Darkness and Daylight: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

"I remember it," cried Edith, "I certainly do, or else it was afterwards told to me so often that it seems a reality."

"The latter is probably the fact," returned Richard. "You were too young to retain any vivid recollections of that fall."

Still Edith persisted that she did remember the face of a little girl in the water as she looked over the rock, and of bending to touch the arm extended toward her. She remembered Bingen, too, with its purple grapes; else why had she been haunted all her life with vine-clad hills and plaintive airs.

"Your mother sang to you the airs, while your nurse, whose name I think was Marie, told you of the grapes growing on the hills," said Richard. "She was a faithful creature, greatly attached to your mother, but a bitter foe of your father. I was too much absorbed in the shadow stealing over me to pay much heed to my friends, and after they left Germany I lost sight of them entirely, nor dreamed that the little girl who came to me that October morning was my baby Eloise. Your voice always puzzled me, and something I overheard you saying to Grace one day about your mysterious hauntings of the past, together with an old song of Petrea's which you sang, gave me my first suspicion as to who you were, and decided me upon that trip to New York. Going first to the Asylum of which you were once an inmate, I managed after much diligent inquiry to procure the address of the woman who brought you there when you were about three years old. I had but little hope of finding her, but determining to persevere I sought out the humble cottage in the suburbs of the city. It was inhabited by an elderly woman who denied all knowledge of Edith Hastings until told that I was Richard Harrington. Then her manner changed at once, and to my delight I heard that she was Marie's sister. She owned the cottage, had lived there more than twenty years, and saw your mother die. Petrea, it seems, had left her husband, intending to return to Sweden, but sickness overtook her and she died in New York, committing you to the faithful Marie's care in preference to your father's. Such was her dread of him that she made Marie swear to keep your existence a secret from him, lest he should take you back to a place where she had been so wretched and where all the influences, she thought, were bad. She would rather you should be poor, she said, than to be brought up by him, and as a means of eluding discovery, she said you should not bear his name, and with her dying tears she baptised you Edith Hastings. After her decease Marie wrote to him that both of you were dead, and he came on at once, seemed very penitent and sorry when it was too late."

"Where was his home?" Edith asked eagerly; and Richard replied,

"That is one thing I neglected to enquire, but when I met him in
Europe I had the impression that it was in one of the Western or
South-western states."

"Is he still alive?" Edith asked again, a daughter's love slowly gathering in her heart in spite of the father's cruelty to the mother.

"No," returned Richard. "Marie, who kept sight of his movements, wrote to her sister some years since that he was dead, though when he died, or how, Mrs. Jamieson did not know. She, too, was ill when he came to her house, and consequently never saw him herself."

"And the Asylum—how came I there?" said Edith; and Richard replied,

"It seems your mother was an orphan, and had no near relatives to whom you could be sent, and as Marie was then too poor and dependent to support you she placed you in the Asylum as Edith Hastings, visiting you occasionally until she went back to France, her native country. Her intention was to return in a few months, but a violent attack of inflammatory rheumatism came upon her, depriving her of the use of her limbs, and confining her to her bed for years, and so prevented her from coming back. Mrs. Jamieson, however, kept her informed with regard to you, and told me that Marie was greatly when she heard you were with me, whom she supposed to be the same Richard Harrington who had saved your life, and of whom her mistress had often talked. Marie is better now, and when I saw her sister more than a year ago, she was hoping she might soon revisit America. I left directions for her to visit Collingwood, and for several months I looked for her a little, resolving if she came, to question her minutely concerning your father. He must have left a fortune, Edith, which by right is yours, if we can prove that you are his child, and with Marie's aid I hope to do this sometime. I have, however, almost given her up; but now that you know all I will go again to New York, and seek another interview with Mrs. Jamieson. Would it please you to have the little orphan, Edith Hastings, turn out to be an heiress?"