University of Virginia Library

36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
IN DAVENPORT.

HOT, and dusty, and tired, and sick, and utterly
hopeless and wretched, Ethie looked drearily
out from the windows of her room at the hotel,
whither she had gone on her first arrival in Davenport.
Her head seemed bursting with giddiness and pain, and
several times, as she stood tying her bonnet before the
mirror, and drawing on her gloves, she glanced at the inviting-looking
bed, feeling strongly tempted to lie down
among the pillows and wait till she was rested before she
went out in that broiling August sun upon her strange
errand. But a haunting presentiment of what the dizziness
and pain in her head and temples portended urged her to
do quickly what she had to do; so with another draught
of the ice-water she had ordered, and which only for a moment
cooled her feverish heat, she went from her room into
the hall, where the boy was waiting who was to show her
the way to “the Governor's house.” He knew just where
it was. Everybody knew in Davenport, and the chamber-maid,
to whom Ethie had put some questions, had volunteered
the information that the Governor had gone East for his
health, and the house, she believed, was shut up,—but not
shut so that she could not effect an entrance to it. She
would find her way through every obstacle, Ethie thought,
wondering at the strength which kept her up and made
her feel equal to anything as she followed her conductor
through street after street, onward and onward, up the

hill, where the long windows and turrets of a most elegant
mansion were visible. When asked at the hotel if she
would not have a carriage, she had replied that she preferred
to walk, feeling that in this way she should expend
some of the fierce excitement consuming her like an inward
fire. It had not abated one whit when at last the house
was reached, and dismissing her guide she stood a moment
upon the steps, leaning her throbbing head against the
door-post, and summoning courage to ring the bell. Never
before had she felt so much like an intruder, or so widely
separated from her husband, as during the moment she
stood at the threshold of his home, hesitating whether to
ring or go away and give the matter up. She could not go
away now that she had come so far, she finally decided.
She must go in and see the place where Richard lived, and
so, at last, she gave a pull to the bell which reverberated
through the entire house, and brought Hannah, the housemaid,
to see who was there.

“Is Governor Markham at home?” Ethie asked, as the
girl waited for her to say something.

Governor Markham was East, and the folks all gone, the
girl replied, staring a little suspiciously at the stranger,
who had advanced into the hall, and showed a disposition
to make herself further at home by walking into the drawing-room,
the door of which was slightly ajar.

“My name is Markham. I am a relative of the Governor's.
I am from the East,” Ethelyn volunteered, as she
saw the girl expected some explanation.

Had Hannah known more of Ethelyn, she might have
suspected something; but she had not been long in the
family, and coming, as she did, from St. Louis, the story
of her master's wife was rather mythical to her than otherwise.

That there was once a Mrs. Markham, who, for
beauty, and style, and grandeur, was far superior to Mrs.
James, the present mistress of the establishment, she had
heard vague rumors; and only that morning, when dusting
Richard's room, she had stopped her work a moment to
admire the handsome picture which Richard had had
painted, from a daguerreotype of Ethie, taken when she
was only seventeen. It was a beautiful girlish face, and
the brown eyes were bright and soft, and full of eagerness
and joy; while the rounded cheeks and pouting lips were
not much like the pale, thin woman who now stood in the
hall, claiming to be a relative of the family. Hannah
never dreamed who it was; but, accustomed to treat with
respect everything pertaining to the Governor, she opened
the door of the little reception-room, and asked the lady
to go in there.

“I'll send Mrs. Dobson, the housekeeper,” she said; and
Ethie heard her shuffling tread as she disappeared through
the hall and down the stairs to the regions where Mrs.
Dobson reigned.

Ethelyn was a little afraid of that dignitary; something
in the atmosphere of the house made her afraid of everything,
and inspired her with the feeling that she had no
business there,—that she was a trespasser, a spy, whom
Mrs. Dobson would be justified in turning from the door.
But Mrs. Dobson meditated no such act. She was a quiet,
inoffensive, unsuspicious personage, believing wholly in Governor
Markham and everything pertaining to him. She
was canning fruit when Hannah came with the message
that some of the Governor's kin had come from the East;
and remembering to have heard that Richard once had an
uncle somewhere in Massachusetts, she had no doubt that

this was a daughter of the old gentleman and a cousin of
Richard's, especially as Hannah described the stranger as
young and tolerably good-looking. She had no thought
that it was the runaway wife, of whom she knew more than
Hannah, else she would have dropped the Spencer jar she
was filling, and burned her fingers worse than she did, trying
to crowd in the refractory cover, which persisted in
tipping up sideways and all ways but the right way.

