“Allie will be glad to know I am so nice. She likes me neat and tidy, but a woman with a child to tend cannot always keep herself as she would,” Laura said, when the hair-dressing was ended and Magdalen had buttoned her night-dress, and thrown around her a crimson shawl which hung across the bed.
The woman herself was rocking the cradle now, and signaling Magdalen to be quiet, for baby was waking up. To her there was a living, breathing child in that empty cradle, and as her warning “sh-sh” rang through the room, Magdalen shuddered involuntarily, and felt a kind of terror of that crib, as if it held a goblin child. Suddenly Mrs. Grey turned to her and said:
“You did not tell me your name, or else I have forgotten.”
“My name is Magdalen Lennox,” was the reply, and instantly the black eyes flashed a keen look of curiosity upon the young girl, who winced a little, but never turned her own eyes away from those confronting her so fixedly.
“Magdalen,” the woman said, “Magdalen. That brings it back to me in part. I remember now. That was the name I gave her when she was christened, because I thought it would please Arthur, who was over the sea. He wanted to call Alice that, but I was hot, and angry, and worried in those days, and my temper ran very high, and I would not suffer it, for out of Magdalen went seven devils, you know, and out of his Magdalen went fourteen, I’m sure. She was a beautiful woman, I heard, and he loved her better than he did me,—loved her first when he was young. I found it out when it was too late. His mother told me so one day when she couldn’t think of anything else to torment me with. The Duchess of Beechwood! She’s out under the snow now, and her monument is as tall as the Tower of Babel. She was a dreadful woman,—she and Clarissa both; that was her daughter, and they just worried and tormented and hunted me down, until I went away.”
Magdalen was gaining some insight into the family history of the Greys, though how much of what she heard was true she could not tell. One thing, however, struck her forcibly. She knew that poor Jessie Morton’s second name was Magdalen, and from some source she had heard that Mr. Grey used frequently to call her by that name, which he preferred to Jessie, and when Mrs. Grey alluded to the beautiful woman whom her husband had loved better than his wife, she felt at once that it was Jessie to whom reference was made,—Jessie who had unwittingly made trouble in this family,—Jessie for whom the father would have called Alice, his first born, and for whom it would seem a later child was subsequently named. She wanted so much to ask questions herself, but a natural delicacy prevented her. She had no right to take advantage of a lunatic’s ravings and pry into family matters, so she sat very quiet for a few moments watching her patient, who said at last:
“Yes, that brings it back in part. St. Luke’s Church, and mother, and Mr. and Mrs. Storms were sponsors, and we called one Madeline, and the other Magdalen after the woman that Arthur liked the best. Did you ever see her?”
“I’ve seen her picture. I lived in her house,” Magdalen replied:
“Tell me of her. Was she prettier than I am?—though how should you know that, when you’ve only seen the gray-haired, wrinkled, yellow hag they keep shut up so close at Beechwood? But I was handsome once, years ago, when mother made those shirts for Arthur and I did them up, and he came before they were done and sat by the table and watched me and said my hands were too small and pretty to handle that heavy iron,—they would look better with rings and diamonds, and he guessed he must get me some, I wore a pink gingham dress that day, and hated ironing and sewing after that, and wished I was a lady like those at the hotel where Arthur boarded, and I took a dollar and bought a ring and put it on my finger, and the next time he came he laughed and held my hand while he looked at it, and told me he would get a better one if I would go with him to the jeweller’s. Mother would not let me, and she had high words with him and ordered him away and called him a hard name,—a villain, who only wanted to ruin me. I was sick ever so long after that with something in my head, though not like what’s got into it since. Arthur sent me flowers and fruit and little notes, and came to the door to inquire, but still mother would not believe him true. When I was most well he wrote a letter asking me to meet him, and I ran away from mother and was married, and had the rings at last,—a diamond and emerald and the plain gold one,—and a white satin gown, and we travelled far and wide, and I looked like a queen when he brought me here to the Duchess and Lady Clarissa, and then to Penelope, who lived in New York, and wasn’t quite so bad, though she snubbed me some. I was not as happy as I thought I should be, for Arthur stayed so much in New York, and his mother was so cold and grand and stiff, that I lay awake nights to hate her, and when Alice was born the Duchess sent her out to nurse, because I was low-bred and vulgar, and Arthur got sick of me and stayed in New York more than ever, and left me to fight my way alone with the dragons, and I got so at last that I did fight good.”
Her eyes were flashing fiercely, and Magdalen, who had listened breathlessly to the strange story, could readily imagine just how that black-eyed, high-spirited creature did fight, as she termed it, when once she was fairly roused to action. There were rage and passion delineated in every feature now, and her face was a bright purple as she hurled her invectives against Arthur’s mother and sister Clarissa, who, it would seem, had persecuted her so sorely, and who were now “lying under the snow.”