The Unseen Bridgegroom by May Agnes Fleming (books to read for self improvement TXT) 📕

but I've been in lunatic asylums before now, and I never yet knew one of 'em to admit there was anything the matter with 'em."

And with this cruel speech, Mrs. Susan Sharpe, keeping her eyes anywhere but upon the young lady's face, lifted the tray and turned to go.

"Is there anything I can do for you, miss?" she said, pausing at the door. "Is there anything nice you would like for supper?"

But Mollie did not reply. Utterly broken down by fasting, and imprisonment, and solitude, she had flung herself passionately on the floor, and burst out into a wild storm of hysterical weeping.

"I'm very sorry for you, Miss Dane," the nurse said for the benefit of the eavesdropper without; "but my duty's my duty, and I must do it. I'll fetch you up your supper presently--a cup of tea will cure the 'stericks."

She opened the door. Mrs. Oleander, at the head of the staircase, was making a great show of having just come up.

"They'll be the death of me yet--those stairs!" she panted. "I often tell my son I'm not fitted to mount up and down a dozen times a day, now in my old age; but, la! what do young men care?"

"Very true, ma'am," replied the imperturbable nurse to this somewhat obscure speech.

"And how's your patient?" continued the old lady.

"Very bad, ma'am--'stericky and wild-like. I left her crying, poor soul!"

"Crying! For what?"

"Because I wouldn't help her to escape, poor dear!" said Mrs. Sharpe in a tone of commiseration. "She's greatly to be pitied."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Oleander, carelessly; "you couldn't help her, you know, even if you would. There's Peter, and Sally, and me on the watch all day long, and from nightfall we let loose Tiger and Nero. They'd tear you both to pieces in five minutes. Tell her so, poor creature, if she talks any more of escape."

"I will, ma'am," responded the respectful Mrs. Sharpe.

Mrs. Oleander ascended the stairs and went to her own room, very well satisfied with the submissive and discreet new nurse; and the new nurse descended to the kitchen, and prepared her patient's supper of tea and toast, delicate sliced ham, and raspberry preserves.

The dusk of the sunless afternoon was falling out-of-doors ere her preparations were completed, and the stair-ways and halls of the dreary house were in deepest gloom as she returned to her patient's room.

She found that unhappy little patient lying prone on her face on the floor, as still, as motionless as if death had hushed forever that impulsive heart. She made no sign of having heard when Mrs. Sharpe entered--she never moved nor looked up until the nurse set the tray on the table, and stooping over her, gave her a gentle shake.

"Miss Dane," she said in her stolid tones, "please to get up. Here's your supper."

And Mollie, with a low, wailing cry, raised her wan face and fixed her blue eyes on the woman's face with a look of passionate reproach.

"Why don't you let me alone? Why don't you leave me to die? Oh, if I had but the courage to die by my own hand!"

"Please to take your supper," was Mrs. Sharpe's practical answer to this insane outburst. "Don't be foolish."

She lifted Mollie bodily up, led her over, seated her in her chair, poured her out a cup of tea, and made her drink it, before that half-distracted creature knew what she was about.

"Now take another," said sensible Mrs. Sharpe; "tea will do you a power of good; and eat something; there's nothing like good, wholesome victuals for curing people of notions."

Wearied out in body and mind, Mollie let herself be catered for in submissive silence. She took to her new nurse as she had never taken to any one else in this horrid house. She had a kindly face, had Mrs. Susan Sharpe.

"You feel better now, don't you?" said that worthy woman, the meal completed. "Suppose you go to bed? You look tired. Let me undress you and tuck you in."

And again willful Mollie submitted, and dropped asleep as soon as her head was fairly on the pillow. Motherly Mrs. Sharpe "tucked her in" and kissed her, and then, with the remains of the supper, went down-stairs to partake of her own evening repast.

Mrs. Oleander took tea with her servants, and was very gossipy indeed. So, too, was old Sully; so, likewise, was old Peter. The beverage that exhilarates seemed to lighten their aged hearts wonderfully; but Mrs. Susan Sharpe did not thaw out under the potent spell of the best English breakfast tea. Silent and attentive, she ate, and drank, and listened, and responded when directly addressed; and, when it was over, helped Sally to clear up, and then pounced upon a basket of undarned hose under the table, and worked away with a will. Her energy and good-will, and the admirable manner in which she filled up the holes in the stockings with wondrous crisscross work, quite won the hearts of both Sally and Sally's mistress.

The clock struck nine; work was laid aside; Mrs. Oleander read a chapter aloud out of the Bible, and they then all adjourned to their respective chambers. Doors and windows had been secured at nightfall, Tiger and Nero liberated--their hoarse, deep growls every now and then making night hideous.

Up in her own apartment, Mrs. Susan Sharpe's first act was to pull up the curtain and seat herself by the window. The night was pitch dark--moonless, starless--with a sighing wind and a dully moaning sea. It was the desolation of utter desolation, down in that dismal sea-side prison--the two huge dogs below the only living things to be heard.

