Chapter XXV

Mr. Rodney gazed sadly at his daughter. He saw that she could scarcely bring herself to believe that which he had told her.

“I see how it is, Aline,” he said to her, gravely. “You are inclined to doubt my assertions. You do not altogether believe what I have told you.”

She was shocked when he put the truth before her in so plain a fashion. She did not know herself how strong a vein of incredulity ran through her painful thoughts.

“Oh, papa, forgive me,” she said, penitently. “I did not mean to doubt you. It was only my unfortunate manner of expressing myself. I was hoping against hope. Will you forgive me for my implied doubt? It is so hard to give up hope.”

He only pressed her hand in silence, and she continued:

“Even if they thought hardly of me, might they not in time relent? Might I not live down the scandal even if they were cruel enough to make a scandal out of nothing?”

“You might in time,” he answered, “but it would be a long while first, so long that your youth and beauty would be faded, and they would forgive you because they could no longer envy you.”

“So long as that?” she asked, with a heavy sigh.

“Yes, dear, nothing but time will heal that wound,” he answered.

She lay silently musing.

She could not bear to give up the beautiful, bright world which she loved so well, and in which she had such unbounded faith and hope.

It was a great temptation to her to accept the sacrifice her father proposed making. She had the innate selfishness of youth which thinks that the world was made for itself. She did not understand how great a sacrifice it was that her family would make. In her ignorance of the world, she could not know.

But while she dallied with the temptation to accept it, she found herself restrained from leaving Chester by a vague, yet subtle, feeling she could not understand. It was stronger than her will, it was some influence outside of herself that she could not analyze, but it was most powerful. It drew her one way, while her reason and her will seemed both to point in a contrary direction. She yielded to it blindly, not knowing that it was fate, that “Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will.”

She looked gravely at her father, who had been watching her face, anxiously noting the changing emotions of its expressive features.

“Papa, my mind is made up,” she said, with almost womanly calmness. “I shall not go away. I will remain in Chester.”

“Remain!” he echoed, surprised at her decision.

“Yes, I will remain. I will not act a cowardly part, and run away from my trouble. I will stay here and live it down if my hair grows gray and my eyes dim in the effort.”

“You will have to be very brave if you do so, Aline,” he answered, not without a certain admiration of her high spirit.

“I intend to be,” she answered, with a sigh.

He could not help feeling relieved at her decision. He was not a rich man. All his income was derived from his legal practice. To begin life anew in another place meant a hard struggle, although he would not have shirked it in the interest of the child he loved so fondly. But now that her own decision made it unnecessary, a burden was lifted from his mind.

He bent down and pressed his lips to her fair, white brow.

“God bless you, and help you, my daughter,” he said.

Her lips quivered, the quick tears rushed into her eyes. She let the lids drop over them hastily, and the bright drops rolled like crushed pearls down her cheeks.

“Aline, you are exhausted. I have been too thoughtless,” he said, remorsefully.

“Yes, I am tired,” she answered, wearily. “I should like to go to sleep.”

They kissed her, and went away softly, but Aline did not go to sleep. She lay, broad awake, in the chilly, rainy dawn of the new day, looking drearily into the future.

“I have lost my life,” she said, mournfully, to herself. “For, if I live it down, I shall be old by then, and nothing but the grave will lie before me.”

She recalled some verses she had read in a book at Delaney House.

“Rudderless, we drift athwart a tempest,
And when once the storm of youth is past,
Without lyre, without lute, or chorus,
Death, a silent pilot, comes at last.”

Death! She gave a shudder in spite of herself. She had always had the keenest love of life, the greatest enjoyment of its pleasures. She was sanguine, ardent, impetuous. Even now, when she looked at Death across a bridge of sorrow, she felt a little afraid of it. She bewailed her blighted life, her irrevocable folly. She would have to pay the cost of her girlish willfulness by the sacrifice of all that was best in life. Bitterly she bewailed her fault and Oran Delaney’s hard heart, that had brought this doom upon her.

“If I had known the cruel price I must pay for my silence, I would have died before I would have pledged myself to it. But Mr. Delaney must have known. He is older than I am--he knows the world. How cruel, how wicked he must be to doom me to such a fate!” she said to herself, indignantly.

Moved by a sudden impulse, she slipped from the bed, threw a light shawl about her shoulders, and went over to the window. She peered down through a crevice in the curtain at the wonderful garden whose blooming beauties had lured her so innocently to her fate.

Oh, how changed was the scene as she gazed upon it now!

The roses all were dead, the leaves were blown from the trees, and lay in sodden drifts across the path. Some late autumn flowers, chrysanthemums, asters, and others of their kind, were breaking into lavish bloom in their neglected beds, but the rain and storm had beaten them prostrate to the ground, with broken stalks, and faces prostrate on the earth. All was dreariness and desolation, and the gray stone towers of grim Delaney House seemed to frown more darkly than ever now that she knew what influence potent for evil pervaded its gloomy interior.

She gazed wistfully at it through the fine impalpable mist of rain that obscured all things. She saw a figure emerge from the gloomy portals into the deeper gloom of the rainy dawn. It was Mr. Delaney. He walked slowly with downcast head and his hands behind him, smoking a cigar as was his usual morning habit. Its fiery spark gleamed fitfully in the dull light, and the fine blue smoke curled upward and lost itself in the mist.

Drawing the curtain closer Aline watched him, herself unseen. She found a singular fascination in doing so, and when she saw his glance turn musingly once or twice up to her window her heart beat strangely--with anger she thought.

“He has spoiled all my life, but does he realize that he has done so?” she asked herself, musingly. “Could he be so deliberately cruel?”

It almost seemed to her that he would not have done so could he have known.

“Could any one be so hard, so cruel, as to willfully blight a young girl’s life?” she asked herself, with a sort of wonder, as her eyes followed Oran Delaney in his dreary saunter along the wet, graveled paths. “He saved my life once. Why should he make it valueless to me?”

As she gazed at the dark, grave face under the brim of the wide slouch hat, it seemed to her that it was not hard nor cruel, only profoundly grave and sad. A longing came over her that he should know all that had transpired that night since she came home.

“If he knew, he might perhaps relent and release me from my vow of silence,” she thought, eagerly.

She remained at the window watching him thoughtfully until he disappeared from view in a turn of the path, then she turned aside to her writing-desk and drew out pens and ink and paper. She wrote hastily, and almost incoherently:

“MR. DELANEY,--They are all very angry and surprised because I would
not tell them where I have been. Papa says that people will think
strangely of me if I do not tell. He says they will think I am guilty
of something--I do not know what--and that they will not associate
with me, and that I shall never have any more peace or pleasure in
my life. You did not know these things when you bound me to silence
and secrecy. Did you, Mr. Delaney? I feel quite sure you did not. You
could not have been so heartless as to ruin all my life like that!
But now that I have told you, will you not have pity on me? Release
me from my promise and let me speak, I pray you.

“ALINE RODNEY.”

She put the poor little appeal into an envelope, and when night came she tied a little weight to it and threw it far out into the garden, hoping that Mr. Delaney would find it there the next morning.