University of Virginia Library

41. CHAPTER XLI.
MRS. SEYMOUR AND MAGDALEN.

HAVING locked the door, Magdalen brought a chair to
Mrs. Seymour, and said:

“You are out of breath; sit there, but let me
stand. I should suffocate if I were sitting down. I feel as if
a hundred pairs of lungs were rising in my throat.”

She was paler now than when Mrs. Seymour first met her in
the parlor, and her eyes flashed and sparkled and glowed as
only one pair of eyes had ever done before in Mrs. Seymour's
presence, and for an instant a doubt of the young girl's sanity
crossed that lady's mind, and she glanced uneasily at the door,
as if contemplating an escape. But Magdalen was standing
before her, and Magdalen's eyes held her fast. She dared not
go now if she could, and she asked nervously what Miss Lennox
wanted of her.

“I want you to tell me what it is about the child of whom
Mrs. Grey talks so much. Was there a child born after Alice,
say nineteen or twenty years ago, and did it die, or was it lost;
and if so, when, and how; and was Mrs. Grey here when it was
born, or was she somewhere else, in Cincinnati or vicinity?
Tell me that. Tell me all about it.”

Mrs. Seymour was very proud and haughty, and very reticent
with regard to their family matters, especially the matters pertaining
to her brother's marriage and his wife's insanity. She never
talked of them to any one except Guy, from whom she had no
secrets; and her most intimate friends, the Dagons and Draggons
of New York society, knew nothing except what rumor
told them of the demented woman who made Beechwood a
prison rather than a paradise. How, then, was she startled,
and shocked, and astonished, when this young girl, — this hired
companion for her niece, — demanded of her a full recital of

what she had never told her most familiar friends. Not asked
for it, but demanded it as a right, and enforced the demand with
burning eyes and the half-menacing attitude of one determined
to have her way. Ordinarily Mrs. Seymour would have put
this girl down, as she termed it, and given her a lesson in good
breeding and manners, but there was something about her now
which precluded all that, and after a moment she said:

“Your conduct is very strange, Miss Lennox. Very strange
indeed, and what I did not expect from you. I suppose I may
be permitted to ask your right to a story which few have ever
heard?”

“Certainly,” Magdalen replied; “question my right as much
as you like, only tell me what I want to know. Was there a
child, and did it die?”

“There was a child, and it did die,” Mrs. Seymour said, and
Magdalen, nothing daunted, continued: “How do you know
it died? Did you see it dead? She says she left it in the cars;
she told me so to-day. Oh, Mrs. Seymour, tell me, please
what you know about that child before I, too, go mad!”

Magdalen was kneeling now before Mrs. Seymour, on whose
lap her hands were clasped, and her beautiful face was all aglow
with her excitement as she continued:

“I know a girl who was left in the cars somewhere in Ohio
almost nineteen years ago; — left with a young boy, and the
mother, who took the train at Cincinnati, never came back, and
he could not find her. He thinks she was crazy. She had
very black hair and eyes, he said, and was dressed in mourning.
Perhaps it was Mrs. Grey. Did she come from Cincinnati
about that time? It was April, 18—, when the baby I mean
was left in the cars.”

Mrs. Seymour was surprised out of her usual reserve, and
when Magdalen paused for her reply, she said:

“My brother's wife came from Cincinnati in May, not
April; but we-thought she had been a long time on the road.
As to its being 18—, I'm not so sure; but it was nineteen

years ago in May, I know, for husband died the next July, and
mother the winter after.”

“And what of the child? And how did it happen that Mrs.
Grey was left to travel alone? Where had she been, and where
was Mr. Grey?” Magdalen asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied,
“My brother was in Europe, — sent there by unhappy domestic
troubles at home. Laura had been in Cincinnati, and
came back to Beechwood after the death of her mother and
the child, of whose birth we had never heard.”

“Never heard of its birth!” Magdalen exclaimed. “Then,
perhaps, you do not know certainly of its death. She says she
left it in the cars with a boy, and Roger was a boy; the child
I told you of was left with him.”

“Who was that child, and where is she?” Mrs. Seymonr
asked, and Magdalen replied, “I am that child, and didn't you
say I reminded you of some one. Didn't Guy and Alice and
your brother say the same; and I, too, can see the resemblance
to that crazy woman in myself.”

Her eyes were full of tears, and as she looked up at Mrs. Seymour
her head poised itself upon one side just as Laura's had
done a thousand times in the days gone by. Mrs. Seymour was
interested now; that familiar look in Magdalen's face had always
puzzled her, and as she saw her flushed, and excited, and eager,
she was struck with the strong resemblance she bore to Laura
as she was when she first came to Beechwood, and more to herself
than to Magdalen she said:

“It is very strange, but still it cannot be, — though that child
business was always more or less a mystery to me. Miss Lennox,”
and she turned to Magdalen, “would you mind telling
me the particulars of your having been left in the car?”

