Mary Jane Holmes

“ An hour later and Magdalen woke with a start, exclaiming when she saw the daylight through the shutters and Hester’s medicine untouched upon the table, “Why didn’t you wake me? Hester has not taken her medicine, and the doctor will blame me.”
“Hester is just as well without it,” Roger answered. “She has slept quietly every moment, and sleep will do her more good than drugs. My word for it she will be better when she wakes; but, Magda, I shall get her a nurse to-day, and relieve you. I cannot let you grow pale and thin. You are looking like a ghost now. ”

“ My heart is badly diseased, and I may drop away any minute, and as death begins to stare me in the face, my thoughts turn toward you, the boy whom I have been so proud of and loved so much. You don’t remember your mother, Roger, and you don’t know how I loved her, she was so beautiful and artless, and seemed so innocent, with her blue eyes and golden hair. Her home was among the New Hampshire hills, a quarter of a mile or so from the little rural town of Schodick, whose delightful scenery and pure mountain air years ago attracted visitors there during the summer months. ”

“ A clear, brown complexion, with a rich, healthful tint on cheek and lip, and a fairer, lighter coloring upon the low, wide forehead; dark, hazel eyes, which, under strong excitement, would grow black as night and flash forth fiery gleams, but which ordinarily were soft and mild and bright, as the stars to which Frank likened them. The eyes were the strongest point in Magdalen’s face, and made her very handsome in spite of the outlandish dress in which Hester always arrayed her, and the rather awkward manner in which she carried her hands and elbows. Hester ignored fashions. ”

“ Walter Scott was uncertain what to do. She had never dreamed that Roger might fancy Magdalen, he was so much older and seemed to care so little for women; but she was sure now that he did, and the hundred thousand dollars she had looked upon as eventually sure seemed to be fading from her grasp. There were wrinkles in her forehead when she left the breakfast table, and her face wore a kind of abstracted look, as if she were intently studying some new device or plan. ”

“ Through the dingy window at the north the moon was looking in, and lighting up that end of the garret with a weird, ghostly kind of light, which made Magdalen shiver more than utter darkness would have done. She knew she was alone; there was no sign of life around her, except the huge rat, which, frightened at this unlooked-for visitation, sprang from Magdalen knew not where, and running past her disappeared in a hole low down under the eaves, reminding Magdalen of what Hester had said of “the loose plank under the rafters where you have to stoop.” ”

“ I am well aware that this is not the time or place for love-making, but your great desire to spare Roger from a knowledge of the will wrung from me what otherwise I would have said at another time. Magdalen, I have always loved you, from the morning I put you in your candle-box and knelt before you as my princess. You were the sweetest baby I ever saw. You have ripened into the loveliest woman, and I want you for my wife. I have wanted money badly, but now that I have it, I will gladly give it all for you. ”

“ There was very little in common between Alice and her father. A thorough man of the world, with no regard for anything holy and good, except as it helped to raise him in the estimation of his fellows, Mr. Grey could no more understand his gentle daughter, whose life was so pure and consistent, and so constant a rebuke to him, than she could sympathize with him in his ways of thinking and acting. There was a time when in his heart he had said there was no God,—a time when, without the slightest hesitancy, he would have trampled upon all God’s divine institutions and set his laws at naught ”

“ Walter Scott had not been in a very amiable mood when she came down to breakfast that morning. Eleven years of the wear and tear of fashionable life had changed her from the fair, smooth-faced woman of twenty-eight into a rather faded woman of thirty-nine, who still had some pretensions to beauty, but who found that she did not attract quite so much attention as she used to do a few years ago, when she was younger, and Frank was not so tall, and so fearful a proof that her youthful days were in the past. ”

“ But Frank’s exclamation of something more than surprise as he suddenly rose to his feet, warned him that it was Magdalen who bore herself so like a queen as she took her seat at the piano. The little girl in the shaker, leaning over the gate, faded before this vision of beautiful girlhood, and for a moment Roger felt as a father might feel who after an absence of eight years returns to find his only child developed into a lovely woman. ”

