“Oh aunt Kate, don’t talk of anything else, until you have told me of my father. How is he and where? Is he at home? I want to go to him this very minute.” As Mabel said this she started toward the door.
“Mabel, dear, come back and sit down,” said Mrs. Maynard, putting a daintily embroidered handkerchief to her eyes, which, to tell the truth, bore no traces of tears. “Your father,” she continued “is dead. He has been dead for two years and over; he died—let me see, it was just ten months after you left home. Of course we could not send you word as we thought that you were drowned; in fact, I may say your father just worried himself to death thinking of you, although I told him, time and again, it was so foolish of him, for, if you were dead it couldn’t be helped, and if you were alive, you would likely be taken care of someway, as it really happened, you see. I never could see the sense of worrying over things that way, but, my poor, dear brother was different.” Mabel sat as if suddenly turned to stone, while her aunt delivered this long diatribe. Slowly she seemed to recover herself and turned to her aunt a face that was ashy in its pallor, as she almost whispered:
“Dead! Aunt Kate, did you say dead? Oh! I never thought of this. My father who was always so strong, dead! I always thought of him as broken hearted by the loss of his daughter. Oh, my father, my father.” As these words passed her lips her body swayed forward slowly and she would have fallen to the floor, if Ahleka had not caught her in his arms. He laid her gently on a couch, which stood near a window, supporting her head on his arm. Mrs. Maynard rushed here and there about the room in a fruitless search for some restorative, wringing her hands and crying: “Oh dear, this is just like Mabel; she always did do such unexpected things. I never saw any one like her.”
“Get some water,” said Ahleka, briefly, “and call some one who can assist her.”
“I will get the water, but dear me I don’t want any one to see her until she is properly dressed; for, of course, as she has just heard of her father’s death she must put on mourning, even if he has been dead two years.” With this she left the room, soon returning with the water Ahleka had asked for.
Mabel slowly regained a sort of semi-consciousness, but for hours she lay as motionless as one dead, except that her eyes sometimes moved slowly about the room. The physician who had been summoned, gravely shook his head as one remedy after another failed to have the desired effect. The next day he pronounced it a case of brain fever.
For days Mabel hovered on the borders of the shadowy land of death. Ahleka scarcely left her bedside, night or day, not withstanding the fact that Mrs. Maynard was horrified at the frightful impropriety of such a proceeding; in spite of all she would say or do, he would stay.
CHAPTER XXII.
Mabel’s convalescence was slow and tedious, and, had it not been for the constant attendance of Ahleka in the sick-room, Mabel would have found it hard to endure the weary days. Mrs. Maynard was glad to leave the care of Mabel to her daughter, Lucy Howard, who was most devoted in the care of the sick girl. Lucy had remained at her mother’s house all through Mabel’s illness. She grew more and more attached to the gentle invalid each day. Mabel’s strong, self-reliant nature was so different from her own. Lucy was one of those women to whom love and kindly treatment seem a necessity of life. She had looked for love from her mother, but Mrs. Maynard was not a woman capable of any really true, deep feeling, and when her daughter had failed to be a social success she could only meet Lucy’s longing for sympathy, with disappointed repining, and complaints that Lucy was herself responsible for her own unhappiness.
In Lucy Howard’s married life had been no gleam of happiness, not even in the first few months of wedded life did Mr. Harry Howard think it necessary to defer to his wife’s wishes in anything, for, he would say to himself, “She married me for money and she has got what she married me for; while I married her because, well, just because I thought she would make me a stunning wife. But, bah! She is as insipid as stale champagne. What man wants a wife who acts as she does? If I’d had the least idea that she would have fallen in love with me, her own husband, I wouldn’t have married her, I swear I wouldn’t. For, about the most unpleasant thing a man can have happen to him is to have a woman fall desperately in love with him. They’re so exacting.” In this way the dashing Mr. Howard commiserated himself. The fact that the heart of this charming girl of eighteen, who possessed a sweet, affectionate disposition, in spite of the false training given her by her mother, should have turned to him with a vast longing for his love in return, had struck him as not a pleasant thing. During the past three years he had shamelessly neglected her, until now, Lucy felt only an intense loathing when she thought of her husband, the father of her little Mae.