One Night's Mystery: -

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One Night's Mystery

Fleming, May Agnes (1840-1880)

ISBN

9783963751219

POPULAR NOVELS.

By May Agnes Fleming.

ONE

NIGHT'S MYSTERY.

A Novel.

BY

w

CONTENTS.

[Pg 9]

ONE NIGHT'S MYSTERY

CHAPTER I.

SYDNEY.

"A girl who has so many wilful ways,

She would have caused Job's patience to forsake him,

Yet is so rich in all that's girlhood's praise,

Did Job himself upon her goodness gaze,

A little better she would surely make him."

 gray, quaint Canadian town, a dozen rows of straggling streets, tin-roofed houses that wink and twinkle back the frosty fall sunshine—houses uniform in nothing except their dulness and their glistening metal roofs. Dull, very dull they certainly are; two-storied, many-windowed, of dingy red brick or gloomy gray stone; depressing beyond all telling to the eye and mind of the solitary stranger doomed for his sins to drag out a few dreary months in the stagnant—well, let us say—town of Petit St. Jacques. Stagnant—that is the word. Life long ago lay down for a siesta there, and never woke up. Religion is the only thing that seems at all brisk. Many gilt spires point upward to the blue Canadian heaven; a full score of bells clash forth each Sunday, and thrice on that day, and thrice each week-day, the great booming bell of the dim old Cathedral de Nôtre Dame chimes forth the Angelus Domini, as you may hear in some dreamy, world forgotten town of old France. Beneath its gray stone arches tall pines and feathery tamaracs toss their green plumes in the salt breezes from the stormy gulf, and brilliant-plumaged, shrill-voiced Canadian birds flit among the branches. In the fiercely hot, short-lived Canadian summer grass grows green in the market-places and busiest streets of Petit St. Jacques.

[Pg 10]

In the summer. But the summer, brief and sweet as a pleasant dream, is at an end; the ides of October are here. Shrill October winds whistle down the wide empty streets; drifts of scarlet maple and orange hemlock leaves swirl in your face; a black frost holds the earth iron bound; your footsteps ring like steel over the unpaved sidewalks; the keen breath of coming winter sets your blood leaping, your eyes sparkling, and lights in dusk Canadian cheeks a hue rosier than all the rouge végétal on earth can give.

"And the last of October will be Halloween! This is the twenty-ninth—only two days more. Girls, do stop whooping like a tribe of Mic-macs gone mad, and list, oh! list to me. Friday next is Halloween."

But the speaker's voice was lost in the shrieking uproar of five-and-thirty school-girls on the war-path. Afternoon school was over, the day scholars gone home, and the boarders, out in the playground for the last half-hour's recess before evening study, were rending the heavens with the deafening, distracting din that five-and-thirty of those rose-cheeked, gold-haired, corseted angels alone know how to raise.

If there was one thing besides its churches for which Petit St. Jacques was famous, it was the establishment of the Demoiselles Chateauroy for young ladies. It stood in the centre of the Rue St. Dominique; and if there was anything to choose in the matter of dulness and respectability among all the dull and respectable streets of the little town, the Rue St. Dominique should be awarded the palm. There were no shops, there were no people; the houses looked at you as you passed with a sad, settled, melancholy mildew upon them; the doors rarely opened, the blinds and curtains were never drawn; prim little gardens, with prim little gravel-paths, shut in these sad little houses from the street; now and then a pale, pensive face might gleam at you from some upper window, spectre-like, and vanish. The wheels of a passing wagon echo and re-echo down its long silence; the very dogs who sneak out to waggle their tails in the front grass-plot have a forlorn and secret-sorrow sort of air. Take it for all in all, you might travel from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande and not find another so absolutely low-spirited and drearily respectable a street as the Rue St. Dominique. Indeed, as Miss Sydney Owenson often and justly remarked, it was a very poor compliment to St. Dominique to christen it after him at all. Miss Sydney Owenson was one of the Demoiselles Chateauroy's five-and thirty boarders; and[Pg 11] it may as well be stated here as elsewhere, had made the Demoiselles Chateauroy more trouble, broken more laws, been condemned to solitary confinement oftener, been the head and front of more frolicsome offendings, and, withal, been better loved by both pupils and teachers during the past three years than the other four-and-thirty put together.

