information, which never came. It was in vain that I conjured her to tell me where my prison was situated, whether at the edge of the city, or far away in the country, or to suffer me to have a glimpse from a window of my vicinity. To all such entreaties she was pitiless, and I was left to that vague and vain conjecture which so wears the intellect.

In the absence of all possibility of escape, it became a morbid and haunting wish with me to know my exact locality. That it could be no great distance from the city of New York, if not within its limits, I felt assured, from the expedition with which my transit from the ship had been effected.

During the first three weeks of my confinement the deep silence that prevailed about me had led me to adopt the opinion that I was the occupant of a maison de santé. I had once driven past one on Staten Island, where a friend of my father's—about whose condition he came to inquire personally—had been immured for years. I did not alight with him when he left the carriage to make these inquiries, but I perfectly remembered the old gray stone building, with its ancient elms, and the impression of gloom and awe it had left on my mind. But this idea was presently dispelled.

I was awakened one morning, in the fourth week of my sojourn in captivity, by the sound of chimes long familiar to my ear, the duplicate of which I had not supposed to be in existence. At first I feared it was some mirage of the ear, so to speak, instead of eye, that reflected back that fairy melody, which had rung its accompaniment to my whole childhood and youth; but, when, after the lapse of seven days, it was repeated, I became convinced that its reality was unquestionable, and that neither impatience nor indignation had so impaired my senses as to reproduce those sounds through the medium of a fevered imagination.

Were these delicious bells, a recent addition to the cupola of our grim asylum, bestowed by some benevolent hand that sought to mark and lend enchantment to the holy Sabbath-day—even for the sake of the irresponsible ones within its walls—or was I indeed—? But of this there could be no question—I dared not hazard such conjecture lest it drive me mad in reality—I must not!

I groped in thick darkness, and time itself was only measured now by those sweet chimes, so like our own, and yet so far away. My very clock one morning was found to have stopped, and was not again repaired or set in motion. Papers I never saw, had never seen since I came to dwell in shadow, save that single one so ostentatiously spread before me, announcing the loss of the Kosciusko and her passengers—a refinement of cruelty, on the part of those who sent it, worthy of a Japanese.

Rafts had been launched and lost, the survivors stated (the men who had seized the long-boat, to the exclusion of the women and children); the sea had swallowed all the remainder. A later statement might refute the first, but even then none could know the truth with regard to my identity, for would not Basil Bainrothe control the publication as he pleased, and make me dead if he listed—dead even after the rescue?

Yet Hope would sometimes whisper in her daring moods; "All this shall pass away, and be as it had not been. Be of good heart, Miriam, and do not let them kill you; live for Mabel—live for Wentworth!"

Then, with bowed head, and silent, streaming tears, my soul would climb in prayer to the footstool of the Most High, and the grace, which had never come to me before, fell over me like a mantle in this sad extremity.

---

CHAPTER VIa.

[transcribers note: There are two Chapter VI in this book]

Unfaltering in her respectful demeanor toward me was Mrs. Clayton from the time of the little scene I have recently described. What new and sudden light had broken in upon her I never knew, but I supposed at the time that the flash of conviction had gone home to her mind with regard to the baseness of Bainrothe and the iniquity of his proceedings, founded on the fear I had expressed of his solitary presence, and the insight she had gained into my character.

Watching none the less strictly, she gradually relaxed that personal surveillance that is ever so intolerable to the proud and delicate-minded, and those suggestions that, however well intended, had been so irritating to me from such a source. She no longer urged me to read, or sew, or eat, or take exercise; but, retiring into her own work (whence she could observe me at her pleasure, for her door was always set wide open, and her face turned in my direction), she employed or feigned to employ herself in her inexhaustible stocking-basket or scollop-work, either one the last resource of idiocy, as it seemed to me.

Left thus to myself in some degree, I unclosed the leaves of the bookcase, and surveyed its grim array of "classics"—all new and unmarked by any name, or sign of having been read—and from them I selected a few worthies, through whose pages I delved drearily and industriously, and most unprofitably it must be confessed. The only living sensations I received from the contents of that bookcase were, I am ashamed to acknowledge, from a few odd volumes of memoirs, and collections of travels that I had happened to find stowed away behind the others. The rest seemed sermons from the stars.

Captain Cook's voyages and LeVaillant's descriptions did stir me very slightly with their strong reality, and make me for a few hours forget myself and my captivity; but all the rest prated at me like parrots, from stately, pragmatical Johnson down to sentimental, maudlin Sterne.

I found them intolerable in the mood in which I was, nothing so exhausting as the abstract! and closed the book desperately to resume my diary, neglected since the awful events of Beauseincourt, but always to me a resource in time of trouble and of solitude. Of pens, ink, paper, there was no lack, and I wrote one day, Penelope-wise, what I destroyed the next. Yet this very "jotting down" impressed upon my brain the few incidents of my prison-house recorded here, that might otherwise have faded from my memory in the twilight of monotony.

I had no need to sew. Fair linen and a sufficiency of other plain wearing-apparel, including summer gowns, I found laid carefully in my drawers, and the creole negress brought in my clothes well ironed and carefully mended, to be laid away by the orderly hands of Mrs. Clayton.

Once, during the temporary illness of this dragon (whose bed or lair was placed absolutely across the door of egress from her closet, so as to block the way or make it difficult of access), the creole, in an unavoidable contingency like this, came with a pile of clothing in her arms to lay the pieces herself in the bureau, by direction of my jailer, and thus revealed herself.

By the merest accident I had found in the lining of my purse two pieces of gold (the rest of my money had been spirited away with the belt that contained it, or the leather had been destroyed by the action of the saltwater), and one of these I hastened to bestow on the attendant, signifying silence by a gesture as I did so.

I knew this wretch to be wholly selfish and mercenary, from my experience of her on the raft—for that she was the same negress I had long ceased to doubt—and I determined, while I had an opportunity of doing so, to enter a wedge of confidence between us in the only possible way.

"Sabra," I whispered, "what became of the young girl, Ada Lee, and the deformed child? It surely can do no harm to tell me this, and I know you understand me perfectly."

"No, honey, sartinly not; 'sides, I is tired out of speakin' Spanish," in low, mumbling accents. "Well, den, dat young gal gone to 'tend on Mrs. Raymond, and, as fur de chile, dey pays me to take kear of dat in dis very house ware you is disposed of. Dat boy gits me a heap of trouble and onrest of nights, dough, I tells you, honey; but I is well paid, and dey all has der reasons for letting him stay here, I spec'"—shaking her head sagaciously—"dough dey may be disappinted yit, when de time comes to testify and swar! De biggest price will carry de day den, chile; I tells you all," eying the gold held closely in her palm.

I caught eagerly at the idea of the child's presence, though the rest was Greek to my comprehension until long afterward, when, in untangling a chain of iniquity difficult to match, it formed one important but additional link.

"Poor little Ernie! I would give so much to see him," I said. "Ask Dr. Englehart to let him come to see me, Sabra, and some day I will reward you"—all this in the faintest whisper. "But Mrs. Raymond—where is she? Does she never come here? I desire earnestly to speak with her. Can't you let her know this? Try, Sabra, for humanity's sake."

At this juncture the head of Mrs. Clayton was thrust forth from its shell, turtle-wise, and appeared peering at the door-cheek.

"You have been there long enough to make these clothes instead of putting them away, old woman," was the sharp rebuke that startled the pretended Dinah to a condition of bustling agitation, and induced her to shut up one of her own shrivelled hands in closing the drawer, with a force that made her cry aloud, and, when released, wring it with agony, that drew some words in the vernacular. "What makes you suppose Miss Monfort wants to hear your chattering, old magpie that you are?" continued Mrs. Clayton, throwing off her mask. "Now walk very straight, or the police shall have you next time you steal from a companion. Remember who rescued you on the Latona, and on what conditions, and take care how you conduct yourself in the future. Do you understand me?"

After this tirade, which sorely exhausted her, Mrs. Clayton relapsed into silence; and now it was my time to speak and even scold. I said:

"Now that the Spanish farce is thrown aside, it is hard indeed that I cannot even be allowed to exchange a few words with a laundress in my solitary condition—hard that I should be pressed to the wall in this fiendish fashion. This woman was telling me of the presence of a little child in the house, and I have desired permission to see it by way of diversion and occupation, I have asked her to apply to Dr. Englehart."

"The child shall come to you, Miss Monfort, whenever you wish," said Mrs. Clayton, with ill-disguised eagerness. "This woman is not the proper person to apply to, however, and it is natural you should feel concerned about it, now that you are able to think and feel again. You know, of course, it is the boy of the wreck."

"Yes, very natural. Its mother died in my arms, if I am not mistaken in the identity of the child; and fortunately—" I paused here, arrested by some strange instinct of prudence, and decided not to show further interest in his fate.

He might be inquired for, and traced even, I reflected, and thus my own existence be brought to light. Selfishly, as well as charitably, would I cherish him. Little children had ever been a passion with me, but this poor, repulsive thing was the "dernier ressort of desolation."

That very evening I heard the husky and guttural voice of Dr. Englehart in the adjoining chamber, or rather in the closet of Mrs. Clayton, a mere anteroom originally, as it seemed, to the large apartment I occupied.

It was very natural that in her ill condition my dragon should seek medical aid, and I paid no further attention to the propinquity of this unpleasant visitor than I could help—sitting quietly by my shaded lamp, absorbed in the Psalter, in which I found nightly refuge.

He came in at last, after tapping very lightly on the door-panel, unsolicited and unexpected, to my presence—the same inscrutable, hirsute horror I had seen before, with his trudging, scraping walk, his square and stalwart frame, his gloved extremities, his light, blue-glasses, hat and cane in hand, a being as I felt to chill one's very marrow.

"Is it true vat I hear," he asked, pausing at some distance, "dat you vant to have dat leetle hompback chilt for a companion, Miss Monfort?"

"It is true, Dr. Englehart."

"And vat can your motif be? Heh? I must study dat for a leetle before I can decide de question, or even trost him as a human being in your hands."

"Lunatics are rarely governed by motives at all," I replied, "only impulses. I want human companionship, however, that is all. I sicken in this solitude—I am dying of mental inanition."

