Chapter XI

The strange and perfectly unaccountable manner of Aline Rodney’s disappearance from her home had excited a great sensation in the town of Chester. Such a harrowing mystery had never before agitated the pretty little country town. Mr. Rodney, Aline’s father, was the only lawyer the town could boast, and although not wealthy, was a prominent member of society in Chester. His two pretty daughters had been educated as carefully as his means would allow, and were the boast of the town for their beauty.

Effie Rodney was a hazel-eyed beauty, with soft waving tresses of chestnut brown and a complexion of the loveliest red and white, combined with features of the purest Grecian type. She was twenty-three years old, and so stately, quiet, and dignified, that her more volatile sister, Aline, audaciously dubbed her an old maid.

Mrs. Rodney was a pretty woman of the same type of beauty as Effie. Mother and daughter were remarkably alike, both being tall, extremely graceful in appearance, and very dignified in manner. To both of them the wild and willful ways of blue eyed Aline were a perpetual wonder and annoyance. They loved her, but she was a sore trial to their patience, and their understanding. She was so gay, so willful, so thoughtless, that, as Mrs. Rodney expressed it, she kept her family “in hot water all the while.” They could never tell what mischievous prank their pretty Aline would be into next. Never were two sisters more unlike than Aline and Effie, both in mind and looks, although they were really fond of each other. Both were beautiful, but one was like a stately, bright-plumaged bird-of-paradise, the other like a brilliant humming-bird, always on the wing, never at rest in its aerial flight.

Neither Mrs. Rodney nor Effie could understand Aline’s complex character. She was wild and willful, but she was also warm-hearted and loving. She was always getting herself into some kind of mischief, always being blamed by mamma, and lectured by Effie. If papa had not petted her and Max adored her she could not have stood it. But the forces for and against being very equally divided she was enabled to hold her own with tolerable equanimity. Sometimes, mamma, acting upon a mistaken sense of duty, allotted to Aline some quite severe punishments, as in the case of the imprisonment the day of the picnic; but there was always papa to pet and soothe his injured little girl, Max to load her with sugar-plums, and even stately Effie to lament that her darling little sister had to be punished. So Aline, with all the faults of her head and heart, was dearly beloved and bitterly missed and mourned in the home from which she had so strangely dropped out like a link from a golden chain.

The incredulous horror on returning from Walnut Grove and finding her gone was something better imagined than described. They examined the empty room, they peered beneath the bed, behind the curtains, within the wardrobe, while little Max, in a fit of absent-mindedness, pulled out the bureau drawers, and even lifted the tray of her Saratoga trunk in a vain search for the lost one.

Beautiful Aline had flown from the dreary room like a swift-winged bird from the prison bars of its cage. They called her name, but she answered not. They sought her in her dearest haunts, but they found her not. They were face to face with a mystery.

Cook had not anticipated such alarm on the part of the family. She had missed the young lady several hours ago when she had taken up luncheon to her, but being used to the mischievous pranks of her young mistress, had believed that she was hiding herself somewhere within the room. She had set down the tray on a stand and gone away, locking the door behind her.

It was locked still when they came home from the picnic rather earlier than they would have done, but that they were anxious over Aline--poor Aline who had missed all the delights of the picnic because she had been a naughty girl yesterday and left undone those things which she ought to have done, and done those things which she ought not to have done.

Aline had deserted the sewing-machine and the ruffles mamma had set her to hem yesterday and gone a-fishing with ten-year-old Max and his comrade Harry Jones. She had coaxed away from cook the sponge cake that was destined to accompany the cream at dinner, and she had triumphantly packed it into her lunch basket and shared it with the two boys that day on the river bank where they cast their lines into the waves. And she had come home with the end of her nose and the back of her neck blistered red, her dress-skirt soiled and “brier-torn,” like Maud Muller’s, and her pretty bare hands turned brown, while Max came trailing behind her with his pantaloons rolled up to his knees, his feet and limbs all yellowed with river mud, and a string of ridiculous little shining minnows in his hands. It was bad for Max--it was utterly disgraceful for that great girl, Aline, decided mamma and Effie. It was a case that called for punishment, more especially as Aline could not even be induced to repentance for her fault. She insisted that she had not meant any harm and that she had done nothing wrong. She could not be brought to see her error in the light that her mamma wished her to see it in. So Mrs. Rodney, deeming this an extreme case, resorted to extreme measures. She knew that Aline had set her heart on the picnic in Walnut Grove--therefore she kept her away to meditate on her misdeeds, and, if possible, to win her to repentance. She even dared hope that under the stress of such punishment Aline might be brought to promise “never to do so any more.”

