CHAPTER LVII.
CHRISTMAS-TIDE.
It was the second Christmas after Magdalen’s bridal, and fires were kindled in all the rooms at Millbank, and pantries and closets groaned with their loads and loads of eatables; and Hester Floyd bustled about, important as ever, ordering everybody except the nurse who had come with Mrs. Guy Seymour and her baby, the little four-months-old girl, whose name was Laura Magdalen, and who, with her warm milk and cold milk, and numerous paraphernalia of babyhood, kept the kitchen a good deal stirred up, and made Hester chafe a little inwardly. But, then, she said “she s’posed she must get used to these things,” and her face cleared up, and her manner was very soft and gentle every time she thought of the crib in Magdalen’s room, where, under the identical quilt the poor heathen would never receive, slumbered another baby girl, Magdalen’s and Roger’s, which had come to Millbank about six weeks before, and over whose birth great rejoicings were made. Jessie Morton was its name, and Guy and Alice had stood for it the Sunday before, and with Aunt Pen were to remain at Millbank through the holidays, and help Magdalen to entertain the few friends invited to pass the week under Roger’s hospitable roof.
The world had gone well with Roger since he came back to Millbank. Everything had prospered with which he had anything to do. The shoe-shop had been rebuilt, and the mill was never more prosperous, and Roger bade fair soon to be as rich a man as he had supposed himself to be before the will was found. On his domestic horizon no cloud, however small, had ever rested. Magdalen was his all-in-all, his choicest treasure, for which he daily thanked Heaven more fervently than for all his other blessings combined. And, amid his prosperity, Roger did not forget to render back to Heaven a generous portion of his gifts, and many and many a sad heart was made glad, and many a poor church and clergyman were helped, quietly, unostentatiously, and oftentimes so secretly that they knew not whence came the aid, but for which they might have given up in utter despair and hopelessness.
Magdalen approved and assisted in all her husband’s charities, and her heart went out after the sad, sorrowful ones, with a yearning desire to make them as happy as herself. Especially was this the case that Christmas time, when to all her other blessings a baby had been added, and she made it a season for extra gifts to the poor and needy who, through all the long winter, would be more comfortable because of her generous remembrance.
When the list of guests to be invited for the holidays was being made out, she sat for a moment by Roger’s side, with her eyes fixed musingly on the bright fire in the grate. Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Irving’s names were on the list, with that of Grace and the young clergyman to whom she was engaged, and Roger waited for Magdalen to say if there was any one else whom she would have.
“Yes, Roger, there is. Perhaps you won’t approve, but I should like to ask Mrs. Walter Scott, if you don’t object too much. She has a dreary time at best, and this will be a change. She may not come, it’s true; but she will be pleased to know we remember her.”
Roger had entertained the same thought, but refrained from giving expression to it from a fear lest Magdalen would not like it, and so that day a cordial invitation to pass the holidays at Millbank was forwarded to the boarding-house in New York which Mrs. Walter Scott was actually keeping as a means of support. Her oil had failed, as well as the bank which held her money. “There might be something for her some time, perhaps, but there was nothing now,” was the report of the lawyer employed to investigate the matter, and then she began to realize how utterly destitute she was. Frank could not help her, and as she was too proud to ask help of Roger, she finally did what so many poor, discouraged women do, opened a boarding-house in a part of the city where she would not be likely to meet any of her former friends, and there, in dull, dingy rooms, with forlorn, half-worn furniture and faded drapery, all relics like herself of former splendors, she tried to earn her living. The goods which she managed to smuggle away from Millbank served her a good turn now, and pawnbrokers and buyers of old silver and pictures soon made the acquaintance of the tall lady with light hair and traces of great beauty, who came so often to their shops, and seemed so sad and desolate. Roger and Magdalen had been to see her once, and Frank had been many times; but Bell never deigned to notice her, though she was frequently in New York, and once drove past the boarding-house in a stylish carriage with her velvets and ermine around her. Mrs. Walter Scott did not see her, and so that pang was spared her. She had finished her book, but the publishers one and all showed a strange obtuseness with regard to its worth, and it was put away in her trunk, where others thing pertaining to the past were buried.
The invitation from Millbank took her by surprise and made her cry a little, but she hastened to accept it, and was there before her daughter-in-law, and an occupant of her former room. She was old and broken, and faded, and poor, and seemed very quiet, and very fond of Magdalen’s baby, which she kept a great deal in her room, calling herself its grandma, and thinking, perhaps, of another little one whose loss no one had regretted save Frank, the father. He came at last with Bell, who was very polite and gracious to her mother-in-law, whom she had not expected to meet.
“Of course I am sorry for her,” she said to Magdalen, who was one day talking of her, and wishing something might be done to better her condition. “But what can I do. She refuses to receive money from me, and as for having her in my house no power on earth could induce me to do that.”