Doubly false

The door opened and Virginia Lander passed through. Her face was sad and pale, violet shadow lay faintly under her eyes, and the long, sweeping folds of her black dress trailed upon the carpet. How like she was to the haughty girl who had so lately left that room. The face, the hair, the carriage the very bearing of the head seemed hers. In everything but the soul which gives vitality and expression the two girls were identical. In certain moods, Cora was like her cousin, for at times she could be sad, regretful, and given up to tender thoughts. Then again, on rare occasions, Virginia could be indignant, proud, almost imperious; but that was always under a keen sense of wrong. Then it was that you could not have told the two girls apart. True, Cora had her own harsh individuality. The sneer that sometimes curved her red lips downward was never seen on the sweet mouth of Virginia, and her eyes never knew the steel-like glitter which sometimes shot through the sleeping venom of her cousin’s deadly glances. But these startling expressions came but seldom even on Cora’s face, and it required a sharp observer to mark the difference. Eunice Hurd was a sharp observer.

“I heard that you were ill, Aunt Lander, and came to help you, if I can be of use.”

Her voice was low and calm, but no trumpet ever thrilled human nerves as it disturbed those of Mrs. Lander. A sudden trembling seized upon her which shook the whole bed. But she made an effort to meet this kindness with answering affection, and struggling up from her pillows, held out one shaking hand.

“Thank you—thank you, my—my—”

She could not utter the lying word. Her teeth began to chatter, her lips turned white.

“You are ill—you suffer—let me bathe your forehead.”

“No, no; do not touch me. It is very kind of you to come, but I am well, I need no help. Eunice, tell her that I—I—”

Here the wretched woman fell upon her pillows and burst into tears.

“You only make her worse,” said Eunice, with strange gentleness. “It’s her nerves, they’re all shook to pieces. Jest go out, that’s a good soul.”

“Let me say one word to her,” persisted Virginia, with sweet firmness. “Aunt Eliza, do try and compose yourself, I will never harm you; I will try not to blame you very much. Do not let my presence disturb you so—I shall never forget how good you were to me once. Look up and see how much happier I am than—than—”

She was about to say, “than you are,” but checked herself and changed it into “than you might suppose.”

“Oh, God help us! Can any one be happy in this house?” exclaimed Mrs. Lander, in an outburst of bitter grief. “I cannot! I cannot! everything is dust and ashes!”

“Ah! I fear we shall none of us be happy again,” said Virginia, filled with commiseration by the evident distress of a woman she had once loved tenderly. “But God is just, and we can trust in him.”

Mrs. Lander started up in her bed. “Do not say that! You intend it as a reproach, and reproaches are cruel.”

“No, no; I did not mean to reproach any one; only to comfort you a little if I could. I saw her go down to the depot, and thought that you might be alone and suffering. But I have only disturbed you.”

“Disturbed her! I should think you had!” answered Eunice, sharply. “Everything disturbs her, poor cretur. Jest go out, that’s a good soul; she ain’t herself nohow.”

Virginia went softly out of the room, sad and heavy-hearted. What but misery came out of the vast property that her father had left? Those who held it seemed scarcely less unhappy than herself. Through that spacious mansion, bedded in flowers and swept by perfumed winds, the different members of the family wandered like unquiet spirits. No one was really at rest; no two of the Lander blood thoroughly loved each other. Distrust, and that hatred which springs from suspicion, poisoned the life that might have been so sweet and luxurious there.

Ellen Nolan met Virginia as she came from Mrs. Lander’s chamber.

“You look ill, dear lady,” she said, lifting her fine eyes to the disturbed face of her mistress. “Why is it that this sin, in which you have not participated, should trouble you so?”

“Come with me, Ellen—come with me. The very atmosphere of these rooms oppresses me. The woods out yonder look so cool and green: there is a log cabin within them, that I once used to play in. Cora and I have spent many a happy day there keeping house with our dolls. It is a quiet, pretty place, and my father loved it. Let us go down there.”

Ellen was ready to go anywhere with her mistress, and glad to feel the entire freedom promised by those distant woods. So the two girls, in reality companions rather than lady and servant, went together across the lawn and into the woods, where the brook made its sweet music under the rustic bridge and the sunlight came in a maze of golden green through the hemlock boughs. Virginia entered the log hut and looked around with a sad, wistful expression of the face.

