An infant’s wail told him what it was, and ere he could step forward, Georgie held the baby to him and cried:
“Take her, Jack; take her before I die.”
And so it was Jack who first received the little unwelcome child. Jack’s arms, which held her close, and Jack’s voice, which tried to hush her plaintive moans. As she entered the room Georgie had sunk down upon the floor, and when her step-mother tried to assist her she pushed her off, exclaiming: “No, no, not yet; let me lie here in the dust until I tell you all and you know how vile I am.”
Then, amid tears and sobs she told them the truth; how she had sinned, and deceived her husband, who had driven her from him with the fury of a madman.
“I have been in the street, out in the dark ever since,” she said, “and I thought once to go down to the river and end my miserable life, but the touch of baby’s hands kept me from it, and at last I come to you. Oh Jack, don’t turn from me now,” she sobbed, as she saw the look of horror on his face. “I know what I am, but don’t you turn against me. You are all I have in the world. Forgive me, Jack. Take me in. Try me, for the baby’s sake. You may learn to love her sometime, and to pity me.”
She was at the boy’s feet now, and her hands held him fast, as she begged thus for his pardon. And Jack forgave her then and there, and laying the baby upon his mother’s lap, he lifted Georgie up and strove to comfort her, and said so long as he could work she should have a home. He was earning good wages now; he supported his mother, and with a little more self-denial on his part, a little overwork out of business hours, he could support her. He did not kiss her; he could not do it then; but he kept his hand upon her neck while he talked to her, and Georgie did not feel one-half so desolate when she felt the touch of that boyish hand. Jack had saved her; Jack would stand by her; Jack would shield her as far as possible. And he did; and, with his mother’s help, managed so well, that none of their few acquaintances guessed the real cause of the separation between Georgie and her husband, or why the former kept so carefully out of sight with her baby when any of them called. It was mortification, and a natural shrinking from meeting old friends, they thought, and so excused it in her, and gradually forgot to speak of her and her affairs at all.
At first there was in Henry Morton’s face and manner a kind of sullen, brutish ferocity, which made him so unpopular that he was finally dismissed by his employer, and cast upon the world, a desperate man, with nothing to do, nothing to live for, his home desolated, his wife lost, and himself dishonored. Falling in with a set of the New York roughs who live mostly by theft and fraud, he went rapidly from bad to worse, becoming such an expert in robbery that he was always put to do the work inside, while his comrades watched without. Thus it happened that he was found in Roy Leighton’s house, and afterward identified by Russell, who knew him by a defect in his right eye, which had been put out when he was a boy. Although he gave an assumed name, it came out at the trial who he was, and that he had a wife, whom he had abandoned. Then came the verdict of the jury, the sentence to the penitentiary, followed swiftly by escape, and the forgetfulness by the public, as is usual in New York; where robberies are so common, and escape from justice not unfrequent.
A year went by, and Georgie received a letter from her husband, telling her he was dying of an incurable disease, among the Alleghany Mountains. Then came a paper containing a notice of his death, and then Jack went himself to the little inland town to make sure that the wretched man was dead. There could be no mistake about it, he thought, and Georgie breathed freer, and urged her brother’s removal to the West, where they were unknown to every one, and where she could begin life anew as Georgie Heyford, instead of Louise Morton.
And so westward they went, settling first upon a farm which Jack worked upon shares, taxing his strength too much, until his health began to fail, and the farm had to be abandoned. The next move was to Chicago, where Jack procured work as half porter, half errand boy, in the store, and rising gradually to a higher place of trust as clerk, and gaining the good opinion of all who came in contact with him. Georgie and his mother supported themselves by plain-sewing and fancy needle-work, while the little Annie was known as the orphan child of a friend of Mrs. Heyford, and Georgie passed for a young girl. Very few people knew her, as she seldom went out except to get or carry work, and her life bade fair to go on in the same quiet, monotonous way, when there came a letter, which changed at once her whole destiny.
It was from Mrs. Freeman Burton, whose only sister had been the first Mrs. Heyford, and Georgie’s mother. As girls the two sisters had been strongly attached to each other. Early orphaned, they had clung together, and by needle-work and teaching supported themselves respectably, until a rich old man, who might have been Mrs. Burton’s grandfather, had fallen in love with and married her, thus raising her to a position of wealth and importance, and furnishing a home of luxury both for her and her sister Annie. The latter, however, had given her affections to young Heyford, who, though poor, had this in his favor, that he was young and well connected, and that she loved him devotedly, which was more than could be said of the gray-haired husband of Mary, the elder sister, who had sold herself for gold, and who set herself against the Heyford match. But love won the day, and with her sister’s farewell words, “never come to me if you are starving,” ringing in her ears, the young wife went willingly with her husband, and for his sake bore cheerfully a life of comparative poverty, and tried to do her duty by her husband and the little child born to them within the first year of their marriage.