“Some of his kin. Pity they are gone. What shall we
do with her?” she said, as she finally pushed the cover to
its place and blew the thumb she had burned so badly.

“Maybe she don't mean to stay long; she didn't bring
no baggage,” Hannah said, and thus reassured, Mrs. Dobson
rolled down her sleeves, and tying on a clean apron, started
for the reception-room, where Ethie sat like one who walks
in a dream from which they try in vain to waken.

This house, as far as she could judge, was not like that
home on the prairie where her first married days were
spent. Everything here was luxurious and grand, and in
such perfect taste. It seemed a princely home, and Ethie
experienced more than one bitter pang of regret that by her
own act she had in all probability cut herself off from any
part or lot in this earthly paradise.

“I deserve it, but it is very hard to bear,” she thought,
just as Mrs. Dobson appeared, and bowing respectfully,
began—

“Hannah tells me you are kin to the Governor's folks,—
and I am so sorry they are all gone, and will be for some
weeks. The Governor is at a water-cure down East,—
strange you didn't hear of it,—and t'other Mr. Markham
has gone with his wife to Olney, and St. Paul's, and dear
knows where. Too bad, ain't it? But maybe you'll stay

a day or two and rest? We'll make you as comfortable
as we can. You look about beat out,” and Mrs. Dobson
came nearer to Ethelyn, whose face and lips were white as
ashes, and whose eyes looked black with her excitement.

She was very tired. The rapid journey, made without
rest or food either, save the cup of tea and the cracker she
tried to swallow, was beginning to tell upon her, and while
Mrs. Dobson was speaking she felt stealing over her the
giddiness which she knew by experience was a precursor to
fainting.

“I am tired and heated,” she gasped. “I could not
sleep at the hotel, or eat, either. I will stay a day and
rest, if you please. Governor Markham will not care. I
was travelling this way, and thought I would call. I have
heard so much about his house.”

She felt constrained to say this by way of explanation,
and Mrs. Dobson accepted it, warming up at once on the
subject of the house, which was her weak point; while to
show strangers through the handsome rooms was her
delight. No opportunity to do this had for some time been
presented, and the good woman's face glowed with the
pleasure she anticipated from showing the Governor's cousin
his house and grounds. But first the lady must have
some dinner, and bidding her lay aside her bonnet and
shawl and make herself at home, Mrs. Dobson hurried back
to the kitchen and despatched Hannah for the tender lamb-chop
she was going to broil, as that was something easily
cooked, and the poor girl seemed so tired and feeble.

“She looks like the Markhams, or like somebody I've
seen,” she said, never dreaming of finding the familiar
resemblance to “somebody she had seen” in the picture
hanging in Richard's room.

What she would have done had she known who the
stranger was is doubtful. Fortunately she did not know;
but being hospitably inclined, and anxious to show the
Governor's Eastern relatives how grand and nice they were,
she broiled the tender lamb, and made the fragrant coffee,
and laid the table in the cozy breakfast-room, and put on the
little silver set, and conducting her visitor out to dinner,
helped her herself, and then left the room, telling Ethelyn
to ring if she wanted anything, as Hannah was within hearing.
Bewildered and puzzled with regard to her own identity,
Ethie sat down at Richard's table, in Richard's house, and
partook of Richard's food, with a strange feeling of quiet,
and a constantly increasing sensation of numbness and bewilderment.
Access to the house had been easier than she
fancied; but she could not help feeling that she had no
right to be there, no claim on Richard's hospitality. Certainly
she had none, if what she had heard at Clifton were
true. But was it? There was some doubt creeping into
her mind, though why Richard should wish to build so
large and so fine a house just for himself she could not
understand. She never guessed how every part of that
dwelling had been planned with a direct reference to her
and her tastes; that not a curtain, or a carpet, or a picture
had been purchased without Melinda's having said she
believed Ethie would approve it. Every stone, and plank,
and tack, and nail had in it a thought of the Ethie whose coming
back had been speculated upon and planned in so many
different ways, but never in this way,—never just as it had
finally occurred, with Richard gone, and no one there to
welcome her, save the servants in the kitchen, who, while
she ate her solitary dinner, feeling more desolate and
wretched than she had ever before felt in her life, wondered

who she was, and how far they ought to go with their
attentions and civilities. They took her for what she professed
to be,—a Markham, and a near connection of the
Governor; and as that stamped her somebody, they were
inclined to be very civil, feeling sure that Mrs. James
would heartily approve their course. She had rung no bell
for Hannah; but they knew her dinner was over, for they
heard her as she went back into the reception-room, where
Mrs. Dobson ere long joined her, and asked if she would
like to see the house.

