CHAPTER XLV
Alone and without references, Laurel did not find it easy to secure respectable lodgings in the city. She thought of returning to the house where she had lived with her father, but a wholesome dread of her base enemy, Ross Powell, held her back. She did not think it would be prudent to venture into that vicinity, so she went to a far-removed portion of the city, where she only secured the cheap and decent lodgings she desired by the payment of several months in advance. She was very well pleased to do this, for she had made up her mind to remain in this quiet, obscure locality until her trial was over. To her curious landlady, she called herself Mrs. Vane and said that she was a widow.
As she had left all her clothing at Eden, Laurel found herself compelled to draw again upon her small hoard of money. In accordance with her rôle of a widow, she bought only black dresses and these were of a cheap and simple kind. She put back her rich, golden hair under an ugly widow's cap, and never ventured into the street without a thick crape veil drawn closely over her face. She did not feel that she was acting a falsehood in doing this. She said to herself that she was worse than widowed. She had been most cruelly put away from her husband's heart for a sin that he ought to have forgiven because she had loved him so dearly and had been tempted so much beyond her power of resistance.
A strange cold bitterness began to grow up in her desolate young heart toward him. She called him hard and cold and unloving in her thoughts because measured by her own passionate love his affection fell so far below the standard where she would have placed it. Laurel was all unversed in the lore of the world. She knew nothing of the difference between male and female love. She had never heard that couplet so wonderfully true that use has worn it threadbare:
"Man's love is of man's life a thing apart,
'Tis woman's whole existence."
She did not know this—no one had ever told her so, and she was fated to learn it in the hardest fashion by cruel experience. She was learning, too, in all their subtle pathos the truth of those mournful lines:
"Alas! the love of women, it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing,
For all of theirs upon the die is thrown,
And if 'tis lost life has no more to bring."
Those were sad and heavy days that followed on her flitting to New York. She was almost crazed with the bitterness of her despair. There were weeks that were afterward almost a blank to her because she spent them in tears that were like drops of blood wrung from her aching, bleeding heart. She lay all day on her little bed vainly dwelling on the irrevocable past, looking back on all that she had lost with incurable longing and bitter regret. When this season of lamenting had worn itself out, Laurel grew hard and proud and tried to forget—a hard task that many, stronger than our little heroine, have essayed in vain.
After a while, she found out that she would have to draw again on the contents of her already diminished purse. There were garments to be provided for the little stranger who was coming to brighten her darkened life. She would not choose coarse, cheap garments now, such as she had bought for herself. She selected the finest, whitest linen, the softest, warmest flannel, the daintiest muslin, and was even a little extravagant in the matter of dainty laces and Hamburg trimmings. Then, when the complete and pretty outfit was laid away, with lavender and rose leaves between the snowy folds, Laurel counted the few dollars that were left from her expenditures and became frightened.
"When it is all gone, what shall I do?" she asked herself, blankly. "Where is the next to come from?"
And her startled reason harshly answered her: "You will have to work for it. You will have to earn it."
Laurel did not know how to earn money. She had never been taught any available thing, and her delicate condition of health precluded the idea of going out into the busy world to toil. Besides, her morbid sensibilities shrunk from the thought of encountering strangers who would look upon her with coldness, perhaps suspicion.
She was in despair at first, but she suddenly remembered how easily and quickly her reckless, pleasure-loving father had earned the wherewithal for their support.
"The publishers were always eager for Papa's MSS.," she said to herself hopefully; "and, being his daughter, I must have inherited his genius. I will write."
She was not egotistical. She was simply ignorant of the world's ways. She did not know how many failed in the world of letters, where one succeeded. The idea took hold of her fancy, and without a dream of failure, she armed herself with a ream of foolscap, plenty of ink, and pens, and went enthusiastically to work.
Comments