"It is true, you look delicate indeed, I am pained to see." The accent, was forgotten here for a moment, and an expression of real sympathy was perceivable in his low, husky voice. "Command me in any way dat accords wid my duty," he continued, "yes! de boy shall come! To interest, to amuse you, is perhaps—to cure!"

"Thank you; I shall await his advent anxiously; be careful not to disappoint me."

"Oh, not for vorlds!"

"You are very kind; I believe, though, that is all we have to say to one another, Dr. Englehart."

"You are bettair, then?" he said, advancing steadily toward me in spite of this dismissal. "You need no more leetle pill? Are you quite sure of dat?"

"Not now, at least, Dr. Englehart."

"Permit me, then, to feel your pulse vonce more. I shall determine den more perfectly dis vexing subject of your sanity."

"Thank you; I decline your opinion on a matter so little open to difference. Be good enough to retire, Dr. Englehart. Let me at least breathe freely in the solitude to which I am consigned."

"I mean no offence, yonge lady," he said, meekly, falling back to the centre-table on which was burning my shaded astral lamp—for I had left it as he approached, instinctively to seek the protection of an interposing chair, on the back of which I stood leaning as I spoke.

He, too, remained standing, with one hand pressed firmly backward on the top of the table, in front of which he poised himself, gesticulating earnestly yet respectfully.

His position was an error of mistaken confidence in his own make-up, such as we see occur every day among those even long habituated to disguise.

As he stood I distinctly saw a line of light traced between his cheek and one of his bushy side-whiskers.

That line of light let in a flood of evidence. The man was an impostor, a tool, as criminal as his employer—not the footprint on the sand was more suggestive to Robinson Crusoe than that luminous streak to me, nor the cause of wilder conjecture.

Yet I betrayed nothing of my amazement I am convinced, for, after standing silently for a time and almost in a suppliant attitude before me, Dr. Englehart departed, and for many days I saw him not again.

An object that looked not unlike a small, solemn owl, stood in the middle of the floor, regarding me silently when I awoke very early on the following morning.

At a glance I recognized poor little Ernie, and singularly enough, he knew and remembered me at once.

"Ernie good boy now," he said as he came toward me with his tiny claw extended. "Lady got cake in pocket, give Ernie some?" Not only did he recall me, it was plain, but the incident that saved his life, and the rebukes he had received on the raft for his refusal to partake of briny biscuit, which no persuasion, it may be remembered, had availed to make him taste—even when devoured by the pangs of hunger. I tried in vain, however, to recall him to some remembrance of his poor mother. On that point he was invulnerable; the abstract had no charm for him or meaning. He dealt only in realities and presences.

A new element was infused into my solitude from this time. In this child I lived, breathed, and had my being, until later events startled my individuality once more into its old currents of existence. Not that I merged myself entirely in Ernie, sickly, wayward, fitful, ugly little mite that he was undeniably. Nay, rather did I draw him forcibly into my own sphere of being and find nutrition in this novel element.

So grudgingly had Nature fulfilled her obligations in the case of this poor stunted infant, that, at two and a half years of age, he had not the usual complement of teeth due a child of eighteen months, and was suffering sorely from the pointing up of tardy stomach-teeth through ulcerated gums.

To attend to and heal his bodily ailments occupied me entirely at first, and finally, finding him ill cared for, I made him a little pallet on my sofa and kept him with me by night and day. Surely such devotion as he manifested in return for my scant kindness to him few mothers have received from their offspring. To sit silently at my feet while I talked to him, or do my bidding, seemed his chief pleasures, as they might not, could not have been, had he been strong, and active, and more soundly constituted. As it was, no more loyal creature existed, nor did the Creator ever enshrine deeper affections or quicker perceptions in any childish frame. Weird, and wise, and witty as Æsop was this child, like him deformed; and to draw out his quaint remarks, read him fresh from his Maker's hand—this warped, and tiny, imperfect volume of humanity—was to me an ever-new puzzle and delight. Severity he had been used to of late, I saw plainly. He shrank with winking eyes from an uplifted hand, even if the gesture were one of mere amazement, or affection, and sat patiently, like a little well-trained dog, when he saw food placed before me, until invited to partake thereof. His manner was wistful and deprecating even to pathos, and I longed for one burst of passion, one evidence of self-will, to prove to myself that I, like others he had been recently thrown with, was not the meanest of all created creatures—a baby's despot!

Oh, better than this the cap and bells, and infant tyranny forever, and the wildest freaks of baby folly. He suffered silently, as I have seen no other child do, uncomplainingly even, and at such times would sink into moods of the blackest gloom, like those of an old, gouty subject. Hypochondria, baby as he was, seemed already to have fixed his fangs upon him. He had days of profound melancholy, when nothing provoked a smile, and others of bitter, silent fretting, inconceivably distressing; again there were periods of the wildest joy, only restrained by that reticence which had become habitual, from positive boisterousness.

All this I could have compelled into subservience, of course, by substituting fear for affection. It is not a difficult matter for the strong and cunning to cow and crush the spirit of a little child; no great achievement, after all, nor proof of power, though many boast of it as such. Strength and hardness of heart are all one requires for this external victory; but human souls are not to be so governed (God be praised for this!), and love and respect are not to be compelled.

It is the error of all errors to suppose that, because a child has a sickly frame or imperfect animal organization, it is just or profitable to give it over to its own devices, and consign it to indolence and ignorance. Alas! the vacancy that begets fretfulness, and crude, capricious desires, the confusion of images that arises from partial understanding, are far more wearing to the nerves of an intelligent infant than the small labor the brain undertakes, if any, indeed, be needed, in mastering ideas properly presented, and suitable to the condition of the sufferer. One might as well forbid the hand to grasp, the eye to see, nay, more, it will not do to confound the child of genius with the fool, or to suppose that the one needs not a mental aliment of which the other is incapable. Feed well the hungry mind, lest it perish of inanition. It is a sponge in infancy that imbibes ideas without an effort; it is a safety-valve through which fancy and poetry conduct away foul vapors; it is an alembic, retaining only the pure and valuable of all that is poured into it, to be stored for future use. It is a lightning-rod that conducts away from the body all superfluous electricity. It does not harm a sensible child to put it to study early, but it destroys a dull one. Let your poor soil lie fallow, but harvest your rich mould, and you shall be repaid, without harm to its fertility.

Ideas were balm to Ernie, even as regarded his physical suffering. His enthusiasm rose above it and carried him to other spheres.

Some illustrated volumes of "Wilson's Ornithology," which I found in the bookcase, proved to be oil on troubled waters in Ernie's case; and before long he knew, without an effort, the name of every bird in the two folios of prints, and would come of his own accord to repeat and point them out to me.

I found, to my amazement, that, when a cage of canaries was brought in and hung in the bath-room at my request for his amusement, he discriminated and gravely averred that no birds like those were to be found in his big book, though yellow hammers and orioles were there in their native colors, that might have deceived a less observant eye into a delusion as to their identity with our pretty importation.

Verses, remarkable for rhyme and rhythm both, when repeated to him a few times with scanning emphasis, took root in that fertile brain which piled his compact forehead so powerfully above his piercing, deep-set eyes, and fell from his infant lips in silvery melody as effortless and spontaneous as the trickling of water or the singing of birds in the trees.

Day by day I saw the little, wistful face relaxing from the hard-knot expression, so to speak, of sour and serious suffering, and assuming something akin to baby joyousness, and the small, warped figure, so low that it walked under my dropped and level hand, acquiring security of step and erectness of bearing. I knew little of the treatment required for spinal disease, but common-sense taught me that, in order to effect a cure, the vertebral column must be relieved as much as possible from pressure, and allowed to rest. So I persuaded him to lie down a great part of the time, and contrived for him a little sustaining brace to relieve him when he walked.

I fed him carefully; I bathed him tenderly, and robbed his weary, aching limbs to rest, so that before many weeks the change was surprising, and the success of my treatment evident to all who saw him—the comprehensive "all" being myself and two attendants.

Dr. Englehart had been suggested in the beginning by Mrs. Clayton, as his medical attendant, but rejected by me with a shudder, that seemed conclusive; yet one evening, unsummoned by me, and as far as I knew by any other, he walked calmly into my apartment, ostensibly to see the little invalid—his charge as well as mine.

For a moment the extravagant idea possessed me that, in spite of appearances, I had done this man injustice, and that he came in reality for humane purposes alone; wore his disguise for these.

This delusion was soon dissipated, as with audacity (no doubt characteristic, though not before evidenced to me), he seated himself complacently and uninvited, and, disposing of his hat and stick, settled himself down for a tête-à-tête, an affair which, if medical, usually partakes of the confidential.

"Your little protégé, Miss Monfort," he said, huskily, "seems to be a serious sufferer," and for a moment dropping his accent while he rubbed his gloved hands together as with an ill-repressed self-gratification; "come, tell me now what you are doing for his benefit," again artistically assuming a foreign accentuation.

In a few words I described my course of treatment and its success.

"All very well," he responded, hoarsely, "as far as it goes; but I am convinced that much severer treatment will he necessaire—"

"I think not," I replied, curtly; "and certainly nothing of the kind will be permitted by me while I have charge of this poor infant."

"A few leetle pills, then, for both mother and child;" he suggested, humbly.

"You are mistaken if you imagine any relationship to exist between Ernie and myself," I answered, calmly, never dreaming at the moment of covert or intended insult. "I might as well inform you at once, that I am Miss, not Mrs. Monfort; you should he guarded how you make mistakes of that nature."

And my eye flashed fire, I felt, for I now heard him chuckling low in the shadow, in which he so carefully concealed himself.

"I shall remembair vat you say," he observed, "and try to do bettair next visit; but all dis time I delay in de execution of my mission here. See, I have brought you von lettair; now vat will you do to reward me?"

Holding it high above my head, in a manner meant, no doubt, to be playful, and to suggest a game of snatch, perhaps, such as his peers might have afforded him, he displayed his treasure to my longing eyes, "but I sat with folded arms.

"If the letter brings me good news, I shall thank you warmly, Dr. Englehart; if not, I shall try to believe you unconscious of its contents."

"Tanks from your lips would, indeed, seem priceless," he remarked, courteously, as with many bows and shrugs he laid it on the table before me, bringing his shaggy head by such means much closer to my hand than I cared to know it should be, under any circumstances.

