And so it was arranged that when Mr. Chetwynd and Lady Jane left New Orleans, Mam’selle Diane d’Hautreve went with them, and the little house and tiny garden were left to solitude, while the jolly canary was sent to keep Tony company in Mrs. Lanier’s conservatory.
CHAPTER XXXIII
AS IT IS NOW
All this happened years ago, some ten or twelve, more or less, and there have been many changes in that time.
In front of the iron railing where Lady Jane clung on that cold Christmas eve, peering into the warmth and light of the Orphans’ Home, there is now a beautiful little park, with magnolias, oaks, fragrant white jasmine, and pink flowering crape-myrtle. The grass is green, and the trees make shadows on the pretty little pond, the tiled bridge and shelled walks, the cactus and palmetto. Flowers bloom there luxuriantly, the birds sing merrily, and it is a spot beloved of children. Always their joyous laugh can be heard mingled with the songs of birds and the distant hum of many little voices in the Orphans’ Home a few paces away.
In the center of that square on a green mound, bordered with flowers, stands a marble pedestal, and on that pedestal is a statue. It is the figure of a woman, seated and holding a little orphan to her heart. The woman has a plain, homely face, the thin hair is combed back austerely from the broad forehead, the eyes are deep-set, the features coarse, the mouth wide. She is no high-born dame of delicate mold, but a woman of the people—untaught, honest, simple, industrious. Her plain gown falls around her in scanty lines; over her shoulders is modestly folded a little shawl; her hands, that caress the orphan at her side, are large and rough with honest toil; but her face, and her whole plain figure, is beautiful with purity and goodness. It is Margaret, the orphans’ friend, who, though a destitute orphan herself, by her own virtue and industry earned the wealth to found homes and asylums, to feed and clothe the indigent, to save the wretched and forsaken, and to merit the title of Mother to the Motherless.
And there sits her marble image, through summer’s heat and winter’s cold, serene and gentle, under the shadow of the home she founded, and in sound of the little voices that she loved so well; and there she will sit when those voices are silent and those active little forms are dust, as a monument of honest, simple virtue and charity, as well as an enduring testimony to the nobility of the women who erected this statue in respectful recognition of true greatness under the homely guise of honest toil.
If one of my young readers should happen near this spot just at the right moment on some fine evening in early spring, he or she might chance to notice an elegant carriage drawn by two fine horses, and driven by a sleek darky in plain livery, make the circuit of the place and then draw up near the statue of Margaret, while its occupants, an elderly woman of gentle and distinguished appearance, and a beautiful young girl, study the homely, serene face of the orphans’ friend.
Presently the girl says reverently, “Dear Mother Margaret! She was a saint, if earth ever knew one.”
“Yes; she was a noble woman, and she came from the poor and lowly. My dear, she is an example of a great truth, which may be worthy of consideration. It is, that virtue and purity do not disdain to dwell in the meanest shrine, and that all the titles and wealth of earth could not ennoble her as her own saintly character has done.”
The occupants of the carriage are Lady Jane and Mam’selle Diane d’Hautreve.