Fashion and Famine

by Ann S. Stephens

The arrow, the arrow is deep in her side!

Bring music and wine with their madness again.

The passions take their distinctive expression from the nature in which they find birth. The grief that rends one heart like an earthquake, sinks with dead, silent weight into another, uttering no sound, giving no outward sign, and yet is powerful, perhaps, as that which exhausts itself in tumult. Some flee from grief, half defying, half evading it, pausing, breathless, in the race, now and then, to find the arrow still buried in the side, rankling deeper and deeper with each fierce effort to cast it out.

Thus it was with the woman to whom our story tends—Ada, the insulted and suffering widow of Leicester. There had been mutual wrong between the two; both had sinned greatly; both had tasted deep of the usual consequences of sin. During his life her love for him had been the one wild passion of existence; now that he was dead, her grief partook of the same stormy nature. It was wild, fierce, brilliant; it thirsted for change; it was bitter with regrets that stung her into the very madness of sorrow.

As an unbroken horse plunges beneath the rider's heel, the object of grief like this seeks for amelioration in excitement. It is a sorrow that thirsts for action; that arouses some kindred passion, and feeds itself with that.

Ada Leicester was not known to be connected, even remotely, with the man for whose murder old Mr. Warren was now awaiting his trial. She was a leader in the fashionable world; her very anguish must be concealed; her groans must be uttered in private; her tears quenched firmly till they turned to fire in her heart. All her life that man had been a pain and a torment to her. The last breath she had seen him draw was a taunt, his last look an insult; and yet these very memories embittered her grief. He had turned the silver thread of her life into iron, but it broke with his existence, leaving her appalled and objectless. She never had, never could love another; and what is a woman on earth without love as a memory, a passion, or a hope?

Her grief became a wild passion. She strove to assuage it in reckless gaiety, and plunged into all the excitements of artificial life with a fervor that made every hour of her existence a tumult. The opera season was at its full height. Society had once more concentrated itself in New York, and still Ada was the brightest of its stars. Morning dances by gas-light took place in some few houses where novelty was an object. Not long after Leicester's death her noble mansion was closed for a morning revel; every pointed window was sealed with shutters and muffled with the richest draperies. Light in every form of beauty—the pure gas-flame—the soft glow of wax-candles—the moonlight gleam of alabaster lamps flooded the sumptuous rooms, excluding every ray of the one glorious lamp which God has kindled in the sky. Dancers flitted to and fro in those lofty rooms; garlands of choice green-house flowers scattered fragrance from the walls, and veiled many a classic statue with their impalpable mist.

Never in her whole life had Ada appeared more wildly brilliant. Reckless, sparkling, scattering smiles and wit wherever she passed; now whirling through the waltz; now exchanging bright repartees with her guests amid the pauses of the music; fluttering from group to group like a bird of Paradise, dashing perfume from its native flower thickets, she flitted from room to room; now sitting alone in a dark corner of the conservatory, her hands falling languidly down, her face bowed upon her bosom, the fire quenched in her eyes, she felt the very life ebbing, as it were, from her parted and pale lips.

Thus with the strongest contrasts, fierce alike in her gaiety and her grief, she spent that miserable morning. The transition from one state to another would have been startling to a close observer, but the changes in her mood were like lightning; the pale cheek became instantly so red; the dull eye so bright, that her guests saw nothing but the most fascinating coquetry in all this, and each new shade or gleam that crossed her beautiful face brought down fresh showers of adulation upon her. The usual quiet elegance of her manner was for the time forgotten.

More than once her wild, clear laugh rang from one room to another, chiming in or rising above the music, and this only charmed her guests the more. It was a new feature in their idol. It was not for her wealth or her beauty alone that Ada Leicester became an object of worship that day. Like a wounded bird that makes the leaves tremble all around with its anguish, she startled society into more intense admiration by the splendor of her agony.