The heiress of Greenhurst

by Ann S. Stephens

I awoke in the night from a broken and unhealthy sleep. Turner’s voice, and the tramp of Jupiter outside my window had aroused me. I raised the sash, and looked out in time to see the old man throw himself on Jupiter’s back and ride swiftly away. Just then the clock chimed three.

I could not sleep again. A remembrance of the scene by my father’s death-bed—the knowledge that now he had full proof that I was indeed his child, came with startling acuteness to my mind. I reflected that in that house my mother had lived her brief period of happiness, and known the anguish that at last drove her to death. Never had I felt her memory so keenly, or her presence so near. A craving desire to draw my soul closer to hers by material things seized upon me. The room which I could remember her to have occupied, and that had been so often alluded to in her journal, had never been opened since she left it. Turner and Maria avoided the very passage which led to it, and I had shared somewhat in this spirit of avoidance. Now a desire possessed me to visit that room. The key was lost, Turner had often told me that, but bolts were of little consequence to me then. I dressed hurriedly and let myself into the garden. Around the old stone balcony the vines had run riot for years, weaving themselves around the heavy balustrades in fantastic and leafy masses.

I tore these vines asunder, laying the old steps bare and scattering them with dead leaves, as I made my way to the balcony, which was literally choked up with the silky tufts of the clematis vines, run to seed, and passion flowers out of blossom. The nails, grown rusty in the hinges, gave way as I pulled at the shutters closed for years and years. Then the sash-door yielded before me, and I stood in the room my mother had inhabited; and for the first time trod its floor since she left it on that bitter, bitter night. How well I remembered it! Then I had stood by her side a little child; now I was a woman alone in its desolation. I sat down in the darkness till the first tints of dawn revealed all its dreary outlines. A pile of cushions lay at my feet, and gleams of the original crimson came up through the dust. On those cushions I had crouched, watching her through my half-shut lashes as she sat in the easy-chair, meditating her last appeal to the merciless heart of her husband.

A cashmere shawl, moth-eaten, and, with its gorgeous tints almost obliterated, hung over the chair, sweeping the dim carpet with its dusty fringes. Pictures gleamed around me through a veil of dust; and vases full of dead flowers stood on the mosaic tables. When I touched the leaves they crumbled to powder beneath my fingers. I beat the cushions free from their defacement, and reverently shook out the folds of my mother’s shawl. These were the objects she had touched last, and to me they were sacred. The rest I left in its dreariness, glad that time and creeping insects had spread a pall over them.

Seated in her chair, I watched the dawn break slowly over the garden. It seemed as if I were waiting for something—as if some object, sacred to her memory, had called me to that room, and placed me in that chair. It was a dull morning. Tints that should have been rosy took a pale violet hue in the east. The birds were beginning to wake up, but as yet they only moved dreamily in the leaves. No wind was astir, and the shadows of night still lay beneath the trees of the wilderness. The stillness around was funereal.

Unconsciously I listened. Yet whom could I expect? What human being ever entered that room sacred to the memory of one unhappy woman?

At length there came upon this stillness a sound that would have startled another, but I sat motionless and waited. It was like the struggling of some animal through the flower thickets—the unequal tread of footsteps—short pauses and quick gasps of breath. Then a feeble sound of some one clambering up the steps, and there, upon the balcony, stood my father.

My heart ceased to beat; for the universe I could not have moved or spoken. He was dressed so strangely, his under garments all white as snow, with that gorgeous gown of Damascus silk flowing over. His head was bare, and the locks curled over the pallid forehead, crisped with a dampness that I afterwards knew was the death sweat.

He stood within the window, with those great, burning eyes bent on me. Their look was unearthly—their brightness terrible; but there was no shrinking in my heart. I hardened under it as steel answers to the flame.

After shaking the dust from my mother’s shawl, I had laid it back upon the chair as it was at first; but when I sat down the folds were disturbed, and fell around my shoulders, till, unconsciously, I had been draped with them much as was my mother’s custom. Thus I appeared before her husband and my father, ignorant of the appalling likeness that struck his dying heart to the centre.