“ I shall be a better man. I am a better man. I believe in Alice’s God, and here by Laura’s side, in His presence and yours, I acknowledge my past transgressions. I renounce my infidel notions, in which I really never did believe. I wish to be forgiven. I pray that Jessie and Laura, both of whom I wronged, may have met together in the Heaven to which I am unfit to go.”
He was talking more to himself than to Magdalen, who, when he had finished, told him of Laura’s last moments, omitting everything which could give him pain and telling him only of the kindly message left for him. ”

“ Exceedingly popular with the villagers, idolized by her husband, perfectly happy in her baby, surrounded by every luxury which wealth can furnish and every care lifted from her by old Hester’s thoughtfulness, there has as yet been no shadow, however small, upon her married life, and her face is as fair and beautiful, and her voice as full of glee as when she sat with Roger by the river side and felt the first awakenings of the love which has since grown to be her life. ”

“ Being a woman herself she knew how to work upon another woman’s feelings, and she talked to and encouraged her son until he caught something of her hopefulness, and saw himself the fortunate possessor of all the glorious beauty and sprightliness embodied in Magdalen, who little dreamed of what lay before her, and who next morning, at the breakfast table, wondered at Frank’s exhilaration of spirits and Roger’s evident depression. ”

“ She likes me neat and tidy, but a woman with a child to tend cannot always keep herself as she would,” Laura said, when the hair-dressing was ended and Magdalen had buttoned her night-dress, and thrown around her a crimson shawl which hung across the bed.
The woman herself was rocking the cradle now, and signaling Magdalen to be quiet, for baby was waking up. To her there was a living, breathing child in that empty cradle, and as her warning “sh-sh” rang through the room, Magdalen shuddered involuntarily, and felt a kind of terror of that crib, as if it held a goblin child. ”

“ He was thinking of the clause, “the boy known as Roger Lennox Irving.” He could take no part of the estate of the man who had dictated those cruel words. He was too proud for that; he would rather earn his bread by the sweat of his brow than be beholden to one who could believe such things of his mother. Frank saw the change in his manner, and anxious to propitiate him, began again to urge his wish that Roger would, at least, allow him to divide the inheritance in case the will was proved, but Roger stopped him impatiently. ”

“ She did not believe she should find anything, but she must look,—she must satisfy herself, let the consequence be what it might. She did not think of Roger, nor the will, nor Frank, but, strange to say, a thought of Jessie crossed her mind,—Jessie, the drowned woman, who seemed so near to her that she involuntarily looked over her shoulder to see if a spectre were there. Then she bent low under the beams,—went nearer to the loose plank,—had her hands upon it, and knew that it did not fit as perfectly as on that night when she first discovered it. ”

“ Then the nature of the prayer changed, and Magdalen knew that Alice was thanking Heaven for sending her to Beechwood. “And if anywhere in the world there are still living the friends she has never known, oh, Father, let her find them, especially her mother,—it is so terrible to have no mother.”
That was what Alice said, and Magdalen’s tears fell like rain to hear this young girl pleading for her as she had never pleaded for herself. She had prayed, it is true. She always prayed both morning and at night, but they were mere formal prayers, and not at all like Alice’s. ”

“ Acknowledged by every one as the daughter of the Greys, caressed and idolized by Alice, petted by Aunt Penelope, and treated by Mr. Grey with the utmost tenderness and deference, Magdalen would have been perfectly happy but for one unfulfilled desire which was the skeleton at her side. Between herself and Alice there was perfect confidence, while she was learning daily more and more to respect her father, who omitted nothing which could tend to win her love. ”

“ Magdalen could not understand all the causes of his distress. She did not dream that every sob and every tear wrung from the strong man was given more to her than to the fortune lost, and she tried to comfort him as best she could, thinking once to tell him how willingly she would toil and slave to make his new home attractive, deeming no self-denial too great if by its means he could be made happier and more comfortable. But she did not dare do this until she knew whether she was wanted in that home among the Schodick hills where he said he was going. ”

“ Anything is better than your silence.”
“Oh, Frank,” Magdalen began, “I am so sorry, because—”
“Don’t tell me no. I will not listen to that answer,” Frank burst out impetuously, forgetting what he had just said when he begged her to speak. “You do like me, or you have seemed to, and have given me some encouragement, or I should not have told you what I have. Don’t you like me, Magdalen?”
“Yes, very much, but not the way you mean. I do not like you well enough to take you for my husband. And, Frank, what of Alice Grey? You say I have encouraged you, and perhaps I have. ”

