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Page 4
Her father and mother she did not mourn as one without hope, believing
that she should see them some day in another world; but from the death of
change which the girl had died no Messiah had ever promised any
resurrection.
CHAPTER II.
The solitude in which Miss Ludington lived had become, through habit, so
endeared to her that when, a few years after she had been settled in her
ghostly village, a cousin died in poverty, bequeathing to her with his
last breath a motherless infant boy, it was with great reluctance that
she accepted the charge. She would have willingly assumed the support of
the child, but if it had been possible would have greatly preferred
providing for him elsewhere to bringing him home with her. This, however,
was impracticable, and so there came to be a baby in the old maid's
house.
Little Paul De Riemer was two years old when he was brought to live with
Miss Ludington--a beautiful child, with loving ways, and deep, dark,
thoughtful eyes. When he was first taken into the sitting-room, the
picture of the smiling girl over the fireplace instantly attracted his
gaze, and, putting out his arms, he cooed to it. This completed the
conquest of Miss Ludington, whose womanly heart had gone out to the
winsome child at first sight.
As the boy grew older his first rational questions were about the pretty
lady in the picture, and, he was never so happy as when Miss Ludington
took him upon her knee and told him stories about her for hours together.
These stories she always related in the third person, for it would only
puzzle and grieve the child to intimate to him that there was anything in
common between the radiant girl he had been taught to call Ida and the
withered woman whom he called Aunty. What, indeed, had they in common but
their name? and it had been so long since any one had called her Ida,
that Miss Ludington scarcely felt that the name belonged to her present
self at all.
In their daily walks about the village she would tell the little boy
endless stories about incidents which had befallen Ida at this spot or
that. She was never weary of telling, or he of listening to, these tales,
and it was wonderful how the artless sympathy of the child comforted the
lone woman.
One day, when he was eight years old, finding himself alone in the
sitting-room, the lad, after contemplating Ida's picture for a long time,
piled one chair on another, and climbing upon the structure, put up his
chubby lips to the painted lips of the portrait and kissed them with
right good-will. Just then Miss Ludington came in, and saw what he was
doing. Seizing him in her arms, she cried over him and kissed him till he
was thoroughly frightened.
A year or two later, on his announcing one day his intention to marry Ida
when he grew up, Miss Ludington explained to him that she was dead. He
was quite overcome with grief at this intelligence, and for a long time
refused to be comforted.
And so it was, that never straying beyond the confines of the eerie
village, and having no companion but Miss Ludington, the boy fell
scarcely less than she under the influence of the beautiful girl who was
the presiding genius of the place.
As he grew older, far from losing its charm, Ida's picture laid upon him
a new spell. Her violet eyes lighted his first love-dreams. She became
his ideal of feminine loveliness, drawing to herself, as the sun draws
mist, all the sentiment and dawning passion of the youth. In a word, he
fell in love with her.
Of course he knew now who she had been. Long before as soon as he was old
enough to understand it, this had been explained to him. But though he
was well aware that neither on earth nor in heaven, nor anywhere in the
universe, did she any more exist, that knowledge was quite without effect
upon the devotion which she had inspired. The matter indeed, presented
itself in a very simple way to his mind. "If I had never seen her
picture," he said one day to Miss Ludington, "I should never have known
that my love was dead, and I should have gone seeking her through all the
world, and wondering what was the reason I could not find her."
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