Читать книгу Magdalen's Vow - May Agnes Fleming - Страница 4

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The month was October, very near its close; the time, late in the evening of a wet and dismal day; the place, a cottage kitchen, its only occupants an old woman and a baby, not twenty-four hours old. The soft patter of the ceaseless rain on the glass, the sobbing cry of the wind around the gables, the moaning surge of the pine woods near—these made their own tumult without.

Within a bright fire blazed in the shining cook stove; a big brass clock ticked loudly in a corner, a maltese cat purred on a mat, and the tea-kettle sung its pleasant song.

The little old woman, who swayed in her Boston rocker before the stove, was the trimmest little old woman ever firelight shone on.

The baby lay in her lap, a bundle of yellow flannel; and, as she rocked, she cried, miserable, silent tears.

"To think that this should be her welcome home!" she kept moaning drearily to herself. "Only one short year and all gone—father, sister, brother, home! My poor dear—my poor dear!"

The loud-voiced clock struck six, with a clatter. The last vibration was drowned in the shrill scream of a locomotive, rushing in. The shrill shriek rent the stormy twilight like the cry of a demon, and woke the sleeping child.

"Hush, baby, hush!" the old woman said, crooning a dismal lullaby. "There she is—there is Magdalen! Poor dear! poor dear! She'll be here in ten minutes now."

But the ten passed—twenty—half an hour—before the knock for which she listened came to the door.

"There she is!"

She plumped the baby into the rocker, made for the door with a rush, and flung it wide. On the threshold, all wet and dripping and worn-looking, a young girl stood. The rainy evening light was just strong enough to show a pale young face, a slender, girlish figure, and a pair of great, luminous dark eyes.

"My darling!" the old woman cried, catching her in her arms. "My own darling girl! And you are wet through and through! You must have walked all the way from the station in the rain."

The girl slowly disengaged herself, entered the hall and stood looking at her.

"Rachel," she said, "am I in time?"

The old woman broke suddenly out crying—loud, anguished sobs, that shook her from head to foot.

It was the girl's most eloquent answer, and she leaned against the wall with a face of blank despair.

"Too late!" she said, slowly; "too late! Laura is dead!"

The old woman's sobs grew louder and her pitiful attempts to stifle them were vain.

"I oughtn't to, I know," she cried, hysterically; "that you should come home like this, and only last year——"

She broke down, weeping wildly. But the girl stood, tearless and white, staring blankly at the opposite wall.

"Father and Laura dead—and Willie! Oh, my God! how can I bear it?"

The old woman hushed her sobs and looked up.

The despair of that orphaned cry smote her, with its unutterable pathos, to the heart.

"Magdalen! Magdalen!" she cried. "My darling, don't look like that! Come in—you are worn and wet—come in to the fire. My child, don't wear that sorrowful face; it breaks your poor old nurse's heart! Come!"

She led the way; the girl followed. The old Scripture name—full of its own pathos always—seemed strangely appropriate here. Mary Magdalene herself might have worn those amber-dropping tresses—might have owned that white, young face, so indescribably sad.

"You poor child!" the old nurse said, "you are as white as a spirit! You must have a cup of tea and some dry clothes right away. Where is your trunk?"

Even in the midst of death and despair, these commonplace questions rise.

Magdalen looked at her with great, haggard eyes.

"I left it at the station. Rachel, when did Laura die?"

"Yesterday," old Rachel answered, crying again; "an hour after her baby was born."

"Her baby? Oh, Rachel!" with a wild start, "I did not know—I did not know——"

The old woman undid the bundle of flannel. The babe lay soundly asleep.

The girl covered her colorless face for a moment, her tears coming at last, falling like rain.

"Laura! Laura! My sister!"

Her tears were noiseless, burning, bitter. She looked up presently, to bend over the sleeping child and kiss its velvet cheek.

"Laura's baby! Poor little motherless thing! Oh, Rachel, it is very, very hard!"

"Very hard, my dearest and terrible to bear; but it must be borne, for all that. My pet, go up to your room and change these dripping clothes. I don't want to lose you, too."

"Better so," the girl said, wearily. "Better end it all, and lie down and die with them. Others would die of half this misery, but I only suffer and live on!"

Slowly and spiritlessly she ascended the stairs to her own familiar room. She changed her wet garments, bathed her aching head, brushed out the rippling, yellow ringlets—all in a weary, aimless sort of way—and then returned to the apartment below. It was a very simple toilet she had made, and her black dress was frayed and faded, and scant and ill-made; but for all that she was well worth looking at.

She was very pretty, in spite of her pallor—so brightly pretty, that it was a pleasure only to look at her.

