"SHE ONLY SAID, 'MY LIFE IS DREARY.'"
That same brilliant sunburst that transfigured the artist's studio in Broadway blazed into the boudoir of Mrs. Carl Walraven, and turned the western windows to sheets of quivering flame.
Elegant and handsome, in a superb dinner-dress of rose-bloom silk and pale emeralds, Mrs. Walraven lay back on her sofa and looked up in the face of her cousin Guy.
"Booted and spurred," as if from a journey, the young man stood before her, hat in hand, relating the success of their scheme. A little pale, a good deal fagged, and very anxious, Dr. Guy had sought his cousin the very first thing on his arrival in town. Mrs. Carl, arrayed for conquest, going out to a grand dinner-party, was very well disposed to linger and listen. An exultant smile wreathed her full, ripe lips and lighted the big black eyes with triumph.
"Poor little fool!" she said. "How nicely she baited her own trap, and how nicely she walked into it! Thank the stars, she is out of my way! Guy, if you let her come back, I'll never forgive you!"
"By Jove, Blanche!" said the doctor, bluntly, "if she ever comes back, it will matter very little whether you forgive me or not. I shall probably go for change of air to Sing Sing for the remainder of my mortal career."
"Pooh! there is not the slightest danger. The ball is in your own hands; Mollie is safe as safe in your dreary farmhouse by the sea. Your mother and Sally and Peter are all true as steel; no danger of her escaping from them."
"No; but they decline to have anything to do with my mad patient. It was no easy matter, I can tell you, to get them to consent to having her there at all. I must get her an attendant."
"That increases the risk. However, the risk is slight. Advertise."
"I mean to. I sent an advertisement to the papers before I came here, carefully worded. Applicants are to come to my office. Those who read it, and who know me, will think I want a nurse for one of my invalids, of course."
"You will be very careful in your selection, Guy?"
"Certainly. My life depends upon it. It is a terrible risk to run, Blanche, for a foolish little girl."
"Bah! Quaking already? And you pretend to love her?"
"I do love her!" the young man cried, passionately. "I love her to madness, or I would not risk life and liberty to obtain her."
"I don't see the risk," said Mrs. Blanche, coldly. "You have the cards in your own hands—play them as you choose. Only you and I know the secret."
Dr. Oleander looked at his fair relative with a very gloomy face.
"A secret that two know is a secret no longer."
"Do you dare doubt me?" demanded the lady, fiercely.
"No—yes—I don't know. Oh! never look so haughtily insulted, Mrs. Walraven. I almost doubt myself. It's my first felony, and it is natural a fellow should quake a little. But Mollie is worth the risk—worth ten thousand risks. If it were to do over again, I would do it. By Heaven, Blanche! you should have seen her as she stood there brandishing that dagger aloft and defying me! I never saw anything so transcendently beautiful!"
Mrs. Walraven's scornful upper lip curled.
"Lady Macbeth—four feet high—eh? 'Give me the daggers!' I always knew she was a vixen. Your married life is likely to be a happy one, my dear Guy!"
"Oh!" Dr. Guy aspirated, "if she only were my wife! Blanche, I would give all I possess on earth to know who that man is!"
"Indeed!" said Mme. Blanche, coolly. "Then I think I can tell you: it was Hugh Ingelow."
"Blanche!"
"I have no positive knowledge, you see, of the fact," went on the lady, adjusting her regal robes, "but an inward prescience tells me so. However, you may remarry her and welcome, Guy. I don't think she will hardly be tried for bigamy. The happy man, whoever he may be, will scarcely come forward and prove the previous marriage."
"And she loves this Hugh Ingelow?" the doctor said, moodily.
"She told that old lady so," Mrs. Blanche said, airily. "But, my dear love-struck cousin, what of that? To love, is one thing; to have, is another. She may love Ingelow, but she is yours. Make her your wife. Teach her to overcame that little weakness."
"As soon as I can settle my affairs," said Doctor Oleander, resolutely, "I shall leave the country. I have a friend in Havana—a physician. There is a promising opening out there, he tells me. I'll take Mollie and go."
