The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green [chrysanthemum read aloud TXT] 📗

XXXII. MRS. BELDEN’S NARRATIVE “Cursed, destructive Avarice, Thou everlasting foe to Love and Honor.” —Trap’s Abram. “Mischief never thrives Without the help of Woman.” —The Same.

IT will be a year next July since I first saw Mary Leavenworth. I was living at that time a most monotonous existence. Loving what was beautiful, hating what was sordid, drawn by nature towards all that was romantic and uncommon, but doomed by my straitened position and the loneliness of my widowhood to spend my days in the weary round of plain sewing, I had begun to think that the shadow of a humdrum old age was settling down upon me, when one morning, in the full tide of my dissatisfaction, Mary Leavenworth stepped across the threshold of my door and, with one smile, changed the whole tenor of my life.

This may seem exaggeration to you, especially when I say that her errand was simply one of business, she having heard I was handy with my needle; but if you could have seen her as she appeared that day, marked the look with which she approached me, and the smile with which she left, you would pardon the folly of a romantic old woman, who beheld a fairy queen in this lovely young lady. The fact is, I was dazzled by her beauty and her charms. And when, a few days after, she came again, and crouching down on the stool at my feet, said she was so tired of the gossip and tumult down at the hotel, that it was a relief to run away and hide with some one who would let her act like the child she was, I experienced for the moment, I believe, the truest happiness of my life. Meeting her advances with all the warmth her manner invited, I found her ere long listening eagerly while I told her, almost without my own volition, the story of my past life, in the form of an amusing allegory.

The next day saw her in the same place; and the next; always with the eager, laughing eyes, and the fluttering, uneasy hands, that grasped everything they touched, and broke everything they grasped.

But the fourth day she was not there, nor the fifth, nor the sixth, and I was beginning to feel the old shadow settling back upon me, when one night, just as the dusk of twilight was merging into evening gloom, she came stealing in at the front door, and, creeping up to my side, put her hands over my eyes with such a low, ringing laugh, that I started.

“You don’t know what to make of me!” she cried, throwing aside her cloak, and revealing herself in the full splendor of evening attire. “I don’t know what to make of myself. Though it seems folly, I felt that I must run away and tell some one that a certain pair of eyes have been looking into mine, and that for the first time in my life I feel myself a woman as well as a queen.” And with a glance in which coyness struggled with pride, she gathered up her cloak around her, and laughingly cried:

“Have you had a visit from a flying sprite? Has one little ray of moonlight found its way into your prison for a wee moment, with Mary’s laugh and Mary’s snowy silk and flashing diamonds? Say!” and she patted my cheek, and smiled so bewilderingly, that even now, with all the dull horror of these after-events crowding upon me, I cannot but feel something like tears spring to my eyes at the thought of it.

“And so the Prince has come for you?” I whispered, alluding to a story I had told her the last time she had visited me; a story in which a girl, who had waited all her life in rags and degradation for the lordly knight who was to raise her from a hovel to a throne, died just as her one lover, an honest peasant-lad whom she had discarded in her pride, arrived at her door with the fortune he had spent all his days in amassing for her sake.

But at this she flushed, and drew back towards the door. “I don’t know; I am afraid not. I—I don’t think anything about that. Princes are not so easily won,” she murmured.

“What! are you going?” I said, “and alone? Let me accompany you.”

But she only shook her fairy head, and replied: “No, no; that would be spoiling the romance, indeed. I have come upon you like a sprite, and like a sprite I will go.” And, flashing like the moonbeam she was, she glided out into the night, and floated away down the street.

When she next came, I observed a feverish excitement in her manner, which assured me, even plainer than the coy sweetness displayed in our last interview, that her heart had been touched by her lover’s attentions. Indeed, she hinted as much before she left, saying in a melancholy tone, when I had ended my story in the usual happy way, with kisses and marriage, “I shall never marry!” finishing the exclamation with a long-drawn sigh, that somehow emboldened me to say, perhaps because I knew she had no mother:

“And why? What reason can there be for such rosy lips saying their possessor will never marry?”