"In real earnest."
"Well, it shall be done--but you will keep your word, this time."
"Have I ever broken it to you?"
"I don"t know; in fact, until the whole of this affair is made plain to me, all must be doubt and darkness. I know that my mission is to leave distrust and misery wherever my voice reaches, or my step can force itself in that household--yet they have all been kind to me, and most of all, the lady herself."
"_She_ kind to _you_! I know what such kindness is. A sweet, gentle indifference, that for ever keeps you at arms" length, or that proud patronage of manner, which is more galling still. Oh, yes, I have felt it. Such kindness is poison."
"I did not find it so," said Agnes, with a touch of feeling, "till your lessons began to work. Then, acting like a traitor, I felt like one, and began to hate those I wronged. But, I suppose this is always so."
The woman laughed. "You turn philosopher early, young lady. Most girls of your age are content to feel and act--you must stop to a.n.a.lyze and reflect. It is a bad habit."
"I suppose so--certainly reflection gives me no pleasure," answered the girl, a little sadly.
"Well, well, child, we have no time for sentiment, now. The sun is almost down, and you have a long walk before you--another week, and if you manage to get your poor old mammy a place, we need not chill ourselves to death in these damp woods. She will bring messages back and forth, you know!"
Agnes shook her head, and laughed, "Oh, mammy, mammy!"
The woman mocked her laugh with a sort of good-natured bitterness.
"There now, that is easily managed, but there is something else for you to undertake; wait."
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE NOTE WITH A GREEN SEAL.
The woman took from among the folds of her dress, a small writing-case of satin wood, formed like a scroll. Touching a spring, she opened it, took out implements for writing, and some note-paper, which emitted a faint and very peculiar perfume, as she began to write. After tracing a few hasty lines, she folded the paper, placed it carefully in an envelope, and proceeded to seal it. Taking from her pocket a singular little taper box of gold, covered with antique chasing, she lighted one of the tapers, and dropped a globule of green wax upon her note, which she carefully impressed with a tiny seal taken from another compartment of the taper box.
Agnes watched all this dainty preparation with a look of half-sarcastic surprise. When the note was placed in her hand, she examined the address and the seal with parted lips, as if she would have smiled, but for a feeling of profound astonishment.
"To General Harrington. The seal a cupid writing on a tablet. Well, what am I to do with this?"
"Leave it upon General Harrington"s library-table after breakfast, to-morrow morning--that is all."
The woman arose, folded up her writing case, and gathering the voluminous folds of her shawl from the moss, where it had been allowed to trail, turned away. Agnes watched her as she disappeared through the forest trees with a rapid step, fluttering out her shawl now and then, like the wings of some great tropical bird.
"I wonder who she really is, and what she would be at?" muttered the girl. "Do all girls distrust so much? Now, this note--shall I read it, and learn what mystery links her with the family up yonder? Why not? It is but following out her own lessons, so it be done adroitly."
Agnes placed her finger carefully upon the envelope, and with a steady pressure, forced it from under the wax.
"Ha! neatly done!" she exclaimed, taking out the enclosed, and unfolding it with hands that shook, spite of herself, "and a fool for my pains, truly. I might have known she would baffle me--written in cypher, even to the name. Well, one thing is certain, that my witch and old General Harrington understand each other, that is something gained. If I had but time, now, to make out these characters, and--and"--
She broke off almost with a shriek, for a hand was reached over her shoulder, and the note taken suddenly from her grasp, while she stood cowering beneath the discovery of her meanness. The woman whom she had supposed on the other side the hill, stood smiling quietly upon her. Not a word was spoken. The woman took out her taper box, dropped some fresh wax beneath the seal, and smiling all the time, handed the note back again.
Agnes turned her face, now swarthy with shame, aside from that smiling look, and began to plunge her little foot down angrily into the moss, biting her lips till the blood came. At last, she lifted her head with a toss, and turning her black eyes boldly on the woman, said, in a voice of half-tormenting defiance, "Very well, what if I did open it? My first lesson was, when you and I read Mrs. Harrington"s letter. If that was right, this is, also."
"Who complained? Who, in fact, cares?" was the terse answer, "only it was badly done. The next time you break a seal, be sure and have wax of exactly the same tint on hand. I thought of that, and came back. It would ruin all, if General Harrington saw his letters tampered with."
"You are a strange woman!" said Agnes, shaking off the weight of shame that oppressed her, and preparing to go.
"And you, a strange girl. Now go home, and leave the note as I directed.
In a day or two we shall meet again. Almost any time, at nightfall you will find me here. Good night!"
"Good night," said Agnes, sullenly, "I will obey you this once, but remember my reward."
Again the two parted, and each went on her separate path of evil--the one lost in shadows, the other bathed in the light of a warm sunset.
It did not strike the woman, as she toiled upward to her solitary dwelling, that she was training a viper which would in the end turn and sting her own bosom. Her evil purposes required instruments, and without hesitation, she had gathered them out of her own life. But, even now, she found them difficult to wield, and hard to control. What they might prove in the future remained for proof.
CHAPTER XXVII.
GENERAL HARRINGTON"S CONFESSION.
General Harrington had spent a good many years of his life abroad, and no American ever went through that slow and too fashionable method of expatriation with more signal effect. While walking through the rooms peculiarly devoted to his use, you might have fancied yourself intruding on the privacy of some old n.o.bleman of Louis the Fourteenth"s court.
