OPPOSITE Mr. Belden’s house, which, about the time of his departure from Newport, passed into the hands of his creditors, was the old country place of the Janeway family. It was still in the possession of the representative of that family, under a different name.
The late Mr. Janeway, though a proud and, as it finally appeared, a bad man, remembered the inherited debt of his family to the Waddys, and felt some aristocratic vanity in his tutelage of the young Ira, our hero. A close intimacy of childish friendship grew up between Mr. Janeway’s only child and daughter, Mary, and his young protégé. Young Horace Belden, the handsome son of the next neighbour, Mr. Belden, the great merchant, was also a companion of Miss Janeway; in fact, the parents of these two destined them for each other. Adjoining estates, large fortunes, good blood, beauty on both sides—the two fathers thought the match a perfect one and the young people were taught to consider it settled. Something unsettled it. Horace Belden unsettled it by being himself and that self was, from[267] early years, not a noble one. He unsettled it in the mind of Mrs. Janeway, as he grew older, by what he called his flirtation with Sally Bishop, a flaunting girl, daughter of Mr. Janeway’s ex-coachman.
Belden, however, remained very devoted to Miss Janeway. He loved her as much as was in his nature, and his pride was fully engaged in winning her, the great match of the day and his by long convention. As he grew older and no better, he began to consider this pure young lady as his bond to purer life and mentally to throw on her the responsibility of his future intended reformation. She must become his, or he would revenge his disappointment, his wounded pride, and his failure of her help and control in his proposed change of character, upon her, upon society, and upon himself.
It was about this time that Mr. Janeway began to discover that too great an intimacy was growing up between his protégé, Ira Waddy, and his daughter. It was well enough while they were children, but the son of a shopkeeper of Dullish Court, and clerk in the counting-house of Belden & Co., was not for Miss Janeway, beauty, aristocrat, heiress, belle. So Mr. Janeway was very distant to Ira Waddy, now a handsome, high-spirited, quick-tempered, energetic young man, full of generous candour and kindliness and gratitude to all the Janeways for the happy and refining influences of their society and their world. The ladies always took Ira’s part, but[268] this only confirmed Mr. Janeway in his purpose of making him uncomfortable. At last, this gentleman, finding one day Ira tête-à-tête with Mary, quarrelled with him openly, and finally forbade him the house, speaking very ill of his character. It may have been too late. Whatever had passed between Ira and Miss Janeway that might fitly be known, Belden knew. Ira Waddy, trustful as he was true, had given his unreserved confidence to Belden, friend of the lady and of him.
Miss Janeway was twenty, two years younger than Ira Waddy, when he, suddenly, one July, fifteen years before this Return of his, went off to those regions where his namesake river rolls. Five years after, the crash in her father’s fortunes came. He became an utterly dishonoured man, financially, morally. He could bear his guilt; not its discovery. He died, as it was best he should. His daughter, belle and reputed heiress, did as scores of young ladies of New England have done: she became a teacher in a school and at last a governess. By-and-by, an old lover of Mrs. Janeway arrived. His constancy and devotion through ill-report touched the lady, and she consented to share her distress and her poverty with his humble fortunes at the West. They did not long remain humble. Where he owned a farm, there a town sprouted; where a lot, thither came a railroad demanding a station. His hillsides became stone quarries; his fields, coal mines. His[269] wealth swelled like a fungus of the forest. His wife died and he soon followed her, fairly bullied out of existence by his own stupendous success. His whole property he bequeathed to his step-daughter on the one condition of a change of name. He thus, as it were, ceased to be childless and avoided contributing to the prosperity of his former rival’s family.
Miss Mary Janeway, the governess of Clara and Diana and Julia Wilkes, became Miss Mary Sullivan, the woman of fortune. She repurchased the Janeway estate, the house where her happy youth had passed, and it was there she had received Diana.
Mrs. Cecilia Tootler, in combination with Miss Sullivan, managed the charities of their neighbourhood. Miss Sullivan, having no incumbrance of a Thomas Tootler and Cecilia, junior, could superintend also those preventive charities, the schools, utilising here her own experience. In the sick-room or the home of the poor, the sorrowful, or the guilty, these two ladies made themselves welcome. The elder with her deep experience had learnt what others need of wisest sympathy, and the younger came like a gleam of cheerful, untarnished hope.
Cecilia in vain endeavoured to persuade her friend to see Sally Bishop.
“She is dying,” said Cecilia. “She is punished for whatever wrong she may have done. But peace of mind is totally denied her. Remorse is[270] killing her faster than her disease. All my consolations are vain. She needs someone better and wiser than I. She needs you.”
“Has she asked for me?” said Miss Sullivan.
“No, not to see you,” replied Cecilia, “but she speaks of you often with great distress. Do come and see her—perhaps she may have some explanation to give. Mary, Mary, what is this mystery?”
“Dear Cecilia,” answered Mary, “it is not because Sally Bishop has been a very bad woman that I avoid her. But she was long ago the willing and exulting means of proving to me not only her own viciousness, but the foul treachery and utterly coarse, detestable baseness of heart and mind of one I trusted as I now trust only God. It was right that I should know the truth, but I must feel a personal horror of a woman whose ill-omened duty it was to tell me to despair and lose my faith and my happiness together. And Sally Bishop did her duty as if it were a privilege and beheld my misery with vile, vulgar, shameless triumph. I abhor the thought of her.”
Cecilia said nothing more at the time—indeed, there was nothing she could say. But as the days passed, Sally Bishop grew hopelessly worse, and her father kept himself boozy all the while. Horse-jockeys, pro-slavery judges, gamblers, and collectors of democratic customs sometimes love their families.
[271]Miss Sullivan had just received Clara’s summons to Diana’s bed of death; she was preparing to go that evening, when Mrs. Tootler drove up in haste.
“Sally Bishop cannot live through the day,” said the lady. “She demands to see you. She has a confession to make. Coming death has absolved her from a pledge of wicked secrecy.”
And so, by the deathbed, Miss Sullivan, whose best and brightest hopes had been destroyed by the infamy of this poor, dying wretch, listened to her confession and pitied and pardoned her. Sally Bishop, vain and immodest, had nursed in her heart against young Ira Waddy the bitter spite of a shameless woman scorned. Belden, who was her first instructor in shamelessness, discovered this, and used his power to delude her into the joint revenge of the letters. Oh, what carefully villainous letters Belden made of them! how brutally treacherous! how vile! Sally Bishop took the correspondence in Ira Waddy’s writing to Miss Janeway.
“There,” said she, “you heiress, you great lady, that have stolen away my lover, because you are rich, and are engaged to him without your father’s knowledge, see what letters he used to write to me and how he spoke of you and his interviews with you. He ruined me because I loved him, and made of me what you see in my own letters, and I was willing that he should marry you because he always[272] promised that I should be first. But now he is trying to get rid of me. He finds me in the way.”
Miss Janeway read the letters as one reads a fascinating tale of horror. There could be no doubt of them; hand, style, circumstances—it was inevitable they were his. Poor, innocent girl—she............