Very rapidly Magdalen repeated the story of her desertion as
she had heard it from Roger, while Mrs. Seymour listened
intently and seemed a good deal moved by the description
given of the mother.

“Was there nothing about you by which you might be identified?
That is, did they keep no article of dress?” she asked,

and Magdalen sprang up, exclaiming, “Yes, — the dress I wore;
a crimson delaine, dotted with black. I have it with me now.”

“A crimson delaine, dotted with black,” Mrs. Seymour
repeated, while her hands began to tremble nervously and her
voice to grow a little unsteady. “There was such a dress in
Laura's satchel; baby's dress, she told us, and Alice has it in
her drawer.”

“Get it, get it, and we will compare the two,” Magdalen
cried, and seizing Mrs. Seymour's hand she dragged rather than
led her to the door of Alice's room; then, going hastily to her
trunk, she took from it the dress which she had worn to Millbank.
“Here it is,” she cried, turning to Mrs. Seymour, who
came in with another dress, at sight of which Magdalen uttered
a wild exultant cry, while every particle of color faded from Mrs.
Seymour's face, and her eyes wore a frightened kind of look.
The dresses were alike! The same material, the same size,
the same style, except that Mrs. Seymour's was low in the neck,
while Magdalen's was high, and what was still more confirmatory
that they had belonged to the same person, the buttons
were alike, and Magdalen pointed out to the astonished woman
the same peculiarity about the button holes and a portion of
the work upon the dresses. The person who made them must
have been left-handed, as was indicated by the hems where left-handed
stitches would show so plainly.

“I am astonished, I am confounded, I am bewildered, I feel
like one in a dream,” Mrs. Seymour repeated to herself.

Then she dropped panting into a chair, and wiping the perspiration
from her face, continued:

“The coincidence is most remarkable; the dresses are alike;
and still it is no proof. Was there nothing else?”

“Yes. Do you recognize this? Did you ever see it before?”
Magdalen said, holding up the little locket which had
been fastened about her neck when she came to Millbank.

Mrs. Seymour took it in her hands and examined it closely,
then passed it back with the remark, “I never saw it before, to
my knowledge.”

“But the initials, `L. G.' — did you notice those?” Magdalen
continued, and then Mrs. Seymour took the locket again,
and glancing at the lettering whispered rather than said aloud:

“`L. G.' That stands for Laura Grey. It may be. I wish
Arthur was here, for I don't know what to think or do.”

“You can at least tell me about the child,” Magdalen persisted,
and Mrs. Seymour, who by this time was considerably
shaken out of her usual reticence and reserve, replied, “Yes,
I can do that, trusting to your honor as a lady never to divulge
what I may tell you of our family affairs. My brother always
had a penchant for pretty faces, and while he was young had
several affairs du cœur which came to nothing. When he was
forty, or thereabouts, he went to Cincinnati, where he stayed a
long time, and at last startled us with the announcement of his
marriage with Laura Clayton, a young girl of seventeen, whose
beauty, he said, surpassed anything he had ever seen. She
was not of high blood, as we held blood, he wrote, but she was
wholly respectable, and pure, and sweet, and tolerably well
educated, and he wanted us to lay aside our prejudices and
receive her as his wife should be received. I was in favor of
doing so, though perhaps this feeling was owing in part to my
husband's sensible reasoning and partly to the fact that I did
did not live here then and would not be obliged to come in
daily contact with her. My home was in New York, and so I
only heard from time to time of the doings at Beechwood. It
transpired afterward that Laura's mother was a widow, who
lived much by herself, without relatives and only a few acquaintances.
She had come from New Orleans the year before,
and bought a house and quite a large lot of land in the
suburbs of Cincinnati. There was Spanish blood in her veins,
and it shows itself in Laura. The mother did some plain
sewing for Arthur, who in that way saw the daughter and finally
married her against her mother's wishes. I think Mrs. Clayton
was a sensible woman, or perhaps she feared that Arthur only
sought her daughter's ruin; for she tried to keep them apart,
and so made the matter worse and drove them into a clandestine

