Chapter XXVIII

Aline ran away to hide herself in her room in a flurry of mingled emotions.

This was the way in which Oran Delaney had answered her pleading letter.

Not a line, not a word, only a shower of gold flung at her feet, as if this could make up to her for all she had lost, for the pleasures that belonged to her youth, for the love that ought to bless her womanhood, for the worldly respect and applause that she had forfeited so innocently and rashly.

She threw herself down into a chair and buried her face in her hands. Stifled sobs shook her frame, and bright crystal drops fell through her fingers.

She felt as if she hated Oran Delaney. He was cruel and heartless, she said to herself, indignantly. What did she care for money? She had her youth and beauty, her tender heart, her desire for the pleasures of life. With all this heritage of youth she could have had happiness enough if only--if only she had not lost that fair fame, that open record of life without which all else availed her nothing.

She wept bitterly for this terrible misfortune that had fallen upon her. She was young and beautiful and pure, but a great, horrible, inky blot had fallen on the whiteness of her life, and she could never wipe it out by the words of explanation that would have cleared away the hideous stain. People believed ill of her. Women, especially young and fair ones like herself, passed by her with sneers and averted faces. She was as innocent and as spotless as they were, but no one would believe it. Because she would not satisfy their curiosity they believed she was a sinner. There was one text that every one took and preached from. It was this: “Where there is secrecy there is guilt.”

By this standard Aline was judged and condemned. The fierce rebellion of her heart against this unjust sentence availed her nothing. The world’s code was many hundreds of years older than she was. It said in so many words: “A woman’s life must be like an open book, that every eye may read. If there is even one leaf folded down, one page the world may not scan, then there is a shameful secret written on it.”

There was one leaf folded down in the book of her life. It was as pure a record as any other; it only recorded the punishment that had come to her for her girlish willfulness and folly. But no one would believe it. She cried out against the hardness and wickedness of the world that could so misjudge her!

“The world must be full of wickedness, or people would not be so ready to believe evil,” she said.

The hardest part of her trouble was that her family were compelled to be sharers in her disgrace. Because they had taken her home again, because they would tell nothing of her absence, people were angry with them, too. They were all under ban alike.

“My beautiful Effie, it is too bad that this shadow should rest upon her life--she who was always so much admired and beloved!” she sighed over and over. “Ah, me, if only I could speak!”

But the iron fetters of her vow chafed and hurt her. There was no going back on that solemn pledge of silence. She might beat her wings as she would against the bars that held her, but there was no escape for her, no release from her sorrow. She could have exclaimed with the poet:

“Oh, Life, is all thy song
Endure and die?”

It seemed to her little less than an insult to offer her money to console her for the cureless wound that had laid desolate her life. She said to herself that she would have to be reduced to beggary--ay, that she would starve on a crust in the street before she would touch a cent of Oran Delaney’s money. He had refused her even a word--he had thrown her his gold like a bone to a dog. Well, she would let him see that she would never touch it. She would die first, she said to herself, in her passionate pride and resentment.

So the days passed by. It was little more than a week before the news of the money in the bank for Aline became disseminated far and wide, thanks to the gossiping tongue of the genial Banker Linton. The busy tongue of scandal wagged afresh over this delicious tid-bit.

Opinions were divided over Aline’s course. There were some who said that she should have accepted the money, that was doubtless offered to her in reparation for wrong that had been done her. This class thought that she was very quixotic in refusing, and even very foolish. The money would have done her a vast deal of good. She might have gone away somewhere with it, and made herself a new home where the story of her mysterious absence was not known. Decidedly, she had acted foolishly in refusing, said these wiseacres.

There was another class who found Aline’s action rather admirable. They argued that if the girl had suffered wrong at the hands of any one, mere money could not repair the injury done. They applauded her spirit in declining such atonement. This new element of romance added fresh fuel to the flame of scandal. It was considered that the case against Aline was quite proven now, for who would give her ten thousand dollars unless to condone an irreparable wrong?

Aline was none the wiser for their praise or blame. Neither penetrated to her quiet cottage home. Day after day dragged itself wearily along, and a dreary, apathetic calm began to settle down on the girl. She had lost heart and hope and given herself up to despair.