Miss Owenson is in disgrace every week of her life, Mademoiselle Jeanne Chateauroy was wont to observe, taking a surreptitious pinch of snuff, "and, if strict justice were administered, would be in punishment and disgrace every day of the week; but, ma foi! what would you? It is only high spirits and good health, after all. She keeps the school in a ferment, that is true; there is no mischief of which she is not ringleader, but it is innocent mischief, after all; she has the smile and voice of an angel; it is impossible to be as severe with her as she deserves, and then, Mon Dieu, it is the best heart that ever beat."

This pensionnat des demoiselles of the sisters Chateauroy was situated, as has been said, in the centre of the Rue St. Dominique, fronting directly upon the street—its extensive gardens and playground in the rear. A wooden wall eight feet high shut in this sacred inclosure and its angelic jeunes filles from the sacrilegious eye of man. In the face of the fierce summer sun, in the teeth of the fierce winter blasts, the twelve green shutters that protected the twelve front windows were kept jealously closed and barred. No prying, curious daughter of Eve might by any chance look out upon the gay and festive dissipations of the Rue St. Dominique—no daring masculine eye might ever in passing glance in. This prison discipline had only existed within the past two years, and a dark and dreadful legend was whispered about through the dormitories in the dead waist and middle of the night to all newcomers of the reason why. As usual, it was all Sydney Owenson's fault. Perched on top of the highest desk in the school-room, her eager head thrust out of the window, this daring, ill-behaved girl had deliberately winked at a passing soldier from the dingy old stone barracks outside the town. The soldier had winked back again; then this totally depraved Miss Owenson had thrown him a kiss; then this dreadful soldier threw her a kiss, and grinned, and went by. Next day he came again; next day Miss Owenson was perched up on the window-sill, like sister Anne on the watch tower, to see if there was anybody coming. Sent by her guardian-angel, no doubt, at this dreadful juncture, Mademoiselle Chat[Pg 12]eauroy the elder came into the school-room; Mademoiselle Chateauroy's horrified eyes beheld Miss Owenson with all the superior half of her person projecting into the Rue St. Dominique: Mademoiselle Chateauroy's stunned ears overheard these words:

"I say, Mr. Lobsterback, who is that lovely young officer I saw prancing all you fellows to the English Church last Sunday? All the girls are dying to know, and I told them I would find out. We're all in love with him. Do tell us his——"

Mademoiselle Chateauroy heard no more. To seize Miss Sydney Owenson, to tear her from her perch, to slam down the window, to glare annihilation upon the grinning red-coat, to confront the offender, livid with horror, was but the work of a second.

What awful fate befell the culprit no pupil knew—no, not to this day; her punishment was enshrouded in the same dark mystery that envelops the ultimate end of the Man in the Iron Mask. She had not been expelled, that was clear, for that was two years ago; and when questioned herself, Miss Owenson was wont to look for a moment supernaturally solemn, and then go off into a peal at the remembrance that made the welkin ring.

It is close upon five on this October evening, when the thirty-five boarders of the pensionnat are disporting themselves in the primrose light of the dying day, under the watchful and weary eyes of Miss Jones, the English teacher. It is a French play, and a very noisy one. Brother Hermit, can you dance? half a dozen tall girls are chanting, in high, shrill, sing-song French. Shrieks of laughter rend the atmosphere, and Miss Jones covers two distracted ears, and calls frantically, and calls in vain:

"Young ladies! Oh, dear me! Young ladies, less noise."

The noise grows fast and furious, the chanting rises shriller and shriller, the screams of laughter wilder and wilder. The Brother Hermits caper about like dancing dervishes gone mad. In the midst of it all, a tall, dark, handsome girl, with a double eye-glass across the bridge of her patrician aquiline nose, comes laughingly up to half-delirious Miss Jones.

"It's more like a maison de santé, with the lunatics set loose, than a decorous young ladies' school, she remarks. I say, Miss Jones, where is Sydney Owenson?"

"I don't know. Oh, if the study bell would but ring! Go and look for Sydney Owenson in the thick of the mêlée; you'll[Pg 13] be sure to find her; they never could make half so much noise without her. Oh, good heaven! hear that."

Another ear-splitting shriek made Miss Jones cover her bruised and wounded tympanums. The dark damsel laughed.

"At once there rose so wild a yell

Within that dark and narrow dell,

As all the fiends from heaven that fell

Had pealed the banner-cry of ——"

Miss Hendrick! screamed Miss Jones.