"My own darling!" the old nurse said, fondly kissing her, "you are more beautiful than ever, and almost a woman at sixteen. It's a sad pity, but oh dear, dear! how can I help it? To think you can go to school no more."

"I must only study at home," Magdalen said, "and practise my music as well as I can. I suppose no one would be willing to engage a governess only sixteen years old. Have we enough to live on for a year, Rachel?"

"More than enough, surely. Your poor papa's lawyer, Mr. Hammond, will tell you. It is very hard, my poor dear, you should have to go out into the big, wicked, cruel world, to earn your own living at all. You are a great deal too pretty."

"Rachel," said Magdalen, abruptly, "where is Laura? I want to see her."

"She's laid out in the parlor, poor darling! Widow Morgan sat up with me the last night, and she helped me afterward to lay her out. She makes a lovely corpse—sweet, pale lamb—and peaceful as an angel. Don't go now. Take some tea first. You look fagged out and I shall have you sick on my hands, too."

"You don't know how strong I am," said Magdalen. "I have grown of late tired of my life, of the world, of myself, of everything; but nothing hurts me. I suffer and live on. Others, more fortunate, would suffer and die."

She drank the tea, strove to eat, and failed.

"It's of no use, Rachel—I can't. I feel as though it were choking me. Let me go and see my sister; then you shall tell me all."

Rachel arose and led the way down the hall, bearing a light. In dead silence she opened the parlor door and Magdalen followed her in.

The cottage parlor was very like any other cottage parlor, plainly and prettily furnished. Carpet and furniture and pictures were all very simple and bright and nice: but one ghastly object was there to chill the quiet beauty of the picture.

In the center of the floor stood a long table, draped in ghostly white. Awfully stiff and rigid, under a white sheet, could be seen the outline of what lay stark and dead thereon.

Magdalen paused on the threshold and laid her hand on Rachel's arm, her eyes fixed, large and dilated, on that ghastly sight. The dim lamplight showed her face, with its stare of white horror.

"Leave me alone, Rachel!" she said, in a hoarse whisper. "Go!"

There was that in her nursling's face the old woman dared not disobey. She turned reluctantly away and left the room.

The girl advanced and stood beside the bed. Only the soft sobbing of the October rain, the shuddering wail of the night wind and the solemn surging of the pine trees, broke the silence of the room.

With a face like snow, like marble, she drew the sheet down, and gazed upon the sister she had loved so well. It was a face wonderfully beautiful in its last dreamless sleep—more beautiful, perhaps, than it had ever been in life. The straight, delicate features were like her own; so was the mass of burnished hair, combed away from the icy brow. The hands were folded together across the bosom; the sweet, beautiful lips were closed with an ineffable expression of rest. Too solemn for words to tell was the unutterable peace of that death sleep.

"And it all ends here!" Magdalen thought. "Youth and hope and innocence! Sweetness and beauty and tenderest love, could not save her one poor hour from ruin and the grave! Oh, my sister—my sister!"

She dropped on her knees and laid her face on the marble breast. No tear fell, no sob shook her slender frame. She seemed to have passed beyond all that. The steady drip, drip, of the ceaseless rain, the mournful sighing of the wind, sounded like a dirge for the dead. So long she knelt there that old Rachel, growing alarmed, opened the door and came in.

"My child! my child!" in an awe-struck whisper, "come away. This will never do!"

The girl got up at once, pale as the dead sister lying before her, and almost as rigid. One last look and she followed the old nurse out into the kitchen. She sat down before the fire, that icy calm still over all.

"And now, Rachel," she said, "tell me the whole story."

The dead girl's sleeping child lay cozily in Rachel's lap, as she rocked to and fro in her nurse chair.

"It's a short enough story," she said, with a heavy sigh, "to contain so much misery. Let me see. It was last September, twelve months, you went away to New Haven, to school?"

"Yes."

"Well, one week after, the trouble began. Willie, you know, was not going to New York, to continue his medical studies, until December, and he spent a good deal of his time in the woods, fishing and shooting, and in the Village loitering about the hotel. It was there he met the villain who brought all our misery—a wretch for whom hanging would be a great deal too good!"

Magdalen's teeth clenched and her eyes suddenly blazed up.

"Go on," she said; "tell me his name."

"His name was Maurice Langley, and he was very handsome. Tall and fair, you know, with dark, curling hair, and a black mustache. He had come to the country for a month's fishing and Willie and he grew as intimate as brothers. Willie brought him home and your poor papa and Laura were taken with him at once. He had such winning ways, such a pleasant laugh and such a charming, offhand manner, that he took people's fancy at first sight. He could play the piano better than Laura and sing most beautiful, and he could talk to your papa like a book. He fascinated all of us the very first visit and I don't know who sang his praises loudest when he went away. It was not Laura; she said nothing; but there was a look in her sweet face that told far more than words.