"I would," replied Mrs. Walraven, cheerfully. "It's a nice, unhealthy climate; and then, when you are a widower—as you will be, thanks to yellow fever—come back to dear New York. There's no place like it. And now, my dear Guy, I don't wish to be rude, you know, but if you would depart at once, you would very much oblige me."
Mrs. Walraven stood up, walked over to the whole-length mirror, and took a prolonged and complacent view of her full-blown charms.
"How do you think I am looking, Guy?" languidly. "Rather too pale, am I not? I must have recourse to that vulgar necessity, rouge. Don't you think this new shade of pink lovely? and so highly suitable to my brunette style."
Dr. Oleander gave her a glance of disgust, took his hat, and turned to leave.
"I didn't come here to talk of new shades of pink, or your brunette style, either. Excuse me for trespassing on your valuable time, and permit me to wish you good-evening."
"Good-evening, cousin mine," Mme. Blanche responded, sweetly. "Come to-morrow, and we'll have another little chat. By the bye, how long do you expect to remain in the city?"
"Until I have engaged an attendant," answered the doctor, rather sulkily.
"Ah! and that will be day after to-morrow, at furthest. You will find dozens of applicants. Well, by-bye. Come again soon. I shall be anxious always for your success."
Dr. Oleander departed. His practice was extensive, and he had hosts of neglected patients to attend to.
Mrs. Walraven saw nothing of him all next day; but in the evening of the succeeding day, and just as she was getting very uneasy, Dr. Oleander entered, pale and fagged.
Dr. Oleander had spent a most harassing afternoon, his office besieged with applicants for that advertised situation. The number of incapables that thought themselves capable, and the number of capables who flatly declined the moment they heard they were to go down into the country, might have worn out the patience of a more patient man. And the capables willing to overlook the dreariness of the country in consideration of high wages rose up immediately and bid him good-day when informed the patient was a lunatic.
Dr. Oleander was driven to the verge of desperation, when, lo! just as he was about to give it up in despair, there entered an applicant who suited as if made to order.
The applicant—this "last, and brightest, and best"—was a woman of uncertain age, tall and stout, strong and strapping, and adorned with a head of violent red hair and a pair of green spectacles. Minus these two disagreeable items, she was a highly respectable woman, with a grave, shrewd face, and a portly person wrapped in a somber plaid shawl.
She stated her case. She had seen the advertisement, and had come to apply for the situation. She was accustomed to the office of sick-nurse, and considered herself fully qualified for it.
Her statement was plain and straightforward—much more so than that of her predecessors. Dr. Oleander was inclined to be pleased, despite the green spectacles.
"But I should wish you to go into the country—a very dull place indeed."
The applicant folded her cotton gloves one over the other, and met the doctor's gaze with composed green glasses.
"The country is no objection, sir. I'm used to quiet, and all places are alike to me."
"You have your credentials with you, I suppose?"
"I have, sir. Here they are."
She handed two or three certificates of capability to the toxicologist.
He glanced them lightly over, and saw that Mrs. Susan Sharpe was all that heart could desire in the way of sick-nurse.
"These are satisfactory," handing them back. "But I have one fact to mention that may discourage you: the lady—the patient—is insane."
Mrs. Susan Sharpe heard this startling statement without moving a muscle of her dull, white face.
"Indeed, sir! A violent lunatic, sir?"
"Oh, dear, no! merely insane. Subject to occasional fits of violence, you understand, but quiet generally. But even in her most violent fits she would be nothing in your hands—a strong, large woman like you. She is little more than a child in years, and quite a child in weakness. If you don't mind the dullness of the country, you would suit admirably, I think."
"I don't in the least mind, sir. The situation will suit me very well."
"I am very glad to hear it," said the doctor, immensely relieved. "We may consider it a bargain, then?"
"If you please, sir," rising quietly. "When will you want me to go?"
"To-morrow morning. By the way, Mrs. Sharpe," said the doctor, eying the obnoxious lunettes, "why do you wear green glasses?"
"My eyes are weak, sir." Mrs. Sharpe removed the spectacles as she spoke, and displayed a pair of dull gray eyes with very pink rims. "The light affects them. I hope my glasses are no objection, sir?"