With a gesture of inexpressible disgust, regretted the next moment, as I reflected that, to bring me this letter, he might be overstepping common rules, I raised the envelope to the light and recognized, to my intense disappointment, the well-known characters of Bainrothe's—small, rigid, neat, constrained.

My heart, which a moment before had beat audibly to my own ear, sank like a stone in my breast, and I sat for a time holding the letter mutely, uncertain how to proceed. Should I return it unread, and thus hurl the gauntlet in the traitor's face, or be governed by expedience (word ever so despised by me of old), and trace the venom of the viper, by his trail, back to his native den?

After a brief conflict of feeling, I determined on the wiser course—that of self-humiliation as a measure of profound policy.

I broke the seal, the well-known "dove-and-vulture" effigy which he called in heraldry "The quarry" and claimed as his rightful crest. Very significantly, indeed, did it strike me now, though I had jested on the subject so merrily of old with Evelyn and George Gaston.

The letter was of very recent date, and ran as follows—I have the original still, and this is an exact copy:

"On September 1st, or as soon thereafter as feasible, I shall call to see you, Miriam, in your retirement, which I am glad to hear has so far been beneficial. Should I find you in a condition to make conditions, I shall lay before you a very advantageous offer of marriage I had received for you before your shipwreck. Should you accept this offer, and attach your signature to a few papers that I shall bring with me (papers important to the respectability of your whole family as well as my own), I shall at once resign to you your father's house and the guardianship of Mabel. The chimera that alarmed you to frenzy can have no further existence, either in fact or fancy. I am about to contract an advantageous marriage with a foreign lady of rank, wealth, and beauty, to whom I hope soon to introduce you. I need not mention her name, if you are wise. Be patient and cheerful; cultivate your talents, and take care of your good looks—no woman can afford to dispense with these, however gifted; and you will soon find yourself as free as that 'chartered libertine' the air, for which last two words I am afraid you will be malicious enough to substitute the name you will not find appended, of your true friend and guardian, B.B."

Had Wentworth spoken, then? Did he know of my immurement? Was it his beloved presence, his dear hand, that were to be made the prize of my silence and submission? Was the bitter pill of humiliation I was now swallowing to be gilded thus? No, no—a thousand times, no! He was not the man with whom to make such conditions—the man I loved—nay worshiped almost. He was of the old heroic mould, that would have preferred any certainty to suspense, and death itself to an instant's degradation.

He deemed me dead, and the obstacle that had risen between us needed no explanation now. The waves had swallowed all necessities like this. But, had he known me the inmate of a mad-house, no bolts or bars would have withheld him from my presence. His own eyes could alone have convinced him of such ruin as was alleged against me by these friends.

From this survey of my utter helplessness I turned suddenly to confront the deep, dark, salient eyes of the disciple of Hahnemann, real or pretended, fixed upon me with a glance that even his blue spectacles could not deprive of its subtle intensity.

Where had I seen before orbs of the same snake-like peculiarity of expression, or caught the outline of the profile which suddenly riveted my gaze as the light partially revealed it, then subsided into shadow again! I pondered this question for a moment while Dr. Englehart, silent, expectant perhaps, stood with his hand tightly grasping the back of a chair, on the seat of which he reposed one knee, in a position such as defiant school-boys often assume before a pedagogue.

As I have said, his head and body were again in shadow, as was, indeed, most of the chamber, for the rays which struggled through the thick ground glass of my astral lamp were as mild as moonbeams, and as unsatisfactory. But the light fell strong and red beneath the shade, and the full glare of the astral lamp seemed centred on that pudgy hand, in its inevitable glove, that had fixed so firm a gripe on the back of the mahogany chair as to strain open one of the fingers of the tight, tawny kid-glove worn by Dr. Englehart. This had parted slightly just above the knuckle of the front-finger, and revealed the cotton stuffing within. Nay, more, the ruby ring with its peculiar device was thus exposed, which graced the slender finger of the charlatan! I do not apply this term as concerned the profession he affected at all, but merely (as shall be seen later) as one appropriate to himself individually.

There must be beings of all kinds to constitute a world, philosophers tell us, and he, no doubt, so long in ignorance of it, had stumbled suddenly on his proper vocation at last. The rôle he was playing (so far successfully) had doubtless been the occasion of an exquisite delight to him, unknown to simpler mortals, who masquerade not without dread misgivings of detection. I for one, when affecting any costume not essentially belonging to me, or covering my face even with a paper-mask for holiday diversion, have had a feeling of unusual transparency and obviousness, so to speak, which precluded on my part every thing like a successful maintenance of the part I was attempting to play. It was as if some mocking voice was saying: "This is Miriam Monfort, the true Miriam; the person you have known before as such was only making believe—but the Simon-pure is before you, a volume of folly that all who run may read! Behold her—she was never half so evident before!"

But to digress thus in the very moment of detection, of recognition, seems irrelevant. The flash of conviction was as instantaneous in its action in my mind as that of the lightning when it strikes its object. I stood confounded, yet enlightened, all ablaze!—but the subject of this discovery did not seem in the least to apprehend it, or to believe it possible, in his mad, mole-like effrontery of self-sufficiency, that by his own track he could be betrayed.

"Vat ansair shall I bear to Mr. Bainrothe from his vard?" asked the Mercury of my Jove, clasping his costumed hands together, then dropping them meekly before him. "I vait de reply of Miss Monfort vid patience. Dere is pen, and ink, and papair, I perceive, on dat table. Be good enough to write at once your reply to de vise conditions of your excellent guardian."

"You know them, then?" I said, quickly, glancing at him with a derisive scorn that did not escape his observation.

"I have dat honnair," was the hypocritical reply, accompanied by a profound bow.

"Disgrace, rather," I substituted. "But you have your own stand-point of view, of course. The shield that to you is white, to me is black as Erebus. You remember the knights of fable?" "Always the same—always indomitable!" I heard him murmur, so low that it was marvelous how the words reached my ear, tense as was every sense with disdainful excitement. Yet he simply said aloud, after his impulsive stage-whisper: "Excuse me! I understand not your allusions. I pretend not to de classics; my leetle pills—" and he hesitated, or affected to do so.

"Enough—I waive all apologies; they only prolong an interview singularly distasteful to me for many reasons. You are behind the curtain, I cannot doubt, and understand not only the contents of that absurd letter, but its unprincipled references. To Basil Bainrothe I will never address one line; but you may say to him that I scorn him and his conditions. Yet, helpless as I am, and in his hands, tell him to bring his emancipation papers, and I will sign them, though they cost me all I possess of property. My sister I will not surrender any longer to his care, nor my right in her, which, with or without his consent, is perfect when I reach my majority. As to the suitor to whom he alluded, he had better be allowed to speak for himself when this transaction is over. I shall then decide very calmly on his merits, tarnished, as these might seem, from such recommendation."

"He is one who has loved you long, lady," said the man, sadly, speaking ever in that made and husky voice (wonderful actor that he was by nature!), which he sustained so well that, had I not unmistakably identified him, it might have imposed on my ear as real. "Hear what has been written on this subject: When others have forsaken you and left you to your fate, he has continued faithful to your memory. The revelation of your immurement was made simultaneously to two men who called themselves your lovers, and its sad necessity explained by your ever-watchful guardian. One of these lovers repudiated your claims upon him, and turned coldly from the idea of uniting his fate to that of one who had even for an hour been a suspected lunatic; the other declared himself willing to take her as she was to his arms, even though her own were loaded with the chains of a mad-house! Penniless and abandoned by all the world, and with a clouded name, he woos her as his wife—the woman he adores!"

And, as he read, or seemed to read, these words, with scarce an accent to mar their impetuous flow, Dr. Englehart drew in his breath with the hissing sound of passion, and folded his arms tightly across his padded breast, as if they enfolded the bride he was suing for in another's name.

"And who, let me ask, is this Paladin of chivalry?" I inquired, derisively. "Give me his name, that I may consider the subject well and thoroughly before we meet at last."

"Excuse me if I refuse to give the name of eider of dese gentlemen at dis onhappy season," he rejoined. "Wen de brain is all right again"—tapping his own forehead—"your guardian will conduct the faithful knight to kneel at de feet of her he loves so well."

"And the other—where is he?" fell involuntarily from my lips—my heaving heart—an inquiry that I regretted as soon as it was uttered; for, affecting sorrowful mystery, the man inclined himself toward me and whispered in my ear confidentially:

"Plighted to another, and gone where no eyes of yours shall rest on him again."

"Pander—liar—spy!" burst from my passionate lips as in all the fury of desperation I turned from the creature who had so wantonly wounded my self-respect, and waved to him to begone. Another name quivered on my lips, but I checked it on their threshold after that first burst of indignation instantly subdued.

I was not brave enough nor strong enough to hazard a shaft like that which might have been returned to me so deathfully. I would let the barrier stand which he had erected between us, and which to demolish would be to lay myself open, perhaps, to insult of the darkest description.

Let the ostrich with his head in the sand still imagine himself unseen; the masquerader still conceive himself secure beneath his paper travesty; the serpent still coil apparently unrecognized beside the bare, gray stone that reveals him to the eye—I was too cowardly, too feeble, to cope with strategy and double-dyed duplicity like this!

So the man went his way with his silly secret undiscovered, as he deemed, and that it might remain so to the end, as far as he could know, I devoutly prayed. For I knew of old the unscrupulous lengths to which, when nerved by hate or disappointment or passions of any kind, he could go, without a particle of mercy for his victims or remorse for his ill-doing.

When Dr. Englehart was gone—for so I still choose to call him for some reasons, although I give my reader credit for still more astuteness than I possessed myself, and believe that he has long ago recognized, through this cloud of mystery and travesty thrown about him, an old acquaintance—the child Ernie rose from the bed on which he had lain tremulous and observant, with his small hands clinched, his eyes on fire. "Ernie kill bad man!" he exclaimed, ferociously, "for trouble missy. Give Ernie letter—he carry it away and hide it; bad letter—make poor Mirry cry."

