University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.

My mother soon afterward gave her
first party. It was attended by many
of the rich and the fashionable of both
sexes; and there was the glare of light,
the presence of beautiful women, and the
wine-cup and the dance. The festival
was prolonged till daybreak, and another
followed soon. The atmosphere was new
to me. At first I was amazed, then intoxicated,
and then—corrupted. Anxious
to bury the memory of my shame, to forget
how lost and abandoned I was, to
drown every thought of my childhood's
home, and of Ernest, who never could be
mine, soon, from a silent spectator, I became
a participant in the revels, which,
night after night, were held beneath my
mother's roof. The persons who mingled

in these scenes were rich husbands,
who came accompanied by other men's
wives—wives who had sacrificed themselves
in marriage, for the sake of wealth,
to husbands twice their age; and these
came with the husbands of other women.
In a word, all that came to the mansion
and shared in its orgies, were either the
victims or the criminals of society—of a
bad social world, which on every hand
contrasts immense wealth and voluptuous
indulgence with fathomless poverty
and withering want, and which too often
makes of a marriage but the cloak for
infamy and prostitution.

—I shared in every revel, and lost myself
in their maddening excitement. I
was admired, flattered, and elevated, at
last, to the position of presiding genius
of these scenes. I became the “Midnight
Queen.” But let the curtain fall.

One night I noticed a new visitor—a
remarkably handsome gentleman—who
sat near me at the supper-table, and
whose hair and eyes and whiskers were
as black as jet. He regarded me very
earnestly, and with a look which I could
not define.

“Don't think me impertinent,” he
said; and then added, in a lower voice,
“for I am your father, Frank. Don't
call me Van Huyden—my name is Tarleton
now.”

Fearful that I might one day encounter
Ernest, I wrote him a long letter,
breathing something of the tone of my
early days—for I forgot for awhile my
utterly hopeless condition—and informing
him that mother and myself were
about to sail for Europe, I wished him
to believe that I was in a foreign land.

And one night, while the revel was
progressing in the rooms below, Wareham
entered my room, and interested
me in the description which he gave of
a young lord, who wished to be introduced
to me.

“Young, handsome, and pale as if from
thought. The very style of man you
admire, my pet.”

“Let him come up,” I answered, and
Wareham retired.

I stood before the mirror as the young
lord entered, and as I turned I saw the
face of my betrothed husband, Ernest
Walworth.

Upon the horror of that moment I
need not dwell.

He fell insensible to the floor, and was
carried from the room, and the house, to
the carriage, by Wareham, who had led
him to the place.

I have never seen the face of Ernest
since that hour.

I received one letter from him—one
only—in which he set forth the circumstances
which induced him to visit my
house, and in which he bade me “farewell!”

He is now in a foreign land. The
bones of his father rest in the village
church-yard. The cottage home is desolate.

Wareham died suddenly, about a year
after our “marriage.” The doctors said
that his death was caused by an overdose
of morphine, administered by himself
in mistake. He died in our house;
and as mother and myself stood over his
coffin, in the darkened room, the day before
the funeral, I noticed that she regarded
first myself, and then the face of
the dead profligate, with a look full of
meaning.

“Don't you think, dear mother,” I
whispered, “that the death of this good
man was very singular?”

She made no reply, but still her face
wore that meaning look.

“Wouldn't it be strange mother, if
your daughter, improving on your lessons,
had added another feature to her
accomplishments—had, from the Midnight
Queen”—I lowered my voice—
“become the Midnight Poisoner?”

I met her gaze boldly—and she turned
her face away.

He died without even a dog to moan
for him, and his immense wealth was inherited
by a deserted and much-abused
wife, who lived in a foreign land.

Immense wealth in him bore its natural
flower—a life of shameless indulgence
ending in a miserable death.

I did not shed very bitter tears at his
funeral. Hatred is not the word to express
the feeling with which I regard his
memory.

Soon afterwards my mother was taken
ill, and wasted rapidly to death. Hers
was an awful death-bed. The candle
was burning to its socket, and mingled
its rays with the pale moonlight which
shone through the window-curtains. Her
brown hair, streaked with gray, falling
to her shoulders, her form terribly emaciated,

and her eyes glaring in her
shrunken face, she started up in her bed
and clutched my hands in hers, and—
begged me to forgive her.

My heart was stone. I could not frame
one forgiving word. As her chilled hands
clutched mine, she rapidly went over the
dark story of her life—how, from an innocent
girl, she had been hardened into
the thing she was—and again, her eyes
glaring in my face, she sought my forgiveness.

“I forgive you, mother,” I said slowly,
and she died.

My father was not present at her
death, nor did he attend her funeral.

As for myself—what has the future in
store for me?

O, for rest! O, for forgiveness! O, for
a quiet sleep beneath the graveyard sod!

And with that aspiration for rest, forgiveness,
peace—uttered with all the
yearning of a heart sick to the core of
life, and all that life can inflict or give—
ended the manuscript of Frances Van
Huyden, the Midnight Queen.

—We will now proceed to give the
events of her life after the period comprised
in her autobiography.