“You are out of breath; sit there, but let me stand. I should suffocate if I were sitting down. I feel as if a hundred pairs of lungs were rising in my throat.”
She was paler now than when Mrs. Seymour first met her in the parlor, and her eyes flashed and sparkled and glowed as only one pair of eyes had ever done before in Mrs. Seymour’s presence, and for an instant a doubt of the young girl’s sanity crossed that lady’s mind, and she glanced uneasily at the door, as if contemplating an escape. But Magdalen was standing before her, and Magdalen’s eyes held her fast. She dared not go now if she could, and she asked nervously what Miss Lennox wanted of her.
“I want you to tell me what it is about the child of whom Mrs. Grey talks so much. Was there a child born after Alice, say nineteen or twenty years ago, and did it die, or was it lost; and if so, when, and how; and was Mrs. Grey here when it was born, or was she somewhere else, in Cincinnati or vicinity? Tell me that. Tell me all about it.”
Mrs. Seymour was very proud and haughty, and very reticent with regard to their family matters, especially the matters pertaining to her brother’s marriage and his wife’s insanity. She never talked of them to any one except Guy, from whom she had no secrets; and her most intimate friends, the Dagons and Draggons of New York society, knew nothing except what rumor told them of the demented woman who made Beechwood a prison rather than a paradise. How, then, was she startled, and shocked, and astonished, when this young girl,—this hired companion for her niece,—demanded of her a full recital of what she had never told her most familiar friends. Not asked for it, but demanded it as a right, and enforced the demand with burning eyes and the half-menacing attitude of one determined to have her way. Ordinarily Mrs. Seymour would have put this girl down, as she termed it, and given her a lesson in good breeding and manners, but there was something about her now which precluded all that, and after a moment she said:
“Your conduct is very strange, Miss Lennox. Very strange indeed, and what I did not expect from you. I suppose I may be permitted to ask your right to a story which few have ever heard?”
“Certainly,” Magdalen replied; “question my right as much as you like, only tell me what I want to know. Was there a child, and did it die?”
“There was a child, and it did die,” Mrs. Seymour said, and Magdalen, nothing daunted, continued: “How do you know it died? Did you see it dead? She says she left it in the cars; she told me so to-day. Oh, Mrs. Seymour, tell me, please what you know about that child before I, too, go mad!”
Magdalen was kneeling now before Mrs. Seymour, on whose lap her hands were clasped, and her beautiful face was all aglow with her excitement as she continued:
“I know a girl who was left in the cars somewhere in Ohio almost nineteen years ago;—left with a young boy, and the mother, who took the train at Cincinnati, never came back, and he could not find her. He thinks she was crazy. She had very black hair and eyes, he said, and was dressed in mourning. Perhaps it was Mrs. Grey. Did she come from Cincinnati about that time? It was April, 18—, when the baby I mean was left in the cars.”
Mrs. Seymour was surprised out of her usual reserve, and when Magdalen paused for her reply, she said: