“If you please,” said Betty, returning, “Miss Alsop says she is so weary that she will sit and rest for half an hour.”
“Just half an hour before father comes home; then, of course, he will invite her to partake his solitary dinner; that’s just what she came for; mother is right; how strange that I never should have thought of all this before!” and a thousand little things now flashed upon her mind in confirmation of what her mother had just said.
Miss Alsop was an unmarried woman of forty, and presented that strange anomaly, a fat old maid. Her teeth were good, her hair thick and glossy, and her voice softer than the cooing of a dove; one of those voices which are the never-failing herald of deceit and hypocrisy to the keen observer of human nature. For years she had had her eye upon Mr. Alsop, and actually claimed a sort of cousinly relationship, which she never had been able very clearly to establish, but upon the strength of which she had come, self-invited, twice a month, to spend the day. The first moment Mrs. Wade saw her, she was conscious of an instinctive aversion to her; but as she was never in the habit of consulting her own tastes or inclinations, she endured the infliction with her own gentle sweetness. No one who witnessed her offering Miss Alsop the easiest chair, or helping her to the daintiest bit on the table, would have supposed that she read the wily woman’s secret heart. Not a look, not a word, not a tone betrayed it; but when the weary day was over, and Miss Alsop had exhausted all her vapid nothings, and, tying on her bonnet, regretted that she must trouble Mr. Wade to wait upon her home, Mrs. Wade, as they passed through the door, and out into the darkness, would lean her cheek upon her hand, while tears, which no human eye had ever seen, fell thick and fast.
Not that Mr. Wade had any affection for Miss Alsop—not at all—he was incapable of affection for any thing but himself and his money; but Miss Alsop had a way of saying little complimentary things to which the most sensible man alive never yet was insensible, from the stupidest and silliest of women. What wonder that the profound Mr. Wade walked into the trap with his betters? and though he would not, for one of his money-bags, have owned it, he always left her doubly impressed with the value of his own consequence. Then—Miss Alsop knew how to be an excellent listener when occasion required, and Mr. Wade was, like all egregious stupidities, fond of hearing himself talk; and occasionally Miss Alsop would ask him to repeat some remark he had made, as if peculiarly struck with its acuteness, or its adaptation to her single-blessed-needs, upon which Mr. Wade would afterward pleasantly reflect, with the mental exclamation, “Sensible woman, that Miss Alsop!” Let it not be supposed that this depth of cunning was at all incompatible with obtuseness of intellect—not at all—there is no cunning like the cunning of a fool. Yes—Miss Alsop knew her man. She knew she could afford to bide her time; besides, were personal charms insufficient, had she not a most potent auxiliary in her bank-book, which placed to her spinster credit twenty thousand dollars in the “People’s Bank?”
CHAPTER VI.
Mrs. Wade sat propped up in bed by pillows, for the nature of her disease rendered repose impossible; dreadful spasms—the forerunners of dissolution—at intervals convulsed her frame. Pale, but firm, the gentle Mary Hereford glided about her, now supporting the worn-out frame—now holding to her lips the cup meant for healing—now opening a door, or slightly raising a window, to facilitate the invalid’s labored breathing.
The fire had burned low in the grate, and when the gray light of morning stole in through the half open shutter, and the invalid would have replenished it, Mrs. Wade’s low whispered, “I shall not need it, Mary,” gave expression to the fearful certainty which her own heart had silently throbbed out through the long watches of that agonized night. Not a murmur escaped the sufferer’s lips—there was no request for the presence of the absent sleeper, who had promised “to cherish through sickness and health;” no mention was made of the children, who had been trustingly placed in the hands of Him who doeth all things well, and who wearily slumbered on, unconscious that the brightness of their childhood’s sky was fading out forever. The thin arms were wound around the neck of the first-born, about whom such happy hopes had once so thickly clustered, and peacefully as an infant drops asleep. Susan Wade closed her eyes forever; so peacefully that the daughter knew not the moment in which the desolate word—“motherless”—was written over against her name.
Motherless!—that in that little word should be compressed such weary weight of woe! It were sad to be written fatherless—but God and his ministering angels only know how dark this earth may be, when she who was never weary of us with all our frailties—she, to whom our very weaknesses clamored more loudly for love, lies careless of our tears.