At the sound of his name Frederic lifted up his head, and taking the child in his arms, kissed her tenderly, as if he would thus make amends for his coldness to the lost Marian.
“‘Tain’t no way to stay here like rocks,” said Uncle Phil at last. “If Miss Marian’s in the river, we’d better be a fishin’ her out,” and the practical negro proceeded to make the necessary arrangements.
Before he left the room, however, he would know if he were working for a certainty, and turning to his master, said, “Have you jest cause for thinkin’ she’s done drownded herself—’case if you hain’t, ’taint no use huntin’ this dark night, and it’s gwine to rain, too. The clouds is gettin’ black as pitch.”
Thus appealed to, Frederic answered, “She says in the letter that she’s going away forever, that she shall not come back again, and she spoke of giving her life away. You found her handkerchief and glove upon the bridge, with Bruno watching near, and she is gone. Do you need more proof?”
Uncle Phil did not, though “he’d jest like to know,” he said, “why a gal should up and dround herself on the very fust night arter she’d married the richest and han’somest chap in the county—but thar was no tellin’ what gals would do. Gener’ly, though, you could calkerlate on thar doin’ jest con-tra-ry to what you’d ’spect they would, and if Miss Marian preferred the river to that twenty-five pound feather-bed that Dinah spent mor’n an hour in makin’ up, ’twas her nater, and ’twan’t for him to say agin it. All he’d got to do was to work!”
And the old man did work, assisted by the other negroes and those of the neighbors who lived near to Redstone Hall. Frederic, too, joined, or rather led the search. Bareheaded, and utterly regardless of the rain which, as Uncle Phil had prophesied, began to fall in torrents, he gave the necessary directions, and when the morning broke, few would have recognized the elegant bridegroom of the previous day in the white-faced, weary man, who, with soiled garments and dripping hair, stood upon the narrow bridge, and in the grey November morning looked mournfully down the river as it went rushing on, telling no secret, if secret, indeed, there were to tell, of the wild despair which must have filled poor Marian’s heart and maddened her brain ere she sought that watery grave.
Before coming out he had hurriedly read his father’s letter, and he could well understand how its contents broke the heart of the wretched girl, and drove her to the desperate act which he believed she had committed.
“Poor Marian,” he whispered to himself, “I alone am the cause of your sad death;” and most gladly would he then have become a beggar and earned his bread by the sweat of his brow, could she have come back again, full of life, of health and hope, just as she was the day before.
But this could not be, for she was dead, he said, dead beyond a doubt; and all that remained for him to do was to find her body and lay it beside his father. So during that day the search went on, and crowds of people were gathered on each side of the river, but no trace of the lost one could be found, and when a second time the night fell dark and heavy round Redstone Hall, it found a mournful group assembled there.
To Alice Frederic had read the letter left for her, and treasuring up each word the child groped her way into the kitchen, where, holding the note before her sightless eyes as if she could really see, she repeated it to the assembled blacks,