"After that Mr. Langley was every day and nearly all of every day, at the house. He and Laura were always together, playing and singing, and drawing and reading. And the more we saw of him, the better we liked him, and we never tried to check this intimacy. And that month passed, and the next came, and Mr. Langley began to talk of going home. I don't know rightly where his home was, but I think in New York, where he was studying law, he told us. The middle of October he did go, shaking hands with the whole of us, the villain, and saying he would never forget the pleasant days he had spent amongst our New Hampshire hills.

"I was afraid Laura would droop and fret after him, but she didn't. She sang as blithely about the house as ever, and how was I to know she was only waiting a letter from him to follow him? That they had it all arranged beforehand? Before the month closed the letter came. Laura bade us good-night the evening that brought it, and next morning, when I went to call her to breakfast, she was gone."

There was a pause. Rachel's tears were falling fast, but Magdalen sat staring straight at the fire, with dry, glittering eyes.

"There was a note for your papa, hurried and brief, telling him she loved Mr. Langley, and was gone to be married. It was necessary, for family reasons, Mr. Langley told her, that the marriage should be strictly private. His family wished him to marry his cousin, and he dared not oppose them openly. She begged her father not to search for her; she would be well and happy and would write again as soon as she was Mr. Langley's wife.

"She never wrote again. It was a terrible suspense. Nobody would believe the story of the marriage in the village and she was disgraced forever. Willie was furious at first. He would seek out Langley and shoot him like a dog, if Laura was not his wife. But you know Willie; his rage flew over. December came; he went to New York and he had not even tried to find them.

"The next we heard he and Langley were as thick as ever. He met Langley in New York and he was Laura's husband; but Laura was only the wretched shadow of herself. They were poor and lived in a shabby boarding-house, and she was miserably dressed. Langley was no law student—nothing but a professional gambler—and in a few months he had made a professional gambler of our poor, weak boy. He wrote and wrote perpetually for money, until there was no more to write for; he was deeply in debt to Langley and others; he grew desperate; he forged Doctor Wentworth's name for two thousand dollars, was detected, arrested, tried and sentenced for six years."

Rachel's voice sank in a hoarse whisper. Magdalen's face had dropped in her hand; she never lifted it during the remainder of the story.

"That blow finished what Laura had begun. Your father dropped down in a fit when he heard it, and never left his bed after; and in September—just one year after that matchless villain came amongst us—he was laid beside your mamma in the churchyard.

"I cannot tell you how desolate I felt here alone, Magdalen. They all wanted me to send for you right away, but I hadn't the heart. I seemed to know poor Laura would come back and I waited for that.

"Early in October, one stormy night, when the wind blew a gale, and the rain fell in torrents, she came. She walked, in all the downpour, from the station, and I think that helped to give her her death blow. But she would have died anyway. She wanted nothing but to get back to the old home and die. Oh, that changed face!—so haggard, so heart-broken! My poor nursling! And so wretched and miserably dressed! She gave one scream when I told her that her father was dead and dropped down in a dead faint.

"Ah, what a wretched, wretched time it was! I never saw despair before, and I pray God I never may again. I wanted to send for you, but she cried out, in a wild, frenzied sort of way:

"'No! no! no! not for ten thousand worlds! I am not fit to breathe the same air she does! Magdalen is my name, not hers! Send for her when I am dead!'

"Once, and once only, I spoke of Langley. She had been quiet for hours, sitting crouching over the fire. At the sound of his name she started up and tossed the hair back from her face like a mad woman.

"'Don't speak of him!' she cried out; 'he is the blackest and basest villain on the face of the earth! My curse on him wherever he goes!'

"My poor Magdalen, it is terrible to have to tell you of such things. After that I never mentioned Langley's name, nor your father's, nor Willie's. I left her to herself. The few days before her last illness she spent in writing a letter. It took her a long time, she was so very weak; but she finished it at last, and told me to give it to you when she was dead and buried.

"'I have told my sister all,' she said; 'it may keep her from quite hating my memory when I am gone!'

"From that hour I could see death approaching. The doctor and the clergyman knew as well as I did she would never rise from her bed again. I wrote for you, but you came too late. Laura's earthly troubles are over."

With fast-falling tears, Rachel's story of sin and suffering closed. The rain and wind, that had made a dismal accompaniment to her dismal words, the light fall of red cinders, the ticking of the old clock, had the silence to themselves; and Magdalen cowered before the fire, her face hidden, hearing all, and never moving or looking up.