But, after all, she had been sorry to punish her bright Aline so hardly. She thought about it at the picnic. It rather damped her pleasure in the gay and festive scene. She told herself that if Aline was brought to a proper state of submission she would make it up to her. She had kept the girl back somewhat, deeming her childish and unformed. She would lengthen her dresses now, put up her careless, girlish ringlets, and let her take her place in Chester society as a grown-up young lady. Perhaps the importance of the change might thrust dignity, as it were, upon the willful girl.

She confided her plans to Effie when she could get her away for a moment from the knot of admirers who always surrounded the pretty Miss Rodney. Effie coincided with her mother. She was too secure in the consciousness of her own beauty to be jealous of her younger sister’s charms, and she thought that it was quite time for Aline to give over childish ways.

So they went home sorry for Aline’s long day of confinement, and full of kindly intentions toward her, eager to hear of her repentance, and to give her the kiss of pardon; and they found her place vacant, her chair empty. They were full of incredulous dismay at first. They thought it must be one of her practical jokes, and that she would return to them presently full of glee over the fright she had given them, and eager to hear how they had passed the day from whose pleasures she had been ruthlessly debarred.

In the meantime, they were full of wonder over the way in which the runaway had escaped from her room. The little chamber formed a small wing of itself on the left side of the cottage. It had three windows, one of which looked down upon the front of the street, another into the small, brick-paved back yard, and the third into the beautiful, neglected garden of Delaney House. It was quite impossible, they thought, that Aline could have escaped through either of these second-story windows unless she had made a rope from the sheets of her bed. But the downy little nest where Aline rested her fair form nightly was undisturbed in its snowy order. She had certainly not escaped that way, but had gone through the door, and the Rodneys were fain at first to accuse the woman whom they had left in charge of connivance at her freedom.

Cook denied the accusation sturdily, and, having a good reputation for veracity, no one presumed to doubt her vehement asseverations.

The mystery thickened. They discussed the possibility of Aline having a skeleton-key to the door, and inclined to that belief. In no other way could they account for her absence.

Night fell; and now, indeed, they began to grow alarmed. Aline was known to be an arrant little coward in the dark. Her little feet would have carried her flying homeward long before night overtook her.

“She has gone to some of the neighbors,” Mrs. Rodney suggested, and her husband and little Max set out to see.

She was not found at any of the neighbors. She did not come home that night, nor for many another succeeding night. It grew into a most absorbing mystery, the strange disappearance of a young girl from her home. It was not a matter of local interest merely, but of general. From the local papers the item was copied into the papers all the country over. It excited a great interest and sympathy. It became one of the sensations of the day. Search was made far and near. Personals appeared in the newspapers; the largest rewards Mr. Rodney could afford were offered for his daughter’s return. He was half mad with cruel anxiety; he hurried hither and thither in search of the lost one. But, in all his grief and anxiety, in all his suspicions, no warning instinct ever prompted him to look into his neighbor’s house.

It was the strangest thing that had ever happened in Chester. In the pretty quiet town no such sensation had ever been heard of before. A young girl locked into her room in the safe sanctuary of home had disappeared in the strangest manner, and not the slightest clew could be found to the mystery. Add to this that the missing girl had been a general favorite, loved for her winning ways, and admired for her beauty, and you may form some idea of how Aline Rodney was missed and mourned.

The panic only became greater as days went by, and there came no tidings of her fate. People were frightened. Young girls shivered in their rooms by day and by night. What if a like fate should befall them?

Mrs. Rodney’s grief and remorse were extreme. The thin crust of pride and dignity melted around her heart, and she realized that she had been hard and stern to the lost one. She blamed herself as the cause of Aline’s flitting, and her self-reproach was most bitter. When proud, hard natures melt, no one can calculate the effect. Mrs. Rodney’s sorrow and remorse completely prostrated her. She became seriously ill, and her physician declared that there was no telling how her low, nervous fever would end, unless her terrible suspense could be broken by news of her lost daughter.

Those were weary days for the Rodneys. Effie was wretched, her mother ill, Mr. Rodney worn to a shadow, and little Max’s grief unceasing. They began to realize what a sunbeam in the house had been the bright-eyed girl whom they had blamed so often. Now, when she was worse than dead to them, mamma and Effie began to realize her worth. Papa and Max had known it all the while.

Two weeks had elapsed, and Effie was sitting by the bedside of her sick mother one evening, when a stranger’s card was brought to her. She looked at it in some surprise. “Dr. Anthony,” she read, slowly. “Why, mamma, have you called a new physician?”

“No, I have not,” said Mrs. Rodney. “It is a stranger, dear. Go to him quickly, please. Perhaps he brings us news.”

Her eyes grew bright with hope and excitement, and Effie’s heart beat a trifle quicker, too. What if her mother’s surmise were true, and they were about to hear news of Aline? She did not even stop for the customary womanly peep into the mirror, but hastened down to the parlor to meet the stranger.