“Never mind, go on;” Magdalen exclaimed eagerly, and Mrs. Seymour continued:
“After the baby went away a kind of melancholy mood came over Laura and she would sit for hours and even days without speaking to any one; then she would have fits of crying, and again was irritable and quarrelsome, so that it was a trial to live with her. After two or three months she ceased to speak of her child, and when Arthur offered to take her to see it flew into so fierce a passion that he took the next train to New York and left her with mother.
“It was a habit of his to go away from anything disagreeable, and most of his time was spent from home. He was always very fickle. To possess a thing was equivalent to his tiring of it, and even before Alice’s birth he was weary of his young wife; and so matters went on from bad to worse till Alice was nearly a year old, and Arthur began to talk of going abroad, while Laura proposed a separation, or that she should be allowed to go to Cincinnati while her husband was away. They would all be happier, she said; and his mother and Clarissa favored the plan. Arthur consented, and went with her himself to Cincinnati, and settled a yearly allowance upon her, and at her mother’s request bought three or four vacant lots which adjoined hers and were for sale, and which she wanted to hold so as to prevent shanties from being built upon them.”
“And didn’t Mrs. Grey see her baby before she went?” Magdalen asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied:
“Yes, once. It was brought to the house, but she took little notice of it, and said it belonged to the Greys, not to her. We think now she was crazy then, though they did not suspect it at the time. She expressed no regret whatever when Arthur left her, but on the contrary seemed relieved to have him go. He sailed for Europe the next week, and was gone a year and a half, or more. Laura wrote to him quite regularly at first, but never held any communication with Beechwood. After a while there was a break in her letters, and when at last she wrote she told him something of which he had no suspicion at the time of his leaving home. He ought to have come back to her then, but he did not, though he sent her money and advised her to return to Beechwood. This she would not do. She preferred to stay with her mother, she said; and he heard no more from her for three or four months, when she wrote a few hurried lines, telling him her baby Madeline died when she was four weeks old, and adding that she presumed he would not care, as it would save him the trouble of taking the child from her as he had taken Alice. That roused him a little to a sense of his duty, and he wrote kindly to her and told her he was sorry, and advised her again to return to Beechwood, where he said he would join her. To this she did not reply for a long time, and when at last she wrote she said that her mother was dead, and that after visiting a friend she was going back to Beechwood. The next he heard from her she was here at Beechwood, where she had arrived wholly unexpected by mother and Clarissa, who did not know that she was coming, and who judged that she must have been weeks on the road. Her baggage was lost, and she had nothing with her but a little satchel, in which was a child’s dress and a few other articles. She was dressed in black, and told them her mother was dead, but said nothing of the child of whose birth they had never heard, she having insisted that Arthur should not tell them of it. She was very quiet for a few days, never speaking unless spoken to, and then she did not always answer. Occasionally they heard her muttering to herself, ‘One is dead, and one is safe. They will never find it,—never,’ but what she meant, they could not guess.
“Alice was spending a few days with her foster-mother up the river, and did not return till Laura had been home a week. In all that time she had never mentioned her child, and when at last she came, and Clarissa said to her, ‘Your baby is here, Laura. Would you like to see her?’ she sprang to her feet and her eyes glared like a maniac’s.
“‘Baby was hid,’ she said. ‘Baby was gone where they could not find it.’
“Then her mood changed, and she raved for the baby till Alice was brought to her; but that only made her worse, and she became perfectly furious, telling them this was not the baby whom she had lost, and whom she insisted upon their finding.
“Clarissa wrote at once to Arthur, who hastened home, finding his mother and sister at their wit’s end, and his wife raving mad, and calling continually for the baby she had lost, or hid. That was her constant theme—‘lost, or hid, or left somewhere.’ Arthur did his best to soothe her, telling her the baby was dead, and asking if she did not remember writing to him about it. But it did no good. Her reply was always the same: ‘One is dead, and one is not.’
“For hours she would sit repeating these words in a kind of moaning, half sobbing way, ‘one is dead, and one is not;’ and never from that time has she known a rational moment. Hunting out Alice’s cradle, she took it to her room, and rocked it day and night, saying her lost baby was in it, and raving fearfully if the family made a noise in the room.