“ ‘He has met with some heavy loss,’ murmured his wife, glancing down the handsome parlors with a look such as a mother might bestow upon the face of a sick child. But I was sure she had not sounded his trouble, and in my impetuosity was about to fly to his side when we saw him pause before the image of Luxury that stands on the stair, look at it for a moment with a strange intentness, then suddenly and with a gesture of irrepressible passion, lift his arm as if he would fell it from its place. The action was so startling, Ona clutched my sleeve in terror, but he passed on and in another moment we heard him shut the door of his room.
“Would he be down to dinner? that was the next question. Ona thought not; I did not dare to think. Nevertheless it was a great relief to me when I saw him enter the dining-room with that set immovable look he sometimes wears when Ona begins one of her long and rambling streams of fashionable gossip. ‘It is nothing,’ flashed from his wife’s eyes to mine, and she lapsed at once into her most graceful self, but she nevertheless hastened her meal and I was quite prepared to observe her follow him, as with the polite excuse of weariness, he left the table before desert. I could not hear what she asked him, but his answer came distinctly to my ears from the midst of the library to which they had withdrawn. ‘It is nothing in which you have an interest, Ona. Thank heaven you do not always know the price with which the splendors you so love are bought.’ And she did not cry out, ‘O never pay such a price for any joy of mine! Sooner than cost you so dear I would live on crusts and dwell in a garret.’ No, she kept silence, and when in a few minutes later I joined her in the library, it was to find on her usually placid lips, a thin cool smile that struck like ice to my heart, and made it impossible for me to speak.
“But the hardest trial of the day was to hear Mr. Sylvester come in at eleven o’clock—he went out again immediately after dinner—and go upstairs without giving me my usual good night. It was such a grief to me I could not keep still, but hurried to the foot of the stairs in the hopes he would yet remember me and come back. But instead of that, he no sooner saw me than he threw out his hand almost as if he would push me back, and hastened on up the whole winding flight till he reached the refuge of that mysterious room of his at the top of the house.
“I could not go back to Ona after that—she had been to make a call somewhere with a young gentleman friend of hers;—yes on this very night had been to make a call—but I took advantage of the late hour to retire to my own room where for a long time I lay awake listening for his descending step and seeing, as in a vision, the startling picture of his lifted arm raised against the unconscious piece of bronze on the stair. Henceforth that statue will possess for me a still more dreadful significance.”
“It is the twenty-fifth of February. Why should I feel as if I must be sure of the exact date before I slept?”
The next extract followed close on this and was the last which Miss Belinda read.
“Mr. Sylvester seems to have recovered from his late anxiety. He does not shrink from me any more with that half bitter, half sad expression that has so long troubled and bewildered me, but draws me to his side and sits listening to my talk until I feel as if I were really of some comfort to this great and able man. Ona does not notice the change; she is all absorbed in preparing for the visit to Washington, which Mr. Sylvester has promised her.”
Miss Belinda calmly folded up the letters and locked them again in the little mahogany box, after which she covered up the embers and quietly went to bed. But next morning a letter was despatched to Mr. Sylvester which ran thus:
“Dear Mr. Sylvester:
“For the present at least you may keep Paula with you. But I am not ready to say that I think it would be for her best good to be received and acknowledged as your daughter—yet. Hoping you will appreciate the motives that actuate this decision,
“I remain, respectfully yours,
“Belinda Ann Walton.”
XV
An Adventure—Or Something More
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
Wordsworth
But to be young was very heaven.”
Hamlet
Ophelia “What means this, my lord? Hamlet Marry, this is the miching mallecho; it means mischief.”
A ride in the Central Park is an everyday matter to most people. It signifies an indolent bowling over a smooth road all alive with the glitter of passing equipages, waving ribbons and fluttering plumes, and brightened now and then by the sight of a well known face amid the general rush of old and young, plain and handsome, sad and gay countenances that flash by you in one long and brilliant procession.
But to Paula and her friend Miss Stuyvesant starting out in the early freshness of a fair April morning, it meant new life, reawakening joy, the sparkle of young leaves just loosed from the bonds of winter, the sweetness and promise of spring airs, and all the budding glory of a new year with its summer of countless roses and its autumn of incalculable glories. Not the twitter of a bird was lost to them, not the smile of an opening flower, not the welcome of a