“It's the only thing we can amuse you with, unless you
are fond of music. Maybe you are,” and Mrs. Dobson led
the way to a little music-room, where, in the recess of a
bow window, a closed piano was standing.

At first Ethelyn did not observe it closely; but when
the housekeeper opened it, and pushing back the heavy
drapery disclosed it fully to view, Ethie started forward
with a sudden cry of wonder and surprise, while her face
was deadly pale, and the fingers which came down with a
crash upon the keys shook violently, for she knew it was
her old instrument standing there before her,—the one she
had sold to procure money for her flight. Richard must
have bought it back; for her sake, too, or rather for the
sake of what she once was to him, not what she was
now.

“Play, won't you?” Mrs. Dobson said. But Ethie could
not then have touched a note. The faintest tone of that
instrument would have maddened her, and she turned away
from it with a shudder, while the talkative Mrs. Dobson
continued, “It's an old piano, I believe, that belonged to
the first Mrs. Markham. There's to be a new one bought
for the other Mrs. Markham, I heard them say.”

Ethie's hands were locked together now, and her teeth
shut so tightly over her lips that the thin skin was broken,
and a drop of blood showed upon the pale surface; but in
so doing she kept back the cry of anguish which leaped up
from her heart at Mrs. Dobson's words. The “first Mrs.
Markham,” that was herself, while the “other Mrs. Markham,”
meant, of course, her rival,—the bride about whom
she had heard at Clifton. She did not think of Melinda as
being a part of that household, “and the other Mrs. Markham,”
for whom the new piano was to be purchased,—she
thought of nothing but herself, and her own blighted
hopes.

“Does the Governor know for certain that his first wife
is dead?” she asked, at last, and Mrs. Dobson replied—

“Of course she's dead. It's five years since he heard a
word. She must have been pretty. Her picture is in the
Governor's room. Come, I will show it to you.”

Mrs. Dobson had left her glasses in the kitchen, so she
did not notice the white face, so startling in its expression,
as her visitor followed on up the broad staircase into the
spacious hall above, and on still further, till they came to
the door of Richard's room, which Hannah had left open.
Then for a moment Ethelyn hesitated. It seemed like a
sacrilege for her feet to tread the floor of that private
room, for her breath to taint the atmosphere of a spot
where the new wife would come. But Mrs. Dobson led
her on until she stood in the centre of Richard's room,
surrounded by the unmistakable paraphernalia of a man,
with so many things around her to remind her of the past.
Surely, this was her own furniture; the very articles she
had chosen for the room in Camden. It was kind in Richard
to keep and bring them here, where everything was so

much more elegant,—kind, too, in him to redeem her piano.
It showed that for a time, at least, he had remembered
her; but, alas! he had forgotten her now, when she wanted
his love so much. There were great blurring tears in her
eyes, and she could not distinctly see the picture on the
wall, which Mrs. Dobson said was the first Mrs. Markham,
asking if she was not a beauty.

“Rather pretty, yes,” Ethie said, making a great effort
to speak naturally, and adding after a moment, “I suppose
it will be taken down when the other Mrs. Markham
comes.”

In Mrs. Dobson's mind the other Mrs. Markham only
meant Melinda, and she replied—

“Why should it? She knew the other lady and liked
her, too.”

“She knew me? Who can it be?” Ethie asked herself,
remembering that the name she had heard at Clifton
was a strange one to her.

“This, now, is the very handsomest part of the whole
house,” Mrs. Dobson said, throwing open a door which led
from Richard's room into a suite of apartments which, to
Ethie's bewildered gaze, seemed more like fairy-land than
anything real she had ever seen. “This the Governor fitted
up expressly for his wife, and I'm told he spent more
money here than in all the upper rooms. Did you ever see
handsomer lace? He sent to New York for them,” she
said, lifting up one of the exquisitely wrought curtains festooned
across the arch which divided the boudoir from the
large sleeping-room beyond. “This I call the bridal chamber.”
she continued, stepping into the room where everything
was so pure and white. “But, bless me, I forgot
that I put on a lot of bottles to heat. I'll venture they are

every one of them shivered to atoms, Hannah is so
careless. Excuse me, will you, and entertain yourself
awhile. I reckon you can find your way back to the
parlor.”

Ethelyn wanted nothing so much as to be left alone and
free to indulge in the emotions which were fast getting the
mastery of her. Covering her face with her hands, as the
door closed after Mrs. Dobson, she sat for a moment bereft
of the power to think or feel. Then, as things became
more real, and great throbs of heat and pain went tearing
through her temples, she remembered that she was in
Richard's house, up in the room which Mrs. Dobson had
termed the bridal chamber, the apartments which had been
probably fitted up for Richard's bride, whoever she might
be.