"Oh, not in the least! Excuse my question. Very well, then, Mrs. Sharpe; just give me your address, and I'll call round for you to-morrow forenoon."
Mrs. Sharpe gave him the street and number—a dirty locality near the East River. Dr. Oleander "made a note of it," and the new nurse made her best obeisance and departed.
And, to inform Mme. Blanche of his success in this matter, Dr. Guy presented himself at the Walraven mansion just as the misty twilight was creeping out and the stars and street lamps were lighting up.
He found the lady, as usual, beautiful and elegant, and dressed to perfection, and ready to receive him alone in the drawing-room.
"I've been seriously anxious about you, Guy," Mrs. Walraven said. "Your prolonged absence nearly gave me a nervous fit. I had serious ideas of calling at your office this afternoon. Why were you not here sooner?"
"Why wasn't I? Because I couldn't be in half a dozen places at once," answered her cousin, rather crossly. "I've been badgered within an inch of my life by confounded women in shabby dresses and poky bonnets all day. Out of two or three bushels of chaff I only found one grain of wheat."
"And that one?"
"Her earthly name is Susan Sharpe, and she rejoices in red hair and green glasses, and the blood and brawn and muscle of a gladiator—a treasure who doesn't object to a howling wilderness or a raving-mad patient. I clinched her at once."
"And she goes with you—when?"
"To-morrow morning. If Mollie's still obdurate, I must leave her in this woman's charge, and return to town. As soon as I can settle my affairs, I will go back to the farm and be off with my bride to Havana."
"Always supposing she will not consent to return with you to New York in that character?"
"Of course. But she never will do that," the doctor said, despondently. "You don't know how she hates me, Blanche."
Blanche shrugged her graceful shoulders.
"Do you implicitly trust this woman you have hired?"
"I trust no one," responded Dr. Guy, brusquely. "My mother and Sally and Peter will watch her. Although, I dare say, there may be no necessity, it is always best to be on the safe side."
"How I should like to see her—to triumph over her—to exult in her misery!" Blanche cried, her eyes sparkling.
"I dare say," said Dr. Oleander, with sneering cynicism. "You would not be a woman, else. But you will never have the chance. I don't hate my poor little captive, remember. There! is that the dinner-bell?"
"Yes—come! We have Sir Roger Trajenna to-day, and Mr. Walraven detests being kept waiting."
"Poor Sir Roger!" with a sneering laugh. "How does the lovesick old dotard bear this second loss?"
"Better than he did the first; his pride aids him. It is my husband who is like a man distraught."
"The voice of Nature speaks loudly in the paternal-breast," said Dr. Oleander. "'Nater will caper,' as Ethan Spike says. Mollie's mamma must have been a very pretty woman, Blanche."
Mrs. Walraven's black eyes snapped; but they were at the dining-room door, and she swept in as your tall, stately women in trailing silks do sweep, bowing to the baronet, and taking her place, and, of course, the subject of the interesting captive down in Long Island was postponed indefinitely.
Dr. Oleander dined and spent the evening at the Walraven palace, and talked about his ward's second flight with her distressed guardian, and opined she must have gone off to gratify some whim of her own, and laughed in his sleeve at the two anxious faces before him, and departed at ten, mellow with wine and full of hope for the future.
Early next morning Dr. Oleander called round for Susan Sharpe, and found that treasure of nurses ready and waiting. All through the long drive she sat by his side in his light wagon, never opening her discreet lips except to respond to his questions, and gazing straight ahead through her green glasses into the world of futurity, for all her companion knew.
"Among your charge's hallucinations," said Dr. Oleander, just before they arrived, "the chief is that she is not crazy at all. She will tell you she has been brought here against her will; that I am a tyrant and a villain, and the worst of men; and she will try and bribe you, I dare say, to let her escape. Of course you will humor her at the time, but pay not the least attention."
"Of course," Mrs. Susan Sharpe answered.
There was a pause, then the nurse asked the first question she had put:
"What is my patient's name, sir?"
