And the black falsehood that had sever’d them
Rose palpable and hideous to the thought.
Hot tears were shed—sad blessings mutely given!
They met, and parted—he went to meet his death,
And she to weep o’er bitter memories!
Zulima made her home in the South, and there also, after years of wandering, came Daniel Clark—weary with excitement, and unhappy with a sense of bitter loneliness. In the first moments of his anger against Zulima, he had made his will, giving all his vast possessions to an aged relative, and making the false friends who had caused his misery executors of that will. And this was the deep game for which these men had staked their souls—these possessions and the control over them. No matter though the fair wife was crushed to the earth; no matter though that beautiful child, in all her infant unconsciousness, was despoiled of her just inheritance. It was for this they had toiled in darkness; it was for this they had heaped falsehood upon falsehood, wrong upon wrong.
But Clark had returned to New Orleans, not to pass a week and away again, as before, but to control his own business—and in New Orleans was Zulima. They might meet, still it was unlikely, for she was proud and sensitive as ever, and lived in the bosom of a new family, and was girded around by new and powerful affections. Looking upon Clark as a heart-traitor, one who had betrayed her unprotected state, and trifled alike with her reputation and her love, she shrank from a thought of the past. The wrong that she believed to have been practiced upon her was so terrible, that she shuddered at the retrospection. Without one shadow of hate or hope of revenge, to perpetuate the struggle that had been so heartrending at first, the only effort that she made was to obtain forgetfulness.
Zulima knew not that Clark had arrived at New Orleans, but a strange inquietude came over her. Thoughts of the sweet and bitter past made her restless day and night; she was haunted by a constant desire to see her child—the child of Daniel Clark; from this innocent creature, wrong and absence in the father had failed to alienate her love.
A little out from New Orleans was a pretty country-house, surrounded by ornamental grounds and embowered in tropical trees. It was a small dwelling, secluded and beautiful as a bower; works of art, rare books, and light furniture, befitting the climate, gave an air of refinement and grace within; passion-flowers, briery roses, and other clinging vines draped the cottage without. An avenue of orange and lime trees led to the front door, and behind was a small garden, cooled by the rain that fell perpetually from a fountain near the center, and glowing with tea-roses, lilies, and a world of those blossoms that grow most thrifty and fragrant in the warm South.
Among these beautiful grounds little Myra Clark had been at play since the breakfast-hour. She had chased the humming-birds from their swarming places in the arbors and rose-hedges; she had gathered golden-edged violets from the borders, and leaping up with a laugh to the orange-boughs that drooped over the gravel-walk, had torn down the white blossoms and mellow fruit to crowd with the flowery spoil that she had gathered in the skirt of her muslin dress. And now with her lap full of broken flowers, fruit, torn grass, and pebble-stones, the child cast herself on the rich turf that swelled up to the brink of the fountain, and pressing her dimpled hands and warm cheek upon the marble, lay in smiling idleness, watching the gold-fish, as they darted up and down the limpid waters, her soft brown eyes sparkling with each new flash of gold or crimson that the restless little creatures imparted to the waters. Now she would cast a broken rose-bud or a tuft of grass into the fountain, and her laugh rang out wild and clear above the bell-like dropping of the water in the marble basin, if she could detect some fish darting up like a golden arrow to meet her pretty decoy. Thus lay the child; thus fell the bright water-drops around; and thus, a little way off, drooped the fruit and flower laden boughs, when the sweet tranquillity was disturbed by a footstep. Down one of the gravel-walks came a man, bearing upon his noble features an air of proud sadness, his very step denoting habitual depression, as he moved quietly and at a slow pace toward the fountain. It was not a look of ill-health that stamped so forcibly the air and demeanor of this man. His frame was still strongly knit, his step firm as iron, but upon his brow was that deep-settled shadow which a troubled heart casts up to the face, and the locks that shaded it were sprinkled with the premature snow which falls early over a brain tortured with unspoken regrets. Thus sorrowful, but still unbowed in his spirit, appeared Daniel Clark, as he moved quietly toward the fountain where his child was at play.