University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.

ONLY two or three days had elapsed since the funeral,
when something happened which was to change the
drift of Laura's life somewhat, and influence in a greater or
lesser degree the formation of her character.

Major Lackland had once been a man of note in the State
—a man of extraordinary natural ability and as extraordinary
learning. He had been universally trusted and honored in
his day, but had finally fallen into misfortune; while serving
his third term in Congress, and while upon the point of being
elevated to the Senate—which was considered the summit of
earthly aggrandizement in those days—he had yielded to
temptation, when in distress for money wherewith to save
his estate, and sold his vote. His crime was discovered, and
his fall followed instantly. Nothing could reinstate him in
the confidence of the people, his ruin was irretrievable—his
disgrace complete. All doors were closed against him, all
men avoided him. After years of skulking retirement and
dissipation, death had relieved him of his troubles at last, and
his funeral followed close upon that of Mr. Hawkins. He
died as he had latterly lived—wholly alone and friendless.
He had no relatives—or if he had they did not acknowledge
him. The coroner's jury found certain memoranda upon his

[ILLUSTRATION]

LAURA SEARCHING FOR EVIDENCES OF HER BIRTH.

[Description: 499EAF. Illustration of a young woman leaning against a stack of packages, with pieces of paper in her hands, reading the content.]

body and about the premises which revealed a fact not suspected
by the villagers before—viz., that Laura was not the
child of Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins.

The gossips were soon at work. They were but little
hampered by the fact that the memoranda referred to betrayed
nothing but the bare circumstance that Laura's real parents
were unknown, and stopped there. So far from being
hampered by this, the gossips seemed to gain all the more
freedom from it. They supplied all the missing information
themselves, they filled up all the blanks. The town soon
teemed with histories of Laura's origin and secret history, no
two versions precisely alike, but all elaborate, exhaustive,
mysterious and interesting, and all agreeing in one vital particular—to
wit, that there was a suspicious cloud about her
birth, not to say a disreputable one.

Laura began to encounter cold looks, averted eyes and
peculiar nods and gestures which perplexed her beyond
measure; but presently the pervading gossip found its way
to her, and she understood them then. Her pride was stung.
She was astonished, and at first incredulous. She was about
to ask her mother if there was any truth in these reports, but
upon second thought held her peace. She soon gathered
that Major Lackland's memoranda seemed to refer to letters
which had passed between himself and Judge Hawkins. She
shaped her course without difficulty the day that that hint
reached her.

That night she sat in her room till all was still, and then
she stole into the garret and began a search. She rummaged
long among boxes of musty papers relating to business matters
of no interest to her, but at last she found several bundles
of letters. One bundle was marked “private,” and in
that she found what she wanted. She selected six or eight
letters from the package and began to devour their contents,
heedless of the cold.

By the dates, these letters were from five to seven years
old. They were all from Major Lackland to Mr. Hawkins.
The substance of them was, that some one in the east had

been inquiring of Major Lackland about a lost child and its
parents, and that it was conjectured that the child might be
Laura.

Evidently some of the letters were missing, for the name
of the inquirer was not mentioned; there was a casual reference
to “this handsome-featured aristocratic gentleman,” as
if the reader and the writer were accustomed to speak of him
and knew who was meant.

In one letter the Major said he agreed with 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,

Another letter had this paragraph in it:

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

That was all. Random remarks here and there, being
pieced together gave Laura a vague impression of a man of
fine presence, about forty-three or forty-five years of age,
with dark hair and eyes, and a slight limp in his walk—it
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, thinking—and
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 bridgeless
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 age—the 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 her—she would speak to
Mrs. Hawkins. And naturally enough Mrs. Hawkins appeared
on the stage at that moment.

She said she knew all—she 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, child—do 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

[ILLUSTRATION]

EVER TRUE.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 105. In-line image of two women embracing and kissing next to a fire.] 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 thing—something like this:

“But who are they?—Animals! What are their opinions
to me? Let them talk—I will not stoop to be affected by it.
I could hate——. Nonsense—nobody 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 so—she 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 want
to and it's not because I think it is any matter who her
father was or who he wasn't, either; it's only on account of

this talk, talk, talk. I think she is a fine girl every way, and
so would you if you knew her as well as I do; but you know
how it is when a girl once gets talked about—it's all up with
her—the world won't ever let her alone, after that.”

The only comment Laura made upon this revelation, was:

“Then it appears that if this trouble had not occurred I
could have had the happiness of Mr. Ned Thurston's serious
attentions. He is well favored in person, and well liked, too,
I believe, and comes of one of the first families of the village.
He is prosperous, too, I hear; has been a doctor a
year, now, and has had two patients—no, three, I think; yes,
it was three. I attended their funerals. Well, other people
have hoped and been disappointed; I am not alone in that.
I wish you could stay to dinner, Maria—we are going to have
sausages; and besides, I wanted to talk to you about Hawkeye
and make you promise to come and see us when we are
settled there.”

But Maria could not stay. She had come to mingle romantic
tears with Laura's over the lover's defection and had found
herself dealing with a heart that could not rise to an appreciation
of affliction because its interest was all centred in
sausages.

But as soon as Maria was gone, Laura stamped her expressive
foot and said:

“The coward! Are all books lies? I thought he would
fly to the front, and be brave and noble, and stand up for me
against all the world, and defy my enemies, and wither these
gossips with his scorn! Poor crawling thing, let him go.
I do begin to despise this world!”

She lapsed into thought. Presently she said:

“If the time ever comes, and I get a chance, Oh, I'll——”

She could not find a word that was strong enough, perhaps.
By and by she said:

“Well, I am glad of it—I'm glad of it. I never cared
anything for him anyway!”

And then, with small consistency, she cried a little, and
patted her foot more indignantly than ever.