The place unmentionable to ears polite. Don't cry out before you're hurt, Miss Jones. No, Syd isn't there, however they manage to raise all that racket without her. Where can she be? I want to tell her that Friday is Hallowe'en, and that Mrs. Delamere has invited all our class who will be allowed to go to a party at her house.

Indeed, Miss Hendrick! Miss Jones, the English teacher, fixed two suspicious light-blue eyes upon Miss Hendrick's dark, handsome face, and expressed volumes of disbelief in that one incredulous word.

"Yes, 'indeed,' Miss Jones, and you are not invited, I'm happy to say. You don't believe me, do you? You never do believe anything Cyrilla Hendrick says, if you can help yourself, do you? You see, Mrs. Colonel Delamere happens—unfortunately for you—to be a lady, and has a weakness for inviting young ladies only to her house. That is why, probably, she is blind to the manifold merits of Miss Mary Jane Jones. You're name is Mary Jane, isn't it, Miss Jones? I saw it in your prayer-book. No, don't apologize, please—it's more one's misfortune than one's fault to be born Mary Jane Jones—'A rose by any other name,' etc."

All this, with her black eyes fixed full upon Miss Jones's face, in the slowest, softest voice, an insolent smile on her handsome lips, Miss Cyrilla Hendrick said.

Miss Jones sprang to her feet, passion flashing from her eye, her pale, freckled complexion flushing crimson.

"Miss Hendrick, your insolence is not to be borne! I will not bear it. The moment recreation is over, I will go to Mam'selle Chateauroy and report your impertinent speech."

Will you, really? Don't excite yourself, dear Miss Jones. If you palpitate in this way, something will go crack. Tell mam'selle anything it pleases your gracious highness; it won't be the first time you've carried stories of me. Mademoiselle[Pg 14] can get a better teacher than you any day, but first-rate pupils don't grow on every tamarac-tree in Lower Canada. Adieu, dear and gentle Miss Jones! I kiss your ladyship's hands. Sydney! Sydney! where are you?

She walked away, sending her fresh, clear young voice over all the uproar. Miss Jones, the teacher, looked after her with a glare of absolute hatred.

"I'll be even with you yet, Miss Cyrilla Hendrick, or I'll know the reason why! You have given me more insolence during the past year than all the school together. As you say, it's no use complaining to Miss Chateauroy. You're a credit to the school, she thinks, with your brilliant singing, and playing, and painting; but I'll pay you for your jibes and insults one day, mark my words—one day, and that before long."

Sydney! Sydney! the clear voice still shouted. Now, where can that girl be? 'That rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels call Lenore.' Sydney! Sydney-y! Sydney-y-y-y!

She stops, expending all her strength in one mighty shout that rises over the wild, high singing of the French Canadians, Frère l'Hermite, savez vous danser? It comes pealing to an upper window overlooking the playground, and a girl huddled up cross-legged like a Turk takes two fingers out of two pretty pink ears, and lifts a yellow head from a book to listen.

Sydney! Sydney Owenson! Oh, my own, my long-lost daughter! cried Miss Hendricks with ear-splitting piercingness, where in this wicked world are you?

Bother! mutters the girl in the window, and then the yellow head, sunning over with curls, goes down again, two fingers return into two ears, a pair of gray eyes glue themselves once more to the pages of the book, and Miss Sydney Owenson is lost again to all sublunary things. They may shriek, they may yell, they may rend the heavens with their unearthly cries, they may drive Miss Jones deaf and frantic—Cyrilla Hendrick, the friend of her bosom, the David in petticoats to her Jonathan ditto, may split her voice in her distracted cries for Sydney, Sydney is a thousand miles away; nothing short of an earth-quake may arouse her, so absorbed is she.

Yes, something does.

Miss Owenson! says the awful voice of Mademoiselle Chateauroy the elder, and Miss Owenson drops her book and jumps as though she were shot. Miss Owenson, what book is that?[Pg 15]

A small, snuff-colored lady, with a frisette and a head-dress of yellow roses and black beadwork, confronts her—a very small, very snuff-colored lady, with glancing opal eyes—Mademoiselle Stephanie Chateauroy.

Miss Owenson puts her two hands, the book in them, behind her back, and faces Mademoiselle Stephanie à la Napoleon the Great. She is a pretty girl—a very pretty girl of seventeen or so, with gray, large, innocent-looking eyes, a pearly skin, a soft-cut, childish mouth, and curls of copper gold down to her slim girl's waist.

Yes, mam'selle, says Miss Owenson, in a tone of cheerful meekness; did you call me, mam'selle?

Why are you not in the playground, Mees Owenson? demands, severely, mademoiselle.

Oh, well! responds Miss Owenson, losing a trifle of her cheerful meekness, "I'm sick of 'Brother Hermit' and the other stupid plays, only fit for the babies of the première class. Besides, the noise makes my head ache."

Miss Owenson makes this remarkable statement calmly. The open window at which she has been sitting is just three feet over the heads of the rioters, and in the very thick of the tumult. Its utter absurdity is so palpable that mademoiselle declines to notice it.

Mees Owenson is aware that absence from the playground, in play hour, is a punishable offence? goes on mademoiselle with increased ascerbity.

Oh, yes, says Miss Owenson, quite cheerfully once more; that's no odds. Nothing's any odds, when you're used to it, and I ought to be used to every species of punishable offences in this school by this time.

Mees Owenson, what were you reading when I entered this room?

A book, mam'selle.

"Mees Owenson, what book?"

Oh, well—a story-book then, if you will have it, by a person you don't know—a Mr. Dickens. I know it's against the rules, but it was all an accident—upon my word it was, mam'selle.

An accident, you sitting here in play-hour reading a wicked novel! Mees Owenson!

It's not a wicked novel. Dickens never wrote anything wicked in his life. Papa has every one of his books in the library at home, and used to read them aloud to mamma. And[Pg 16] I mean it's an accident my finding the book. It isn't mine; I don't know whose it is; I found it last evening, lying among the cabbages—honor bright, mam'selle! I'll pitch it back there now.

And then, before Mlle. Stephanie can catch her breath, Miss Owenson gives the volume behind her a brisk pitch out of the open casement, and it falls plump upon the head of her sworn friend, Cyrilla Hendrick.

There is a moment's pause, and teacher and pupil confront each other. That an explosion will follow, Miss Sydney Owenson fully expects, but what was she to do? Helen Heme's name was on the fly-leaf. Helen Heme was a day-scholar, who surreptitiously smuggled story-books inside the sacred walls of the pensionnat for the private delectation of the boarders. Helen had been threatened with expulsion the next time she was caught in the act red-handed, so to say, and it was much more on Helen's account than on her own that Sydney Owenson was palpitating now.

"I coaxed so hard for that 'Pickwick,' Sydney thinks. I hope to goodness some of the girls will pick it up and hide it outside. I don't mind mam'selle's flare-up—I'm used to it—but I'd never forgive myself if Nell came to grief through me."

She looks up now into mademoiselle's indignant face, clasps two little white hands imploringly, and begins, with that voice and smile mademoiselle herself declares to be the most charming on earth, to wheedle her out of her just wrath.

"Oh, Mam'selle Stephanie, don't be angry, please. I know it's wrong to break rules, but then I am so tired of the stupid old plays out there, and the girls are so noisy and rude, and my head did ache, and the book was not a bad book—upon my word and honor it wasn't, mam'selle; not a bit like a novel at all, and I did find it among the cabbages last evening, and——"

Mademoiselle Stephanie knows of old that Miss Owenson is perfectly capable of going on in this strain without a single full stop for the next hour. Therefore, without a word, she pulls a letter out of her pocket and hands it to her pet pupil.

"I will overlook your disobedience this once, petite, she said, because it is probably the very last time you will ever have a chance to disobey. Read your mamma's letter, my dear; I know what it contains, as it came inclosed in one to me. Chérie, mam'selle's voice absolutely falters, you—you are about to leave school."

Sydney Owenson rises to her feet, the great gray eyes dilate[Pg 17] and grow almost black with some vague terror. She looks at her letter—a look of absolute affright, the last trace of color leaving her pearl-fair skin—then at mademoiselle.

Papa, she falters. "Oh, mam'selle! don't say papa is——"

"Worse?—No, my dear. You poor child, you are as white as the wall. No, papa is no worse—it isn't that—it is—but read your letter, tres chère; it will tell you all about it, and believe me, my dear, and mademoiselle lays two snuff-colored old hands kindly on the girl's shoulders, no one in this school will regret the loss of its most troublesome pupil more than I shall."

She toddles away and leaves Miss Owenson to read her letter. Ah, she sighs, "it is the best, the tenderest little heart in the world, after all. I shall never love another pupil so well. Only a baby of seventeen, and to be married in a month! Hèlas, the poor little one!"

Sydney tears open her letter; it is a lengthy, spidery, woman's scrawl.

"Owenson Place, October 25, 18—.

"My Dear Little Daughter:—I have written to the Mademoiselles Chateauroy, telling them to have all things ready for your departure on Monday, the third of November. You are to leave school, and for good. Papa is not worse really, but he thinks he is, and he pines for you. He has taken it into his head—you know how hypochondriacal he is—that he will die before the year ends, and he insists that you must be married at once, else he will not live to see it. Now don't worry about this, Sydney. I know how foolish you are concerning poor papa's whims, and it is only a whim. Bertie is here, came by the Cunard steamer from England three weeks ago, and is naturally all impatience to see you. It is a very absurd whim of papa's, I think myself, this marrying a child of seventeen and a boy of twenty-two; but what use is it my saying so? I was nine-and-twenty when I married Captain Owenson. Still, I am sure, I hope you will be happy; and Bertie is so nice and good-tempered and gentlemanly and all that, that any one might get along with him. Rebecca will reach Petit St. Jacques Saturday afternoon, and you and she will start for home on Monday morning. Papa has actually sent to Paris for your wedding-dress, and pearls, and veil, as though good enough could not have been got in New York City; but it is another of his whims to look down upon everything in this country, and[Pg 18] think nothing fit for you that doesn't come from Europe. I'm sure sometimes I wonder he ever married an American lady, or that he found a school on this continent fit for his only child. I know he would have sent you to the Sacre Cœur at Paris, only he couldn't bear to put the ocean between himself and you. But this has nothing to do with it. So bid the young ladies and teachers good-by, and be ready to start on Monday morning with Rebecca.

"Your affectionate Mother,

Charlotte Owenson.

P.S.—Bertie sends his love and a kiss, he says, to all the pretty girls in the school. He is as foolish as ever, but very handsome and elegant, I must say. Christ Church College has improved him greatly. He wanted to accompany Rebecca, but, of course, I wouldn't hear of anything so improper as that.

C. O.

P.S. No. 2.—By the by, papa says you may invite your particular friend, Miss Hendrick, if you like, to be one of your bridemaids. He knew her aunt, Miss Phillis Dormer, in England, and her mother comes of one of the best families in Dorsetshire. As if the best family in Dorsetshire mattered in America.

C. O.

CHAPTER II.

CYRILLA.

he long, loosely written, rambling letter dropped on Sydney's lap, her hands folded over it, and she sat strangely quiet (for her), looking out at the faint opaline twilight sky. To leave school on Monday—to be married in a month! Surely enough to startle any school-girl of seventeen. Besides being the daughter of the richest man, besides having double, treble the spending money of any other girl in the pensionnat, besides having silks and laces and jewels as though she were five-and-twenty and out, besides having beauty and talent and goodness and grace, Sydney Owenson had one other and still greater claim to be queen rose of[Pg 19] Mlle. Stephanie's rosebud garden of girls,—she was engaged! All and each of the four-and-thirty other boarders of mam'selle—not to speak of the one-and-twenty day-scholars—looked forward in the fulness of time to a possible lover, a prospective engagement, and an ultimate husband, but a real lover and a bona fide engagement none of them had yet attained, with the exception of Miss Owenson. That heighth of bliss Miss Owenson had reached in her sixteenth birthday. The midsummer vacation over, the young lady had returned to Canada from her paternal mansion—a solitaire diamond ablaze on one slim finger, a locket (with a gentleman's portrait and a ring of brown hair) around her white throat—and calmly announced to all whom it might concern that she was engaged.

The first stunning shock of surprise over, a torrent of questions poured upon the blissful fiancée.

"Oh! good gracious! Oh, Mon Dieu! was she really? Oh, how nice! Oh! c'est charmant? What was his name? Where did he live? How did it come about? What did he say? Was he handsome? Was he rich? Did papa and mamma know? Oh, what a love of a ring, and oh, how splendid it was to be engaged at sixteen! And when, O Sydney! when were they going to be married?"