Chapter I

“Fair roses from far countries
Around my portals twine;
Bright on their radiant faces
Caressing sunbeams shine,
But my neighbor over yonder
Has a fairer rose than mine.

“I see his dainty cottage
Beyond my garden bowers,
High o’er it, tall and stately,
My shadowing mansion towers;
But my neighbor’s Rose of roses
Is sweeter than my flowers.”

The family carriage of the Rodneys stood before the gate, and Mouse and Kitty, the two sleek gray ponies, champed their bits impatiently while the Rodneys, great and small, issued forth in gala attire.

They were going to the picnic in Walnut Grove--mamma, papa, Effie, and little Max--all but Aline, and _she_ was in disgrace and forbidden to go. (Not that the command itself would have been sufficient to detain her, but she was locked into her room, “in durance vile,” and left in charge of the cook for safe-keeping.)

Aline was usually in disgrace with the family. She had the sweetest face and the warmest heart in the world, but with her high spirits and willful ways she had a most lamentable faculty for getting into mischief of some sort daily, and it was for some more flagrant offense than usual that mamma had sternly vetoed the picnic to-day and locked her into her room to meditate on her many and grievous faults.

The culprit, from her upper window, flattened her pretty piquant little nose against the window-pane and gazed after the departing quartet with great sparkling tears in the lovely eyes whose rare and peculiar shade of deep purple-blue had been caught from the far-off strain of Irish blood that flowed in her veins. They were “sweetest eyes were ever seen,” at once arch and tender and shaded by long, black-fringed lashes overarched by--

“Slender brows of shining jet,
Limned against the forehead’s snow,
Like triumphal arches set
O’er the conquering eyes below.”

The Rodneys entered the carriage, and Aline flung them one last despairing kiss from the tips of her slim white fingers, but no one saw except, perhaps, her little brother, who looked up regretfully and saw the lovely, girlish face smiling at him through its sparkling tears. Then the carriage door was closed, Mouse and Kitty broke into a sedate trot, and the sweet face retired from the window and hid itself in a small square of snowy linen. Aline’s heart was for the moment completely broken.

It was no small trial to be shut up in that hot, stifling little chamber all that lovely, sunny July day. She thought of the beautiful green grove close by the shining river, with the light winds ruffling its cool breast, of the happy gathering of young people, the games, the dancing, the hamper baskets of cold chicken and sweetmeats, indigestible pickles and pies and cakes, prepared for the gay, unceremonious dinner, and her heart sunk heavily. She would not willingly have foregone the delights of that day for anything she possessed. Any other punishment she could have borne with equanimity, but it did seem as if mamma had been actuated by malice prepense in forbidding the picnic to which Aline had looked forward eagerly for two long weeks.

She wept some bitter tears, distinctly tinctured with anger, into her snowy handkerchief, then she wiped her eyes and looked about her for some means of passing the tedious time away. Her mother had brought her up a volume of sermons, by way of profitable reading. Aline vented her spite and disappointment most unjustifiably on the unoffending volume, by tossing it out of the little end window into her neighbor’s garden, and the innocent missile, in its rapid descent, hit her neighbor sharply upon the head.

When she saw what she had done, a little cry of dismay broke from her lips. The great gray stone mansion standing in the beautiful garden next door to Mr. Rodney’s cottage was known throughout the little village of Chester as a haunted house; and its owner, the dark, moody-looking man who had just returned from a protracted sojourn abroad, was generally considered a very mysterious man. He was immensely rich, a bachelor, and handsome in a dark, corsair-like style that the girls of Chester considered very fascinating although it was so inaccessible.

As for the gentleman himself he neither knew nor cared what the good villagers thought of him. He was among them, but not of them. He sought no society and received no guests. He dwelt alone and lonely in the grand old mansion where several generations of his ancestors had lived and died, and which popular imagination peopled with ghosts. Indeed, it was positively asserted that at the dread midnight hour shrieks of woe had been heard to issue from the deserted house, and lights had been seen flashing from window to window as if waved in phantom hands. The Delaneys had been a hard, proud, cruel race, so said Mme. Rumor, that knowing dame, and it was no wonder if some of them returned to earth in spirit to bewail the deeds done in the flesh.

The humbler home of the Rodneys, a simple two-storied cottage, stood next the gloomy gray stone mansion, and the small end window of Aline’s little room overlooked the beautiful garden where the taciturn, grave-browed master strolled at will, and smoked his choice Havanas and switched off the heads of his splendid roses and lilies with his slender ebony cane as if hating all things beautiful and sweet.

Many a time and oft Aline had watched this strange, mysterious unknown neighbor of theirs through a crevice in the white curtain, and speculated curiously over his history, while she inwardly deprecated the fact that those splendid flowers belonged to such a monster.

“The cruel wretch! To snap off their heads with his ugly stick! I should like to knock _his_ head off!” Aline often muttered indignantly to herself, and lo! now in her eagerness to place the obnoxious book forever beyond her mother’s reach, she had almost compassed her wish. She saw the tall, straight figure reel a moment under the suddenness of the blow, saw him put his white hand quickly to his head, where a sharp corner of the book had inadvertently struck it. In her terror and dismay she uttered a little cry of alarm and regret. He looked up quickly at the sound--so quickly that she could not retreat.

As he looked up he saw the sweetest girl face he had ever beheld in his life--beautiful even through its frightened pallor--with startled, wide-open blue eyes, the long black lashes curled upward, giving them an expression of almost infantine innocence and purity. The delicate oval of the lovely face was daintily broken by a deep dimple in the rounded chin, the parted red lips disclosed teeth like pearls, and the dark, silken hair, worn in short, babyish rings on the round, white forehead, fell over her shoulders in long, loose, natural ringlets to the slender, rounded waist. Framed in the small, white-draped window, with a vine of his own rare clematis clambering up from his garden and twining luxuriantly about the casement, she looked like some beautiful picture--a picture that Oran Delaney carried in his heart to his dying day, “unforgotten in every charm.”

For her, she looked down into the dark, wondering eyes of her mysterious neighbor, and set her little teeth and held her ground bravely, determined not to fly from his wrath. Some confused, remorseful dread of mamma’s and Effie’s anger at this new scrape flashed into her mind momentarily; poor mamma, who thought that for this one day, at least, she had secured her willful, thoughtless darling from the commission of the smallest bit of mischief--and she determined to make a treaty of peace with this _bête noir_ of hers, in order to secure his silence, little dreaming that with this culminating act of folly the story of her life would begin.

Aline was ordinarily a brave girl, but she was honestly frightened now at what she had done. Oran Delaney was an ogre in her eyes, and her youthful imagination, fired by the descriptions she had heard of him, recoiled in dismay at the thought of his wrath. Of course he would suppose that she had hurled the book at his head on purpose. His anger would be something fearful, she did not doubt. Would he report her conduct to her parents? She resolved frantically that, at all odds, he should not do that. She could not endure it.