Chapter 32

LOST! LOST! LOST!

"Stop! stranger; may I speak with you?-- Ah, yes, you needn't fear-- While I whisper through the grating, I wouldn't have them hear. These jailers, if a body But chance to speak her name, They roll their eyes so savage, As if they meant to tame Some wild beast, and they scare me. Come nearer, nearer yet; Come near me till I whisper, 'Have you seen her?--seen Annette?'

"What did they bring me here for? I say, I want to go! How shall I ever find her When I am locked in so? They lied to me-- 'Twas once there in the street, Where I sat on a doorstep To rest my aching feet. They say, 'We'll lead you to her,' And many times said, 'Come,' At last I followed, eager To find my little one. But when I bid them bring her. They answer, 'By and by.' Just turn the key, please, won't you, And let me slip out sly?"

One of the most troublesome patients at the Virginia Asylum for the Insane in Staunton was a pretty, pale little woman named Mrs. Chase.

To look at her sitting very quiet--sometimes with her fair little hands meekly folded, and a brooding sorrow in her tearful, deep blue eyes--you would have said she was a most interesting patient, and could not surely give any one trouble.

But the women attendants in her ward could have told you quite a different story.

Mrs. Chase had a suicidal mania, and had to be watched closely all the time to keep her from taking her own life.

These attendants would have explained to you that all insane people have some hobby that they ride industriously all the time.

There was the man who believed himself to be Napoleon reincarnated, and amused everybody with his military toggery and braggadocio.

There was the lady who called herself Queen Victoria, and was never seen without a huge pasteboard crown.

There were the two men who each claimed to be the Christ, and frowned disapproval on the claims of each other.

There was the youth who imagined himself a violin virtuoso, and fiddled all day long, varying his performance by pausing to pass around the hat for pennies, of which he had accumulated, it was said, more than a gallon already.

There was the forsaken bride who was waiting every day for the false lover to return and bear her away on a blissful wedding-tour.

There was the man who believed himself already dead, and solemnly recounted to you the particulars of the horrible death he had died, adding that he was detained from his grave by the delay of the cruel undertakers in taking his measure for the coffin. He had actually been known to slip into the dead-house one day, and lie down in a casket intended for a real corpse, having to have force employed to eject him from his narrow abode.

Again, there was the man who imagined himself to be a grain of corn, and fled with screams of alarm from the approach of a chicken. These, and scores of others with hobbies, tragic or ridiculous, as the case might be; but not one of them all, said the attendants, needed such care and watching as pale, pretty, meek little Mrs. Chase.

Her hobby was a lost or stolen child.

No one knew whether or not there was any truth in her claim. She had been brought there from Richmond, a friendless stranger, who had been found wandering homeless in the street, raving of a lost child.

Her story was just as likely to be false as true, they said, for lunatics imagined many things. It might be her child had died; for she was always praying for death, that she might find her lost darling again.

It was melancholy madness. The hardest to cure of all, said the doctors, and she had been frustrated in several frantic attempts to end her life. She was so clever and so cunning that they had to watch her constantly; but even the most impatient of the attendants could not give her a cross word, her grief was so pathetic, and she seemed so sorrowfully helpless in her frail, gentle prettiness.

"Have you seen my daughter, my darling little Dainty? She is lost; stolen away from me while I slept," she would say to every strange person she saw, and her pale face would glow as she added, proudly: "She was the prettiest girl in the world. I have often heard people say so. She was as beautiful as a budding rose, with hair like the sunshine, and eyes as blue as the sky. Her little hands were white as lilies, and her feet so tiny and graceful, every one turned to watch her as she passed; and was it any wonder she caught such a grand, rich lover? She would have married him if she had not been lost that night. Oh, let me out! let me go and find my darling! You have no right to lock me in here!"

Then she would fly into paroxysms of anger, trying to batter down the walls and escape from what she called her stony prison; and at other times she would pray for death, crying:

"Oh, God! send me death; for surely my darling must be dead, or she would have come back to me long before they locked me up here! They stole her away and killed her, my sweet Dainty, the cruel enemies who hated and envied her so much for her angelic beauty and her noble lover! Oh, who would keep me back from death, when only through its dark gates can I find my child again?"

But they watched her carefully; they allowed her no means of ending the life of which she was so weary; and so the months flew by from September to spring, and it was almost a year since Dainty had left her home so gladly for the country visit that had ended so disastrously, and with such a veil of mystery over her strange fate.

"Where is Annette? Where is she? Does anybody know?"