"No, Ernie, I will keep it," I said, as I laid it carefully aside. "It shall stand as a sign and testimony of treachery to the end. Go to sleep, little child; but first say your prayers, so that the good angels may sit by you all night. Don't you hear Mrs. Clayton groaning? Poor Clayton! I most go and comfort her and soothe her pains, as Dinah cannot do. And, now that the bad doctor is gone home, and we are all locked up again securely, we shall rest peacefully, I trust; and so, good-night!"

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CHAPTER VII.

From being the most silent of children, a perfect creep-mouse in every way, Ernie had become fearfully loquacious under my care, and was now as talkative as he had ever been observant.

The action that most children develop through exercise of limb had been reserved for his untiring tongue. He had literally learned to talk from hearing me read aloud, which I did daily, much to Mrs. Clayton's delight and edification, for the benefit of my own lungs, which suffered from such confirmed silence, as I had at first indulged in. His exquisite ear—his prodigious memory—aided him in the acquirement of words, and even long and difficult sentences, of which he delivered himself oracularly when engaged with his blocks and dominoes.

He told himself wonderful stories in which the "buful faiwry" and "hollible" giant of the story-books figured largely. I am almost ashamed to acknowledge that I would hold my breath and strain my ear at times to listen to these murmured stories, self-addressed, as I have never done to receive the finest ebullitions of eloquence or the veriest marvels of the raconteur. There was something so sweet, so wondrous to me in this little, ever-babbling baby-brain fountain, content with its own music, having no thought of auditors or effect, no care for appreciation, totally self-addressed and self-absorbed, that I was never weary of giving it my ear and interest. Had the child known of or perceived this, the effect would have been destroyed, and a fatal self-consciousness have been instituted instead of this lotus-eating infantile abandon—the very existence of which mood indicated genius. What poor Ernie's father might nave been I could only surmise from his own qualities, which, after all, may have flowed from a far-off source; but that his mother had been gentle, simple, and inefficient, I knew full well, from my slight acquaintance with her, and observation of her non-resisting organization. Ernie, on the contrary, grappled with obstacles uncomplainingly, and was only outspoken in his moments of gratification. His was the temperament that is the noblest and the most magnanimous in its very moulding. Whining children are selfish, as a rule, and petty-minded, and most often incapable of enjoyment—which last is a gift of itself that goes not always with possession.

Among other accomplishments self-acquired, Ernie had the power of mimicry to a singular degree. Mrs. Clayton had a slight hitch in her gait of late from rheumatic suffering, which he simulated solemnly, notwithstanding every effort on my part to restrain him.

Without a smile or any effort of mirth, he would limp behind as she walked across the floor, unconscious of his close attendance, and when she would turn suddenly and detect him, and shake her clinched fist at him, half in jest, he would retaliate by a similar gesture, and scowl, and stamp of the foot, that so nearly resembled her own proceedings as to cause me much internal merriment. But of course for his own advantage, as well as from regard for her feelings, it was necessary for me on such occasions to assume a gravity of deportment bordering on displeasure.

It may be supposed, then, that when, on the morning after Dr. Englehart's visit, before my chamber had been swept and garnished, and while Mrs. Clayton was busy in her own, Ernie brought me a letter and laid it on the table before me, as Dr. Englehart had done the night before in his presence, I was infinitely amused.

What, then, was my surprise in stooping over it to find this letter addressed to myself in the unfamiliar yet never-to-be-forgotten character of Wardour Wentworth!

After the first moment of bewilderment I opened the already-fastened letter—closed, as was the fashion of the day, without envelope, and sealed originally with wax, of which a few fragments still remained alone.

The date, the subject, the earnest contents, convinced me that I now held the clew of that mystery which had baffled me so long, and that the missing letter said to have been lost at Le Noir's Landing was at last in my possession. It needed not this additional proof of treachery to convince me that my suspicions had been correct, and that, next to the arch-fiend Bainrothe, I owed the greatest misery of my life to him who, in his ill-adjusted disguise, had dropped this letter from his pocket on the preceding evening—my evil genius, Dr. Englehart—alias Luke Gregory.

It was a gracious thing in God to permit me to owe the great happiness of this discovery to the little crippled child he had cast upon my care so mysteriously, and I failed not to render to him with other grateful acknowledgments "most humble and hearty thanks" for this crowning grace. Henceforth Hope should lend her torch to light my dearth—her wings to bear me up—her anchor wherewith to moor my bark of life wherever cast, and to the poor waif I cherished I owed this immeasurable good. Had Mrs. Clayton anticipated him with her infallible besom—that housewifely detective, that drags more secrets to light than ever did paid policeman—I should never have grasped this talisman of love and hope, never have waked up as I did wake up from that hour to the endurance which immortalizes endeavor, and renders patience almost pleasurable.

On the back of this well-worn letter was a pencil-scrawl, which, although I read it last, I present first to my reader, that he may trace link by link the chain of villainy that bound together my two oppressors.

It was in the small, clear calligraphy of Basil Bainrothe, before described; characterized, I believe, as a backhand—and thus it ran:

"You are right—it was a master-stroke! Keep them in ignorance of each other, and all will yet go well. I sail to-morrow, and have only time to inclose this with a pencilled line. Try and head them at New York. My first idea was the best—my reason I will explain later.

"Yours truly,

"B.B.

"N.B.—The man could not have played into our hands better than by taking up such an impression. There is no one there to undeceive him."

THE LETTER.

"My Miriam: Your note, through the hands of Mr. Gregory, has been received—read, noted, pondered over with pain and amazement. The avowal of your name so uselessly withheld from me, lets in a whole flood of light, blinding and dazzling, too, on a subject that fills me with infinite solicitude.

"There have been strange reserves between us that never ought to have existed, on my part as well as yours. I should have told you that I once had a half-sister, called Constance Glen—older than myself by many years—who married during my long absence from our native land a gentleman much older than herself, an Englishman by the name of Monfort, and, after giving birth to a daughter, died suddenly. These particulars I gathered from strangers, but there were many wanting which you can best supply. I know that this gentleman had a daughter, or daughters, by an earlier marriage—and I can find no clew to the date of my sister's marriage—which might in itself determine the possible age of her own daughter. That this child survived I have painful cause to remember. I had sustained shipwreck, and was in abeyance for clothes and money both, when it occurred to me to call on my brother-in-law, present to him my credentials, and remain a few days at his house as his guest, in the enjoyment of my sister's society, until my needs could be supplied from certain resources at a distance. The reception I met with from his elder daughter, and the information she haughtily gave me, determined my course. I sought no more the inhospitable roof of Mr. Monfort, to find shelter beneath which I had forfeited all claim by the death of my sister, then first suddenly revealed to me. Her child, I was told, had been recently injured by burning and could not be seen, even by so near a relative, and the manner of the young lady, whom I now identify as Evelyn Monfort, was such as to lead me at the time to believe this a mere excuse or evasion, which I did not seek to oppose.

"It is just possible that there may be a third sister, yet I think I have heard you say you had but one, and this reminiscence is anguish to my mind. Even more, the careless and unwarrantable allusions of Mr. Gregory to certain scars, evidently from burns that he had the insolence to observe on your neck and arms, and remark upon as mere foils to their beauty, in my first acquaintance with you and before I had a right to silence him, recurred to me as a partial confirmation of my fears. Without explaining to him my motives, I questioned him on this subject again soon after he handed me your note, a proceeding that I should have shrunk from as gross and unworthy of a gentleman under any other circumstances. I did not stop to think what impression my inquiries would leave upon his mind, ever prone to levity and suspicion; but he must have seen that I was deeply moved, and that no impertinent curiosity could sway me to such a course with regard to the woman I loved and had openly declared my plighted wife. You will understand all this and make allowance for me. Write to me immediately, and relieve, if possible, my intense solicitude. At all events, let me know the truth, and look it in the face as soon as may be. Any reality is better than suspense. Yet I must 'hope against hope,' or surrender wholly. I have not time to write another line. My business is imperative, or I should certainly retrace my steps.

"Yours eternally,

"WENTWORTH."

The man who wrote this letter was capable of condensing in a few calm words a world of passion, whether he spoke or wrote them; but he had governed his pen carefully in his agonizing uncertainty. It was yet to be determined when he penned these lines whether he should be considered a lover addressing his mistress, or an uncle writing to his niece, and in this bitter perplexity he commanded his inclinations to the side of principle.

I wept with tears of joy and thankfulness above this constrained epistle—I pressed it to my heart, my lips, a thousand times, in the quiet hours of night, in the moments of retirement my jailer granted me. The child Ernie alone saw and wondered at these manifestations of which I first saw the extravagance through his solemn imitations thereof, which yet made me catch him rapturously in my arms and kiss him a thousand times, until he put me aside, at last, with decorous dignity, as one transcending privilege.

By some vicarious process, best understood by lovers, I lavished on little Ernie a thousand terms of endearment, meant only for another, and by the light of my own happiness he seemed transfigured. He was identified with the lifting away of a burden more bitter than captivity itself. They could but kill my body now—my soul was filled with a new life that nothing could extinguish; and believing in Wentworth, I felt that I could die happy, let death come when and how it would. I knew now that in the course of time, whether I lived or died, Wentworth would know that I was not his niece, and claim Mabel as his own, remembering my estimate of those who held her in charge. Then would the tide of love and passion, so long repressed, roll back in its old channel, and he would leave no stone unturned, no path unexplored, whereby to trace my fate.

To this, as yet, he held no clew. The sea had seemed to swallow Miriam Harz, by which name I had been registered in the ship's books and known to the passengers; nor could it be surmised that the young "mad girl," since spoken of, as I had been told, in the papers, as having been restored to her friends by the accident of meeting the Latona, and Miriam Monfort, were one and the same person. But if the time should come when all should be explained, either by my own lips or the revelations of others, good cause might Basil Bainrothe and his confederate have to tremble!

Like all cold, patient, deeply-feeling men, there were untold reserves of power and passion in the nature of Wardour Wentworth which might, for aught I knew to the contrary, tend naturally to and culminate in revenge. The wish to retaliate was, I knew, a fundamental fault in my own character, one I had often occasion to struggle with even in childhood, when Evelyn, my despot, was also my dependant, and generosity had been called to the aid of forbearance. Vengeance was a fierce thirst in my Judaic heart which only Christian streams could ever allay or quench, and I judged the man I loved by self—not always a fitting standard of comparison.

