PAGE 9
Fanny McDermot
by
She paid the charges of the funeral; those charges that always come, a sordid and vexing element, with the bereavements of the poor; and late the following evening, Mrs. O’Roorke, hearing, as she fancied, a footstep descending the stair, and soon after a carriage rolling away, mounted to verify or dismiss her suspicions. There was no answer to her knock; the door was not locked, she opened it; a lamp was burning on the table, and a letter, the wafer yet wet, lying by it.
“Ellen,” she called. Ellen came.”Who is this letter for, Ellen?”
“Why! for you, mother, and Fanny’s writing!”
“Read it, Ellen; she knows I cannot read, and if there’s e’er a secret in it, keep it as if it were your own.”
Ellen read—”Mrs. O’Roorke,—You have been a kind friend to me, and I thank you; and give you, in token of my gratitude, all that I have in this room. My clothes please give to Ellen, and the purse with the two dollars, in the corner of the drawer, to Pat. With many thanks from me,
“Ever your grateful friend, “FANNY MCDERMOT.”
“The dear darlint; but faith, Ellen, that’s not the whole of it; see if there’s never a little something of a sacret shoved in betwixt the other words?”
“Ne’er a syllable, mother.”
“Ne’er a what, child? t’was a sacret I asked for.”
“You’ve got the whole, mother, every word.”
“Sure it’s not of myself I’m thinking; but the time may come, when she’ll wish for as rough a friend as I am. God help her and guide her, poor child! in this rough, stony world—darlint child!”
It was some time before Ellen clearly comprehended that Fanny was gone from them, probably for ever; and it was some time longer, before these generous creatures could bear to consider themselves in any way gainers by her departure. They turned the key of Fanny’s door, and went to their own room—Ellen to brood over what seemed to her an insolvable mystery, and her mother to ‘guess and fear.’
Fifteen months had now passed away since Fanny had looked out from her joyless home in Houston street, to an existence bright with promised love and pleasure. She had seen
“The distant gates of Eden gleam,
And did not dream, it was a dream.”
Our readers must now follow her to an isolated house in the upper part of the city. There she had two apartments, furnished with more finery than elegance, or even neatness. The rose-coloured curtains were faded, the gilded furniture tarnished, and from the vases of faded artificial flowers Fanny’s sickening thoughts now often turned to the white jessamine and rose, types of her lost purity, that blossomed in her Aunt Sara’s window.
Fanny was not the first tenant of these apartments, which, with others in the same house, were kept, furnished an
d supplied, by a certain Mrs. Tilden, who herself occupied the basement rooms. Fanny, now by courtesy called Mrs. Stafford, was but little more than seventeen, just on the threshold of life! That fountain of love which has power to make the wilderness blossom, to fill the desert places of life with flowers and fruits, had been poisoned, and there was no more health in it. The eye, which should have been just opening to the loveliest visions of youth, was dull and heavily cast down, while tear after tear dropped from it on a sleeping infant, some few months on its pilgrimage “between the cradle and the grave.” The beautiful form of Fanny’s features remained, but the life of beauty was gone; her once brilliant cheek was pale, and her whole figure shrunken. Health, self-respect, cheerfulness, even hope, the angel of life, were driven away for ever—and memory, so sparkling and sweet to youth, bore but a bitter chalice to poor Fanny’s lips. She sat statue-like, till she started at a footstep approaching the door. A slovenly servant girl entered, in a pert and noisy manner, that expressed the absence of all deference, and took from a handkerchief, in which it was wrapped, a letter addressed to Nugent Stafford, saying, “I’ve been to the Astor House, and the American, and the City Hotel, and all them boarding-houses down town, and there’s no such person there, and nowhere else, I expect.”