May Agnes Fleming

“ Toosypegs crushed his hat over his eyes, and turned his steps in the direction of Dismal Hollow.
“Poor Horlander!” said Pet; “if he isn’t scared out of his wits, if he ever had any. Say, Goody, won’t you tell my fortune, too?”
“Come hither, scoffer,” said the sibyl, with solemn sternness. “Appear, and learn the dark doom Destiny has in store for thee. Fate, that rules the fortunes of men as well as little yaller gals, will make you laugh on ’tother side of your mouth, one of these days.”
“Oh, Hamlet! what a falling off was there!” quoted Ray, laughing. ”

“ What a pity I have no prince to come for me! Wonder if Ray Germaine’s gone yet—but, there! I don’t care whether he is or not. He does not care two pins whether he ever sees me again or not. Nobody cares about me, and I’m nothing but a poor, abused, diabolical little wretch. Oh, yaw-w-w! Lor’! how sleepy I am! I do wish somebody would come and talk to me, even Rozzel Garnet, or that man with all the black whiskers, who was impolite enough to call me names, or that wild, odd-looking outlaw queen—anybody would be better than none. ”

“ Dearest Maude, rouse yourself from this trance of despair, and remember our Erminie is in the hands of One who ‘doeth all for the best.’ He who noteth even the fall of a sparrow will protect our angel child.”
A shiver, a shadow, a fluttering of the heart, and that was all. No words came from the pale lips.
“Have faith, sweet wife, and trust in God. Overcome this selfish grief, and remember there still remain many for you to love—many who love you. Live for them, my own Maude; live for me; live for the heaven where our Erminie has gone.” ”

“ Toosypegs wiped his eyes and blew his nose, with a look of deepest affliction. “Why, it was only Ranty dressed up.”
“Ranty!” said Mr. Toosypegs, springing to his feet.
“Yes: Ranty Lawless, you know, dressed up in old clothes. He is always doing things like that, to make people laugh. It wasn’t any old woman at all—only him.”
Mr. Toosypegs took off his hat, which, all this time, had been on his head; looking helplessly into it, and, finding no solution of the mystery there, clapped it on again, sat down, and placing both hands on his knees, faced round, and looked Erminie straight in the face. ”

“ MR. TOOSYPEGS IN DISTRESS AGAIN.
The time I’ve lost in wooing, In watching and pursuing The light that lies in woman’s eyes, Has been my heart’s undoing. Though wisdom oft has sought me, I scorned the love she brought me; My only books were woman’s looks. And folly’s all they’ve taught me. —Moore. Admiral Harry Havenful sat alone in the parlor of the White Squall, the heels of his boots elevated on the knobs of the andirons, his chair tipped back to that sublime angle which women admire, but men only understand. ”

“ I guess she thinks I don’t love her, but I do. Did you ever see that Lord De Courcy?”
“No; but I saw his son, Lord Villiers, and his wife, Lady Maude. My gracious!” exclaimed Mr. Toosypegs, with an unexpected outburst of enthusiasm, “she was the handsomest woman in the world! I can’t begin to tell you how good-looking she was! If all the handsome women ever you saw were melted into one, they wouldn’t be near so good-looking as Lady Maude!”
“How I should like to see her!” said little Erminie, laying down her work with a wistful sigh. “Tell me about her, Mr. Toosypegs.” ”

“ No, my lord; such vengeance as that would never satisfy the gipsy Ketura!”
“Saints in heaven! Am I sane or mad? Oh, woman, woman! speak, and tell me truly. Does the child yet live?”
“It does!”
“Thank God! Oh, bless God for that!” he cried, passionately, while tears of joy fell fast from his eyes.
The same evil, sinister smile curled the lips of the gipsy.
“What a fool the man is!” she said, bitterly, “thanking God that her life is spared, when she will yet live to curse the hour she was born. Oh, man! can you comprehend the depths of a gipsy’s hate—you, with your cold, sluggish Northern blood? ”

“ Miss Germaine, you do not mean it; you cannot mean it! it’s impossible you can mean it! Refuse me! Oh, it is utterly impossible you can mean it!”
“On the contrary, wonderful as it seems, I must distinctly and unequivocally decline the honor.” And Erminie’s look of calm determination showed her resolution was not to be shaken. Judge Lawless rose to his feet and confronted her. Indignation, humiliation, anger, wounded pride, mortification, jealousy, and a dozen other disagreeable feelings, flushing his face until its reflection fairly imparted a rosy hue to his snow-white shirt bosom. ”

“ A cold welcome, my little Mother Cary’s Chicken,” grunted the admiral. “Why don’t you kiss him like you did Snowdrop? That’s no way to welcome a friend you haven’t seen for three whole blessed years.”
Ray’s eyes met hers, and the color flushed to her very brow; then, withdrawing her hand, she tossed her saucy head till all her jetty curls flashed, and throwing herself into a seat, began talking to Erminie, as if for a wager.
“Who told you we were come?” asked Erminie.
“No one,” said Pet. “It was an inspiration from on high, I expect, that told me I should find you here.” ”