“How many times he has been with me in this little cabin. It was here he first taught me to read.”

“Let us sit down and think how he would have wished you to act in this hard strait,” said Ellen, drawing a splint-bottomed chair to the window and unfolding a camp-stool for herself. “Surely, if the spirits of the dead even can visit us, his will be near to guide his child when so terribly beset!”

“I think he has guided me, Ellen. All the time something whispers me to wait and let God himself unravel the iniquity which surrounds me. I have seen Lawyer Stone a second time, and even his sharp intellect fails to discover any means of redress so long as my aunt persists in the statement she has made. It seems like madness when I contradict this statement without a single witness to sustain me.”

“Your aunt is not bad enough to persist in this forever. In her sense of justice there may yet be hope. She looks miserably, and the servants tell me is in no respect the woman that she was,” said Ellen. “Necessity, in this case, may prove the best wisdom. You can do nothing but wait.”

“Oh! Ellen, my life in this house is one torment. But I cannot leave it.”

“But where can you go, if it becomes unbearable?”

“Anywhere, so that you and I are alone.”

“But we have no money!”

“Yes, in the drawer of that desk was a box with some gold in it; not much, but enough to keep us a year or two, with economy, I should think. Then the pearls and other bits of jewelry are worth something. My poor, dear father gave me the gold, piece by piece, all through my childhood, and the box we called my bank. He little thought how precious it might become to me. But in what way to use it—where to go—Ellen, you are wise, and have learned something of the world—what could you and I do? We will live very humbly, work hard, if that is needful. I can do embroidery and fine needlework.”

Ellen shook her head and sat in restless thought awhile then she looked up brightly.

“That will never do; thousands of women are dependent on needlework and starve on it. But, lady, I can work.”

“You, Ellen!”

“Yes, lady, I am weak and crooked, and seem very helpless, but God, in compensation, my father used to say, has given me a strength here and here, out of which you and I shall win bread and that independence you long for.” Ellen touched her heart and her forehead lightly as she spoke.

“What do you mean, Ellen?”

“I can think—feel—dream—write such things as men and women will take joy in reading.”

“This you can do, Ellen; I see it in your face, I read it in your words; sometimes they thrill me with all the sweetness of poetry. Yes, Ellen, you can write a book—but what can I do?”

“Sing like an angel, dear lady. In all my life I never heard a voice like yours.”

“But to make that available I must be seen and take rank with opera singers. There would be no privacy for me.”

“True, true; and that would be terrible. Well, you were not born to work. Your gold shall keep us a little while independent if you are compelled to use it. When that is gone, I will do the rest. God will help us, for he always aids those who try for themselves. While I write you will sing, thus making a noble voice richer and sweeter. Then, if my poor effort fails, you will be prepared to make sacrifices. Besides, God will not drive you to the last resource unless it is good for you.”

“How wisely—how like a woman you talk, Ellen. If we could only go at once.”

“What prevents us, lady?”

“This, Ellen; Lawyer Stone does not sanction our leaving the house. While we stay here, he says, the right to possession is a disputed question. If we go away, it is to surrender all.”

“And we must live here.”

“It is my duty, Ellen. The rights which my father gave me must not be abandoned weakly. As I would be in duty bound to protect another, I must protect myself. The property which my father left is a sacred trust to be used for the good of mankind, as he used it. In her hands it will be perverted; humanity will gain nothing by it. Even now it gives neither comfort nor content to any one. Wealth is a wonderful power, Ellen, either for good or evil. I have thought a great deal of this in our lonely sea voyage after the ship rescued us. It was a weight upon me, Ellen, and I prayed for strength to bear this noble responsibility as he had done. But it is wrested from me.”

“Not altogether, sweet lady. God is just.”

“But for that belief, we should be helpless indeed,” said Virginia, smiling kindly upon her humble friend. “Ellen, yours is wise counsel; we must not waste our lives in vain regrets or idle dreaming. That which is in your brain and my voice shall be worked out faithfully. In this large house we can live almost solitary lives—you and I. That strange woman, Eunice, will, I think, help us in this. We will study, practice and wait.”

“I have often heard my father say that the great secret of success lay in knowing how to wait and when to act.”

