A Noble Woman

by Ann S. Stephens

While they went down to the shore and were bringing in the trunks Mr. Mellen stood by the fire, quite regardless of the curiosity with which the children regarded him, and unconscious of several modest attempts at conversation made by the old man's daughter:

"Your clothes are wringing wet; hadn't you better get some things of father's and start dry?"

"No," answered Mellen, glancing at the water-proof carpet-bag which he had seized on leaving the boat, remembering that it contained important papers. "I have some things in here, and they will find my macintosh in the boat."

He left the room while speaking, and, knowing the house well, went upstairs, in order to change his wet garments. The young woman uttered a little cry of dismay and ran a step or two after him, but turned back, seized with terror of the dead body, about which she would gladly have given warning.

Mellen had taken a candle from the table when he left the kitchen, and entered the little room upstairs with it flaring in his hand. It did not illuminate the whole chamber, but a cold feeling of awe crept over the man as he stepped over the threshold, and a shudder, which sprang from neither cold nor wet, passed to his heart.

With a trembling hand he set the light on a little pine table and looked around. A bed stood in the further corner of the room, a great and coldly white bed, on which a human form was lying in such awful stillness as death alone knows.

Breathless and obeying a terrible fascination, he went up to the bed and drew down the coarse linen sheet. A beautiful face, chiselled from the marble of death, lay before him, with a cold smile on the lips, and the blue of the eyes, that had been like violets, tinging the white lids that covered them. Masses of rich chestnut hair were gathered back from the face; and over the bosom, struck cold in the bloom of life, two white hands were folded in an attitude of solemn prayerfulness.

As Mellen gazed on this cold vision his lips grew white with terrible emotions, for he knew that face, notwithstanding all the changes that years and an awful death had left upon it. Moment after moment crept by and he did not move. At last, reaching forth his hand, he touched the woman's hair, then a convulsion of grief swept over him, his eyes filled, his lips quivered and he fell upon his knees crying out:

"Oh, woman, woman, has he driven you to this?"

The stillness, which was his only answer, crept to his heart. He arose, covered the face of his false love, and quitted the room, leaving the candle behind. He could not bear to think of her lying alone in that grim darkness.