His bed chamber was arranged after the most approved French style, his dressing-room replete with every conceivable invention of the toilet, from the patent boot-jack with its silver mountings, to the superb dressing-case, glittering with gold and crystal, everything was perfect in its sumptuousness. In his own house, this old man was given up to self-worship, without a shadow of concealment. In society the graceful hypocrisy of his deportment was beautiful to contemplate, like any other exhibition of the highest art. If benevolence was the fashion, then General Harrington was the perfection of philanthropy. Nay, as it was his ambition to lead, the exemplary gentleman sometimes made a little exertion to render benevolence the rage! His name often lead in committees for charity festivals, and he was particularly interested in seeing that the funds were distributed with the most distinguished elegance, and by ladies sure to dignify humanity by distributing the munificence of the fashionable world in flowing silks and immaculate white gloves.
After this fashion, the General was a distinguished philanthropist.
Indeed, humanity presents few conditions of elegant selfishness in which he was not prominent. A tyrant in his own household, he had, from his youth up, been the veriest slave to the world in which he moved. Its homage was essential to his happiness. He could not entirely cheat his astute mind into a belief of his own perfections, without the constant acclamations of society. As he grew old, this a.s.surance became more and more essential to his self-complacency.
The General studied a good deal. His mind was naturally of more than ordinary power, and it was necessary that he should keep up with the discoveries and literature of the day, in order to shine as a savant, and belles-lettres scholar. Thus some three or four hours of every day were spent in his library, and few professional men studied harder to secure position in life, than he did to acc.u.mulate knowledge which had no object higher than self-gratulation.
Still, with all his selfishness and want of true principle, the General was, at least, by education, a gentleman, and he would at any time have found it much easier to force himself into an act of absolute wickedness, than to be thought guilty of ill-breeding in any of its forms. In short, with General Harrington, habit stood in the place of principle. He possessed few of those high pa.s.sions that lead men into rash or wicked deeds, and never was guilty of wrong without knowing it.
Unconsciously to herself, Agnes Barker had wounded the old man in his weakest point, when she resented his question if she had read Mabel"s journal, with so much pride. This haughty denial was a reproach to the impulse that had seized him to read the book from beginning to end. His conscience had nothing to urge in the matter, but the meanness of the thing he intended, struck him forcibly, and after a moment"s hesitation, he closed the journal and laid it in a drawer of his desk. Thus, by affectation and over-acting, the girl defeated her object, much to her own mortification. The pa.s.sage on which General Harrington had opened at random, was in itself harmless, a warm and somewhat glowing description of a pa.s.sage up the Guadalquivir in the spring months, had nothing in it to provoke farther research, and the General seldom read much from mere curiosity. Certainly, the book might contain many secret thoughts and hidden feelings of which Mabel"s husband had never dreamed, but it was many years since the old gentleman had taken sufficient interest in the feelings of his wife to care about their origin or changes, and so, Mabel"s precious book, in which so many secret thoughts were registered, and memories stored, lay neglected in her husband"s desk.
Fortunately, she was unconscious of her loss. Sometimes for months together, she shrank from opening the escritoir in which the volume was kept. At this period, she was under the reaction of a great excitement, and turned with a nervous shudder from anything calculated to remind her of all the pain which lay in the past.
Another reason, perhaps, why General Harrington was less curious about his wife"s journal than seemed natural to his tempters, lay in his own preoccupation at the time. One of his youthful vices had grown strong, and rooted itself amid the selfishness of his heart; all other sins had so cooled down and hardened in his nature, that with most men they might have pa.s.sed for virtues, the evil was so buried in elegant conventionalisms; but one active vice he still possessed, always gleaming up from the white ashes of his burnt out sins, with a spark of vivid fire.
General Harrington was a gambler. Understand me----it is not probable that he had ever entered a gambling hall openly or frankly since his youth, or ever sat down with swindlers or professed blacklegs around the faro table. The General was altogether too fastidious in his vices for that. No, he rather plumed himself secretly upon the aristocratic fashion in which he indulged this most lasting remembrance of a reckless youth.
The club life of England had always possessed great fascinations for this fine old republican gentleman, and he was among the first to introduce the system in New York. Here, his naturally fine energies had been vigorously put forth, and he became not only a prominent member of an aristocratic club, but a princ.i.p.al director and supporter also.
At this lordly rendezvous, the General spent a great portion of his time, and somehow, I do not pretend to point out the direct process, for it was generally understood that no high play was sanctioned in the establishment, and the mysterious glances and half-murmurs which transferred five dollar notes into five thousand, as the harmless games proceeded, are not capable of an embodiment--but, it chanced very often, that General Harrington found a transfer of funds necessary after one of these club nights, and once or twice, a rather unpleasant interview with Mr. James Harrington had been the result.
But these unsatisfactory consequences seldom arose. The General was too cool and self-controlled to be always the loser, and up to the time of our story, this one active vice had rather preponderated in favor of his own interests.
But a rash adventure, and a sudden turn of fortune, reversed all this in a single night; and General Harrington--who possessed only the old mansion-house, and a few thousand a year in his own right--all at once found himself involved to more than the value of his family home, and two years income in addition. Close upon this, came that fearful accident upon the river----and, worse still, the application of his son to marry a penniless little girl, whose very existence depended on his charity.
With all these perplexities on his mind, the General had very little time for idle curiosity, and thus his wife"s secret remained for the time inviolate.