Dr. Oleander paused an instant, and mastered a sudden tremor. His voice was quite steady when he replied:
"Miss Dane. Her friends are eminently respectable, and have the utmost confidence in me. I have every reason to hope that the quiet of this place and the fresh sea air will eventually effect a cure."
"I hope so, sir," Mrs. Susan Sharpe said; and the pink-rimmed eyes glowed behind the green glasses, and into the tallow-candle complexion crept just the faintest tinge of red.
It was an inexpressibly lonely place, as Mrs. Sharpe saw it. A long stretch of bleak, desolate, windy road, a desolate, salty marsh, ghostly woods, and the wide, dreary sea. Over all, this afternoon, a sunless sky, threatening rain, and a grim old pile of buildings fronting the sea view.
"A lonesome place," Mrs. Susan Sharpe said, as if in spite of herself—"an awfully lonesome place!"
Dr. Oleander looked at her suspiciously as he drew up before the frowning gate.
"It is lonely," he said, carelessly. "I told you so, you remember; but, from its very loneliness, all the better for my too excitable patient."
Mrs. Sharpe's face seemed to say she thought it might be more conducive to begetting melancholy madness than curing it, but her tongue said nothing. Two big dogs, barking furiously, came tumbling round the angle of the house. Dr. Oleander struck at them with his whip.
"Down, Tiger! Silence, Nero, you overgrown brute!" he cried, with an angry oath. "Come along, Mrs. Sharpe. There's no occasion to be alarmed; they won't touch you."
Mrs. Sharpe, despite this assurance, looking mortally afraid, kept close to the doctor, and stood gazing around her while waiting to be admitted. Bolts grated, the key creaked, and heavily and warily old Peter opened the door and reconnoitered.
"It is I, Peter, you old fool! Get out of the way, and don't keep us waiting!"
With which rough greeting the young man strode in, followed by the nurse.
"He fetches a woman every time," murmured old Peter, plaintively, "and we've got a great plenty now, Lord knows!"
"This way, ma'am," called Dr. Oleander, striding straight, to the kitchen; "we'll find a fire here, at least. It's worse than Greenland, this frigid-zone!"
Mrs. Oleander sat before the blazing fire, plucking a fowl; Sally stood at the table, kneading dough. Both paused, with feminine exclamations, at sight of the doctor, and turned directly, with feminine curiosity, to stare at the woman.
"How do, mother? How are you, Sally? Back again, you see, like the proverbial bad shilling! This is Mrs. Susan Sharpe, the nurse I promised to bring. How's our patient?"
He turned anxiously to his mother. She took her eyes from Mrs. Sharpe to answer.
"I don't know; she frightens me, Guy."
"Frightens you!" growing very pale. "How? Is she so violent?"
"No; it's the other way. She's so still; she's like one dead in life. She sits all day, and never moves nor speaks. She doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive, and she never sleeps, I believe; for, go into her room night or day, there you find her sitting wide awake."
Dr. Oleander looked white with dismay.
"Does she never speak?" he asked.
"She never spoke to me but once, and that was to ask me who I was. When I told her I was your mother, she turned her back upon me, with the remark, 'He says I'm mad, and surely none but a mad-woman would look for mercy from a tiger's dam!' She has never spoken to me since."
Dr. Oleander stood listening with a very gloomy face. Mrs. Sharpe, sitting warming herself before the fire, looked straight at it, with a blank, sallow face.
"What do you find her doing mostly?" he asked, after awhile.
"Sitting by the window, looking at the sea," answered his mother—"always that—with a face the color of snow."
The gloom on the young man's face deepened. What if he should prove himself a prophet? What if this spirited, half-tamed thing should go melancholy mad?
"I will go to her at once!" he exclaimed, starting up. "If she goes into a passion at sight of me, it will do her good. Anything is better than this death in life."
He held out his hand for the key of the room upstairs. His mother handed it to him, and he strode out at once; and then Mrs. Oleander turned her regards upon the new nurse.
Strangers were "sight for sair een" in that ghostly, deserted farmhouse. But the new nurse never looked at her; she sat with those impenetrable green glasses fixed steadfastly on the blazing fire.