marriage. Mother and sister Clarissa were here then.
Clarissa was never married, and from her I learned the most I
know about the trouble. She deeply regretted afterward the
course they pursued toward Laura, whom they did not understand,
and whose life they made so wretched with their coldness
and pride. She was naturally high-spirited, but she bore patiently
for a long time whatever they laid upon her and tried, I believe,
to please them in all things. Clarissa herself told me that the girl
never really turned upon them, except as her eyes would sometimes
blaze with anger, until Alice was born, and mother wanted
her put out to a wet nurse, who lived so far away that for Laura
to see her baby every day was impossible. Then she rebelled
openly, and there was a terrible scene, but mother carried her
point, as she usually did when she had Arthur where she could
talk to him. Laura fought like a tigress when the last moment
came, and mother took the baby from her by force, and then
locked her in her room for fear she would go down to the
river and drown herself, as she threatened to do. Arthur was
in New York, or I think he would have interfered when he saw
how it affected Laura. I was sorry for the poor girl when I
heard of it from Clarissa. I had lost a dear little baby and
could sympathize with Laura. I think it makes a woman
harder and less considerate not to have a husband or children
of her own, and Clarissa had neither.”

Mrs. Seymour forgot that her mother had both husband and
children, and that therefore the thing which would excuse Clarissa
could not be applied to her. But Magdalen did not forget
it, and her fists were involuntarily clinched as if to smite
the hard old woman who had torn Laura's baby from her.

“Does Alice know this?” she asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied,
“She does not, of course. There could be no reason
for harrowing up her feelings with a recital of the past, and I
hardly know why I am telling you the story so fully as I am.”

“Never mind, go on;” Magdalen exclaimed eagerly, and
Mrs. Seymour continued:

“After the baby went away a kind of melancholy mood came

over Laura and she would sit for hours and even days without
speaking to any one; then she would have fits of crying, and
again was irritable and quarrelsome, so that it was a trial to
live with her. After two or three months she ceased to speak
of her child, and when Arthur offered to take her to see it flew
into so fierce a passion that he took the next train to New
York and left her with mother.

“It was a habit of his to go away from anything disagreeable,
and most of his time was spent from home. He was always
very fickle. To possess a thing was equivalent to his tiring of
it, and even before Alice's birth he was weary of his young
wife; and so matters went on from bad to worse till Alice was
nearly a year old, and Arthur began to talk of going abroad,
while Laura proposed a separation, or that she should be allowed
to go to Cincinnati while her husband was away. They
would all be happier, she said; and his mother and Clarissa
favored the plan. Arthur consented, and went with her himself
to Cincinnati, and settled a yearly allowance upon her,
and at her mother's request bought three or four vacant
lots which adjoined hers and were for sale, and which she
wanted to hold so as to prevent shanties from being built upon
them.”

“And didn't Mrs. Grey see her baby before she went?”
Magdalen asked, and Mrs. Seymour replied:

“Yes, once. It was brought to the house, but she took
little notice of it, and said it belonged to the Greys, not to her.
We think now she was crazy then, though they did not suspect
it at the time. She expressed no regret whatever when
Arthur left her, but on the contrary seemed relieved to have
him go. He sailed for Europe the next week, and was gone a
year and a half, or more. Laura wrote to him quite regularly
at first, but never held any communication with Beechwood.
After a while there was a break in her letters, and when at last
she wrote she told him something of which he had no suspicion
at the time of his leaving home. He ought to have come back
to her then, but he did not, though he sent her money and advised

her to return to Beechwood. This she would not do.
She preferred to stay with her mother, she said; and he heard
no more from her for three or four months, when she wrote a
few hurried lines, telling him her baby Madeline died when she
was four weeks old, and adding that she presumed he would
not care, as it would save him the trouble of taking the child
from her as he had taken Alice. That roused him a little to a
sense of his duty, and he wrote kindly to her and told her he
was sorry, and advised her again to return to Beechwood, where
he said he would join her. To this she did not reply for a long
time, and when at last she wrote she said that her mother was
dead, and that after visiting a friend she was going back to
Beechwood. The next he heard from her she was here at
Beechwood, where she had arrived wholly unexpected by
mother and Clarissa, who did not know that she was coming,
and who judged that she must have been weeks on the road.
Her baggage was lost, and she had nothing with her but a
little satchel, in which was a child's dress and a few other
articles. She was dressed in black, and told them her
mother was dead, but said nothing of the child of whose birth
they had never heard, she having insisted that Arthur should
not tell them of it. She was very quiet for a few days, never
speaking unless spoken to, and then she did not always answer.
Occasionally they heard her muttering to herself, `One is
dead, and one is safe. They will never find it, — never,' but
what she meant, they could not guess.

“Alice was spending a few days with her foster-mother up
the river, and did not return till Laura had been home a
week. In all that time she had never mentioned her child, and
when at last she came, and Clarissa said to her, `Your baby is
here, Laura. Would you like to see her?' she sprang to her
feet and her eyes glared like a maniac's.

