Chapter XVI: The Return Home

Mark put her into the carriage on the seat with Alice where she wished to sit. She had accomplished her object. She had made both men dance to her music and was satisfied to take a back seat and to admire the splendid view from the top of the hill. The river, the meadows, the ponds, the wooded hills and several distant villages were spread out before them in a grand panorama.

“It is lovely and I am glad you brought us here,” Helen said, leaning from the carriage, more conscious of the admiration she was exciting than of the view for which she really cared but little.

“I came this way to show it to you,” Mark said, “but I’ll never try it again with these blooded brutes.”

They were very quiet and docile now and continued so all the way home, and although there were several hills to go up and down they neither flinched nor stopped. Virginia, who was the ruling spirit, would put her head over against Paul’s neck when the hill was steeper than usual, and with a little neigh seemed coaxing him to good behavior; then, squaring her shoulders for the effort, plunged up the ascent at a pace which showed she at least had no heart trouble. Mark took the party round one of the ponds and into the village the opposite way from which they had left it. The road was past the Dalton House which caught Alice’s attention at once. The windows had nearly all been broken and the setting sun poured a flood of light through them into the empty rooms. A mass of woodbine had climbed up one of the gables to the top of the chimney, around which it had twined itself with graceful curves, and on one of its branches, which swayed in the wind, a robin was singing his evening song.

“Look, Helen, what a picturesque old ruin. It must have a history,” Alice said.

Before Helen could reply Mark rejoined, “That is the haunted house. You’ll hear enough about it if you stay here long. It has something to do with _me_.”

Helen was interested at once and asked that the horses be stopped while she looked at the ruin.

“The advertisement mamma saw had in it something about a haunted house, put in to attract attention, I suppose. Is this it, and is it really haunted, and what had you to do with it? Was somebody killed here? How dreadful! I dote on haunted houses,” she said flippantly.

For a minute Mark made no reply; then he answered in a tone she had never heard before, “My great-grandfather was killed here, and the credulous people say his wife comes back to visit the scene of the tragedy.”

“Poor thing! Where is she now?” Helen asked at random.

Mark laughed and thought of the withered rose in his pocket book and the grave from which he picked it; then he said, “Hard telling where she is. She has been dead nearly a hundred years.”

“How sad; died of a broken heart, I suppose,” was Helen’s next remark.

Craig moved uneasily, wondering what Mark would reply, and wholly unprepared for his quick answer, “Died of a broken neck! She was hung!”

Helen gave a little screech and fell back against the cushioned seat, while Alice turned pale with wonder and surprise.

“That’s my pedigree,—my heredity,” Mark went on, with a certain defiance in his voice. “Mr. Taylor will tell you all about it, if you ask him. It is his crack story; but remember I had nothing to do with it.”

He turned and looked at Helen, who met his look with tears in her eyes.

“I am so sorry,” she said, very softly, and the words and the tears compensated for the shame Mark had felt when he avowed his ancestry.

“I am glad I was the first to tell it,” he thought, as he told the horses to go on.

Not another word was spoken till the hotel was reached; then, as Mark helped Helen out, she said to him again, “I am sorry I gave you pain.”

“And I am glad you did,” was his answer.

They found Uncle Zach in the depths of humiliation and remorse. He had confessed to Dot the affair with the safe and received so severe a castigation from her tongue that he had crept up to the garret and looked at “Taylor’s Tavern” and Johnny’s blanket, and the envelope with Zacheus Taylor Esq. on it and had sat a long time on the trunk wondering if he were a fool, with no more judgment than a child, as Dot said he was.

“I guess I be,” he said, “but if Johnny had lived I b’lieve I’d been more of a man;” and a few hot tears fell upon the yellow blanket which was once little Johnny’s.

The sight of Taylor’s Tavern did not have its usual uplifting effect, for there was still Mark to meet. But Mark did not prove very formidable. Jeff had told him the whole story, blaming Mrs. Tracy most, and saying, “If I’s you, I’d let him off easy. The old lady lammed him till he felt so small you could put him in a coffee pot. It hain’t done no harm. He’d forgot how to work the combination. Miss Tracy can’t open it, nor Celine, neither. Nobody but _me_.”

“And if I ever catch you at it I’ll break every bone in your body,” Mark said, expending his wrath on the boy, who, with a laugh, went rolling off on the grass.

