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PAGE 23

Fanny McDermot
by [?]

Mrs. Emly locked the door. Truly the children of this world are wise in their generation! Sydney disengaged his arm, and said, in a scarcely audible voice, for his false words choked him as he uttered them, “Who do you take me for? The woman is mad!”

“No—I am not mad yet—but oh, my head, it aches so! it is so giddy! Feel how it beats, Stafford. Oh, don’t pull your hand away from me! How many times you have kissed these temples, and the curls that hung over them, and talked about their beauty. What are they now? What will they soon be? You feel it throb, don’t you? Stafford, I am not going to blame you now. I have forgiven you; I have prayed to God to forgive you. Oh how deadly pale you are now, Stafford! Now you feel for us! Now, look at our poor little child!” She uncovered the poor little infant, and raised it more from stupor than from sleep. The half-famished little thing uttered a feeble, sickly moan.”Oh God! oh God—she is dying! Is not she dying?” She grasped Augusta Emly’s arm.”Can’t something be done for her? I have killed her! I have killed my baby! It was you that were kind to us yesterday—yes—it was you. I don’t know where it was. Oh—my head—my head!”

“For God’s sake, mamma, let us take her home with us,” cried Augusta, and she rushed to the door to look for her servant. As she opened it, voices and footsteps were heard descending the stairs. She heeded them not,—her mother did.

“Go now—go instantly, Sydney,” she said.

“Oh, no—no—do not go,” cried Fanny, attempting to grasp him; but he eluded her, and unnoticed by them, passed through the throng of servants at the door, threw himself into the first hackney coach he saw, and was driven away.

Fanny uttered one piercing shriek, looked wildly around her, and passing through the cluster of ladies pressing into the cloak-room, she passed, unobserved by her, behind Miss Emly, who stood, regardless of the pouring rain, on the doorstep ordering her coachman to drive nearer the door. When she returned to the cloak-room, it was filled with ladies; and in the confusion of the shawling, there was much talk among them of the strange apparition that had glided out of the room as they entered.

Mrs. Emly threw a cloak around her daughter.”Say nothing, Augusta!” she whispered, imperatively, “they are both gone.”

“Gone! together?”

Mrs. Emly did not, or affected not to hear her. The next morning Miss Emly was twice summoned to breakfast before she appeared. She had passed a sleepless and wretched night, thinking of that helpless young sufferer, ruined, and in her extreme misery, driven forth to the stormy elements.

There is not a sadder moment in life than that in which a young, hopeful, generous creature discovers unsoundness, worldliness, and heartlessness in those to whom nature has most closely bound her,—than that, when, in the freedom of her own purity and love of goodness, and faith in truth, she discovers the compromising selfishness, the sordid calculations, the conventional falsehood of the world. Happy for her, if, in misanthropic disgust, she does not turn away from it; happy, if use does not bring her to stoop from her high position; most happy, if like Him who came to the sick, she fulfil her mission, and remain in the world, not of it!

Augusta went through the form of breakfast, and taking up the morning paper and passing her eye listlessly over it, her attention was fixed by the following paragraph:

” Committals at the Tombs —Fanny McDermot, a young woman so calling herself, was taken up by a watchman during the violence of the storm last night with a dead infant in her arms. A rich velvet mantilla, lined with fur, was wrapped round the child. Nothing but moans could be extracted from the woman. She was committed for stealing the mantilla. A jury of inquest is called to sit upon the child, which they have not yet been able to force from the mother’s arms.”