I awoke, as I had done of old, after one of my lethargic seizures, from a deep, unrefreshing slumber, with a lingering sense about me of drowsiness and even fatigue.

I found myself lying on a broad, canopied bedstead, the massive posts of which were of wrought rosewood, bare of draperies, as became the season, save at the head-board, behind which a heavy curtain was dropped of rose-colored damask satin.

Of the same rich material were composed the tester and the lightly-quilted coverlet, thrown across the foot of the bed, over a fine white Marseilles counterpane.

The chimney immediately opposite to me, as I lay, was of black marble, and, instead of graceful Greek caryatides, bandaged mummies, or Egyptian figures, supported the heavy shelf that surmounted the polished grate. In the centre of this massive mantel-slab was placed a huge bronze clock, and candelabra of the same material graced its corners.

In either recess of this chimney rosewood doors were situated, one of which stood invitingly ajar, disclosing the bath-room, into which it opened, with its accessories of white marble.

The other, firmly closed, seemed to be the outlet of the chamber its only one with the exception of the four large Venetian windows, two on either side of me as I lay, the sashes of which, warm as the season was, were drawn closely down.

The furniture of this spacious chamber to which, as if by the touch of a magician’s wand, I found myself transported, was throughout solid and of elegant forms, consisting as it did of armoire, toilet-table, bookcase, etagere, writing and flower stands, tables and chairs, of the richest rosewood.

At the foot of my bed was placed a console, supporting a huge Bible and Prayer-book, bound alike in purple velvet, emblazoned with central suns of gold an arch-hypocrisy that was not lost on its object. Freshly-gathered flowers were heaped in the vases of the floral stands, filling the close, cool room with an overpowering fragrance. The carpet of crimson and white seemed to the eye what it afterward proved to the foot thick, soft, and elastic; and harmonized well with the rich, antique, and consistent furniture.

The sort of microscopic scrutiny that children manifest seemed mine in my unreasoning, half-convalescent state; and for a time I observed all that I have described with a listless pleasure, difficult to analyze, a sort of dreamy acceptance of my condition, the very memory of which exasperated me, later, almost to self-contempt.

A crimson cord hung at one side of my bed, continued from a bell-wire at some distance, the tassel of which I touched lightly, and, at the very first signal, Mrs. Clayton appeared through the hitherto only unopened door, to know and do my bidding.

The clock on the mantel-shelf struck nine as she stood beside me, and made respectful inquiries concerning my wants and condition; understanding which, she disappeared, to return a few minutes later, followed by an ancient negress, bearing a silver waiter.

I recognized in this sable assistant (or thought I recognized at a glance) my companion in shipwreck; but, upon making known my convictions, was met with a prompt denial by the sable dame herself, who, shaking her head, gave me to understand, in a few broken words, that she “no understood English only Spanish tongue!”

Her dress handsome and Frenchified her creole coiffure, and the long gray locks that escaped from her crimson kerchief bound over her ears, as well as her more refined deportment, did indeed seem to discredit my first idea, which came at last (notwithstanding these discrepancies) to be fixed, and proved one link in the long chain of duplicity I untangled later.

At the time, however, I gave it little thought, but partook with what appetite I might of the choice and delicate repast provided for me, in this truly princely hotel, whose fame I discovered had not been over-trumpeted. On my previous visits to New York, the Astor House had been unfinished, and had made in its completion a new era certainly in the “tavern-life” of that inhospitable city of publicans. When the delicious coffee and snowy bread, the eggs of milky freshness, the golden butter, the savory rice-birds, the appetizing fish, had each and all been merely tasted and dismissed, and the exquisite China, in which the breakfast was served, duly marveled at as an unprecedented extravagance on the part even of John Jacob Astor, Mrs. Clayton came to me with kindly offers of assistance in the performance of my toilet, still a matter of difficulty in my feeble hands.

My long hair, yet tangled and clogged with sea-water, was to be at last unbound and thoroughly combed, cleansed, and oiled, so that the black and glossy braids, that had been my chief personal pride, might again be wound about my head in the old classic fashion.

Then came the bath, with its reviving, rehabilitating process, and lastly I assumed with the docility of a baby or a pauper the clean and fragrant linen and simple wrapper that had been mysteriously provided for me by the Lady Anastasia again, I could not doubt.

