Mabel's Mistake Part 52

"Submit, no--my fiery Zillah; but the richest enjoyments of life should be tasted daintily--a noisy revenge is not to my taste."

"But you will live with this woman yet?"

The General smiled meaningly.

"She will, perhaps, remain under my roof."

"And you will not take away the name she has disgraced?" persisted Zillah, pale with suspense.

"You are a little too fast there, my friend. A name is never dishonored by anything kept secret within the bosom of a family. Disgrace is the scorn of society, and how can the world scorn that which it does not know?"

"But it shall know. I will myself proclaim this infamy!" cried the woman, clenching her hand, and shaking from head to foot with internal rage.

The General cast on her a look half-surprised, half-amused.

"Ah, Zillah, and who on earth of our world can you know, or--if that were possible--what would your word be against the life of a woman so universally admired and beloved, as my wife has been?"

"But, I will prove what I say by that book."

"Which is just now in my possession, where it is likely to remain. Be content, beautiful Zillah. The fate of Mabel Harrington rests with me. I shall not trust her to your jealous rage."

"To my jealous rage!" repeated Zillah, hardening down in her pa.s.sion till she seemed turning to marble from a single effort of will. "I thought of your honor, not of my own wrongs. I struggle against contempt for the man whom I have so long and so miserably loved."

"Contempt, Zillah?"

"Yes, sir, contempt. Even your slave has a right to despise the man who connives at his own dishonor."

"Woman, are you mad!--but no matter. I am too weary for much anger. You should have remembered of old that I hate scenes. This has been gotten up with too much intensity. I am tired of it."

"I see, I see!" replied the woman, resuming her slave-like submission.

"You are tired, with no one to care about it. Let me serve you once more."

Zillah went to a marble console in another part of the room, poured out a gla.s.s of wine, and, sinking gently at his feet, presented it after the Oriental fas.h.i.+on which he had taught her years before.

He took the wine and drank it off, dropping his hand carelessly upon her shoulder as he returned the gla.s.s. The woman sat gazing into his face, her brow knitted, and her eyes full of thought.

"Then you shrink from a public exposure in this matter?" she said at last, bending her head on one side and touching his hand with her lips, which fell upon it cold as ice, so deep was the craft and so cruel was the pa.s.sion that prompted this caress.

"I shrink from purchasing revenge at the cost of everything that renders life worth having. Once for all, Zillah, to quarrel with James Harrington is to give up all that I enjoy. Of my wife's fortune, nothing but this old mansion, and some fragments of real estate, remain. My first wife, as you know, left every dollar of her property to James, else the marriage which has created all this turmoil would never have taken place. Up to this hour, the young man has given me almost the entire control of his income. Mrs. Harrington has no idea that her property has not always supplied our income. To a.s.sail them, is to expose my own losses at the gambling-table--both while I was her guardian and her husband--I only wish the accursed book had never reached my hands. So long as she was acknowledged the most correct and splendid woman in society, what was her heart and its secrets to me? I tell you, I am tied to silence in this matter, and your interference can but annoy me."

"Not if I point out the way by which the vengeance you pant for may enrich yourself," said the woman, arousing from her thoughtfulness.

"Oh, that would be a discovery, indeed."

"James Harrington loves the lady."

"I am not so sure of that; but, suppose it so, what then?"

"Legal separations are easy in this country. Let her go to one of those States where incompatibility of temper, absence, or caprice, is deemed sufficient reason for divorce. This will be generous, and they must be grateful for a forbearance that she has no right to expect. Half his fortune--nay, the whole of it--will be little to ask in return."

"Woman, has a fiend or angel put this thought into your head?"

"Both; if love is an angel, and hate a fiend."

"And, what can you expect from this?"

"Nothing!"

"Nothing! This is not true, Zillah!"

"Is it hoping much, when I only wish to be a slave again?"

"My poor Zillah; and did you, indeed, care for me so much?"

The woman fell down upon her knees, buried her face between both hands, and burst into a pa.s.sion of tears.

The General was annoyed; there was something too much like a scene in the att.i.tude and tears of his former slave. He leaned back in his chair, regarding her with a glance of cynical impatience. She caught the look, as her hands fell apart; and the hot blood that rushed over her face seemed to burn up her tears. She broke into a smile, and arose, sweeping a hand across her eyes fiercely, as if to punish them for weeping.

"There, there, I will go now. It is a long time since I have been so foolish."

General Harrington smiled; the flush of her face and the brilliant mist which tears had left in her eyes, reminded him of past years, when he had, from mere wantonness, provoked those pa.s.sionate outbursts, in order to kindle up the beauty of her face.

"But you have forgotten to say how you obtained entrance into my private apartments. I trust no one saw you come in."

"No one that could recognize me. I became too well acquainted with the house when we stopped here with my old mistress, on our way to Europe, for any need of a door. The balconies are too near the ground for that."

"And how long had you been waiting in my bed-chamber, then?" continued the General, pleased with the prompt return of her cheerfulness.

"All the time that you were reading. I only sought to look on you again from a distance, and would have escaped without disturbing you, had it been possible."

The General smiled complacently. After the outrage suffered by his self-love, this devotion soothed him greatly.

"My poor Zillah!" he said, with a sort of compa.s.sion in his voice, "poor Zillah!"

She did not answer him, and when he turned a moment after to learn the cause, her place was empty. Like some gorgeous wild bird, she had lighted at his feet a moment, and flown away. But the vellum-book was in his hands, and her wicked counsel lay folded close among the evil things in his heart.

CHAPTER LIX.

A STORM IN THE WOODS.

And Lina wandered off, deep, deep into the woods--her head aching with overcharged thought, her heart lying wounded and cold in her bosom. Hour after hour she toiled on, wild with the pain of her new sorrow. It seemed to her that intense action could only bring rest. Thus, she clambered hill after hill, drew herself up the steep face of many a rock that, at another time, would have defied her efforts, and waded, knee-deep, in drifts of dead leaves that choked up the hollows.

Sometimes she would stop suddenly, out of breath, and panting with the fatigue of her aimless exertions. But after looking wildly about, as if in fear of pursuit, she would dart off again, perhaps retreading the rough path she had left. At last, she sat down, exhausted, at the foot of a tree, and looked around in bitter despair as she saw the woods darken overhead, and felt a soft storm of snow flakes floating dreamily over her.

The poor child was numb and cold. Her very breath seemed turning to ice upon her lips. But for the little hound that crept up to her bosom, and lay patiently there, with its slender head laid upon her shoulder, and its limbs trembling with the cold, she would have perished. But the warmth from this little animal's body kept the vitality in her poor heart, and instead of death, a drowsiness fell upon her, which would perhaps have ended in a wakeless sleep. But just as she was sinking away into that deathly torpor from which few are aroused, a female figure came, floating like a dark bird of prey, through the storm, now obscured by the thick interlacing of naked branches, and again dimmed in her approach by the veil of virgin snow-flakes that filled the air.