“I never counted on this,” she whispered, as she paced
up and down the range of rooms, from the little parlor or
boudoir to the dressing-room beyond the bedroom, and the
little conservatory at the side where the choicest of plants
were in blossom, and where the dampness was so cool to her
burning brow.

It did not strike her as strange that Richard should
have thought of all this, nor did she wonder whose taste
had aided him in making such a home. She did not wonder
at anything except at herself, who had missed so much
and fallen into such depths of woe.

“Oh, Richard!” she sighed, as she went back into the
bridal chamber. “You would pity me now, and forgive
me, too, if you knew what I am suffering here in your
home, which can never be mine!”

She was standing near the window, taking in the effect
of her surroundings, from the white ground carpet covered

with brilliant bouquets, to the unrumpled, snowy bed
which looked so diliciously cool and inviting, and seemed
beckoning the poor, tired woman to its embrace. And
Ethie yielded at last to the silent invitation, forgetting
everything save how tired, and sorry, and fever-smitten she
was, and how heavy her swollen eyelids were with tears,
and the many nights she had not slept. Ethie's cheeks
were crimson, and her pulse throbbing rapidly as, loosing
her long, beautiful hair, which of all her girlish beauty
remained unimpaired, and putting off her little gaiters, she
lay down upon the snowy bed, and pressing her aching
head upon the pillows, whispered softly to her other self,
—the Ethelyn Grant she used to know in Chicopee, when
a little twelve-year-old girl she fled from the maddened cow
and met the tall young man from the West.

“Governor Markham they call him now,” she said, “and
I am Mrs. Governor,” and a laugh broke the stillness of
the rooms kept so sacred until now.

In the hall below Hannah overheard the laugh, and
mounting the stairs cast one frightened glance into the
chamber where a tossing, moaning figure lay upon the bed,
with masses of brown hair falling about the face and floating
over the pillows.

Good Mrs. Dobson dropped one of the jars she was filling
when Hannah came with her strange tale, and leaving
the scalding mass of pulp and juice upon the floor, she
hastened up the stairs, and with as stern a voice as it was
possible for her to assume, demanded of Ethelyn what she
was doing there. But Ethie only whispered on to herself
of divorces, and governors' wives-elect, and bridal chambers
where she could rest so nicely. Mrs. Dobson was
nothing to her, and the good woman's wrath changed to

pity as she met the bright, restless eyes, and felt the burning
hands which she held for a moment in her own. It
was a pretty little hand,—soft and white, and small almost
as a child's. There was a ring upon the left hand, too; a
marriage ring, Mrs. Dobson guessed, wondering now more
than ever who the stranger was that had thus boldly taken
possession of a room into which none but the family ever
came.

“She is married, it would seem,” she said to Hannah, and
then, as Richard's name dropped from Ethelyn's lips, she
looked curiously at the face so ghastly white, save where
spots of crimson colored the cheeks, and at the mass of hair
which Ethie had pushed up and off from the forehead it
seemed to oppress with its weight.

“Go bring me some ice-water from the cellar,” Mrs.
Dobson said to Hannah, who hurried away on the errand,
while the housekeeper, left to herself, bent nearer to Ethelyn
and closely scrutinized her face; then stepping to
Richard's room, she examined the picture on the wall, and
came to a conclusion as to who the strange woman was.

Mrs. Dobson was a good deal alarmed,—“set back,” as
she afterward expressed it when telling the story to Melinda,—and
her knees fairly knocked together as she returned
to the sick-room, and bending again over the stranger
asked, “Is your name Ethelyn?”

For an instant there was a look of consciousness in the
brown eyes, and Ethie whispered faintly—

“Don't tell him. Don't send me away. Let me stay
here and die; it won't be long, and this pillow is so nice.”

She was wandering again, and satisfied that her surmises
were correct, Mrs. Dobson lifted her gently up, and to the
great surprise of Hannah, who had returned with the ice,

began removing the heavy dress and the skirts so much in
the way.

“Bring some of Mrs. Markham's night-clothes and ask
me no questions,” she said to the astonished girl, who
silently obeyed her, and then assisted while Ethelyn was
arrayed in Melinda's night-gown and made more comfortable
and easy than she could be in her own tight-fitting
dress.

“Take this to the telegraph office,” was Mrs. Dobson's
next order after she had been a few moments in the library,
and Hannah obeyed, reading as she ran:

The way was open for the despatch, and in less than half
an hour the operator at Olney was writing out the message
which would take Melinda back to Davenport as fast as
steam could carry her.