And Gregory! I could imagine well the fiendish delight with which he had seen me day by day writhing uncomplainingly beneath the unexplained and as I had deemed unsuspected alienation of Wentworth, the cause of which his act had wrapped in mystery! Afraid to tamper with the note I gave him for the cool, discerning eye of Wentworth, curiosity had at first led him to break the seal of that intrusted to his care in return, and dark malevolence to retain it rather than destroy, for the eye of his confederate. That he had dispatched it at once for Paris was very evident from the pencilling on the back of the letter; and that the snare was set for me already, in which the accident of the encountered raft proved an assistant, I could not doubt.

I fell into the hands of Bainrothe on shipboard instead of into those of Gregory in New York; this was the only difference, for subterfuge could have done its work as well, if not as daringly, on land as on sea; and the league of iniquity was made before I sailed from Savannah.

How perfectly I could comprehend, for the first time since this revelation, what Wentworth must have suffered beneath his burden of unrelieved doubt and conjecture! I could see how, day by day, as no answer came to change the current of his thoughts, conviction slowly settled down like a cloud upon his heart, his reason; and what stern confirmation of all he dreaded most, my silence must have seemed to him!

All this I saw in my mental survey with pity, with concern, with wild desire to fly to him, and whisper truth and consolation in his arms; for I loved this man as it is given to passionate, earnest natures to love but once, be it early or late; loved him as Eve loved Adam, when the whole inhabited earth was given to those two alone.

"You seem in very good spirits to-day, Miss Monfort," said Mrs. Clayton, with unusual asperity on one occasion, when, holding Ernie in my arms, I lavished endearments upon him; "your king, indeed! your angel! I really believe you admire as well as love that hideous little elf."

"Of course I do," Mrs. Clayton; "all things I love are beautiful to me;" and I remembered how Bertie's plain face had grown into touching loveliness in my sight from the affection I bore her.

"And do you really love this child?"

"Most certainly, and very tenderly too; is he not my sweetest consolation in this dreary life?" "What if they remove him?"

"Ah! what, indeed!" and, relaxing my grasp, I clasped my hands together patiently; that thought had occurred to me before.

"It is a very strong affection to have sprung up from a short acquaintance on a raft," she remarked, sententiously.

"I saved his infant life, you know; and the benefactor always loves the thing he benefits. It is on this principle alone God loves his erring creatures, Mrs. Clayton, rest assured."

"If you had loved the child with true friendship, you would have pushed him into the sea, rather than have held him in your arms above it."

"Do you suppose he is less near to God than you or I—to Christ the all-merciful?" I questioned, sternly. "Much rather would I have that infant's yet unconscious hope of heaven than either yours or mine, Mrs. Clayton!"

"But his earthly hope—it was that I alluded to; what chance for him? Poor, weakly, deformed; he had better be at rest than knocked from pillar to poet, as he must be in this hard, cold world of chance and change."

"And that shall never be while I live, Ernie," I said, taking him again in my lap, at his silent solicitation. "Why, Mrs. Clayton, with such a noble soul, such intelligence as this child possesses, he may fill a pulpit, and save erring souls, or write such beautiful poems and romances as shall thrill the heart, or draw from an instrument sounds as divine as De Beriot's, or paint a picture, and immortalize his name; there is nothing too good, too great for Ernie to do, should God grant him life to achieve; and, as surely as I am spared to be enfranchised, shall I make this gifted child my charge."

"You are perfectly infatuated, Miss Monfort; I declare, I shall begin to believe—"

"No, you shall not begin to believe any such thing," I interrupted her, smiling; "you are surely too sensible and just a woman to begin to believe fallacies thus late in the day."

"Have it your own way," she said, sharply; "you always get the better of me at last."

"Not always," I pursued, "or I should not be here, you know. It rests with you to keep or let me go—"

"To ruin my child's husband! There, now! you have my life-secret," she said, with a desperate gesture; "use it as you will."

I understood more than ever the hopelessness of my case from the moment of that impulsive revelation, to which I made no answer.

"What is more," she said, huskily, "I, too, am watched; I never knew this until two days ago: a negro man, an attendant of the house, an old servant of your guardian's, I believe, guards the doors below, and refuses to let me pass to and fro. Dinah, even, is employed to dog my steps. This is not exactly what I bargained for; yet, in spite of all, on her account I shall be faithful to the end." And for a time she busied herself in that careful dusting of the ornaments of the chamber, which seemed mechanical, so habitual was it to her sense of order and tidiness.

Her hand was on the gold-emblazoned Bible, I remember, and her party-colored bunch of plumes lifted above it, as if for immediate action, when her arm fell heavily to her side, and she heaved a bitter sigh, so deep, it sounded like a long-suppressed sob, rather, to my ear.

"If I could only think you did not hate me, Miss Miriam," she said, "I believe I could be better satisfied to lead the life I do."

"Hate you! Why should I hate you, Mrs. Clayton? You are only a tool in the hands of my persecutor, I know, from your own confession, and I understand your motive better in the last few moments than I did before (inadequate as it seems to my sense of justice), for aiding this oppressor. You have been very kind to me in some respects; an inferior person could have tortured in a thousand ways, where you have shown yourself considerate, delicate even, and for all this I thank you more than I can express. I should be very ungrateful, indeed, were I to hate you. The word is strong."

"Yet you prefer even that hump-backed child to me or my society," she said, peevishly.

"The comparison cannot be instituted with any propriety," I responded, gravely, turning away and dismissing the boy to his blocks and books, as I did so, which made for him, I knew, a fairy kingdom of delight, through the aid of his splendid imagination.

A commonplace infant will tire of the choicest toys; they are to such minds but effigies and delusion, which last, the delight of imaginative infancy, to the cut and dried, dull, childish understanding is impossible.

I once overheard one little girl at a theatre—a splendid spectacle, calculated to dazzle and delight imaginative childhood—say to another: "It is nothing but make-believe! That house and garden are only painted. See how they shake! And the women are dressed in paste jewelry, like that our cook-maid wears to parties, and no jeweler would give a cent for them; and the fairies are poor girls, dressed up for the occasion; and the whole play is made up as they go. You see, I know all about it, father says."

I heard no more, but had a glimpse of a little, eager face suddenly dashed in its expression, and of small fingers pressed to unwilling ears to shut out unwelcome truths.

The discriminating child seemed a little monster in my eyes, who ought to have been sent out of the way at once of all companions capable of abandon and enjoyment; and, as to the "father" she quoted from, I could imagine him as the embodiment of asinine wisdom, so to speak—the quintessence of the practical, which so often, I observe, inclines its devotees to idiocy!

I knew very well that Wattie was not of the stamp to doubt the truth and splendor of "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," or "Cinderella," as surveyed from the stage-box, in his confiding infancy, any more than to believing in baubles when the time came to justly discriminate. Woe for the incredulous child, too matter-of-fact to be enlisted in the creations of fancy, and who tastes in infancy the chief bitterness of age—the incapability of surrendering life to the ideal!

How fresh imagination keeps the heart—how young! What a glorious gift it is when rightly used and governed! Hear Charlotte Bronté's testimony, as recorded by her biographer: "They are all gone," she says, "the sisters I so loved, and I have only my imagination left to comfort me. But for this solace I should despair or perish." The words are not exact—the book is not beside me, but such is their substance. He who lists can seek them for himself in the pages of that wondrous spell woven by Mrs. Gaskell—that tragic and strange biography which once in a season of deep despondency did more to reconcile me to my own condition, through my pity and admiration for another, than all the condolences that came so freely from lip and pen. Every fabric that love had erected crumbled about her or turned to Dead-Sea ashes on her lip. See what a world of passion those French letters and themes of hers betray!

The brand of suffering and suffocating sorrow is on every one of them, plain to the eye of the initiated alone, they who have gazed on the wonders of the inner temple—the holy of holies—and gone forth reverently to dream of the revelation evermore in silence.

But, above every ruin of hope, or pride, or affection, like an imperial banner flung from "the outer wall," her imagination waved and triumphed. "The clouds of glory" she trailed after her were dyed in spheres unapproachable by death, or shame, or disappointment, and the gift described in the Arabian story as conferred by the genii's salve when he touched therewith the eyes of the traveler and caused him to see all the wonders of the earth, its gems, its gold, its gleaming chrysolites, its inward fires, unobscured by the interposition of dust and clay, which veiled them from all the rest of humanity, may stand as a type of her ideality.

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CHAPTER VIII.

The six weeks which had been allotted to me as the term of my captivity were accomplished, and still Mr. Basil Bainrothe came not—wrote not. I had seen the month of August glide away, its progress marked only by the changing fruits and flowers of the season, and the more fervent light that pierced through the Venetian blinds when turned heavenward, for it was through these alone that the light of day was permitted to visit my chamber.

Where, then, was the place of my captivity situated? In the environs of a great city, possibly, for the wind often blew, laden with fragrance as from choice rather than extensive gardens, through my casement, and the shadow of a tall tree impending over the skylight of the bath-room was, when windy, cast so distinctly on its panes as to convince me of the neighborhood of an English elm, the foliage of which tree I knew like an alphabet.

And then, those fairy, Sabbath chimes! Were such musical bells duplicated in adjacent cities? or was I, indeed, near our old, beloved church, in which memory so distinctly revealed our ancient, velvet-lined pew, my father's bowed head, and the venerable pastor rising white-robed and saintly in his pulpit to bid all the earth keep silent before the Lord! Conjecture was rife! Thus August passed away.

My birthday had gone by, and the equinox was upon us, with its rapid changes of sun and storm, when one of these tempests, accompanied by hail of unusual size, shattered to fragments the skylight of the bath-room. This hail-storm was succeeded by a deluge of rain, which flooded not only the adjacent closet, but the chamber I occupied, among other evils completely submerging the superb Wilton carpet, concerning the safety of which Mrs. Clayton felt immense responsibility.

A glazier came as soon as the weather permitted, who was carefully escorted through my chamber by Mrs. Clayton to ascertain the repairs to be made—a fresh-looking, white-aproned Irish lad, I remember (for a human being was a novelty to me then), who found it necessary, in order to repaint the wood-work, to bear the sash away with him, leaving behind his tray of chisels and putty, and the light step-ladder he had brought with him on his shoulder, and on whose return I vainly waited as a chance for communication with the outer world.

