The Actress' Daughter: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

In silence, and with a curling lip and an unutterable depth of scorn in her beautiful eyes, Georgia would listen to this conjugal tirade, but her lips would be sealed; and Richmond, indignant and deeply offended, would leave the room, and the next moment, all smiles and suavity, rejoin his guests. And Georgia, left alone, would press her hand to her breast with that feeling of suffocation rising again until the very air of the perfumed room would seem to stifle her. And such scenes as this were of frequent occurrence now, and one and all sank deep in her heart, to rankle there in anguish and bitterness untold.

Perhaps it may seem strange that Mrs. Wildair and Miss Richmond should hate Georgia; but so it was. Mrs. Wildair was the haughtiest, the most overbearing, and the most ambitious of women. Her sons were her pride and her boast, in public as well as in private, and she had often been heard to declare that they should marry among the highest in the land, and perpetuate the ancient glory of the Richmonds. When Charley had disappointed all this expectation, and had become an alien from her heart and home, the shock, given more to her ambition than to her affections, was terrible, and when she recovered from it, all her hopes centered in her first-born, Richmond.

There was an English lady of rank, the daughter of an earl, at that time visiting an acquaintance of Mrs. Wildair in New York, and to this high-born girl did she lift her eyes and determine upon as her future daughter-in-law. But before she had time to write to Richmond, and desire him to return home for that purpose, his letter came, and there she read the quiet announcement that, in a week or two, he was to be married in Burnfield to a young, penniless girl, "rich alone in beauty," he wrote.

Mrs. Wildair sat nearly stunned by the shock. Down came her gilded coroneted chateau d'Espagne with a crash, to rise no more. Her son was his own master; she knew his strong, determined, unconquerable will of old, to combat which was like beating the air. Nothing remained for her but to consent, which she did with a bitter hatred against the unconscious object that had thwarted her burning in her heart, and a determination to make her pay dearly for what she had done, which resolution she proceeded to carry into effect the moment she arrived in Richmond House.

"To think that she—a thing like that—sprang from the dregs of the city, for she is not even an honest farmer's daughter—should have dared to become my son's wife," she said, hissing the words through her clenched teeth; "a low wretch, picked up out of the slime and slough of the city filth, to come between me and my son. Oh! was Charley's act not degradation enough, that this must fall upon us too?"

"Let us hope, my dear aunt, that the place she has had the effrontery to usurp will not long be hers," murmured the dulcet voice of her niece, to whom she had spoken. "We have built up already a wall of brass between them, and I have a plan in my head that will transform it to one of fire. Recollect, aunt, divorces are easily obtained, and then your son will be free once more, and our queenly pauper will be ignominiously cast back into the slime she rose from."

Miss Freddy's hatred came from pretty much the same cause as Mrs. Wildair's. In any case, she would have considered it her duty to follow that lady's lead: but now she had her own private reasons for hating her with all the bitter intensity of a mean little mind.

Miss Freddy was to have married Charley, and was quite ready and willing to do so at a moment's notice, but in her secret heart she would have far preferred his elder brother. Differing from the rest of the world, Richmond, even "from boyhood's hours," had been her favorite; but when she saw his mother's hopes aspire to a coronet and a title, she was overawed, and made up her mind to be cast into the shade. To be rivaled by a lady like this could be borne, but that a peasant girl—a nameless, unknown girl—should win the prize for which she had sought in vain—oh! it was a humiliation not to be endured. So she entered heart and soul into all her aunt's plans, and won that lady's approbation for her dutiful conduct, while she carefully concealed her own motives. And this, then, was the secret of Georgia's persecutions.

The "wall of fire" the amiable young lady had referred to was to make Richmond jealous. Now, jealousy was never a fault of his, but artful people can work wonders, and Miss Freddy went carefully, but surely, to work, with Mrs. Wildair for her stanch backer. And Georgia, all unconscious, walked headlong into the snare laid for her.

As her husband had said, the Arlingfords were the only ones in the house whom Georgia could at all endure. The frank, genial, honest straightforwardness of brother and sister pleased her; and, indignant at the treatment so openly offered her, they devoted themselves in every way to interest and amuse her. And Miss Freddy seeing this, her little keen eyes fairly snapped with gratification, and by a thousand little devices and pretenses she would manage to dispose of the sister, and leave Georgia altogether to be entertained by the brother. And then the attention of the company would be artfully directed to the twain who were so much together, and Richmond would hear from one and another: