presiding genius of every festival. As for myself, dropping the name of husband, I will sink into an unobtrusive visitor. When you see a little more of the world you will not think your case such a hard one after all."
My face buried in my hands, I had not one word of reply. Lost—lost—utterly lost!
CHAPTER XV.
"LOST, LOST UTTERLY."
My mother soon afterward gave her first party. It was attended by many of the rich and the fashionable of both sexes, and there were the glare of lights, the presence of beautiful women, and the wine-cup and the dance. The festival was prolonged till daybreak, and another followed soon. The atmosphere was new to me. At first I was amazed, then intoxicated, and then—corrupted. Anxious to bury the memory of my shame, to forget how lost and abandoned I was, to drown every thought of my childhood's home and of Ernest, who never could be mine, soon from a silent spectator I became a participant in the revels which, night after night, were held beneath my mother's roof. The persons who mingled in these scenes, were rich husbands who came accompanied by other men's wives; wives, who had sacrificed themselves in marriage, for the sake of wealth, to husbands twice their age, and these came with the husbands of other women—in a word, all that came to the mansion and shared in its orgies, were either the victims or the criminals of society—of a bad social world, which on every hand contrasts immense wealth and voluptuous indulgence with fathomless poverty and withering want, and which too often makes of a marriage but the cloak for infamy and prostitution. I shared in every revel, and lost myself in their maddening excitement. I was admired, flattered, and elevated at last to the position of presiding genius of these scenes. I became the "Midnight Queen." But let the curtain fall.
One night I noticed a new visitor, a remarkably handsome gentleman who sat near me at the supper-table, and whose hair and eyes and whiskers were black as jet. He regarded me very earnestly and with a look which I could not define.
"Don't think me impertinent," he said, and then added in a lower voice, "for I am your father, Frank. Don't call me Van Huyden—my name is Tarleton now."
Fearful that I might one day encounter Ernest, I wrote him a long letter breathing something of the tone of my early days—for I forgot for awhile my utterly hopeless condition—and informing him that mother and myself were about to sail for Europe. I wished him to believe that I was in a foreign land.
And one night, while the revel was progressing in the rooms below, Wareham entered my room and interested me in the description which he gave of a young lord, who wished to be introduced to me.
"Young, handsome, and pale as if from thought. The very style of man you admire, my pet."
"Let him come up," I answered, and Wareham retired.
I stood before the mirror as the young lord entered, and as I turned, I saw the face of my betrothed husband, Ernest Walworth.
Upon the horror of that moment I need not dwell.
He fell insensible to the floor, and was carried from the room and the house to the carriage by Wareham, who had led him to the place.
I have never seen the face of Ernest since that hour.
I received one letter from him—one only—in which he set forth the circumstances which induced him to visit my house, and in which he bade me "farewell."
He is now in a foreign land. The bones of his father rest in the village church-yard. The cottage home is desolate.
Wareham died suddenly about a year after our "marriage." The doctors said that his death was caused by an overdose of Morphine administered by himself in mistake. He died in our house, and as mother and myself stood over his coffin in the darkened room, the day before the funeral, I noticed that she regarded first myself and then the face of the dead profligate with a look full of meaning.
"Don't you think, dear mother," I whispered, "that the death of this good man was very singular?"
She made no reply, but still her face wore that meaning look.
"Would it be strange, mother, if your daughter, improving on your lessons, had added another feature to her accomplishments—had from the Midnight Queen,"—I lowered my voice—"become the Midnight Poisoner?"
I met her gaze boldly—and she turned her face away.
He died without ever a dog to mourn for him, and his immense wealth was inherited by a deserted and much abused wife, who lived in a foreign land.
Immense wealth in him bore its natural flower—a life of shameless indulgence, ending in a miserable death.
I did not shed very bitter tears at his funeral. Hatred is not the word to express the feeling with which I regard his memory.
Soon afterward my mother was taken ill, and wasted rapidly to death. Hers was an awful death-bed. The candle was burning to its socket, and mingled its rays with the pale moonlight which shone through the window-curtains. Her brown hair, streaked with gray, falling to her shoulders, her form terribly emaciated, and her eyes glaring in her shrunken face, she started up in her bed, clutched my hands in hers, and—begged me to forgive her.
My heart was stone. I could not frame one forgiving word.
As her chilled hands clutched mine, she rapidly went over the dark story of her life—how from an innocent girl, she had been hardened into the thing she was—and again, her eyes glaring on my face, besought my forgiveness.
"I forgive you, Mother," I said slowly, and she died.
My father was not present at her death, nor did he attend her funeral.
And for myself—what has the Future in store for me?
O, for Rest! O, for Forgiveness! O, for a quiet Sleep beneath the graveyard sod!
And with that aspiration for Rest, Forgiveness, Peace, uttered with all the yearning of a heart sick to the core, of life and all that life can inflict or give, ended the manuscript of Frances Van Huyden, the Midnight Queen.
It is now our task to describe certain scenes which took place in New York, between Nightfall and Midnight, on this 23d of December, 1844. And at midnight we will enter The Temple where the death's head is hidden among voluptuous flowers.
PART SECOND.
"FROM NIGHTFALL UNTIL MIDNIGHT."
DEC. 23, 1844.
CHAPTER I.
BLOODHOUND AND THE UNKNOWN.
Two persons were sitting at a table, in the Refectory beneath Lovejoy's Hotel. One of these drank brandy and the other drank water. The brandy drinker was our friend Bloodhound, and the drinker of water was a singular personage, whose forehead was shaded by a broad-brimmed hat, while the lower part of his face was covered by a blue kerchief, which was tied over his throat and mouth.
Seated at a table in the center of the place, these two conversed in low tones, while all around was uproar and confusion.
"You