While Dinah was busy with mops and brooms drying the carpet, and Mrs. Clayton thoroughly occupied with her active superintendence of the needful operations, little mischievous, meddlesome Ernie had made his way, contrary to all rules, beneath and behind my bed, and torn off a goodly portion of the gray and gilded paper which had so far effectually aided to conceal a closed door situated behind the bed-head, from which the frame had been removed. Then, for the first time since our acquaintance, did I slap sharply those little, busy fingers which I could have kissed for thankfulness, and, watching my opportunity, I replaced the paper, unseen by Mrs. Clayton, with the remains of a gum-arabic draught which had been prescribed for his cough. I knew that, after experiencing such condign punishment, he would return no more to the scene of his destruction, and that he might forget both injury and discovery, I devoted myself to his amusement during that active, long, rainy day with unhoped-for success.

The glazier had announced to Mrs. Clayton that his return might be deferred for four-and-twenty hours, and, as the succeeding day was clear and warm, I proceeded, in spite of broken sashes, to take my daily bath as usual at twelve o'clock.

Mrs. Clayton, with her prison-key in her pocket, and her snuffbox at hand, yielded herself, to the delight of ginger-nuts and her stocking-basket, and rested calmly after her fatigues of the preceding day; and Ernie, attracted by the crunching noise—the sound of dropping nuts, perhaps, which betrayed the presence of his favorite article of food—hastened to keep her company—a thing he never did disinterestedly, it most be confessed.

An opportunity, now presented itself for observation which I knew might not again occur during my whole captivity; and surely no sailor ever ascended to the mast-head of the Pinta with a heart more heaved with emotion than was mine, as I placed my foot on the last rung of the ladder, and towered from my waist upward above the skylight. I had drawn the bolt within, as I invariably did while bathing, and with a feeling of proud security I stood and surveyed the scene beneath and around me. The angle of vision did not, it is true, embrace objects immediately below me, owing to the projecting cornices of the flat roof (a mere excrescence from the original structure, as this was), but beyond this the eye swept for some distance uninterruptedly.

Bathed in the golden light of that autumn noonday sun, I saw and recognized a long-familiar scene, and for a moment I reeled on the slender step as I did so, and all grew dark around me. But, with one of those energetic impulses that come to us all in time of emergency, I recovered my balance in time to save myself from falling; and eagerly and wistfully, as looks the dying wretch on the dear faces he is soon to see no more, I gazed upon the paradise from which fiends had driven me.

There, indeed, just as I had left it, lay the deep-green grassy lawn, with its richly-burdened flower-pots, its laburnums, and white and purple lilacs, and drooping guelder-rose bushes, and its great English walnut-tree towering, like a Titan, in the centre. There was the hawthorn-hedge my father's hand had planted, and the fountain-like weeping-willow my mother had set, in memory of her dead, whose graves were far away; and there towered the lofty elm-trees, with their long, low, sweeping branches, meeting in friendly greeting, to two of which a swing had once been attached as a bond of union—a swing in which it had once been my childish pleasure to sway and read, while Mabel sat beside me with her head upon my shoulder, held securely in her place by my strong, loving, encircling arm.

Nor were these all to assure me that, after a year of melancholy and eventful absence, I looked again upon the precincts of home. A little farther on rose the gray wall and tower of the library and belfry, half concealed by its heavy coating of ivy, glossy and dark, and shutting away all other view of the mansion. Beyond these last was the pavilion my father had built for the playhouse of his children, through the open lattice-door of which I saw a girl seated at her work, with graceful, bending neck, and half-averted face. A moment later, Claude Bainrothe lounged across the sward, cigar in hand. At his approach, the face within was turned, and I recognized, at a glance, that of my young aurora-like companion of the raft, Ada Greene. Then gazing cautiously around, as if to elude observation (never dreaming of the eye dropped like a bird's upon him), he lifted the rosy face in his hand and kissed it thrice right loverly!

I saw no more—I would not witness more—for had I not learned already all that I asked or ought to know? Well might the dear old chimes ring out their Sabbath welcome to one who had obeyed their summons from her childhood up to womanhood! Well might the summer air bear on its wings greeting of familiar odors, lost and found!

This was no idle dream, no mirage of a vagrant brain like that sea-picture, or that wild vision at Beauseincourt, but sober, and sad, and strange reality. I understood my position from that moment, geographically as well as physically. I was a prisoner in the house of Basil Bainrothe (while he, perchance, reigned lordly in my own); that house whose hidden arcana I had never explored, and which, beyond its parlor and exterior, was to me as the dwelling of a stranger.

Derisively deferential, he had resigned to me this secluded chamber in the ell—his own particular sanctum, I remember to have heard—and betaken himself, in all probability, to the more spacious mansion of his former neighbor.

Far wiser, even if sadder, than I went up its rounds, did I descend that ladder!

Half an hour after I had entered it, and with new hope, I emerged from the bath-room as fresh as a naiad, having first abstracted from the tool-box of the glazier two tiny chisels of different sizes, and a small lump of putty, which I secreted, on my first opportunity, in my favorite hiding-place—a hollow in the post of my bedstead—an accidental discovery of mine, made during Mrs. Clayton's first illness, since which I had always insisted on making up my own bed, much to her relief.

My conscience so disturbed me on the score of this theft, that I hastened to secrete my only remaining piece of gold in the glazier's box; ill-judged, as this appeared to me on reflection. The boy was an apprentice, evidently, and might else, I thought, at the time, have been the loser. I feared to add a line, and dared not seek a passing word with him, so carefully was I watched.

I next examined, with the eye of scientific scrutiny, two massive rulers that lay on my table, one made of maple-wood, and the other of ebony, and, having selected the first as most available for my purpose, prepared to commence the most arduous undertaking of my life—the careful shaping of a wooden key.

I had read somewhere that, during the French Revolution, a young peasant-girl, by means of such an instrument, had set at large her lover, or her brother, in La Vendee; having taken with soft wax the outline of the wards of the lock, in a moment of opportunity.

That day my work began—three times a failure, but at last successful. With the aid of putty, gradually allowed to harden I obtained the mould I desired, in the dead of night, and afterward, whenever privacy, even for a few minutes, was mine, I drew from my bosom my sacred piece of sculpture, and worked upon it with knife and chisel alternately, as devotee never worked on sculptured crucifix. Never shall I forget the rapture, the ecstasy of that moment, in which, ensconced between my bed-head and the wall, I slowly turned the key, first thoroughly soaked in oil, in the morticed wards, and knew, by the slight giving of the door, that it was unlocked.

Not Ali Baba, when be entered the robbers' cave, and saw the heaps of gold—all his by the force of one magic word; not Aladdin, when the genius of the lamp rose to his bidding, bearing salvers of jewels, which were to purchase for him the hand of the sultan's daughter; not Sindbad, when he saw the light which led him to the aperture of egress from the sepulchre in which he had been pent up with his wife's body to die—knew keener or more triumphant sensations than filled my bosom as I laid that completed key next my heart, after turning it cautiously backward and forward in my prison-lock!

I dared not, at that time, draw back the bolt above, that confined it loosely yet securely, or turn the silver knob sufficiently to set it even ever so little ajar; but I did both later, when oil had time to do its subtle work, and I could effect my experiment in silence. Yet I hazarded nothing of the sort when the quick ear of Mrs. Clayton held watch in the adjoining room. I was obliged to take advantage of those moments of rare absence, when, double-locking the doors of her chamber, both inner and outer, she would descend, for a few minutes, to the realms below, returning so suddenly and silently as almost to surprise me, on one or two occasions, at my work.

About the time of the completion of my experiment, I became aware of sounds in the room beneath my chamber, and sometimes on the great stairway (of which I now knew the largest platform was situated very near the head of my bed), that gave token of occupancy.

The rattling of china and silver might be discerned in the ancient dining-room, at morn and night. The occupant probably dined elsewhere, but the regularity of these meals was unmistakable.

I recognized, faintly, the step of Bainrothe on the stairway, distinguishing it readily from any other, as it passed and repassed my hidden door.

October had now set in, with a chilliness unusual to that bland season, and I asked for and obtained permission to have a fire kindled in the wide and gloomy grate of my chamber, hitherto unused by me.

About this household flame, Ernie, Mrs. Clayton, and I gathered harmoniously; she with her unfailing work-basket, I with book or pencil, the baby with his blocks and dominoes and painted pictures—the only happy and truly industrious spirit of the group. My true work was done—else might it never have been completed.

The presence of fire was indispensable to Mrs. Clayton, and, from the time of its first lighting, she left me but seldom alone. Her rheumatic limbs needed the solace that I had no heart to grudge her, distasteful as she was to me, and becoming more so day by day—false as I now knew her to be—false at heart.

How hatred grows, when we once admit the germ—not, like love, parasitically—but strong, stanch, stern, alone throwing down fresh roots, even hour by hour, like the banyan, monarch of the Eastern forest. I am afraid I have a turn for this passion naturally, but for love as well, ten times more intense—so that one pretty well counterbalances the other.

To carry out the vine-simile, I might as well add at once that, in the end, the parasitical plant has triumphed, and stifled the sterner growth. In other words, Christianity has conquered Judaism. "I suppose I may soon expect a visit from Mr. Bainrothe," I said one day to Mrs. Clayton. "I think my birthday approaches; can you tell me the day of the month? I know that of the week from remembering the Sabbath chimes."

I thought she started slightly at this announcement, but she replied, unflinchingly:

"The 5th, yes, I am quite sure it is the 5th of the month."

"Do you never see a newspaper, Mrs. Clayton, and, if so, can you not indulge me with a glimpse of one? I think it would do me good—remind me that I was alive, I have seen none since the account of Miss Lamarque's safety, for which God be praised."[5]

"No, Miss Monfort, it is simply impossible. I should be transgressing the rules of the establishment."

"Dr. Englehart's, I suppose, as if indeed there were such a person," I said, impetuously—unguardedly.

"Do you pretend to doubt it?" she asked, slowly, setting her greedy eyes upon my face, and dropping her darning-work and shell upon her knee. Why, what possesses you to-day, Miss Miriam?"

