The Unseen Bridgegroom by May Agnes Fleming (best free ebook reader .TXT) 📖

crossly. "I've been badgered within an inch of my life by confounded women in shabby dresses and poky bonnets all day. Out of two or three bushels of chaff I only found one grain of wheat."

"And that one?"

"Her earthly name is Susan Sharpe, and she rejoices in red hair and green glasses, and the blood and brawn and muscle of a gladiator--a treasure who doesn't object to a howling wilderness or a raving-mad patient. I clinched her at once."

"And she goes with you--when?"

"To-morrow morning. If Mollie's still obdurate, I must leave her in this woman's charge, and return to town. As soon as I can settle my affairs, I will go back to the farm and be off with my bride to Havana."

"Always supposing she will not consent to return with you to New York in that character?"

"Of course. But she never will do that," the doctor said, despondently. "You don't know how she hates me, Blanche."

Blanche shrugged her graceful shoulders.

"Do you implicitly trust this woman you have hired?"

"I trust no one," responded Dr. Guy, brusquely. "My mother and Sally and Peter will watch her. Although, I dare say, there may be no necessity, it is always best to be on the safe side."

"How I should like to see her--to triumph over her--to exult in her misery!" Blanche cried, her eyes sparkling.

"I dare say," said Dr. Oleander, with sneering cynicism. "You would not be a woman, else. But you will never have the chance. I don't hate my poor little captive, remember. There! is that the dinner-bell?"

"Yes--come! We have Sir Roger Trajenna to-day, and Mr. Walraven detests being kept waiting."

"Poor Sir Roger!" with a sneering laugh. "How does the lovesick old dotard bear this second loss?"

"Better than he did the first; his pride aids him. It is my husband who is like a man distraught."

"The voice of Nature speaks loudly in the paternal-breast," said Dr. Oleander. "'Nater will caper,' as Ethan Spike says. Mollie's mamma must have been a very pretty woman, Blanche."

Mrs. Walraven's black eyes snapped; but they were at the dining-room door, and she swept in as your tall, stately women in trailing silks do sweep, bowing to the baronet, and taking her place, and, of course, the subject of the interesting captive down in Long Island was postponed indefinitely.

Dr. Oleander dined and spent the evening at the Walraven palace, and talked about his ward's second flight with her distressed guardian, and opined she must have gone off to gratify some whim of her own, and laughed in his sleeve at the two anxious faces before him, and departed at ten, mellow with wine and full of hope for the future.

Early next morning Dr. Oleander called round for Susan Sharpe, and found that treasure of nurses ready and waiting. All through the long drive she sat by his side in his light wagon, never opening her discreet lips except to respond to his questions, and gazing straight ahead through her green glasses into the world of futurity, for all her companion knew.

"Among your charge's hallucinations," said Dr. Oleander, just before they arrived, "the chief is that she is not crazy at all. She will tell you she has been brought here against her will; that I am a tyrant and a villain, and the worst of men; and she will try and bribe you, I dare say, to let her escape. Of course you will humor her at the time, but pay not the least attention."

"Of course," Mrs. Susan Sharpe answered.

There was a pause, then the nurse asked the first question she had put:

"What is my patient's name, sir?"

Dr. Oleander paused an instant, and mastered a sudden tremor. His voice was quite steady when he replied:

"Miss Dane. Her friends are eminently respectable, and have the utmost confidence in me. I have every reason to hope that the quiet of this place and the fresh sea air will eventually effect a cure."

"I hope so, sir," Mrs. Susan Sharpe said; and the pink-rimmed eyes glowed behind the green glasses, and into the tallow-candle complexion crept just the faintest tinge of red.

It was an inexpressibly lonely place, as Mrs. Sharpe saw it. A long stretch of bleak, desolate, windy road, a desolate, salty marsh, ghostly woods, and the wide, dreary sea. Over all, this afternoon, a sunless sky, threatening rain, and a grim old pile of buildings fronting the sea view.

"A lonesome place," Mrs. Susan Sharpe said, as if in spite of herself--"an awfully lonesome place!"

Dr. Oleander looked at her suspiciously as he drew up before the frowning gate.

"It is lonely," he said, carelessly. "I told you so, you remember; but, from its very loneliness, all the better for my too excitable patient."

Mrs. Sharpe's face seemed to say she thought it might be more conducive to begetting melancholy madness than curing it, but her tongue said nothing. Two big dogs, barking furiously, came tumbling round the angle of the house. Dr. Oleander struck at them with his whip.

"Down, Tiger! Silence, Nero, you overgrown brute!" he cried, with an angry oath. "Come along, Mrs. Sharpe. There's no occasion to be alarmed; they won't touch you."

Mrs. Sharpe, despite this assurance, looking mortally afraid, kept close to the doctor, and stood gazing around her while waiting to be admitted. Bolts grated, the key creaked, and heavily and warily old Peter opened the door and reconnoitered.

