The Guardian Angel | Page 8

found her,
and the alarm was so great that the young girl's friends were willing to
advertise her in a public journal, it was clear that the gravest
apprehensions were felt and justified. The paper carried the tidings to
many who had not heard it. Some of the farmers who had been busy all
the week with their fields came into the village in their wagons on
Saturday, and there first learned the news, and saw the paper, and the
placards which were posted up, and listened, open-mouthed, to the
whole story.
Saturday was therefore a day of much agitation in Oxbow Village, and
some stir in the neighboring settlements. Of course there was a great
variety of comment, its character depending very much on the sense,
knowledge, and disposition of the citizens, gossips, and young people
who talked over the painful and mysterious occurrence.
The Withers Homestead was naturally the chief centre of interest.
Nurse Byloe, an ancient and voluminous woman, who had known the
girl when she was a little bright-eyed child, handed over "the baby" she
was holding to another attendant, and got on her things to go straight up
to The Poplars. She had been holding "the baby" these forty years and
more, but somehow it never got to be more than a month or six weeks
old. She reached The Poplars after much toil and travail. Mistress
Fagan, Irish, house-servant, opened the door, at which Nurse Byloe
knocked softly, as she was in the habit of doing at the doors of those
who sent for her.
"Have you heerd anything yet, Kitty Fagan?" asked Nurse Byloe.
"Niver a blissed word," said she. "Miss Withers is upstairs with Miss
Bathsheby, a cryin' and a lamentin'. Miss Badlam's in the parlor. The
men has been draggin' the pond. They have n't found not one thing, but
only jest two, and that was the old coffeepot and the gray cat,--it's them
nigger boys hanged her with a string they tied round her neck and then
drownded her." [P. Fagan, Jr., Aet. 14, had a snarl of similar string in
his pocket.]
Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor. A woman was

sitting there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself with
the blackest of black fans.
"Nuss Byloe, is that you? Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you, though
we 're all in trouble. Set right down, Nuss, do. Oh, it's dreadful times!"
A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was
here called on for its function.
Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of those
soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so fearfully like a
very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they flatten under the
subsiding person.
The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam,
second-cousin of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living
as a companion at intervals for some years. She appeared to be
thirty-five years old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage
of youth, though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty,
as is often the case with women. She wore a not unbecoming cap;
frequent headaches had thinned her locks somewhat of late years.
Features a little too sharp, a keen, gray eye, a quick and restless glance,
which rather avoided being met, gave the impression that she was a
wide-awake, cautious, suspicious, and, very possibly, crafty person.
"I could n't help comin'," said Nurse Byloe, "we do so love our
babies,--how can we help it, Miss Badlam?"
The spinster colored up at the nurse's odd way of using the possessive
pronoun, and dropped her eyes, as was natural on hearing such a
speech.
"I never tended children as you have, Nuss," she said. "But I 've known
Myrtle Hazard ever since she was three years old, and to think she
should have come to such an end,--'The heart is deceitful above all
things and desperately wicked,'"--and she wept.
"Why, Cynthy Badlam, what do y' mean?" said Nurse Byloe. "Y' don't

think anything dreadful has come o' that child's wild nater, do ye?"
"Child!" said Cynthia Badlam,--"child enough to wear this very gown I
have got on and not find it too big for her neither." [It would have
pinched Myrtle here and there pretty shrewdly.]
The two women looked each other in the eyes with subtle interchange
of intelligence, such as belongs to their sex in virtue of its specialty.
Talk without words is half their conversation, just as it is all the
conversation of the lower animals. Only the dull senses of men are dead
to it as to the music of the spheres.
Their minds travelled along, as if they had been yoked together,