"It's enough to drive any one mad, this horrible place," said Mrs. Susan Sharpe, to herself; "and the very weather seems in the conspiracy against us."

She took her lamp as she spoke, and held it close to the window, with an anxious, listening face. Its solitary red ray streamed far out over the black road.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes passed, then a sound rent the night silence--a long, shrill, sharp whistle.

"Thank the Lord!" said Mrs. Susan Sharpe. "I thought he wouldn't fail."

She dropped the curtain, set the light on the table, knelt down and said her prayers, rose up and undressed herself; and then this extraordinary female went to bed and to sleep.


CHAPTER XX.

HUGH INGELOW KEEPS HIS PROMISE.

Mrs. Susan Sharpe was up with the lark, or, rather, with the sea-gulls whirling and shrieking out on the tossing waters. The early morning sun streamed in the little chamber; the wind wailed plaintively still, and the dull tramp, tramp of the multitudinous waves kept up their ceaseless refrain.

All was yet still in the lone farmhouse--no living thing was stirring, not even the rats, that had held high carnival all night. Down in the back yard and front garden, Tiger and Nero prowled about their beat, surlily growling at the tossing trees, and were monarchs of all they surveyed.

Mrs. Sharpe was not an imaginative person, luckily. She got up and made her toilet, and splashed herself briskly in a basin of cold water. The effect of these ablutions was singular--they effected a total cure of her inflamed eyelids.

More singular still, a wig of red hair stood on the dressing-table, and Mrs. Sharpe's cranium was adorned with a respectable growth of dark, glossy, brown hair.

"If they only saw me now," said Mrs. Sharpe to herself, with a chuckle, "I rather think they'd open their old eyes!"

She went to work artistically--reddened her eyelids over again, carefully adjusted her wig, set her cap on it, fixed her spectacles on her nose, and surveyed herself complacently in the cracked chimney-glass.

"You'll do," said Mrs. Sharpe, nodding familiarly to her image: "You're as ugly as if somebody had bespoke you. I only wonder how that little unfortunate can take to such a looking object--and she does take to me, poor dear! And now I'll write to him. He's sure to be along in the course of the morning."

Taking from her capacious pocket a blank-book and a lead-pencil, Mrs. Susan Sharpe sat down and wrote.

And this is what Mrs. Sharpe wrote:

"She's here, and safe and well, and don't know me no more than the dead. But I can't get her out. Two old women and one old man are on the watch all day long. I daren't sneeze but they know it. And before they go off the watch there's two big, savage dogs goes on, and prowl about all night. I don't know what to do; tell me. She's awful down-hearted, and cries and goes on. I heard your whistle last night. Her room is next to mine--the windows to the left. If you walk on the beach she'll see you; she sits at the window all day. Doctor O. is going to Cuba in a week, and going to take her with him; so you had better be quick."

Mrs. Sharpe read her own composition over two or three times, with a satisfied look.

"I think that will do," she murmured. "Trust him to find a way out of a fix, and we're in a fix now, if there ever was one. Drat the dogs! If it wasn't for them I could get on myself."

Mrs. Sharpe was not a rapid scribe. It had taken her a considerable while to write this, and the household was astir. She folded it up in the smallest possible dimensions, and wedged it into her thimble.

"A brass thimble makes a good, strong envelope," said the nurse, with a grim smile. "And now to begin my day's work."

She quitted her own apartment and went into that of her charge. Mollie was still asleep--sleeping like a babe, with lips apart, and cheeks softly flushed, and loose, golden hair falling in burnished masses over the pillow. Involuntarily Mrs. Sharpe paused.

"She looks like a picture," she thought. "No wonder he's crazy in love."

The sound of the opening door awoke the light sleeper. She rose up on her elbow and stared around. The nurse advanced with a propitiatory smile.

"Good-morning, miss," she said, cheerfully. "I hope you had a nice sleep."

"Oh, is it you?" said Mollie. "I was dreaming I was back home with guardy, and Sir Roger, and poor Hugh, and here I am still. Oh!" in a voice of bitter anguish, "why did you awake me?"

"My poor dear," said the nurse, touched, "I didn't know, you know, or I wouldn't. There! don't think about it now, but get up, like a good girl, and wash and dress yourself, and have your breakfast comfortable. Things won't be always like this, you know."

Mollie looked wistfully at her, but Mrs. Sharpe wasn't going to commit herself, with no certainty but that listening ears were at the door.

She assisted the poor prisoner with her toilet, combed out and curled the beautiful, abundant hair, and made her as pretty as a picture.

"She's lost her rosy cheeks, and is failed away to nothing," mused the nurse. "Only for that, she'd be the loveliest thing the sun shines on."

"And now you're fixed, my pretty dear," said Mrs. Sharpe, "I'll go down and get your breakfast. Nobody ever feels right in the morning on an empty stomach."

Down in the kitchen, Mrs. Sharpe found things in a lively state of preparation--coffee boiling, steak broiling, toast making, and muffins baking.