She rose from her sleepless bed one morning, and went to the window and drew back the curtain, and looked at the dreary morning sky stretching chill and cold over all the land. It was gray and sunless like her life, she thought, wearily, and dropped her eyes and sighed heavily.

The down-dropped eyes suddenly fell on a bit of paper lying outside the window on the narrow sill and held down by a piece of gravel. It was addressed to herself in a strong masculine hand, and Aline’s heart beat quickly as she lifted the sash and drew it in.

“At last,” she said, as she hurriedly tore it open and ran her eager eyes over the clear, bold chirography.

Only a few lines, hurried and incoherent as her own had been, but strong and earnest like the writer:

“Aline, you refused the money because you guessed that I had sent
it,” ran the brief note. “Oh, for God’s sake, take it, child, and
believe that it is your own as the gift of a heart that bleeds
because it has wronged you, and because it can make no other
atonement than what lies in sordid gold. Let your father take the
money and make a new home for you all in some distant city where this
unmerited persecution may not follow you, and where you may have all
the social pleasures due to your youth and beauty and innocence. Take
the money and use it. It is only due, and I shall never forgive you
if you continue to willfully refuse it. D.”

She ran her eyes slowly over the brief note twice. It only excited her anger and contempt. She said to herself that he was a coward, strong man as he was, to make a weak girl suffer for the sake of that hidden secret he guarded so jealously. Oh, that she had never taken that oath of silence upon her girlish lips!

How grim and gray and frowning the towers of Delaney House appeared in the dull, cold light. All the years of her girlhood it had been a pleasure to her to watch the mysterious mansion, with the picturesque ivy creeping about and covering the grim, hard angles and small-paned windows with beauty. She had watched the sunset lighting its windows with splendor every evening; she had gazed upon the beautiful garden with rapturous delight; she had speculated often, with girlish curiosity, over the motives that made Oran Delaney an alien from his kind, shut up in that gloomy house, and but seldom seen in the streets of the town. It had not always been thus. Ten years ago, before Oran Delaney went abroad, and before the Rodneys came to live in Chester, he had been friendly, genial, social, mixing freely with the best society of the town on his annual visits from college, and was liked and admired by all. After his father’s death he had shut up the old family mansion and gone abroad. He had remained away several years, and returned to his home a strange and altered man. He no longer sought society, he did not visit nor receive visits, he gave no invitations, and accepted none. He seemed to have become an inveterate recluse, and remained isolated in the lonely mansion, haunted by the ghosts of his dead-and-gone ancestors, perhaps, for there were rumors of strange sounds and blood-curdling shrieks heard by day and by night by those who passed his home. Aline had heard all these tales from the townsfolk, and her girlish interest had been strongly roused. Yet how little she had dreamed of the subtle influence Delaney House and its strange master would exert upon her life!

She held the note in her fingers, and gazed dreamily at Delaney House, thinking, with a shudder, of the strange, horrible, unearthly creature hidden within its walls, and of the long days of illness and sorrow she had suffered from the creature’s rude assault.

“_He_ thinks that gold can pay me for all that I have suffered--for all I suffer now!” she breathed, with bitter sarcasm.

As she stood there in her long white dressing-gown, with her loose dark hair falling heavily over her shoulders, Mr. Delaney came out with his cigar.

It was the first time that Aline had been visible at the window since she had returned. Usually she sprung back from sight at the moment of his appearance.

A new mood came to her now. She stood there calmly, holding the paper in her hand, and fixing her gaze steadily upon the darkly handsome, brooding face visible under the wide-brimmed hat. He did not see her at first, but at length the angry intensity of her gaze seemed to draw his eyes upward by some subtle fascination. In a moment he saw her standing there, pale, proud, angry, holding his letter in her clinched white hand.

Even at the distance at which he stood, he could see the angry flash of the deep violet eyes as they steadily regarded him. Her gaze held his a moment as if trying to pour all the wrath that filled her being into his inner consciousness, then--

Even while he still regarded her with his dark, soulful eyes in mute inquiry, she lifted her hands and tore the pleading letter into fragments, that fluttered swiftly from her hands and fell down into the garden among the winding paths. It was her only answer to his prayer. When the last white strip had fluttered from her disdainful fingers, she removed her magnetic gaze from his, stepped backward, without word or sign, and dropped the white curtain between them.