“All this must end to-day,” I said, “when really clothed and in my right mind.” I requested writing-materials and more light to work by, and composed myself to write to Dr. Pemberton (once again, I knew, in Philadelphia), and request his assistance and protection in getting home safely, and, if need be, in tracing Captain Wentworth.

“I suppose Captain Van Dorne has been too busy to call,” I observed, carelessly, as I prepared to commence my letter, “and Mrs. Raymond too happy, probably, in getting safe to shore and her lover, to think of me.”

“They have both inquired for you,” said Mrs. Clayton, as she arranged pen, ink, and paper, before me, with her usual precision, while a grim, sardonic smile lingered about her features; “several have called, but none have been admitted.”

“Who have called, Mrs. Clayton? Give me the cards immediately. I must, must know,” I rejoined, eagerly, pausing with extended hand to receive them.

“Oh, there were no cards, and such as want to see you can come again. There, now! write away, and never trouble your mind about strange people. Have you sufficient light?”

And, as she spoke, she touched a cord which set at right angles with the lower one the upper inside shutter of another window as she had adjusted the first.

I wrote, two hasty notes, one on further consideration to Captain Wentworth himself, who might, after all, be at that very time in that same hotel “Quien sabe?” as Favraud used to say with his significant shrug, which no Frenchman ever excelled or Spaniard equalled (albeit they shrug severally).

My spirits rose with every word I wrote, and, when I got up from my chair after sealing and directing my letters, a new and subtle energy seemed to have infused itself through my frame. “There, I have finished, Mrs. Clayton,” I said, putting aside the implements I had been using. “Now go, if you please, and bring to me the proprietor of this hotel. I will give him my letters myself, since I have other business to transact with him,” and I laid my watch and chain on the table before me, ready for his hand, not having lost sight of my early resolution. “But, stay before you go, be good enough to open the lower shutters and throw up the windows. Cool as the weather is in this climate, I stifle for air, and this close atmosphere, laden with fragrance, grows oppressive. Who sent these flowers, by-the-by, Mrs. Clayton? or do they belong to the magnificence of this idealized hotel?” She made no reply to any thing I had been saying.

By this time, however, she had lowered the upper sashes of the windows about a foot, and the fresh air of morning was pouring in, curling the paper on the centre table and dispersing the noisome fragrance of the flowers, in which I detected the morbid supremacy of the tuberose and jasmine.

“I want to see the streets, the people,” I said, approaching one of the windows; “this artistic light is not at all the thing I need. I have no picture to paint, not even my own face;” and, finding her unmoved, I undertook to do the requisite work myself.

The sashes were shut away below by inside shutters, which resisted all my efforts to stir them. After a moment’s inspection, I perceived that they were secured by iron screws of great strength and size; not, in short, meant to be moved or opened at all. Again I essayed to shake them convulsively one after the other as you may sometimes see a tiger, made desperate by confinement, grapple with the inexorable bars of his cage, though certain of failure and defeat.

Overpowered by a sudden dismay that took entire possession of me, I sank into one of the deep fauteuils that extended its arms very opportunely to receive me, and sat mutely for a moment, while anguish unutterable, and conjecture too wild to be hazarded in speech, were surging through my brain.

“I am too weak, I suppose, to open these shutters,” I said at last, feebly. “Be good enough to do it for me, Mrs. Clayton, or cause it to be done immediately.”

Was it not strange that up to this very moment no suspicion had clouded my horizon since I woke in that sumptuous room?

“I cannot transcend my orders by doing any thing of the kind,” she said quietly, yet resolutely, as she pursued her avocation, that of dusting with a bunch of colored plumes the delicate ornaments of the etagere carefully one by one.

“Your authority! Who has dared to delegate to you what has no existence as far as I am concerned?” I asked indignantly. “I will go instantly.”

“You cannot leave this chamber until you receive outside permission,” she interrupted, firmly planting herself at once between me and the door through which I had seen her enter. “You must not think to pass through my chamber, Miss Miriam. It is locked without, and there is no other outlet.”