"I shall answer no questions, Mrs. Clayton—this right, at least, I reserve—but, the fact is, I doubt every thing lately, except this child and God. I do not believe my Creator will forsake me utterly—I shall not, till the end." And tears rolled down my face, the first I had shed for days. I had been petrified, of late, by the resolution I was making, and the effort of mind it had cost me. I had felt, until now, that I was hardening into atone.

"You desire to see Mr. Bainrothe, I suppose," she remarked, after a long silence, daring which she had again betaken herself to her occupation, without lifting her eyes as she asked the question.

"I desire to look my fate in the face at once, and understand his conditions," I replied, sullenly.

"But what if he is not here—what if Dr. Englehart—" lifting her eyes to mine.

"I cannot be mistaken," I interrupted, with impetuosity, "I have heard his step; he eats in the room below; I am convinced, for I know of old that bronchial cough of his—the effect of gormandism—"

Then suddenly, Ernie, looking up, made a revelation, irrelevant, yet to my ear terrible and astounding, but fortunately incomprehensible to my companion. What did that little vigilant creature ever fail to remark?

"Mirry make tea," he said, or seemed to say, and my face paled and flushed alternately, until my brain swam.

"Make tea?" sail the voice of Mrs. Clayton, apparently at a great distance. "No, I will make the tea, Ernie, as long as we stay together. Mirry does not know how to draw tea like an Englishwoman."

Oh, fortunate misunderstanding! how great was the reaction it occasioned! From an almost fainting condition I rallied to vivacity, and, for long, weary hours, sat pointing out pictures to the boy, to win him to oblivion, and persuade him to silence. Singularly enough, but not unusual with him, he never resumed the topic. I had taken pains to hide my work from his observing eyes; and how he knew it, unless he lay silently and watched me from his little bed, when I worked at early dawn in mine, I never could conjecture. A few days later Mrs. Clayton announced to me that Mr. Bainrothe would call very shortly.

It was early morning, I remember, when she laid before me the card of "Basil Bainrothe," with its elaborate German characters, on which was written, in pencil, the addendum, "Will call at ten o'clock;" and, punctual as the hand to the hour, he knocked at the dressing-room door at the appointed time, and was admitted.

He entered with that light, jaunty step peculiar to him, and which I have consequently ever associated in others with impudence and guile. Hat and cane in the left hand, he entered; two fingers of the right raised to his lips, by way of salutation (he clinched his glove in the remainder), to be offered to me later, and ignored completely, then waved carelessly, as if condoning the offense.

He was quite a picture as he came in—a fashion-plate, and as such I coolly regarded him—fresh, fair, and smiling, looking younger, if possible, than when we parted a year before, and handsome, as that much-abused word goes, in his debonair, off-hand style of appearance.

He was dressed with even more than his usual care and trimness (wore patent-leather boots, my aversion from that hour, for these were the first I had ever seen), and lavender-colored pantaloons, very tightly strapped down over them; a glossy black coat and vest, and linen of unimpeachable quality and whiteness; while a chain of fine Venetian gold held his watch, or eye-glass, or both, in suspension from his neck. Yet no beggar in rags ever appeared to me half so loathly as did this speckless dandy!

"You have come," I said, grimly, as he settled his shirt-collar to speak to me, after formally depositing his hat and cane, and a roll of paper he drew from his pocket, on the centre-table, and wiping his face carefully with his cambric, musk-scented handkerchief, unspeakably odious and unclean to my olfactories—"you have come at last; yet the greatest wonder to me is, how you dare appear at all before me," and I looked upon him right lionly, I believe.

"You were always inclined to assume the offensive with me, Miriam. Yet I confess you have a little shadow of reason this time, or seem to have, and I am here to-day for purposes of explanation or compromise" (bowing gracefully), and he rubbed his palms together very gently and complacently, looking around as he did so for a chair, which perceiving, and drawing to the table so as to face me where I eat on the sofa, he deposited himself upon, assuming at once his usual graceful pose.

It was fauteuil, and he threw one arm over that of the chair, suffering his well-preserved white hand—always suggestive of poultices to me—with its signet ring, to droop in front of it—a hand which he moved up and down habitually, as he conversed, in a singularly soothing and mechanical fashion—his "pendulum" we used to call it in old times, Evelyn and I, when it was one of our chief resources for amusement to laugh at "Cagliostro," our sobriquet for this ci-devant jeune homme, it may be remembered.

"Let me premise, Miriam," he began, "by congratulating you on your improved appearance"—another benign bow. "You were so burned and blackened by exposure, and so—in short, so very wild-looking when I last saw you, that I began to fear for the result; but perfect rest and retirement, and good nursing, have effected wonders. I have never seen you so fair, so refined-looking, and yet so calm, as you are now (calmness, my child, is aristocratic—cultivate it!); even if a little thin and delicate from confinement, yet perfectly healthy, I cannot doubt, from what I see. Do assure me of your health, my dear girl. You are as dumb to-day as Grey's celebrated prophetess."

"All personal remarks as coming from you are offensive to me, Mr. Bainrothe," I rejoined; "proceed to your business at once, whatever that may be—a truce to preamble and compliments."

"You shall be obeyed," he remarked, bowing low and derisively. "Yet, believe me, nothing but my care for your fair fame and my own have led me to confine you in such narrow limits for a season which, I trust, is almost over. As to my persecutions, which, I am told, you allege as a reason for leaving your house and friends so precipitately, these are out of the question henceforth forever, I assure you"—with a wave of the velvet hand—"since I am privately married to a lady of rank and fortune, who will soon be openly proclaimed 'my wife,' and who will be found, on close acquaintance, worthy of your friendship."

While giving utterance to this tirade, Mr. Bainrothe was slowly unwinding a string from around the roll of papers he had laid on the table, and which he now proceeded to spread somewhat ostentatiously before me, still mute and impassive to all his advances as I continued to be. "There are several," he said. "Your signature to each will be required, which, now that you are in your right mind again, and of age, will be binding, as you know. My witnesses shall be called in when the time comes. Dr. Englehart and Mrs. Clayton will suffice as proofs of these solemnities—these and others likely to occur."

"Solemnities! Levities, mockeries rather!" I could not help rejoining.

He felt the sarcasm. His florid cheek paled with anger, his yellow-speckled eyes glowed with lurid fire, he compressed his lips bitterly as he said:

"Marriage is usually considered a solemnity, Miss Monfort; and, let me assure you, it is only as a married woman I can conscientiously release you from confinement. You have shown yourself too erratic to be intrusted in future with your own liberties."

"Possibly," I rejoined. "Yet I mean to have the selection, let me assure you, in return, of the controller of my liberties—nay, have already selected him, for aught you know!"

My cool audacity seemed for a moment to paralyze even his own. He paused and surveyed me, as if in doubt of his own senses.

"Impayable!" I heard him murmur, softly, and, turning to the book-shelves, he left me for a time to master the contents of the three documents over which I was bending.

I read them in order as they were numbered, and became more and more indignant as their meaning opened upon my brain, and culminated at last in a sharp, sudden exclamation of utter disdain.

I started from my chair and approached him, paper in hand. I think for a few moments the idea of personal danger possessed him, and the vision of a concealed dirk or pistol swam before his eyes, which he shielded with his hand, while he placed a chair between us; and, truth to say, there was murder in my heart, and in my eyes as well, I suppose, even if the mistrust went no further.

I could have obliterated him from the face of the earth at that moment as remorselessly as if he had been a viper in my path striking to sting me. Yet I advanced toward him with no demonstration or intentions of this kind, having the habits of lady-like breeding and usual innocence of weapons, and ignorance of the use thereof as well, to restrain me.

I forget. Close to my heart lay one of the sharp, shining chisels I had taken from the glazier in the bath-room.

"What is it you object to, Miriam?" he asked, in faltering tones, as his hand fell and his glimmering eyes encountered mine.

From that day I have believed the legend which tells that, when the Roman, helpless in his dungeon, thundered forth, "Slave! darest thou kill Caius Marius?" the armed minion of murder turned and fled, dropping the knife he held, in his panic, at the feet of the man he came to slay. Almost such effect was for a time observable in Basil Bainrothe.

It made me smile bitterly. "All, every thing," I answered. "The whole requisition, from first to last, is base, dastardly—crime-confessing, too—if seen with discriminating eyes. Why, if innocent of fraud toward me and mine, should you ask a formal acknowledgment on my part as to your just administration of my affairs, and a recantation of all I have said to the contrary, both with regard to yourself and Evelyn Erle? Such are the contents of this first paper, the only one that I could, under any possible circumstances, be induced to sign as a compromise with your villainy; for, not to gain my own life or liberty, will I ever put hand to the others, infamous as they are on the very surface."

"Miriam, this violence surprises me, is wholly unlooked for, and unnecessary," he remarked, mildly. "From what Mrs. Clayton has told me, I had supposed that my disinterested care and assiduity with regard to your condition were about to meet their reward in your rational submission to the necessities of your case and mine. Resume your seat, I entreat you, and let us calmly discuss a matter that seems to agitate you so unduly. Perhaps I may be able to place it before you in a better light ere we have concluded our interview. You will sit down again, Miriam, will you not?"

"Oh, surely, if you are alarmed; but, really, I should suppose, with Mrs. Clayton and Dr. Englehart no doubt in call, you need not be so tremulous. There, you are quite safe, I assure you, in your old place, with the table between us;" and I pointed derisively to fauteuil he had occupied so gracefully a few moments before, and into which he now slowly subsided.

"Contemptuous girl," he broke forth at last, "you may yet live to regret this behavior; so far, nothing has been denied you; no expense has been spared for your comfort; in a tribunal of justice you could say this, no more: 'My guardian, thinking me mad from his experiences of my conduct and health, and regaining accidental possession of me at a time when, under a feigned name, I was thought to be drowned, deemed it best, before revealing my existence to the world, to try and restore me to sanity by private measures, rather than bring upon my malady the eyes of a mocking world. In doing this, he used all delicacy, all devotion, surrounding me with comforts, and many luxuries, and even humoring my insane whim to have the companionship of a year-old child found with me on the raft under circumstances suspicious—if no more—'"

"Wretch!" I gasped, "dare only asperse me in thought, and"—the menace hung suspended on my tongue. What power had I to execute it, even if uttered?