“ Since their return from New York she had been far more familiar in her intercourse with him than she would have been had she not believed there was something between him and Alice Grey which might ripen into love. With no fears for herself, she could afford to be very gracious, and being naturally something of a coquette, she had tormented and teased poor Frank until he had some reason for believing that his affection for her was returned, and that his suit would not be disregarded should he ever urge it upon her. ”

“ There was a night, too, which Hester never forgot,—a night when, with nervous agony depicted in every lineament, Jessie made her swear that, come what might, she would never desert or cease to love the boy Roger, sleeping so quietly in his little crib. She was to care for him as if he were her own; to consider his interest before that of any other, and bring him up a good and noble man. That was what Jessie asked, and what Hester swore to do ”

“ But from the poor-house arrangement he recoiled in horror, remembering a sweet-faced, blue-eyed little girl, with tangled hair and milk-white feet, whom he had seen sitting on the door of the poor-house in Belvidere. She had been found in a stable, and sent to the almshouse. Nobody cared for her,—nobody but Roger, who often fed her with apples and candy, and wished there was something better for her than life in that dark dreary house among the hills. And it was to just such a life, if not a worse one, that the cruel conductor would doom the Baby left in his care. ”

“ Every other person made her nervous, she said. Magdalen’s hands were soft; Magdalen’s step was light; Magdalen knew what to do; and so Magdalen stayed by her constantly, glad of an excuse to keep away from Frank, with whom she had held but little intercourse since that night in the library, which she remembered with so much regret. Hester’s illness she looked upon as a godsend, and stayed all day by the fretful old woman’s bedside, only leaving the room at meal time, or to make a feint of watching Mrs. Walter Scott, for whom Hester evinced a strong dislike or dread. ”

“ There was a teasing look in Magdalen’s eyes, which told Roger 385he had nothing to fear, and raising himself up he drew her down beside him and said: “I ask you to be candid with me, Magda. We have wasted too much time not to be in earnest now. Your coming to me as you have could only be construed in one way, were you like most girls; but you are not. You are impulsive. You think no evil, see no evil, but do just what your generous heart prompts you to do. ”

“ Nothing but silence and loneliness, and the moonlight, which fell across the floor, and made the young girl shiver as she went on to the end of the hall, where a door opened suddenly, and a slight, straight woman appeared with iron-grey puffs around her forehead, diamonds in her ears, diamonds on her soft white hands, and diamonds fastening the lace ruffle, which finished the neck of her black-satin dress. ”

“ The factory hands could not work after they heard of it, and one by one they stole out upon the green in front of the large manufactory, where they were joined by other hands from the shoe-shop, until the square was full of excited men and boys, and girls, the murmur of their voices swelling louder and louder as, encouraged by each other, they grew more and more indignant toward the “new lords,” as they called Frank and his mother, and more enthusiastic in their praises of Roger. ”

“ Occasionally they heard her muttering to herself, ‘One is dead, and one is safe. They will never find it,—never,’ but what she meant, they could not guess.
“Alice was spending a few days with her foster-mother up the river, and did not return till Laura had been home a week. In all that time she had never mentioned her child, and when at last she came, and Clarissa said to her, ‘Your baby is here, Laura. Would you like to see her?’ she sprang to her feet and her eyes glared like a maniac’s. ”

“ That chest was a sacred place to Hester, for it held poor Jessie’s linen, the dainty garments trimmed with lace, and tucks and ruffles and puffs, which the old Squire had bidden Hester put out of his sight, and which she had folded away in the big old chest, watering them with her tears, and kissing the tiny slippers which had been found just where Jessie left them. ”

“ Magdalen was his all-in-all, his choicest treasure, for which he daily thanked Heaven more fervently than for all his other blessings combined. And, amid his prosperity, Roger did not forget to render back to Heaven a generous portion of his gifts, and many and many a sad heart was made glad, and many a poor church and clergyman were helped, quietly, unostentatiously, and oftentimes so secretly that they knew not whence came the aid, but for which they might have given up in utter despair and hopelessness. ”

