CHAPTER IX.
HOPE AND HAVE.
Fanny got out of the horse car at the Park. She was in the midst of the great city, but she felt no interest in the moving, driving scene around her, for the thought of poor Jenny still engrossed her. She had even forgotten Mr. Long, and the dreaded policemen who might be on the watch for her. This was the good time for which she had stolen the money and run away from her happy home at Woodville. It was a mockery, and she even wished she had been caught before she left Pennville.
It was now two o'clock in the afternoon, though hours enough seemed to have elapsed since she left Woodville to make a week. She had eaten nothing but an ice-cream since breakfast, and she was faint from the excitement and the exertion of the day. She found a saloon for ladies, and entered; but the nice things of which she had dreamed in the morning no longer existed for her. She ate a simple dinner, and walked down Broadway till she came to the Museum, which she had regarded as an important element in the enjoyment of her week in the city.
She paid the admission fee, and went in. She wandered from room to room among the curiosities, hardly caring for anything she saw, till she came to the exhibition-room, where plays were acted. She had never seen a play performed, and she had looked forward with brilliant anticipations to the pleasure of seeing one. She was disappointed, for it had not entered into her calculation that a clean conscience is necessary for the full enjoyment of anything. The actors and the actresses strutted their brief hour before her; but to her the play was incomprehensible and silly. It had no meaning, and even the funny things which the low comedian said and did could not make her laugh. Before the performance was half finished, she had enough of it, and left the place in disgust.
Jenny Kent was rapturously happy, dying in a hovel, in the midst of poverty and want, while she was miserable with health and strength, with plenty to eat, drink, and wear. Fanny tried to shake off the strange depression which had so suddenly come over her. She had never been troubled with any such thoughts and feelings before. If she had occasionally been sorry for her wrong acts, it was only a momentary twinge, which hardly damped her spirits. She was weighed down to the earth, and she could not rid herself of the burden that oppressed her. She wanted to go into some dark corner and cry. She felt that it would do her good to weep, and to suffer even more than she had yet been called upon to endure.
"I'll bear your name to heaven with me," had been the words of the dying girl to Fanny; but what a reproach her name would be to the pure and good of the happy land! In some manner, not evident to our human sight, or understood by our human minds, the words of Jenny had given the wayward girl a full view of herself—had turned her thoughts in upon the barrenness of her own heart. Her wrong acts, so trivial to her before, were now magnified into mountains, and the crime she had committed that morning was so monstrous and abominable that she abhorred herself for it.
In spite of the reproaches which every loving word of the dying girl hurled into the conscience of Fanny, there was a strange and unaccountable fascination in the languid look of the sweet sufferer. Wherever she turned, Jenny seemed to be looking at her with a glance full of heaven, while the black waters of her own soul rose up to choke her.
Fanny struggled to get rid of these strange thoughts, but she could not; and she was compelled to give herself wholly up to them. Something, she knew not what, drew her irresistibly towards the dying girl, and she started up Broadway to find the flowers she had promised to carry to her. In a shop window she saw what she wanted. The flowers were of the rarest and most costly kinds; but nothing was too good for Jenny, and she paid four dollars for a bouquet. In another store she purchased some jelly and other delicacies such as she had seen the ladies at Woodville send to sick people. Thus prepared to meet the dying girl, she took a horse car, and by six o'clock reached the humble abode of Mrs. Kent.
"How is Jenny?" asked she, as she entered the house, without the ceremony of knocking.