The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (free ebooks romance novels txt) 📕

Mr. Hawkins that the inquirer seemed not altogether on the wrong track; but he also agreed that it would be best to keep quiet until more convincing developments were forthcoming.

Another letter said that "the poor soul broke completely down when he saw Laura's picture, and declared it must be she."

Still another said:

"He seems entirely alone in the world, and his heart is so wrapped
up in this thing that I believe that if it proved a false hope, it
would kill him; I have persuaded him to wait a little while and go
west when I go."

Another letter had this paragraph in it:

"He is better one day and worse the next, and is out of his mind a
good deal of the time. Lately his case has developed a something
which is a wonder to the hired nurses, but which will not be much of
a marvel to you if you have read medical philosophy much. It is
this: his lost memory returns to him when he is delirious, and goes
away again when he is himself-just as old Canada Joe used to talk
the French patois of his boyhood in the delirium of typhus fever,
though he could not do it when his mind was clear. Now this poor
gentleman's memory has always broken down before he reached the
explosion of the steamer; he could only remember starting up the
river with his wife and child, and he had an idea that there was a
race, but he was not certain; he could not name the boat he was on;
there was a dead blank of a month or more that supplied not an item
to his recollection. It was not for me to assist him, of course.
But now in his delirium it all comes out: the names of the boats,
every incident of the explosion, and likewise the details of his
astonishing escapethat is, up to where, just as a yawl-boat was
approaching him (he was clinging to the starboard wheel of the
burning wreck at the time), a falling timber struck him on the head.
But I will write out his wonderful escape in full to-morrow or next
day. Of course the physicians will not let me tell him now that our
Laura is indeed his childthat must come later, when his health is
thoroughly restored. His case is not considered dangerous at all;
he will recover presently, the doctors say. But they insist that he
must travel a little when he gets wellthey recommend a short sea
voyage, and they say he can be persuaded to try it if we continue to
keep him in ignorance and promise to let him see L. as soon as he
returns."

The letter that bore the latest date of all, contained this clause:

"It is the most unaccountable thing in the world; the mystery
remains as impenetrable as ever; I have hunted high and low for him,
and inquired of everybody, but in vain; all trace of him ends at
that hotel in New York; I never have seen or heard of him since,
up to this day; he could hardly have sailed, for his name does not
appear upon the books of any shipping office in New York or Boston
or Baltimore. How fortunate it seems, now, that we kept this thing
to ourselves; Laura still has a father in you, and it is better for
her that we drop this subject here forever."

That was all. Random remarks here and there, being pieced together gave Laura a vague impression of a man of fine presence, abort forty-three or forty-five years of age, with dark hair and eyes, and a slight limp in his walkit was not stated which leg was defective. And this indistinct shadow represented her father. She made an exhaustive search for the missing letters, but found none. They had probably been burned; and she doubted not that the ones she had ferreted out would have shared the same fate if Mr. Hawkins had not been a dreamer, void of method, whose mind was perhaps in a state of conflagration over some bright new speculation when he received them.

She sat long, with the letters in her lap, thinkingand unconsciously freezing. She felt like a lost person who has traveled down a long lane in good hope of escape, and, just as the night descends finds his progress barred by a bridge-less river whose further shore, if it has one, is lost in the darkness. If she could only have found these letters a month sooner! That was her thought. But now the dead had carried their secrets with them. A dreary, melancholy settled down upon her. An undefined sense of injury crept into her heart. She grew very miserable.

She had just reached the romantic agethe age when there is a sad sweetness, a dismal comfort to a girl to find out that there is a mystery connected with her birth, which no other piece of good luck can afford. She had more than her rightful share of practical good sense, but still she was human; and to be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of his heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead that seem greater.

The recent wearing days and nights of watching, and the wasting grief that had possessed her, combined with the profound depression that naturally came with the reaction of idleness, made Laura peculiarly susceptible at this time to romantic impressions. She was a heroine, now, with a mysterious father somewhere. She could not really tell whether she wanted to find him and spoil it all or not; but still all the traditions of romance pointed to the making the attempt as the usual and necessary, course to follow; therefore she would some day begin the search when opportunity should offer.

Now a former thought struck hershe would speak to Mrs. Hawkins. And naturally enough Mrs. Hawkins appeared on the stage at that moment.

She said she knew allshe knew that Laura had discovered the secret that Mr. Hawkins, the elder children, Col. Sellers and herself had kept so long and so faithfully; and she cried and said that now that troubles had begun they would never end; her daughter's love would wean itself away from her and her heart would break. Her grief so wrought upon Laura that the girl almost forgot her own troubles for the moment in her compassion for her mother's distress. Finally Mrs. Hawkins said:

"Speak to me, childdo not forsake me. Forget all this miserable talk. Say I am your mother!I have loved you so long, and there is no other. I am your mother, in the sight of God, and nothing shall ever take you from me!"

All barriers fell, before this appeal. Laura put her arms about her mother's neck and said:

"You are my mother, and always shall be. We will be as we have always been; and neither this foolish talk nor any other thing shall part us or make us less to each other than we are this hour."

There was no longer any sense of separation or estrangement between them. Indeed their love seemed more perfect now than it had ever been before. By and by they went down stairs and sat by the fire and talked long and earnestly about Laura's history and the letters. But it transpired that Mrs. Hawkins had never known of this correspondence between her husband and Major Lackland. With his usual consideration for his wife, Mr. Hawkins had shielded her from the worry the matter would have caused her.

Laura went to bed at last with a mind that had gained largely in tranquility and had lost correspondingly in morbid romantic exaltation. She was pensive, the next day, and subdued; but that was not matter for remark, for she did not differ from the mournful friends about her in that respect. Clay and Washington were the same loving and admiring brothers now that they had always been. The great secret was new to some of the younger children, but their love suffered no change under the wonderful revelation.

It is barely possible that things might have presently settled down into their old rut and the mystery have lost the bulk of its romantic sublimity in Laura's eyes, if the village gossips could have quieted down. But they could not quiet down and they did not. Day after day they called at the house, ostensibly upon visits of condolence, and they pumped away at the mother and the children without seeming to know that their questionings were in bad taste. They meant no harm they only wanted to know. Villagers always want to know.

The family fought shy of the questionings, and of course that was high testimony "if the Duchess was respectably born, why didn't they come out and prove it?why did they, stick to that poor thin story about picking her up out of a steamboat explosion?"

Under this ceaseless persecution, Laura's morbid self-communing was renewed. At night the day's contribution of detraction, innuendo and malicious conjecture would be canvassed in her mind, and then she would drift into a course of thinking. As her thoughts ran on, the indignant tears would spring to her eyes, and she would spit out fierce little ejaculations at intervals. But finally she would grow calmer and say some comforting disdainful thingsomething like this:

"But who are they?Animals! What are their opinions to me? Let them talkI will not stoop to be affected by it. I could hate. Nonsensenobody I care for or in any way respect is changed toward me, I fancy."

She may have supposed she was thinking of many individuals, but it was not soshe was thinking of only one. And her heart warmed somewhat, too, the while. One day a friend overheard a conversation like this: and naturally came and told her all about it:

"Ned, they say you don't go there any more. How is that?"

"Well, I don't; but I tell you it's not because I don't