These pretty words unlocked a flood of tender grief in the mother’s heart. She arose, with the child in her arms, and sat down upon the tomb. Smiles now broke through her tears, and during fifteen minutes it seemed to Zulima as if she had passed through that place of tombs into paradise, so sweet was the love that flooded her heart with every lisping tone of her child. But for the poor mother there was no lasting happiness. While her bosom was full of these sweet maternal feelings, there came tearing through the shrubbery a negro woman, panting with haste, and shouting in a coarse voice the name of little Myra.
“We must part, my child!” murmured Zulima, turning pale as the woman caught sight of her charge from a tomb which she had mounted to command a view of the grounds, and with a degree of self-command that was wonderful even to herself, she arose and led the little girl forward.
“Oh, Miss Myra, Miss Myra!” cried the negress, snatching up the little girl and kissing her with a degree of eagerness that made poor Zulima shudder; “what should I have done if you had been lost in earnest?”
Myra struggled to get away, and held out her arms to Zulima. How pale the poor mother was! Her eyes sparkled though at this proof of fondness in the child, and taking her from the woman, she kissed her forehead, and leading her a little way off, bent down with a hand upon those bright ringlets, and called down a blessing from God upon her daughter. Ah! these blessings, what holy things they are! The sunshine they pour forth, how certain it is to flow back to the source and fill it with brightness! If “curses are like chickens that always come home to roost,” are not blessings like the ringdoves that coo most tenderly in the nest that shelters their birth? For many a day, while tossed upon the waters, Zulima was the happier for having seen and blessed her child.
CHAPTER III.
Oh, she was like a fawn, chased to the plain,
Half blind with grief and mad with sudden pain
That plunges wildly in its first despair,
To any copse that offers shelter there.
It was near midsummer when one of the city postmen of Philadelphia entered a large warehouse in the business part of that city. He approached the principal desk with a bundle of papers and letters on one arm, from which he drew a single letter bearing the New Orleans post-mark. A young man who stood at the desk writing what appeared to be business notes, of which a pile, damp with ink, lay at his elbow, took the letter, and thrusting his pen back of one ear, prepared to open it. There was an appearance of great and even slovenly haste about this letter. The paper was folded unevenly. The wax had been dropped upon it in a rude mass, and was roughly stamped with a blurred impression which it would have been difficult to make out. The address was blotted, and every thing about it bore marks of rough haste. The young merchant broke open the seal with some trepidation, for the singular appearance of the letter surprised him not a little. He read half a dozen of the first lines, then looking over his shoulder as if afraid some one might see that which he had read, he turned his back to the desk and was soon wholly absorbed in the contents of the epistle. As he turned over the page, you would have seen the color gradually deepen upon his cheeks, and even flush up to the forehead, as if there was something in the epistle which did not altogether please him. After a little he folded the letter, compressing his lips the while, and fell into deep thought. The service which this letter required of him was one against which every honest feeling of his heart revolted; but his worldly prospects, his hopes of advancement in life, all depended upon the writer. Ross had been his friend; had placed him in the Philadelphia branch of a great commercial house; and to thwart one of his wishes might prove absolute ruin.