I drop the curtain upon the scene when the mother acknowledges and receives to her arms her long-lost daughter, while I go to carry comfort to the heart of Mrs. De Vrai, the ill-treated wife—the widow of a villain—the mother of his child, soon to be an orphan.
What a load it lifted from her crushed heart, when I told her those three little words—"he is dead."
"Then my child will be safe, at least from his evil influences."
What a dreadful thing it is for a wife to feel upon the death of her husband that she is safe herself, that her child is safe, more safe among strangers than with its own father.
Why should she feel so? Why does she feel so? The answer is still shorter than that which gave her relief—which told her that her child's father was dead. That was composed of three words, this of one. That one word is—Rum!!
It was that which made a villain of him, a double villain to two wives and the children of both. It was that which made him attempt the greatest wrong that a father can do to his own child. Poor Agnes!
It was that which drove Mrs. De Vrai step by step from the paths of peaceful, youthful innocence, comfort and affluence, to—but I will not name the intermediate steps—to that wretched abode where the little girl who sold Hot Corn, and slept in the rain upon the cold stones, breathed her pure life away in prayers to that mother not to drink any more of that soul and body destroying rum.
It was that mother, who, upon her death bed, prayed me to tell the world the fruits that the traffic in rum produces. "Tell them to look at me, at my history, or a brief view of it; its details would fill a volume. Tell mothers to watch their daughters. Tell those who bring up children in hotels and public houses, that they are rearing their daughters to one chance of virtue, against ten of sin and woe. My mother was left early a widow, with a competence to raise her two daughters 'at home,' yet she seemed to delight in the excitement incident to a life in a hotel or great boarding-house. As children, we were petted and spoiled; as misses, we learned all that girls usually learn in such boarding-schools as fashionable mothers send them to; as young ladies, we were the flattered of fops and roués, and our mother allowed us to be in a constant flirtation at home, or out every night to parties, balls, soirées, theatres, concerts, and then to saloons, late suppers, and wines, and—oh dear!—what if I had had a home and a mother to keep me out of temptation; but I had not, and I met with the fate almost inevitable.
"Among the boarders at the hotel, where we stopped at Saratoga, was an Englishman, who claimed, and I believe rightly, to be one of the nobility, for he wrote his name, Sir Charles R——, and had a well-known coat of arms upon his seal, which he used publicly. Of course, I was flattered, proud, vain of the attentions of an English nobleman, young, handsome, full of money, and ardent in his professions of love, which I have no reason to think of otherwise than as sincere; I was seventeen, tall, straight, handsome form, face, and figure, and always dressed with taste. My eyes were black; cheeks, rosy; and hair like the wing of a crow. I was well bred, and well read, and could talk and sing to captivate. So could he, and we were both equally affected. When we left the Springs, he came with us to New York, and put up at the same hotel. Then I was innocent. Oh, mothers! mothers! how long can you answer for the innocence of your daughters who go to fashionable eating and drinking saloons, and leave them after midnight, with their young blood on fire, and in such a state of mind that they hardly know whether they go home to rest in their own room, or in some of the thousand traps for the unwary, in almost every street in the city?
"Oh, mothers, mothers, every one,
With daughters free from sin,
How can you look so coldly on
The ways from virtue daughters win?