Myra

by Ann S. Stephens

But the vast property of Daniel Clark had been scattered far and wide by the men who had taken it in trust. The personal property had melted away first, then tract after tract of land, block upon block of real estate had followed, till the claimants, most of them innocent purchasers, might be counted by hundreds. But the greater the obstacles that presented themselves, the more resolute became this young creature in the advocacy of her own just cause. All necessary evidence of the existence of a last will and of its destruction was secured; witnesses of Zulima’s marriage with Daniel Clark in Philadelphia still existed. The mother herself, though shrinking from the cruel publicity of her wrongs, gave such aid as her naturally shrinking nature, now rendered almost timid by suffering, would permit. Men of influence, struck by the sublime spectacle of a fair young creature, with scarcely the physical strength of a child, entering courageously on a battle where such fearful odds prevailed against her, came generously to her support. The great fight of her life opened hopefully; victory might be distant, but she would not doubt that it would come at last.

But in the midst of her first struggle she had forgotten to be prudent, indeed precaution was scarcely natural to that early period of her life. By adoption she had become a child of the North, but the warm genial glow of her blood still sympathized with the sunny climate to which she had moved, fearlessly, with her little children at the most dangerous season of the year.

But her husband was a northern man by birth, and he did not assimilate readily to the hot, moist climate of New Orleans. The excitement into which he was thrown doubtless added to the causes which oppressed him; in the midst of his struggles, in the full bloom and force of his manly youth, Whitney was stricken down among the first victims that the yellow fever seized upon that year.

They were living at an hotel in the heart of the city, with no home comforts around them, and surrounded by a crowd of enemies—such as spring from hotly-contested law-suits where many persons are interested in the defence. To all those persons who had in any way attained a claim on the property of Daniel Clark, his daughter was, of course, held as an aggressive enemy,—a woman who had come with her ambition and her doubtful claims to disturb the tranquillity of a great city. Many of these persons, having bought the property they possessed in good faith, really felt her action to be a great wrong—they had no means of knowing the facts of a case over which so many legal minds have struggled, and naturally sided with their own visible interests against the fair claimant. Thus the yellow fever that struck her husband down in a single hour, found Myra in the midst of enemies such as few women have ever encountered.

All day Myra had been lonely and sad, her children felt the heavy effects of the climate, and her own bright energies seemed yielding themselves to the enervating influences that surrounded them. Sometimes in the great struggle that she had commenced so bravely, Myra felt the painful reaction which springs from a long strain upon the energies. That day she had been thinking of her pretty home in the North, of its quietude, its cool thickets, and the great forest-trees that overshadowed it. Near the house was a spring of water—one of those natural outgushes of crystal waves which children love to play near, and whose flow is remembered as the sweetest music in the world afterward. In the heat and closeness of her room, Myra’s thoughts had been constantly going back to this spring. The children also had prattled about it between themselves, and once had joined in a pretty petition to the languid mother that they might go back again and play out-of-doors.

Myra felt the tears come to her eyes as she answered them; there was no real cause for this depression, but it had fallen heavily upon her all day; she felt like snatching up her little ones and fleeing with them to the northward, where they might all breathe and laugh freely.

While the young wife was in this strange mood, the door opened and her husband came in. She glanced up in his face smiling a welcome, but his eyes were heavy, and a hot crimson burning on either cheek startled her.

She put the children aside, and seizing his hand gave another terrified look in his face. He tried to smile, but instantly lifted a hand to his forehead and groaned aloud.

“What is this, my husband—are you ill, or have you been walking in the hot sun?”

He withdrew his hot hand from her clasp, and sharply ordered the children back as they came laughing toward him. The little ones began to cry, but Myra would not be repulsed, she was no child to shrink away from a sharp word, though it was the first she had ever known him give her darlings.