“Woman!” I said, grasping her feebly yet fiercely, by the arm. “Look at me! Raise those feline eyes to mine, if you dare, and answer me truthfully: What means this mockery? Why have you been forced on me at all? Where is Captain Van Dorne? What becomes of his promises? What house is this in which I find myself a prisoner? Speak!”

“You can do nothing to make me angry,” she rejoined, calmly. “I know your condition, and pity and respect it, but I shall certainly fulfill my part of this undertaking. Captain Van Dorne recognized you as Miss Monfort by the description in the newspaper, as did my mistress, and for your own welfare we determined to secure you and keep you safe until the return of Mr. Bainrothe and your sisters from Europe. They will be here shortly, and all you have to do is to be patient and behave as well as you can until the time comes for your trial;” and she cast on me a menacing look from her green and quivering pupils, indescribably feline.

My trial! Great Heaven! did they mean to turn the tables, then, and destroy me by anticipating my evidence? I staggered to a chair and again sat down silent confounded. “Where am I, then?” I feebly asked at length.

“In the establishment of Dr. Englehart,” she made answer, “a private madhouse.”

“God of heaven! has it come to this?” I covered my eyes with my hands and sobbed aloud, while tears of pride and passion rained hotly over my cheeks. This outburst was of short duration. “I will give them no advantage,” I considered. “My violence might be perverted. There are creatures too cold and crafty to conceive of such a thing as natural emotion, and passion with them means insanity. Thank God, the very power to feel bears with it the power of self-government, and is proof of reason. I will be calm, and if my life endures put them thus to shame.” “You say that I am in the asylum of Dr. Englehart?” I asked after a pause, during which she had not ceased to dust the furniture and arrange the bed in its pristine order, speckless, with lace-trimmings, pillow-cases smooth as glass, and sheets of lawn, and counterpane of snow. “If so, call my physician hither; I, his patient, have surely a right to his prompt services.” “It is just possible,” I thought, “that interest or compassion may, one or both, still enlist him in my cause I can but try.”

A slight embarrassment was evidenced in her countenance as I made this request. It vanished speedily.

“He is absent just at this time,” she answered, quickly. “When he returns I will make known your wish to him, if, indeed, he does not call of his own accord.”

“Be done with this shallow farce,” I exclaimed, harshly. “It shames humanity. Acknowledge yourself at once the faithful agent of a tyrant and felon, or a pair of them, and I shall respect you more. Confess that it was the voice of Basil Bainrothe I heard at my cabin-door, and that Captain Van Dorne was imposed upon by that specious scoundrel, even to the point of being conscientiously compelled to falsehood.

“I deny nothing I acknowledge nothing,” she said, deliberately. “You and your friends can settle this between yourselves when they arrive. Until then, you need not seek to tamper with me it will be useless; and I hope you are too much of a lady to be insulting to a person who has no choice but to do her duty.”

She could not more effectually have silenced me, nor more utterly have crushed my hopes. Yet again I approached her with entreaties.

“I hope you will not refuse to mail my notes, even under these trying circumstances,”! said, extending them to her.

“You can ask Dr. Englehart to do so when he comes,” she answered, gently; “for myself, I am utterly powerless to serve you beyond the walls of this chamber.”

“And how long is this close immurement to continue?” I asked again, after another dreary pause. “Am I not permitted to breathe the external air to exercise? Is my health to be unconsidered?”

“I know nothing more than I have told you,” she replied. “I am directed to furnish you with every means of comfort with books, flowers, clothing, musical instrument, even, if you desire it; but, for the present, you will not leave these walls, and you will see no society. The doctor has decided that this is best.”

“And whence did he derive his authority?”

“Oh, it was all arranged between him and Mr. Bainrothe, your guardeen” (for thus she pronounced this word, ever hateful to me), “long ago; before he went to France, I suppose. Captain Van Dorne had nothing to do but hand you over.”

“Captain Van Dorne! To think those honest eyes could so deceive me!” and I shook my head wofully.

When I looked up again from reverie, Mrs. Clayton had settled herself to work with a basket of stockings on her knees, which she appeared to be assorting assiduously.

