LITMIR.BIZ

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him since, up to this day; he could hardly have sailed, for his name does not appear upon the books of any shipping office in New York or Boston or Baltimore. How fortunate it seems, now, that we kept this thing to ourselves; Laura still has a father in you, and it is better for her that we drop this subject here forever.”

      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 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

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