I promised her again, and then, taking the scissors from the table, she cut from the back of her head one of her long, bright curls, and laying it in my hands bade me keep it as a remembrance of her.
“Mother is coming and you must go,” she said, with a little shiver, as we heard Mrs. Fordham’s voice below, and with a hurried kiss and the whispered words, “Remember about the grave, good-by, I shall see you again some time, and possibly write to you,” she pushed me toward the door, and when I saw her again she was waving her hand to me from the window of the car which took her away from Hampstead.
CHAPTER V.
EDITH LYLE.
It was a dark, dreary, January afternoon, and the dreariness and darkness were increased by the dense fog which since noon had settled like a pall over the great city of London, and by a pitiless rain, which, mixing with melting snow, ran in muddy puddles down the gutters and in dirty streams down the windows of the third floor back room of the lodging in Dorset Street, where a very young girl was lying. Her face was whiter than the pillow against which it lay, and in the eyes there was a look of utter helplessness, as if all life, and hope, and energy had been crushed out, and there was nothing left but apathy and utter indifference to the future. And yet this was the same face which Colonel Schuyler had seen framed in a net-work of green, and of whose bright beauty he had dreamed, with his lady wife beside him: but he would not have known it now. Months of mental anguish and continual combat with the mother’s stronger nature, added to days of intense suffering, and homesickness, and longing for the dead in that far-off grave in Hampstead, had left their marks on the young girl, until now that the crisis was past she lay quiet and passive in her mother’s hands and seemed to assent to whatever the mother proposed.
That estimable woman had chosen lodgings in Dorset Street, knowing she would be safe there from any one whom her daughter might meet in the future. The name Heloise had been dropped, and she was Edith Lyle now, a young widow, whose husband had died soon after her marriage, and so no suspicions were excited and no comments made by the few who occasionally saw her stealing up or down the stairs which led to her apartment. Only the housemaid, Mary Stover, was interested in her, or paid much heed to her extreme youth and beauty. And even Mary but seldom came in contact with her, so that Edith hardly knew of her existence, or how much she was in the serving woman’s thoughts. Since the birth of her baby, a wee little creature, with masses of golden hair and a look in its blue eyes of the dead, Edith had scarcely thought of anything, but had lain with the child held closely to her bosom, as if fearful of losing it. Baby was now four weeks old, and the impatient Mrs. Fordham could wait no longer, and on the dreary day of which I write she sat by her daughter’s side and said to her, in the tone which Edith had never yet had courage to withstand:
“Edith, you are strong enough now to leave this wretched place. Baby will be four weeks old to-morrow, and I have everything arranged. I have made particular inquiries about the —— Street Foundling Hospital, and learned that in no other place are the children so well cared for. The matron and nurses are very kind, and the little ones healthy and happy, and in nine cases out of ten are adopted by good families and grow up respectable men and women.”
“But, mother,” Edith gasped, while her hold tightened on the little pink fingers which lay on her neck, “I cannot let her go. She is mine,—truly, lawfully mine,—and you shall not take her from me.”
“Hush, child, you do not know what you are talking about,” came impatiently from Mrs. Fordham’s lips. “I tell you we cannot be hampered with a child, and it shall be as I say. I know it will be well cared for. I shall keep sight of her, and see that no harm befalls her, and if you ever should wish to claim it, that mark on its bosom is sufficient to identify it.”
At the mention of the peculiar birthmark on her child, Edith moaned faintly, and thought of the white rose with the blood stain in the centre, and the awful day when it was brought back to her, and she had laid it next her breaking heart. There was a blood-red spot over baby’s heart, and Edith knew how it came there, and shuddered and grew sick as she remembered it, and held tighter to the little one whom her mother would wrest from her. At last, wearied with the controversy which was exciting her daughter so much, Mrs. Fordham seemed to give up the contest, but it was only seeming. She was one who never gave up, and what she could not accomplish by fair means she was not too scrupulous to attain by foul. Baby must go. It was something in her way, and must be sacrificed; so, when the hour came round for her daughter’s medicine, she mixed with it one of the sedative powders which Edith had taken for wakefulness when her illness was at the worst. As it had been successful then so it was now, and she ere long fell into a heavy sleep, which Mrs. Fordham knew from experience would last for several hours. This was her time for action, and going to the bed she stooped to take the child from the arms which held it so fast. Even in her sleep Edith must have had a dim consciousness of the threatened danger, for she held firmly to the little one, while her white lips moaned: