Page:What will he do with it.djvu/484

474 love-vow—yea, even the very bells and coral that pleased the infant in its dainty cradle, and the very Bible in which the lips that now bargain for sixpence more, read to some gray-haired father on his bed of death!

Soon the sums thus miserably raised were as miserably doled away. With a sullen apathy the woman contemplated famine. She would make no effort to live—appeal to no relations, no friends. It was a kind of vengeance she took on others, to let herself drift on to death. She had retreated from lodging to lodging, each obscurer, more desolate than the other. Now, she could no longer pay rent for the humblest room; now, she was told to go forth—whither? She knew not—cared not—took her way toward the river, as by that instinct which, when the mind is diseased, tends toward self-destruction, scarce less involuntarily than it turns, in health, toward self-preservation. Just as she passed under the lamp-light at the foot of Westminster Bridge, a well-dressed man looked at her, and seized her arm. She raised her head with a chilly, melancholy scorn, as if she had received an insult—as if she feared that the man knew the stain upon her name, and dreamed, in his folly, that the dread of death might cause her to sin again.

"Do you not know me?" said the man; "more strange that I should recognize you! Dear, dear!—and what a dress!—how you are altered! Poor thing!"

At the words "Poor thing!" Arabella burst into tears; and in those tears the heavy cloud on her brain seemed to melt away.

"I have been inquiring, seeking for you everywhere, Miss," resumed the man. "Surely you know me now! Your poor aunt's Jawyer! She is no more—died last week. She has left you all she had in the world; and a very pretty income it is, too, for a single lady."

Thus it was that we find Arabella installed in the dreary comforts of Poddon Place. "She exchanged," she said, "in honor to her aunt's memory, her own name for that of Crane, which her aunt had borne—her own mother's maiden name." She assumed, though still so young, that title of "Mrs." which spinsters, grown venerable, moodily adopt when they desire all mankind to know that henceforth they relinquish the vanities of tender misses—that, become mistress of themselves, they defy and spit upon our worthless sex, which, whatever its repentance, is warned that it repents in vain. Most of her aunt's property was in houses, in various districts of Bloomsbury. Arabella moved from one to the other of these tenements, till she settled for