There she sat, spectacles on nose, thimble on twisted finger, ivory-egg in hand, in active preparation for that work, woman’s par excellence, that alone rivals Penelope’s. Surely that assortment of yellow, ill-mated, half-worn, and holey hose, was a treasure to her, that no gold could have replaced, in our dreary solitude (none the less dreary for being so luxurious). I envied her almost the power she seemed to have to merge her mind in things like these; and saw, for the first time in my life, what advantages might lie in being commonplace.

It was now nearly the end of July. My birthday occurred in the middle of September. I thought I knew that, as soon as possible after my majority, Mr. Bainrothe’s conditions would be laid before me.

I could not, dared not, believe that my captivity would be lengthened beyond that time. I resolved that I would condone the past, and go forth penniless, if this were exacted in exchange for liberty at the end of a month and a half from this time.

Six weeks to wait! Were they not, in the fullness of their power, to crush and baffle me? Six weary years! For, during all this time, I felt that the unexplained mystery that weighed upon my life would gather in force and inflexibility. Death would have seemed to have set its seal upon it, in the estimation of Captain Wentworth, as of all others. He would never know that the sea, which swallowed up the Kosciusko, had spared the woman he loved, nor receive the explanation that she alone could give him, of the mystery he deplored.

Before I emerged from my prison, he might be gone to the antipodes, for aught I knew, and a barrier of eternal silence and absence be interposed between us. So worked my fate! These reflections continued to haunt and oppress me, by night and day, and life itself seemed a bitter burden in that interval of rebellious agony, and in that terrible seclusion, where luxury itself became an additional engine of torture.

Days passed, alternately of leaden apathy and bitter gloom, varied by irrepressible paroxysms of despair. Whenever I found myself alone, even for a few moments, I paced my room and wept aloud, or prayed passionately. There were times when I felt that my Creator heard and pitied me; others when I persuaded myself his ear was closed inexorably against me.

I suffered fearfully this could not last. The accusation brought against me by my enemies seemed almost ready to be realized, when my body magnanimously assumed the penalty the soul was perhaps about to pay, and drifted off to fever.

Then, for the first time, came the man I had until then believed a myth, and sat beside me in the shadow, and administered to me small, mystic pellets, that he assured me, in low, husky whispers, and foreign accent, would infallibly cure my malady my physical one, at least; as for the mind, its forces, he regretted to add, were beyond such influence!

For a moment, the wild suspicion intruded on my fevered brain that this leech was no other than Basil Bainrothe himself, disguised for his own dark purposes; but the tall, square, high-shouldered form that rose before me to depart (taller, by half a head, than the man I suspected of this fresh deception), and the angular movements and large extremities of Dr. Englehart, dispelled this delusion forever. After all, might he not be honest, even if a tool of Bainrothe’s?

I took the sugared miniature pills the novel medicine he had left for me faithfully, through ministry of Mrs. Clayton’s, and was benefited by them; and, when he came again, as before, in the twilight, I was able to be installed in the great cushioned chair he had sent up for me, and to bear the light of a shaded lamp in one corner of the large apartment.

Dr. Englehart approached me deferentially, and, without divesting himself of the light-kid gloves which fitted his large hands so closely, he clasped my wrist with his finger and thumb, and seemed to count my pulses.

“Ver much bettair,” was his first remark, made in that disagreeable, harsh, and husky voice of his, while he bent so near me that the aroma of the tobacco he had been smoking caused me to cough and turn aside.

Still, I could not see his face, for the immense bushy whiskers he wore, nor his eyes, for the glasses that covered them, nor his teeth, even, for the long, fierce mustache that swept his lips; and when, after a brief visit, he rose and was gone again, there remained only in my mind the image of a huge and hairy horror a sort of bear of the Blue Mountains, from the return of which or whom I fervently hoped to be delivered.

“Send him word I am better, Mrs. Clayton,” I entreated; “I cannot see him again, he is so repulsive; and, if you have a woman’s heart in your breast, never leave me alone with him, or with Mr. Bainrothe, when he calls, for one moment they inspire me equally with terror, indescribable,” and I covered my face to hide its burning blushes.

