Dora Deane; Or, The East India Uncle

by Mary Jane Holmes

"Heaven forgive me for tarrying here, while she was suffering so much!" he cried; "but what of Dora She did not die. I have written to her, and sent her many messages, but never a word has she replied, save once"—here Uncle Nat's voice grew tremulous as he added, "and then she sent me this—look—'twas Fannie's hair," and he held to view a silken tress much like the one which lay next Howard Hastings's heart! "Oh, what a child it made of me, the first sight of this soft hair," he continued, carefully returning it to its hiding-place, without a word of the generous manner in which it had been paid for.

"Shall I tell him now?" thought Mr. Hastings, but Uncle Nathaniel spoke before him, and as if talking with himself, said softly, "Oh, how I loved her, and what a wreck that love has made of me. But I might have known it. Twenty-one years' difference in our ages was too great a disparity, even had my face been fair as John's. She was seventeen, and I was almost forty; I am sixty now, and with every year added to my useless life, my love for her has strengthened."

"Could you not transfer that love to her daughter? It might make you happier," suggested Mr. Hastings, and mournfully shaking his head, Uncle Nat replied, "No, no, I've tried to win her love so hard. Have even thought of going home, and taking her to my bosom as my own darling child—but to all my advances, she has turned a deaf ear. I could not make the mother love me—I cannot make the child. It isn't in me, the way how, and I must live here all alone. I wouldn't mind that so much, for I'm used to it now, but when I come to die, there will be nobody to hold my head, or to speak to me a word of comfort, unless God sends Fannie back to me in the dark hour, and who knows but He will?"

Covering his face with his hands, Uncle Nathaniel cried aloud, while Mr. Hastings, touched by his grief, and growing each moment more and more indignant, at the deception practised upon the lonesome old man, said slowly and distinctly: "Dora Deane never received your letter—never dreamed how much you loved her—never knew that you had sent her money, She has been duped—abused—and you most treacherously cheated by a base, designing woman! To tell you this, sir, I have come over land and sea! I might have written it, but I would rather meet you face to face—would know if you were worthy to be the uncle of Dora Deane!"

Every tear was dried, and bolt upright, his keen eyes flashing gleams of fire, and his glittering teeth ground firmly together, Nathaniel Deane sat, rigid and immovable, listening to the foul story of Dora's wrongs, till Mr. Hastings came to the withholding of the letter, and the money paid for Fannie's hair. Then, indeed, his clenched fists struck fiercely at the empty air, as if Eugenia had been there, and springing half way across the room, he exclaimed, "The wretch! The fiend! The beast! The Devil! What shall I call her? Help me to some name which will be appropriate."

"You are doing very well, I think," said Mr. Hastings, smiling in spite of himself at this new phase in the character of the excited man, who, foaming with rage, continued to stalk up and down the room, setting his feet upon the floor with vengeance, and with every breath denouncing Eugenia's perfidy.

"Curse her!" he muttered, "for daring thus to maltreat Fannie's child, and for making me to believe her so ungrateful and unkind. And she once cut off her hair to buy a party dress with, you say," he continued, stopping in front of Mr. Hastings, who nodded in the affirmative, while Uncle Nat, as if fancying that the few thin locks, which grew upon his own bald head, were Eugenia's long, black tresses, clutched at them savagely, exclaiming, "The selfish jade! But I will be avenged, and Madam Eugenia shall rue the day that she dared thus deceive me. That mother, too, had not, it seems, been wholly guiltless. She was jealous of my Fannie—she has been cruel to my child. I'll remember that, too!" and a bitter laugh echoed through the room, as the wrathful old man thought of revenge.

But as the wildest storm expends its fury, so Uncle Nat at last grew calm, though on his dark face there were still traces of the fierce passion which had swept over it. Resuming his seat and looking across the table at Mr. Hastings, he said, "It is not often that old Nat Deane is moved as you have seen him moved to-night; but the story you told me set me on fire, and for a moment, I felt that I was going mad. But I am now myself again, and would hear how you learned all this."

In a few words, Mr. Hastings told of his foolish fancy for Eugenia, and related the circumstance of his having overheard her conversation at the hotel in Rochester.

"And Dora, you say, is beautiful and good," said Uncle Nat; "and I shall one day know her and see if there is in her aught like her angel mother, whose features are as perfect to me now as when last I looked upon them beneath the locust trees."