“I didn’t or’to do it; no, I didn’t or’ter,” Uncle Zach said, half an hour later to Mark, who answered, “That’s so; but I reckon no harm is done. Jeff is the only one who is any wiser, and we can manage him.”

Thus reassured Uncle Zach brightened wonderfully, and inquired if Paul and Virginny had kept up their character.

“Yes, more than kept it up,” Craig answered for Mark.

He had come to the office to drop into the letter box a hastily written postal to his coachman in Auburndale, telling him to send up Dido and his new light buggy at once. He had made up his mind to this that afternoon and already anticipated the pleasure it would be to drive over the Ridgefield hills with the young ladies, meaning mostly Helen, who had woven her spell around him when he sat on the broken wall with his arm supporting her and her head on his shoulder. His mother might not approve, but he was old enough to act for himself. To go out with the bloods again was impossible. So Dido was sent for, and Craig told his mother of it before he went to bed.

Mrs. Mason made no comment except to ask how soon he expected his horse. He didn’t know,—within three days at the latest, and glad that his mother had taken the matter so quietly, he said good night and went to his room to dream of laughing brown eyes, which had stirred in him feelings he had never believed could be stirred by one whom he had not known twenty-four hours.

Mark, too, had his dreams,—wakeful ones,—which for a long time would not let him sleep. Every pulse was vibrating with the feverish madness which had possessed him since he first looked into Helen Tracy’s face and had strengthened with each moment he had been with her.

“I’ll win her, too,” was his last conscious thought, as he dropped into an uneasy sleep, in which Helen and ’Tina and Paul and Virginia were pretty eagerly blended.

Helen also had her dreams or schemes, which she communicated to Alice, whom she asked into her room before going to bed.

“It is quick to make up my mind when I have only known them a day,” she said, “but it seems to me I have known them years, so much happened in that absurd drive with those wretched _bloods_, as Mr. Taylor calls them. I am perfectly fascinated with Apollo, notwithstanding the terrible thing he told us. I was so sorry for him I could have cried. Mrs. Taylor told me some of the story after supper when you were on the piazza. It is very interesting, but too long to repeat to-night. It was a case of a woman loving some man better than her husband and getting that man to kill him. It often happens, you know. The great-grandfather was a Dalton,—a splendid family. Mamma has heard of them. There’s a governor and a judge and a good many more things somewhere, but they have always ignored Apollo’s branch because of that woman, ’Tina somebody. She was from a good family, too,—but if a woman does not love her husband and does love some one else, what would you have?”

“Not murder, certainly,” Alice said, vehemently, and Helen replied, “Of course not. How you startled me, and how funny you look, as if I were defending ’Tina. I am not. I am defending Mr. Hilton, and shall treat him just the same as if his grandmother hadn’t killed somebody. If he were only the Sphinx and the Sphinx were Apollo, I should be so glad. There is more warmth, more magnetism about him, but it is not to be thought of. Helen Tracy and a hotel clerk! That would be funny. He must have sense enough to know it, so there will be no harm in enjoying myself with him, and being in earnest with the other one, of whom I really think I can learn to be fond. It came to me when I was sitting on the wall with his arm around me, and you all thinking I was faint.”

“And weren’t you?” Alice asked, in a voice which made Helen look at her quickly, as she answered, “Not a bit. I was tired walking up that horrid hill in boots a size too small and which hurt me every step I took, but I wasn’t faint. I was making believe.”

“Why?” Alice asked, sternly, and Helen replied, “Don’t be so cross. I always tell you everything, you know, and it was really nothing more than lots of girls do. I was tired and could have screamed with the pain in my feet, and then they seemed so concerned I thought I’d put on a little just to see what they would do. I hope I posed gracefully. My heart did beat faster than usual with the climb, so it wasn’t much of a fib, but I wasn’t going to have my dress and veil and gloves spoiled with that water which, I dare say, he would have dashed all over me if I hadn’t recovered in time to prevent it. It was a jolly lark and pretty good for the first day in Ridgefield.”

Alice did not answer. The soul of truthfulness herself, she could scarcely imagine her cousin guilty of so contemptible a ruse for the sake of attention and admiration. She knew she was a flirt, but not of this sort, and her good night was rather constrained and cold when she at last said it and went to her room.