At length the morning came when Nellie was to start on her journey. Mr.
Wilbur had arrived the night before, together with his sister, whose
marble cheek and lusterless eye even then foretold the lonely grave
which awaited her far away ’neath a foreign sky. Durward and Mr.
Douglass accompanied them as far as Cincinnati, where they took the
cars for Buffalo. Just before it rolled from the depot, a young man
closely muffled, who had been watching our party, sprang into a car
just in the rear of the one they had chosen, and taking the first
vacant seat, abandoned himself to his own thoughts, which must have
been very absorbing, as a violent shake was necessary, ere he heeded
the call of “Your ticket, sir.”
Onward, onward flew the train, while faster and faster Nellie’s tears
were dropping. They had gushed forth when she saw the quivering chin
and trembling lips of her gray-haired father, as he bade his only child
good-bye, and now that he was gone, she wept on, never heeding her
young friend, who strove in vain to call her attention to the fast
receding hills of Kentucky, which she—Mary—was leaving forever. Other
thoughts than those of her father mingled with Nellie’s tears, for she
could not forget John Jr., nor the hope cherished to the last that he
would come to say farewell. But he did not. They had parted in
coldness, if not in anger, and she might never see him again.
“Come, cheer up, Miss Douglass; I cannot suffer you to be so sad,” said
Mr. Wilbur, placing himself by Nellie, and thoughtlessly throwing his
arm across the back of the seat, while at the same time he bent
playfully forward to peep under her bonnet.
And Nellie did look up, smiling through her tears, but she did not
observe the flashing eyes which watched her through the window at the
rear of the car. Always restless and impatient of confinement, John Jr.
had come out for a moment upon the platform, ostensibly to take the
air, but really to see if it were possible to get a glimpse of Nellie.
She was sitting not far from the door, and he looked in, just in time
to witness Mr. Wilbur’s action, which he of course construed just as
his jealousy dictated.
“Confounded fool!” thought he. “_I_ wouldn’t hug Nellie in the cars in
good broad daylight, even if I was married to her!”
And returning to his seat; he wondered which was the silliest, “for
Nellie to run off with Mr. Wilbur, or for himself to run after her. Six
of one and half a dozen of the other, I reckon,” said he; at the same
time wrapping himself in his shawl, he feigned sleep at every station,
for the sake of retaining his entire seat, and sometimes if the crowd
was great, going so far as to snore loudly!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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