Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories

by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

I was not married until five years after you left me. It is a great sin to say it, but I always hoped that you would come back to me I did not know then how great my wrong was. Now I know it and I have ceased to hope. Do not try to find me. It will be useless. I shall never willingly cross your path, dear Edmund. I have learned that happiness never comes where I am; and I would not darken your life again,—no I would not, so help me God! Only forgive me, if you can, and do not say anything bad about me to my child—ah! what a horrible thought! I did not mean to ask you that, because I know how good you are. I am so wild with strange thoughts, so dazed and bewildered that I do not know what I am saying. Farewell, dear Edmund.—Your, EMILY.

If you should decide not to keep my little girl (as I do not think you will), send a line addressed E.H.H., to the personal column in the 'N.Y. Herald.' But do not try to find me. I shall answer you in the same way and tell you where to send the child. E.H."

This letter was not shown to me until several years after, but even then the half illegible words, evidently traced with a trembling hand, the pathetic abruptness of the sentences, sounding like the grief-stricken cries of a living voice, and the still visible marks of tears upon the paper, made an impression upon me which is not easily forgotten.

In the meanwhile Storm, having read and reread the letter, was lifting his strangely illumined eyes to the ceiling.

"God be praised," he said in a trembling whisper. "I have wronged her, too, and I did not know it. I will be a father to her child."

The little girl, who had awaked, without signalling the fact in the usual manner, fixed her large, fawn-like eyes upon him in peaceful wonder. He knelt down once more, took her in his arms, and kissed her gravely and solemnly. It was charming to see with what tender awkwardness he held her, as if she were some precious thing made of frail stuff that might easily be broken. My curiosity had already prompted me to examine the basket, which contained a variety of clean, tiny articles,—linen, stockings, a rattle with the distinct impress of its nationality, and several neatly folded dresses, among which a long, white, elaborately embroidered one, marked by a slip of paper as "Baby's Christening Robe."

I will not reproduce the long and serious consultation which followed; be it sufficient to chronicle the result. I hastened homeward, and had my landlady, Mrs. Harrison, roused from her midnight slumbers; she was, as I knew, a woman of strong maternal instincts, who was fond of referring to her experience in that line,—a woman to whom your thought would naturally revert in embarrassing circumstances. She responded promptly and eagerly to my appeal; the situation evidently roused all the latent romance of her nature, and afforded her no small satisfaction. She spent a half hour in privacy with the baby, who re-appeared fresh and beaming in a sort of sacerdotal Norse night-habit which was a miracle of neatness.

"Bless her little heart," ejaculated Mrs. Harrison, as the small fat hands persisted in pulling her already demoralized side curls. "She certainly knows me;" then in an aside to Storm: "The mother, whoever she may be, sir, is a lady. I never seed finer linen as long as I lived; and every single blessed piece is embroidered with two letters which I reckon means the name of the child."

Storm bowed his head silently and sighed. But when the baby, after having rather indifferently submitted to a caress from me, stretched out its arms to him and consented with great good humor to a final good-night kiss, large tears rolled down over his cheeks, while he smiled, as I thought only the angels could smile.

I am obliged to add before the curtain is dropped upon this nocturnal drama, that my friend was guilty of an astonishing piece of Vandalism. When my landlady had deposited the sleeping child in his large, exquisitely carved and canopied bed (which, as he declared, made him feel as if a hundred departed grandees were his bed-fellows), we both went in to have a final view of our little foundling. As we stood there, clasping each other's hands in silence, Storm suddenly fixed his eyes with a savage glare upon one of the bed-posts which contained a tile of porcelain, representing Joseph leaving his garment in the hand of Potiphar's wife; on the post opposite was seen Samson sheared of his glory and Delilah fleeing through the opened door with his seven locks in her hand; a third represented Jezebel being precipitated from a third-story window, and the subject of the fourth I have forgotten. It was a remnant of the not always delicate humor of the seventeenth century. My friend, with a fierce disgust, strangely out of keeping with his former mood, pulled a knife from his pocket, and deliberately proceeded to demolish the precious tiles. When he had succeeded in breaking out the last, he turned to me and said: