“He may linger thus for years,” said the doctor, in reply to Hubert’s questioning.
Hubert could ill bear to see his father’s distorted visage, but it was worse, far worse, for him to look upon the ghastly pallor which had settled on the face of Minnie. She scarcely raised her eyes to his face, and the hand she extended toward his proffered grasp was cold and nerveless. He could not stand it. In three days he was again in Washington, and as his father was so accommodating as to live on, the round of projected gayeties was not interrupted. Hubert daily received tidings from the doctor respecting his father, until it was decided that death was yet far distant, and this living death might be dragged out through many months, when all present anxiety ceased.
His first care was to secure a provision for Minnie, hoping in this way to relieve his conscience of the terrible load which weighed upon it. The house where she had so long resided with his parents was secured to her for life, together with a small annuity, to commence at his father’s death, on condition that she remained with his father during the remainder of his existence. It was a cruel precaution, for Minnie would never have dreamed of deserting her benefactor. To look upon the ghastliness of death for the rest of her life—to humor the caprices and minister to the diseased appetite of a gibbering and restless corpse (for such seemed the stricken man) was the fulfillment of her destiny.
For five years Minnie lived on in this dreary and solitary manner, the helpless invalid and a single servant forming the whole household. But it mattered little to her now. A dull torpor had gradually crept over her feelings. She was like an automaton, moved by some other mechanism than that of her own volition. Long ere Mr. Woodley dropped into the grave, she had grown gray, and wrinkled, and bent, like one in extreme old age. At length the end came. The last spark of life went out, and Mr. Woodley was consigned to darkness and the worm. Again Hubert came to look upon the wreck he had made. She made a feeble attempt to tell him her future plans. She wished to enter a recently established charity for “poor gentlewomen,” but the pride of the man of wealth revolted at such a scheme. He refused to permit her to depend on any other than himself for a support, and Minnie felt that the time was past when she could have earned her own maintenance. The last remnant of her womanly pride was crushed by the strong hand of him who had ruled her whole life with a rod of iron. She lived a dependent on the bounty of Hubert Woodley, dwelling in the house where he had wooed her in her days of girlish loveliness, and fed by the dole with which he had silenced his remorse, until she had counted her half century of sorrow; then, weary and worn out in mind and body, she sunk into the grave, with none to mourn over her, none to treasure any memorial of her existence. Hubert, of course, took possession of her few effects. He found among her papers a lock of sunny brown hair, which he well remembered to have given her, and the cruel letter which had announced his marriage. There were no love-gifts—he had been too cautious to commit himself by such trifles. As he sat alone in that dreary old parlor, with its sombre paper, its dark carpet, its high-backed perpendicular chairs, and that dreadfully monotonous clock ticking as loudly as if it would fain awaken the conscience of the solitary occupant of that melancholy apartment, he felt a superstitious awe steal over him which he could not overcome. He threw the letter and the lock of hair into the smouldering embers of the wood fire upon the hearth, and as the flame leaped up to consume those remnants of the past, the drooping figure of Minnie Clifton stood between him and the sudden blaze. A wild cry broke from his lips, he started from his seat, and at that moment a servant unclosed the door. To the day of his death Hubert Woodley believed that by the mysterious agency of fire, burning as it did into the very soul of that mystery which involved the happiness of a human being, he had called up the spectre of the wronged and joyless object of his early love—the victim of his selfishness—whose whole life had been like a dull and dreary dream.
SONG.
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BY THOMAS FITZGERALD, EDITOR CITY ITEM.
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Ah! do not speak so coldly,