The Unseen Bridegroom

The Unseen Bridegroom

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unseen Bridgegroom, by May
Agnes Fleming This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
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Title: The Unseen Bridgegroom or, Wedded For a Week
Author: May Agnes Fleming
Release Date: May 22, 2005 [EBook #15875]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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UNSEEN BRIDGEGROOM ***

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THE UNSEEN BRIDEGROOM;
OR,
WEDDED FOR A WEEK
BY MAY AGNES FLEMING

CHAPTER I.
THE WALRAVEN BALL.
A dark November afternoon--wet, and windy, and wild. The New York

streets were at their worst--sloppy, slippery, and sodden; the sky
lowering over those murky streets one uniform pall of inky gloom. A
bad, desolate, blood-chilling November afternoon.
And yet Mrs. Walraven's ball was to come off to-night, and it was
rather hard upon Mrs. Walraven that the elements should make a dead
set at her after this fashion.
The ball was to be one of the most brilliant affairs of the season, and all
Fifth Avenue was to be there in its glory.
Fifth Avenue was above caring for anything so commonplace as the
weather, of course; but still it would have been pleasanter, and only a
handsome thing in the clerk of the weather, considering Mrs. Walraven
had not given a ball for twenty years before, to have burnished up the
sun, and brushed away the clouds, and shut up that icy army of winter
winds, and turned out as neat an article of weather as it is possible in
the nature of November to turn out.
Of course, Mrs. Walraven dwelt on New York's stateliest avenue, in a
big brown-stone palace that was like a palace in an Eastern story, with
its velvet carpets, its arabesques, its filigree work, its chairs, and tables,
and sofas touched up and inlaid with gold, and cushioned in silks of
gorgeous dyes.
And in all Fifth Avenue, and in all New York City, there were not half
a dozen old women of sixty half so rich, half so arrogant, or half so
ill-tempered as Mrs. Ferdinand Walraven.
On this bad November afternoon, while the rain and sleet lashed the
lofty windows, and the shrill winds whistled around the gables, Mrs.
Ferdinand Walraven's only son sat in his chamber, staring out of the
window, and smoking no end of cigars.
Fifth Avenue, in the raw and rainy twilight, is not the sprightliest spot
on earth, and there was very little for Mr. Walraven to gaze at except
the stages rattling up the pave, and some belated newsboys crying their
wares.

Perhaps these same little ill-clad newsboys, looking up through the
slanting rain, and seeing the well-dressed gentleman behind the rich
draperies, thought it must be a fine thing to be Mr. Carl Walraven, heir
to a half a million of money and the handsomest house in New York.
Perhaps you might have thought so, too, glancing into that lofty
chamber, with its glowing hangings of ruby and gold, its exquisite
pictures, its inlaid tables, its twinkling chandelier, its perfumed warmth,
and glitter, and luxury.
But Carl Walraven, lying back in a big easy-chair, in slippers and
dressing-gown, smoking his costly cheroots, looked out at the dismal
evening with the blackest of bitter, black scowls.
"Confound the weather!" muttered Mr. Walraven, between strong,
white teeth. "Why the deuce does it always rain on the twenty-fifth of
November? Seventeen years ago, on the twenty-fifth of this horrible
month, I was in Paris, and Miriam was--Miriam be hanged!" He
stopped abruptly, and pitched his cigar out of the window. "You've
turned over a new leaf, Carl Walraven, and what the demon do you
mean by going back to the old leaves? You've come home from foreign
parts to your old and doting mother--I thought she would be in her
dotage by this time--and you're a responsible citizen, and an eminently
rich and respectable man. Carl, my boy, forget the past, and behave
yourself for the future; as the copy-books say: 'Be virtuous and you will
be happy.'"
He laughed to himself, a laugh unpleasant to hear, and taking up
another cigar, went on smoking.
He had been away twenty years, this Carl Walraven, over the world,
nobody knew where. A reckless, self-willed, headstrong boy, he had
broken wild and run away from home at nineteen, abruptly and without
warning. Abruptly and without warning he had returned home, one fine
morning, twenty years after, and walking up the palatial steps, shabby,
and grizzled, and weather-beaten, had