“ The world need never know that you are aught to the outlawed rover-chief. You are free, sir; free to go, and to take Miss Lawless with you, if you choose. I did wish to see my poor old mother before I left, but, perhaps, it is better as it is. I will leave this part of the world altogether, and return no more; the son of Maude Percy, the one love of my crime-darkened life, will never be compromised by me.”
There was something unspeakably sad in the proud, cold way this was said, compared with the deep melancholy, the bitter remorse in his dark eyes. ”

“ She struck her bosom with her hand, and rocked back and forward, while her wild, black eyes gazed steadily before her with that same rigid look of changeless despair.
“I loved her better than anything in earth or heaven, except her father—my heart was wrapped up in hers—she was the dearest part of myself; and, since I lost her, life has been a mockery—worse than a mockery to me. Girl!” she said, looking up suddenly and fiercely, “never love! Try to escape woman’s doom of loving and losing, and of living on, when death is the greatest blessing God can send you. Never love! ”

“ Toosypegs, Ketura, Raymond, Erminie, and the negress, Lucy, entered the wagon, and turned their backs upon Dismal Hollow.
Half an hour’s drive through a forest-road, all aglow with the leafy splendor of early July, brought them to the seashore. Far removed from any other habitation, stood a pretty little whitewashed cottage, a little fairy-bandbox of a place, on a bank above the sea, nestling like a pearl set in emeralds as it gleamed through a wilderness of vines and shrubs. ”

“ At the first alarm, Firefly had flitted swiftly and fleetly across the room, jumped into bed, and seizing the sponge, gave her face and hands a vigorous rubbing; and now stood screaming with the rest, not to say considerably louder than any of them.
“Oh, Miss Sharpe, get up! the house is on fire! we’re all murdered in our beds!” yelled Pet, going over and catching that lady by the shoulder with a vigorous shake.
And “Oh, Miss Sharpe! Oh, Miss Sharpe! Get up. Oh-oh-oh!” shrieked the terrified children, clustering round the bed, and those who could springing in and shaking her. ”

“ For one moment she held it poised in the air, and then she drew it back.
“No,” she said, with a fiendish smile; “it will be a greater revenge to let it live—to let it grow up a tainted, corrupted, miserable outcast; and then, when spurned alike by God and man, present it to them as their child. Ha! ha! ha! that will be revenge indeed! Live, pretty one—live! You are far too precious to die yet.”
Awakened from her sound sleep by the unusual and unpleasant sensation of the bitter March storm beating in her face, little Erminie began to cry. ”

“ While he lived, incurable sorrow must be hers; but he was gone, and happy days might dawn for her yet. She might love another now, without feeling it a crime to do so—one noble and generous, and worthy of her in every way. One deep breath of relief, one low sigh to the memory of his sad fate, and then a look of calm, deep happiness stole over the beautiful face, such as it had not worn for years, and the beautiful head, with its wealth of raven ringlets, dropped on her arm, in a voiceless thanksgiving, in a joy too intense for words.
And this was Lady Maude Percy. ”

“ THE DAWN OF A BRIGHTER DAY.
“Thoughts that frown upon our mirth Will smile upon our sorrow; And many dark fears of to-day May be bright hopes to-morrow.” —Pinckney. That same night, within that same hour, when her son lay cold and stark in the room below, the fierce, turbulent spirit of the gipsy queen passed away.
Death above, and death below—the cold, dread, invisible presence pervading the whole house with a chilling awe. Voices were hushed to lowest whispers, footfalls were muffled; the deep, fervent joy of the reunited held in check by its dread majesty. ”

“ Of the gipsy Ketura, nothing was known. Now and then, at intervals, Earl De Courcy would catch a glimpse of a dark, wild face, with streaming hair, and hollow, sunken eyes, flitting after him like a haunting shadow from the grave. Wherever he went, night or day, that dusky, ominous shadow followed, dogging his steps like a sleuth-hound, until the dread of it grew to be a horror unspeakable—the vague, mysterious terror of his life. No precautions could rid him of it, until it became the very bane of his existence. ”

“ Miss Pet, take care!” whispered Mr. Toosypegs, who, gray with terror, had been all this time crouching out of sight, in a corner; “it’s real dangerous to rouse her; she might bring the roof down about our heads, and kill us all, if you angered her.”
“Who is that young man?” said the old woman, in an appalling voice, as she slowly raised her finger, and pointed it, like a pistol, at the trembling head of Mr. O. C. Toosypegs.
“I—I—I’m Orlando C. Toosypegs, I—I’m very much obliged to you,” stammered Mr. Toosypegs, dodging behind Pet, in evident alarm. ”

“ I have but a short time to live, and I cannot die till I learn if you have kept your vow of vengeance, made long ago against Lord De Courcy.”
“I have! I have!” she exclaimed, rousing to something like her old fierceness. “Oh, Reginald! you have been avenged. I have wrung drops of blood from their hearts, even as they wrung them from mine. Yes, yes! I have avenged you! They, too, know what it is to lose a child!”
“Mother! mother! what have you done?”
“I stole their child! their infant daughter the heiress of all the De Courcys, the last of her line! ”