“`Baby was hid,' she said. `Baby was gone where they
could not find it.'

“Then her mood changed, and she raved for the baby till
Alice was brought to her; but that only made her worse, and

she became perfectly furious, telling them this was not the
baby whom she had lost, and whom she insisted upon their
finding.

“Clarissa wrote at once to Arthur, who hastened home, finding
his mother and sister at their wit's end, and his wife raving
mad, and calling continually for the baby she had lost, or hid.
That was her constant theme — `lost, or hid, or left somewhere.'
Arthur did his best to soothe her, telling her the
baby was dead, and asking if she did not remember writing to
him about it. But it did no good. Her reply was always the
same: `One is dead, and one is not.'

“For hours she would sit repeating these words in a kind of
moaning, half sobbing way, `one is dead, and one is not;' and
never from that time has she known a rational moment. Hunting
out Alice's cradle, she took it to her room, and rocked it day
and night, saying her lost baby was in it, and raving fearfully if
the family made a noise in the room.

“This annoyed Arthur terribly. He likes quiet, and ease, and
luxury, and, as he could not have these in his own house, he
sought them elsewhere, and has travelled almost over the world.
Twice Laura has been in a private asylum. She was there all
the time we were abroad; but after our return Alice begged so
hard for her to be allowed to come to Beechwood, that Arthur
brought her back, and will never move her again.

“Mother died the winter after Laura's return, and Clarissa
the year following. As my husband was dead, and I alone in
the world, I came here to care for my brother and Alice. Poor
girl! Her life has been a sad one, though she knows nothing,
or comparatively nothing, of the early domestic trouble between
her parents, and how her mother was received at Beechwood.”

Mrs. Seymour paused here, and Magdalen, who had listened
eagerly, asked, “If that child which died when it was four
week sold had lived, how old would it have been when Mr. Grey
came home?”

Mrs. Seymour could hardly tell, for the reason that in her

letter to her husband Laura did not give the date of its birth,
but as nearly as they could judge it must have been nine or
ten months old, possibly more.

“Yes,” Magdalen said; “and the dress in the satchel, — did
it never occur to you that it could not have been made for a
four weeks' old baby. It was meant for a larger child. And did
you never think there might be a meaning in the words, `One
is dead, and one is not,' Mrs. Seymour?” and Magdalen grew
more earnest and vehement. “There must have been two
children instead of one, — twins, one of whom died and the
other she left in the cars. I know it, I believe it. I shall prove
it yet. She has always talked to me of two, and one she said
was Madeline and one was Magdalen, and Mr. Irving told me
that the woman in the cars called me something which sounded
like Magdalen. Don't you see it? Can't you understand how
it all might be?”

Mrs. Seymour was confounded and bewildered, and answered
faintly, “Oh, I don't know; I wish Arthur was here.”

“I am going to him,” Magdalen exclaimed, starting to her
feet, — “going at once, and have him help me solve this mystery.
Alice must not know till I come back, and not then, if I fail. I
shall start for Cincinnati to-morrow. A woman can oftentimes
find out things which a man cannot. Do you think your nephew
will go with me?”

She talked so fast, and with so much assurance, that Mrs. Seymour
was insensibly won to think as she did and assent to whatever
she suggested; and the result was that in less than half an
hour's time Guy, who had been invited up to Magdalen's room,
had heard the whole of the strange story. He believed it, and indorsed
Magdalen at once, and hurrahed for his new cousin, and
winding his arm around her waist waltzed with her across the
room, upsetting his Aunt Pen's work-basket, and when she remonstrated
he caught her in his other arm and took her with him
in his mad dance. Exhausted, panting, and half indignant at her
scape-grace nephew, Auntie Pen released herself from his grasp,
and after a time Magdalen succeeded in stopping him, but he

kept fast hold of her hands, while she explained what she wanted
of him, and asked if he would go with her.

“Go with you? Yes, the world over, ma belle cousin,” he
said, and greatly to the horror of prim Mrs. Penelope, he sealed
his promise to serve her with a kiss upon her brow.

Mrs. Seymour was shocked, and half doubted the propriety
of sending Magdalen off alone with Guy; but Magdalen knew
the kiss was given to Alice as her possible sister rather than to
herself, and so did not resent it.

They were to start the next day, but it was not thought best
to let Alice know of the journey until morning. Then they
told her that a matter of importance, which had recently come
to Magdalen's knowledge, made it necessary for her to go to
Cincinnati, and that Guy was going with her. Alice knew
they were keeping something from her, but would not question
them, and without a suspicion of the truth she bade Magdalen
and Guy good-by, and saw them start on their journey to Cincinnati.