“Look up, Miss Monfort, and listen to me,” said Mrs. Clayton, at last, regarding me keenly, with her warped forefinger uplifted in her usual admonitory fashion, but with an expression on her face of interest and sympathy such as I had never witnessed there before. “A new light has broken just now upon my understanding; I can’t tell how or whence it came, but here it is,” pressing her hand to her brow; “I believe you have been misrepresented to me but that is neither here nor there. I shall watch you closely and faithfully until we part all the more that I do not believe you any more crazy than I am; I half suspected this before, but I know it now.” She paused, then continued: “I should have to tell you my life’s secret if I were to explain to you why Mr. Bainrothe’s interests are so dear to me, so vital even, and I will not conceal from you that I knew your guardeen’s good name depends on your confinement here until you come of age. After that it will only be necessary for you to sign a few papers, and all will be straight again no harm or insult is designed. To these I would never have lent myself in any way ill as you think of me. And as long as we continue together I will guard your good name as I would do that of my own dear daughter that is, if I had one. You shall receive no visitor alone.”

She spoke with a feeling and dignity of which I had scarcely believed her capable, shrewd and sensible as I knew her to be, and far above the woman she called her mistress, in a certain retenu of manner and delicacy of deportment, usually inseparable from good-breeding.

I could not then guess how acceptable, to her and the person she was chiefly interested in, were these signs of my aversion for Basil Bainrothe, and what sure means they were of access to the only tender spot in the obdurate heart of Rachel Clayton.

Certain it is that, from these expressions, I derived the first consolation that had come to me in my immurement, and from that hour the solemn farce of keeper and lunatic ceased to be played between us two.

From such freedom of communication on my jailer’s part, I began to hope for additional information, which never came. It was in vain that I conjured her to tell me where my prison was situated, whether at the edge of the city, or far away in the country, or to suffer me to have a glimpse from a window of my vicinity. To all such entreaties she was pitiless, and I was left to that vague and vain conjecture which so wears the intellect.

In the absence of all possibility of escape, it became a morbid and haunting wish with me to know my exact locality. That it could be no great distance from the city of New York, if not within its limits, I felt assured, from the expedition with which my transit from the ship had been effected.

During the first three weeks of my confinement the deep silence that prevailed about me had led me to adopt the opinion that I was the occupant of a maison de sante. I had once driven past one on Staten Island, where a friend of my father’s about whose condition he came to inquire personally had been immured for years. I did not alight with him when he left the carriage to make these inquiries, but I perfectly remembered the old gray stone building, with its ancient elms, and the impression of gloom and awe it had left on my mind. But this idea was presently dispelled.

I was awakened one morning, in the fourth week of my sojourn in captivity, by the sound of chimes long familiar to my ear, the duplicate of which I had not supposed to be in existence. At first I feared it was some mirage of the ear, so to speak, instead of eye, that reflected back that fairy melody, which had rung its accompaniment to my whole childhood and youth; but, when, after the lapse of seven days, it was repeated, I became convinced that its reality was unquestionable, and that neither impatience nor indignation had so impaired my senses as to reproduce those sounds through the medium of a fevered imagination.

Were these delicious bells, a recent addition to the cupola of our grim asylum, bestowed by some benevolent hand that sought to mark and lend enchantment to the holy Sabbath-day even for the sake of the irresponsible ones within its walls or was I indeed? But of this there could be no question I dared not hazard such conjecture lest it drive me mad in reality I must not!

I groped in thick darkness, and time itself was only measured now by those sweet chimes, so like our own, and yet so far away. My very clock one morning was found to have stopped, and was not again repaired or set in motion. Papers I never saw, had never seen since I came to dwell in shadow, save that single one so ostentatiously spread before me, announcing the loss of the Kosciusko and her passengers a refinement of cruelty, on the part of those who sent it, worthy of a Japanese.

Rafts had been launched and lost, the survivors stated (the men who had seized the long-boat, to the exclusion of the women and children); the sea had swallowed all the remainder. A later statement might refute the first, but even then none could know the truth with regard to my identity, for would not Basil Bainrothe control the publication as he pleased, and make me dead if he listed dead even after the rescue?

Yet Hope would sometimes whisper in her daring moods: “All this shall pass away, and be as it had not been. Be of good heart, Miriam, and do not let them kill you; live for Mabel live for Wentworth!”

Then, with bowed head, and silent, streaming tears, my soul would climb in prayer to the footstool of the Most High, and the grace, which had never come to me before, fell over me like a mantle in this sad extremity.