"It is I, Peter, you old fool! Get out of the way, and don't keep us waiting!"

With which rough greeting the young man strode in, followed by the nurse.

"He fetches a woman every time," murmured old Peter, plaintively, "and we've got a great plenty now, Lord knows!"

"This way, ma'am," called Dr. Oleander, striding straight, to the kitchen; "we'll find a fire here, at least. It's worse than Greenland, this frigid-zone!"

Mrs. Oleander sat before the blazing fire, plucking a fowl; Sally stood at the table, kneading dough. Both paused, with feminine exclamations, at sight of the doctor, and turned directly, with feminine curiosity, to stare at the woman.

"How do, mother? How are you, Sally? Back again, you see, like the proverbial bad shilling! This is Mrs. Susan Sharpe, the nurse I promised to bring. How's our patient?"

He turned anxiously to his mother. She took her eyes from Mrs. Sharpe to answer.

"I don't know; she frightens me, Guy."

"Frightens you!" growing very pale. "How? Is she so violent?"

"No; it's the other way. She's so still; she's like one dead in life. She sits all day, and never moves nor speaks. She doesn't eat enough to keep a bird alive, and she never sleeps, I believe; for, go into her room night or day, there you find her sitting wide awake."

Dr. Oleander looked white with dismay.

"Does she never speak?" he asked.

"She never spoke to me but once, and that was to ask me who I was. When I told her I was your mother, she turned her back upon me, with the remark, 'He says I'm mad, and surely none but a mad-woman would look for mercy from a tiger's dam!' She has never spoken to me since."

Dr. Oleander stood listening with a very gloomy face. Mrs. Sharpe, sitting warming herself before the fire, looked straight at it, with a blank, sallow face.

"What do you find her doing mostly?" he asked, after awhile.

"Sitting by the window, looking at the sea," answered his mother--"always that--with a face the color of snow."

The gloom on the young man's face deepened. What if he should prove himself a prophet? What if this spirited, half-tamed thing should go melancholy mad?

"I will go to her at once!" he exclaimed, starting up. "If she goes into a passion at sight of me, it will do her good. Anything is better than this death in life."

He held out his hand for the key of the room upstairs. His mother handed it to him, and he strode out at once; and then Mrs. Oleander turned her regards upon the new nurse.

Strangers were "sight for sair een" in that ghostly, deserted farmhouse. But the new nurse never looked at her; she sat with those impenetrable green glasses fixed steadfastly on the blazing fire.


CHAPTER XIX.

MISTRESS SUSAN SHARPE.

Dr. Oleander was by no means a coward, yet it is safe to say his heart was bumping against his ribs, with a sensation that was near akin to fear, as he ascended the stairs. He was really infatuatedly in love with his fair-haired little enchantress, else he never had taken his late desperate step to win her; and now, having her completely in his power, it was rather hard to be threatened with her loss by melancholy madness.

"What _shall_ I do with her?" he asked himself, in a sort of consternation. "I must keep her here until I get my affairs settled, and that will be a week at the soonest. If we were safely _en route_ for Havana, I should cease to fear. How will she receive me, I wonder?"

He tapped softly at the door. There was no response. The silence of the grave reigned all through the lonely old house. He tapped again. Still no answer. "Mollie!" he called. There was no reply. The next moment he had inserted the key, turned it, and opened the prison door.

Dr. Oleander paused on the threshold and took in the picture. He could see the low-lying, sunless afternoon sky, all gray and cheerless; the gray, complaining sea creeping up on the greasy shingle; the desolate expanse of road; the tongue of marshland; the strip of black pine woods--all that could be seen from the window. The prison-room looked drear and bleak; the fire on the hearth was smoldering away to black ashes; the untasted meal stood on the table. Seated by the window, in a drooping, spiritless way, as if never caring to stir again, sat bright Mollie, the ghost of her former self. Wan as a spirit, thin as a shadow, the sparkle gone from her blue eyes, the golden glimmer from the yellow hair, she sat there with folded hands and weary, hopeless eyes that never left the desolate sea. Not imprisonment, not the desolation of the prospect, not the loneliness, not the fasting had wrought the change, but the knowledge that she was this man's wife.

Dr. Oleander had ample time to stand there and view the scene. She never stirred. If she heard the door open, she made no more sign than if she were stone deaf.

"Mollie!" he called, advancing a step.

At the sound of that hated voice she gave a violent start, a faint, startled cry, and, turning for the first time, eyed him like a wild animal at bay.

"Mollie, my poor little girl," he said in a voice of real pity, "you are gone to a shadow! I never thought a few days' confinement could work such a change."

She never spoke; she sat breathing hard and audibly, and eying him with wild, wide eyes.

"You mustn't give way like this, Mollie; you mustn't really, you know. It will not be for long. I mean to take you away from here. Very soon we will go to Cuba, and then my whole life will be devoted to you. No slave will serve his mistress as I will you."

He drew nearer as he spoke.