“ Admiral Havenful, I don’t expect you’ve ever been in love, but it’s the most awful state to be in ever was. It makes you feel worse than sitting down into a wasp’s nest—it really does. In fact, I don’t know anything, except, perhaps, sea-sickness, that’s equal to it in unpleasantness.”
So completely unexpected was this declaration, that the admiral so far forgot himself as to look appealingly at his pipe and growl out, “Heave ahead!”
The effect of this command on Mr. Toosypegs, in his present disordered state of mind was perfectly electrifying. ”

“ This world’s a humbug! Virtuous poverty, illustrated in the person of Captain George Jernyngham, is snubbed and sent to Coventry, while potent, rich, and depraved youths like you are borne along on beds of roses. Yes, I repeat it, the world’s a humbug! society’s a nuisance! friendship’s a word of two syllables found in dictionaries, nowhere else! and cigars, kid gloves and pale ale are the only things worth living for. There’s an ‘opinion as is an opinion.’”
“Oh, come now, Jernyngham! things are by no means so desperate as you would have me believe,” said Lord Villiers, laughing. ”

“ Shout after shout of derision greeted him as he went on; for the rabble ever hate those who, belonging to their own class, raise themselves above them. But when a woman—a wild, haggard, despairing woman—rushed through the crowd, and greeted him with the passionate cry: “My son! oh, my son!—my son!” a silence like that of death fell over the vast throng. Unheeding all around her, the gipsy Ketura would have forced her way to his side; but she was held back by those who had charge of the convicts. ”

“ No pitch of passion could be half so terrific as that unearthly quiet.
“Devil!—fiend! you shall die for this!” he cried, madly springing up. “What ho! without there! Secure this hag of perdition before—”
A low, strangled gurgle finished the sentence; for, with the bound of a pythoness, she had sprung forward and grasped him by the throat. She had the strength of a giant. He was a weak, broken-down old man, as powerless in her strong, horny fingers as an infant.
He grew black in the face, his eyeballs projected, and he struggled, blindly and helplessly, to extricate himself. ”

“ The hour, the scene, the darkness, the danger, might have made an older and stronger person quail. Alone in the woods, where no scream for help could be heard, with the gloom of Hades all around, save when the blue blaze of the heat-lightning flashed for a moment through the darkness, helpless and alone, in the power of a fierce, blood-thirsty negro. For one instant, a deadly inclination to swoon came over her; but the next, “coward and boaster,” as she heard the words from Ranty’s lips, came borne to her ear, nerving her heart with new courage and her childish arms with new strength. ”

“ Poor Marguerite! she clasped the little gilded, glittering butterfly to her breast, and wept over her with a passionate [Pg 390] love that touched every heart. There was a perceptible coldness and jealousy in the dainty little lady’s greeting of Erminie, whom she looked upon as a rival and natural enemy; but the gentleness and sweetness of the new-found heiress were not to be resisted; and before they all separated for the night Lady Rita made up her mind that matters were, after all, by no means so bad as she had at first supposed. ”

“ But when love comes in at the door, sense flies out at the window, to change the adage a little, and especially where gentlemen on the disagreeable side of forty are concerned. So Judge Lawless was deaf, blind and dumb to that awful bugbear, “They say,” and might have been seen at the cottage morning, noon, and night, to the utter amazement and complete astonishment of all who knew him, and to none more so than to his blue-eyed inflammation of the heart herself. Erminie was at a loss—completely at a loss, and so was Ray. ”

“ As Ray bowed, Ranty arose, and the earl caught sight of him.
“Mr. Lawless,” he exclaimed, in pleased surprise; “I did not expect to meet you here. My dear, you remember the gallant preserver of Rita’s life?”
Ranty actually blushed at the epithet, coming as it did from the father of Erminie.
“Would you wish to see Lady Rita? She is up-stairs.”
“Thank you, my lord. Some other time I will have that pleasure,” answered Ranty. “At present, we have no time to spare; every minute is precious.” ”

“ Ray having wrought himself up to the belief that Miss Lawless was a heartless flirt, worthy of no higher feeling than contempt, he, in order to resist the dark witchery of her magnetic eyes, wrapped himself up in his very coldest mantle of pride, and addressed just as little of his conversation to her as he possibly could, without being positively rude. Pet, as proud in her own way as himself, noticed this at once, and her cheeks flushed, and her eyes flashed, for a moment, with anger and pride. ”

“ The terrified servants understood enough of this singular address to know Miss Toosypegs wished for a fire, her dinner, and her nephew. An old woman, therefore, in a gaudy Madras turban, advanced, and led the way up a rickety flight of stairs into a comfortless-looking room, with a damp, unaired odor, where, on a bed, lay the mortal remains of O. C. Toosypegs, with the darkey—whose name I may as well say at once was Cupid—giving him a most vigorous rubbing, which extorted from the dead man sundry groans and grimaces and encouraged Cupid to still further exertions. ”