"As to my name, I feigned none. It was my mother's, is my own, and from her I inherited, or, from the race of which she sprang, the power to remember and avenge my wrongs; to hate, and curse—and blast, perhaps, as well—such as you and yours, granted to his chosen children through the power of Almighty God!" And again I rose and confronted him; then fiercely pointed down upon his ignoble head, now bowed involuntarily, either from policy or nervous terror, I never knew, a finger quivering and keen with scorn and rage, an index of the mind that directed it.

"I wonder you are not afraid to behave to me in this manner," he said, at length, lifting his head with a spasmodic jerk, and raising to mine his mottled, angry eyes, now cold and hard as pebbles, "seeing that you are, so to speak, in the hollow of my hand;" and, suiting the action to the word, he extended his long, spongy, right hand, and closed it crushingly, as though it contained a worm, while he smiled and sneered—oh, such a sneer! it seemed to fill the room.

"True, true—I am very helpless," I said, sitting down with a sudden revulsion of feeling, and, clasping my hands above my eyes, I wept aloud, adding, a moment later, as I indignantly wiped my tears: "Yes, if the worst betide there will only be one more martyr; and, what is martyrdom, that any need shrink from it? The world is fall of it!"

"Nothing, if you are used to it," he said, carelessly, "as the old woman remarked of the eels she was skinning alive; I suppose you know all about it by this time. But come, you are rational again, now, and I don't wish to be hard on you, Miriam; I don't, upon my soul!"

"Your soul!" I murmured—"your soul!" I reiterated louder; and I smiled at the idea that suggested itself—"have reptiles souls?"

"The memory of your father alone, my old, confiding friend, one of the most perfect of men, as I always thought him, would incline me kindly to his daughter, even if no other tie existed between us," he said calmly, unmindful of my sarcasm. "But other ties do exist, mistaken girl! The world looks upon us as one family—since the marriage of Claude and Evelyn, that uncongenial union which, but for your caprice, would never have taken place, and which is at the root of all our misfortunes, all our fatal necessities."

"Necessities!" I muttered, between my clinched teeth, drumming with my fingers impatiently on the table before me, and smiling scornfully a moment later.

"You seem in a mood for iteration, to-day, Miss Monfort."

"I make my running commentaries in that way, Mr. Bainrothe. But a truce to recrimination and reminiscence both. Let us adhere strictly to the letter and verse of our affairs. These papers form the subject of your visit, I believe. Know, at once, that the first I will sign, on certain conditions, bitter and humiliating as I feel it to be obliged to do this; but, that I will ever consent to yield the guardianship of my sister wholly to Evelyn Erle and her husband, or divest myself of my house and furniture, or my wild lands in Georgia, to you, here first named to me, in consideration of expenses already incurred and to be incurred for Mabel's education, and my own safe-keeping, during a long attack of lunacy; or that I will, to crown the whole iniquitous requisition, consent to give my hand in marriage to that scoundrel—Luke Gregory!—are visions as vain as those of the child who tried to grasp a comet or the moon—or, to descend in comparison, to catch a bird by putting salt on its tail! There, you have my ultimatum; now go and make the best of it!"

"I am prepared for your objections—prepared, too, to overcome them," he said, coolly. "Take time to consider all this. I do not expect an answer to-day, did not when I came, nor will I accept one signature without the whole. There is no compromise possible. As to your marriage—it must be accomplished before you leave this room. I, as a magistrate, can tie the knot—fast enough to bind all the other agreements to certain fulfillments, for Gregory is a friend of mine, and a man of honor, and will see them carried out to the letter. He loves you, too, and proves it, for he takes you penniless. Afterward a priest may complete the ceremony if you have any scruples. Then, of course, it rests between you and Gregory, whether you remain together or separate as wide as the poles—I shall wash my hands of the whole affair thereafter, having secured my good name and yours."

I stood with bowed head and moving lips before him—mutely, indignantly. "I shall, however, make all this," he continued, "appear as well as possible to your friends and mine, especially, believe me, Miriam! I shall state, for your sake, that, after being rescued from the raft, you were partially insane, but still sufficiently mistress of yourself to coincide with me and your sisters in the wish to let your death as Miss Harz pass current with the world, until you should redeem your errors" (what errors?), "and be restored to health and perfect reason. You will see that your acknowledgment of the last paper includes these extenuating facts, when you have leisure to re-read it (for I saw how hastily you glanced over that one in particular); you must do me the favor to peruse it much more carefully," drawing on his gloves coolly, "before you make your final decision. You are very comfortable here, my dear girl," glancing around benignly, "but you have no conception of the frame of mind, bare walls, utter solitude, a tireless hearth and a frugal table, would bring about in a very few days or weeks, or even in one as resolute and defiant as yourself. I should be loath to try such an experiment or deprive you, of your child—but necessitas non habet legem, the school-book says. I think you, too, studied a little Latin, Miriam?"

"Monster!"

"Not a very relevant or polite remark, I must confess. By-the-by, Miriam, as you stand before me with your well-poised figure—your blazing eyes—your quivering nostrils—your curling, compressed lip—your heaving chest (always a splendid feature in your physique), your folded arms, and the color coming and going in your pale-olive cheek, in the old flame-like way I used to admire so much in your girlhood—you are a splendid creature, by Jove! I could find it in my heart to love you still—there, it is out at last—if it were not for Mrs. Raymond—" glancing, as he spoke, in the direction of Mrs. Clayton, with a knowing smile. "It was your magnificent disdain that kindled the torch before. Beware how you revive that fanaticism of mine!"

I turned for one moment with an involuntary feeling of appeal to Mrs. Clayton, but her cold, green eyes were quivering in accordance with the smile that stretched her thin lips to a line of mocking mirth. One glimpse of sympathy would have carried me to her arms for refuge—distasteful as she was to me in every way save one. She, like myself, was a woman. But such perversion of all natural feeling estranged me from her irreconcilably and forever.

I was alone; shame, humiliation, despair, possessed me; indignation, for the insult I was forced to bear in her presence, filled my soul—I stood with my head cast down, tears raining on my bosom, my arms dropped nervelessly beside me, my hands clinched, my whole frame trembling with excitement.

Slowly and one by one came those convulsive sobs—that rend and wrench the physical frame as earthquakes do the earth. Then rose the sudden resolve—born of volcanic impulse, irresistible to mind as is the lava-flood to matter, sweeping before it all obstructions of reason, habit, expediency.

If it cost me my life I would avenge myself on this tiger, thirsting for my blood; I would anticipate him in his work of destruction, and the strength of Samson seemed to permeate my frame.

It was strange that at that moment of cold, impetuous energy I forgot the steel I carried in my bosom, and thought only of the power I bore in my own hands. I determined to strangle him with my strong, elastic fingers, of which I knew full well the powerful grasp.

The consequences were as cobwebs in my estimate—compared to the ecstasy of such revenge—for all this flashed through my brain with the swift vividness of lightning, and in less than thirty seconds after his last remark this matter was matured. The woman prevailed over the lady.

I raised my eyes slowly and dashed away my tears, preparatory to the onset. He was looking at me wonder-struck, and, perhaps, with something like compunction in his face as I met his gaze. He must have read an expression that appalled him in those dilated eyes of mine that confronted his, for, as I sprang toward him, he bounded backward and escaped through the door of Mrs. Clayton's chamber, which he shot after him with undignified alertness. I stood smiling, and strangely cold, leaning against the mantel-shelf, while my heart beat as though, it would have leaped from my throat, and I could feel the pallor of my face as chill as marble.

Mrs. Clayton approached me, but I put her away with waving hands, "Go, wretch!" I said, "woman no more, you have unsexed yourself. Leave me in peace—your touch is poisonous."

She shrank away silently, and I stood for a while like one frozen; then cast myself down on a chair and gave way to bitter weeping. The flood-gates were open, and the "waters" had indeed "come in over my soul." I had restrained my passionate inclinations until now, not only from a sense of personal dignity, but from a determination not to play into the hands of my enemies and captors, and all the more from such long self-control was the revulsion potent and overwhelming.

The consciousness that Ernie was at my knee at last aroused me from the indulgence of my grief, and I looked down to meet his corn passionate and inquiring eyes fixed upon me with a masterful expression I have never seen in any other childish face. It thrilled me to the heart.

"What Mirry cry for—is God mad with Mirry?" he asked at length.

"It seems so, Ernie—yet oh, no, no! I cannot, will not believe in such injustice on the part of the Most High!" I pursued in sad soliloquy, with folded hands, and shaking head, and musing eyes fixed on the fire before me: "My God will not forsake me!"

"Did the bad man hurt Mirry?" he asked, leaning with both arms on my lap and putting up his hand to touch my face.

"Yes, very cruelly, Ernie."

"Big giant will come and kill him, and fayways put him in the river, and the old wolf wat eat Red Riding Hood eat him, and then the devil will roast him for his dinner."

I could but smile, albeit through my tears, at the climax of these threats which seemed to delight and stir the inmost soul of Ernie. His eyes flashed, his cheek crimsoned, his wide red mouth curled with disdainful ire, disclosing the small, pointed pearls within; he seemed transfigured.

"And Ernie! what will Ernie do for Mirry?" I asked, as I watched the workings of his expressive face. "Will Ernie let the wicked man kill Mirry?"

He looked at his small hands and arms, then extended them wistfully.

"Ernie will tell good Jesus," he said, "and he will make Ernie grow big—ever so big—to tie the man and put him in a bag like Clayton's cat."

The burlesque was irresistible, and none the less so that the child was so direfully in earnest. To his infant imagination no worse disaster than had befallen Clayton's cat could be devised. This animal, adored by him, had been bagged and exiled, perhaps drowned for aught I know, for stealing cheese from the cupboard sacred to Clayton, by that vengeful potentate, to the despair of Ernie. The idolized kittens, too, which had followed her, had disappeared with their mother, and days of infant melancholy ensued, during which the canaries before referred to were brought as substitutes. The faithful heart still clung to its feline passion, it was evident, though for weeks the memory of that hapless cat had been ignored and its name unmentioned.

I believe, after my momentary wrath was over, I should have been content with the punishment suggested by the child, as sufficient even for Basil Bainrothe.