“Your father was a wise, good man, Ellen.”

Ellen Nolan’s eyes filled with tears, and in her sweet humility she took Virginia’s hand and kissed it.

“Hark, I hear some one coming,” said the young lady. “Look out, Ellen, and see who it is.”

Ellen looked out of the little window and saw a man coming up the path by the brook. He stood in the shadow of the bridge a moment, cast one glance at the cabin, and retreated hastily. Ellen did not see his face clearly, but the figure was that of a young person, tall and elegant.

“It is some traveller from the tavern below here, I fancy,” said Virginia when Ellen told her what she saw. “We must go away; this place was solitary enough while he lived, but everything is changed now.”

Ellen looked a little anxiously after the man. His air and figure seemed familiar to her and brought the brother she loved so much to her mind, by some unconscious train of association.

“Yes,” she said at last, with more cheerfulness than was usual to her, “let us go now. But what a lovely place this would be to write in, so cool and shadowy, it seems almost like the green light of a wilderness.”

Virginia smiled and shared the poetic love of nature which beamed in those honest eyes with that kindred sympathy which makes letters and music twin arts.

“How I wish we could gather up the murmurs which come up from the brook and the mysterious shivering of the leaves in one melody,” she said. “I have tried more than once and failed.”

“Try again,” answered the hunchback, hopefully, “over and over again; that is the way in which genius accomplishes itself, my father often said. If you have an idea, work it out. When God gives a thought, he gives the capacity for developing it. Gold never comes from the mine without hard labor. Toil and thought go hand in hand.”

“Your father must have been a strangely thoughtful man,” said Virginia, looking with tender affection on the hunchback.

“He was—he was!” answered Ellen. “I love to think his sayings over in the night; I love to feel them starting up like blossoms in my own heart. He was a good man, was my father. I know how he lived—you saw how he could die.”

“The inheritance he has left you, Ellen, is better far than gold.”

“Yes, because it is a part of himself.”

“Still he was, from your account, a practical man.”

“I think that genius which is not practical may be called by some other name—insanity perhaps. He used to say so, and I believe it. The great geniuses of the age, those who will live and breathe through all time, are, at least in this age, eminently practical men. It is small minds that affect eccentricity.”

It was a study to watch those young lips uttering thoughts and sayings that seemed so much beyond her years; but Virginia was right, Ellen had received an inheritance of thought from her father with a memory which treasured every saying of his as a miser hoards his gold. What seemed to be precocity in her sprang out of the intense love she had borne for him. When she spoke of him or his thoughts the light would deepen and kindle in her eyes; her white forehead expanded and the expression of her mouth grew beautiful to look upon.

“How deeply you have thought of these things,” said Virginia, stealing an arm fondly over Ellen’s shoulder. “Sometimes it seems to me as if nothing could make you unhappy.”

“Is any one in this world altogether unhappy, I wonder? When God has made the earth so beautiful and filled it with so many sources of comfort, no human soul should be really miserable. Then the thoughts of that other world, to which your father and mine have gone, fills the future with noble sources of aspiration. While love exists in this world and travels on through eternity, linking humanity with the divine, what present trouble should rob a firm heart of its energies and its hopes?”

“I love to hear the father’s thoughts on the child’s young lips, but it makes me almost afraid of you, Ellen,” exclaimed Virginia, smoothing the bright hair of her protégé with a kindly touch of the hand.

“Not of me, lady; you cannot be afraid of me while I love you so dearly.”

Speaking thus lovingly to each other the young girls left the cabin and walked slowly towards the house.

“It is strange, but this seems really like my home, now that she is away,” said Virginia, looking towards the house, whose pillars rose white and symmetrical from the green of the lawn and shrubbery. “I breathe more freely.”

“Carry out your idea of living by ourselves, and this nervous feeling, which holds the very breath in one’s bosom, will pass away. This life of ours gives too much time for thought.”

“Yes, yes, we will go to work,” answered Virginia, made cheerful by the idea. “There is music in my throat, and thought in this brain of yours.”

“These are our mines, and we must work them,” said Ellen. “Perhaps it was for this God allowed that wicked girl to steal your inheritance. Who knows?”

By this time the two girls had reached the house and disappeared behind the white pillars with their arms around each other, happier than they had been for months.