“ The remainder of Jessie’s wardrobe was in the bureau in the Squire’s own room,—the white satin dress and pearls which she wore in the picture,—the expensive veil, the orange wreath which had crowned her golden hair at the bridal, and many other costly things which the old man had heaped upon his darling, were all there under lock and key. But Hester kept the oaken chest, and under Jessie’s clothes were sundry baby garments which Hester had laid away as mementos of the happy days when Roger was a baby, and his beautiful mother the pride of Millbank and the belle of Belvidere. ”

“ He would rather she should think Alice gave it to him, and after a moment he took it from his pocket and handed it to Magdalen, who stood for a long time gazing at it without saying a word. It was the picture of a sweet-faced young girl, whose short, chestnut hair rippled in waves all over her head just as Magdalen’s did. Her dress was a white muslin, with clusters of tucks nearly to the waist, and her little rosetted slipper showed below the hem. ”

“ As to proving the will,” and Roger smiled bitterly when he saw how eagerly his sister listened, and remembered the question she had asked him just as Frank came in, and which he had not yet answered, “As to proving the will, you will have no trouble there. I certainly shall make none. You will find it very easy stepping into your estate.”
Mrs. Walter Scott drew a long breath of relief and sank into her chair, in the easy, contented, languid attitude she always assumed when satisfied with herself and her condition. ”

“ All Bell’s linen came ready made from Paris, and such tucks and ruffles and puffs and flutings and laces had never been seen before in Boston in so great profusion. And Bell bore herself like a queen, who had all her life been accustomed to Parisian luxury. There was no doubt of her gracing Millbank or any other home, and Frank each time he saw her felt more than repaid for the piles and piles of money which he paid out for her. ”

“ Frank was glad Roger had broached the subject, and he began at once to tell what he meant to do and be, if Magdalen would but listen favorably to him. He would study so hard, and overcome his laziness and his expensive habits, and be a man, such as he knew he had not been, but such as he felt he was capable of being with Magdalen as his leading star. He had not spoken to her yet, he said, but he should do so that night, and he was glad to have Roger’s approval, as that would surely bias Magdalen’s decision. ”

“ Hester had no children of her own, and she took him instead, petting and caring for, and scolding him as he deserved, and through all, loving him with a brooding, clinging, unselfish love, which would stop at nothing which she could make herself believe was right for her to do in his behalf. And so, when the young bride looked coldly upon him and spoke slightingly of his mother, Hester declared battle at once; and the hatchet had never been buried, for Mrs. Walter Scott, in her frequent visits to Millbank, had only deepened Hester’s first impressions of her. ”

“ Magdalen had cried; and with these words still ringing in his ears, Frank said to her at last, “Magdalen, you need not give your life; there is a far easier way by which Roger can be spared the pain of knowing that Millbank is not his. He never need to know of this will; no one need to know of it but ourselves,—you and me, Magdalen. We will keep the secret together, shall we?” ”

“ Much as I hate work I could work for her, and a life of poverty shared with her has more attractions for me than all the kingdoms in the world shared with another.”
They had reached Millbank by this time, and Magdalen met them at the door. She had been out for a drive, and the exercise and clear wintry air had brought a deeper glow than usual to her cheeks and made her eyes like diamonds. She had never been more beautiful to Frank than she was that evening in her soft crimson dress, with her hair arranged in long curls, which fell about her face and neck in such profusion. ”

“ He was gentlemanly to a certain extent, and knew all the ins and outs of good society; but he was not like the men with whom Bell Burleigh had associated all her life; not like the men she respected for what was in their heads rather than in their purse. But as these men had thus far been unattainable, and the coffers at home were each year growing lower and lower as her father grew older and older, Bell swallowed all sentiment, and the ideas she had once had of a husband to whom she could look up, and accepted Frank Irving and Millbank. ”

“ I hope for nothing now. I am not angry with you. I could not be so if I would. I bless you for all you have been to me. I hope you will be happy here at Millbank when I am gone; and now go, my darling. You are shivering with cold and the room is very damp. God bless you, Magda.”
He led her out into the hall, then closed the door upon her, and went back again to his solitude and his sorrow, while Magdalen, bewildered and frightened and wearied out, found her way as best she could to her own room, where a few moments later Celine found her fainting upon the floor. ”