Chapter I: Fanny and Roy

The October sun was shining brightly into the windows of a handsome drawing room in New York, where two young people were talking earnestly together. The girl was scarcely twenty and looked younger. She was short and slight and dainty and sweet, with beautiful blue eyes which laughed when she laughed and gave a wonderful brightness to her face. There was something peculiar in their expression which was rapid and searching and made the young man beside her wonder if what they saw in him boded good or ill to his suit. He was twenty-two, tall and straight and broad shouldered, with something in his voice and features and manner which reminded one of the July morning twenty-three years before when Craig Mason sat on the north piazza of the Prospect House and talked to Alice Tracy. To one who had been in Ridgefield that summer there would have come back the scent of the new mown hay and the perfume of the white pond lilies Alice wore in her belt, and in the young man’s eyes he would have seen a likeness to Alice’s eyes, with thicker lashes and heavier brows.

After this the reader scarcely need be told that the young man was the son of Craig and Alice, born abroad where his parents had spent much of their time since their marriage, with occasional visits to America. Alice had been delighted with the old world, and as Craig’s health was better there they had staid on and on,—sometimes in Paris where their son Roy was born, sometimes in Switzerland, sometimes in Italy, and once for a winter in Cairo, and again in London, where Craig’s mother died. They had brought her back to Boston, and tired of wandering with no particular home, had decided to settle down quietly for a time at least. But not in the house Craig had looked at for himself and Helen. Nothing could have induced him to take that at any price. He preferred his mother’s old home, which, if not in so fashionable a part of the city, was dear to him for its associations with his boyhood and manhood and mother. Here they had lived for three years, two of which Roy had spent at Harvard, where he had entered as a Junior, studying hard in order to be graduated with honor, and still managing to join in a good many athletic sports and to fall in love with his pretty half cousin, Fanny Prescott, a pupil in a private school. She had thought him a boy at first and played with and teased him unmercifully, now sending him from her in a rage and then luring him back with a trick of her eyes which we have seen before. She had not inherited all her mother’s dazzling beauty and but little of her nature. In her frankness and perfect truthfulness she resembled Alice. Her Sundays when at school had been spent with the Masons, and thus Roy had every facility for falling in love with her. But while she kept him at fever heat with her innocent coquetries she gave him no encouragement. Once, when he said, “I must and will speak seriously to you,” she called him a big boy and told him to wait till he had his diploma and a mustache. He had them both now; the mustache was a very small one, which some might think did not add to his face. The diploma, received in June, was _en regle_, and he had come for the serious talk.

He had not seen her since May, at which time she had been called home by the sudden illness and death of her father, Judge Prescott. As it was so near the close of the term she had not returned to school, but had spent the summer with her mother at a quiet place among the Adirondacks. She did not know that he was coming but was glad to see him, and led him to a sofa on which they both sat down. Then her manner changed suddenly to one of shyness and almost shamefacedness as she moved away from him and put a sofa cushion between them. She was in mourning for her father and the black brought out the purity of her complexion and the brightness of her eyes which filled with tears when Roy spoke of her father and his grief when he heard he was dead.

“Don’t talk of him. I can’t bear it yet. Talk of something else, please,” she said, and Roy plunged at once into the object of his visit, reminding her that he had his diploma and his mustache, and now he wanted her love.

“Oh, Roy, it’s too bad in you to spoil our good times as friends. As lovers we might quarrel, and then we are cousins,” she said.

“Only seconds, which does not count,” Roy answered, moving nearer to her, while she put another cushion between them so that only her shoulders and head were visible.

Roy was of a more ardent nature than his father, and there was no stiffness or hesitancy in his wooing when once he was fairly under way.

“You can pile up the cushions till I can’t see you at all,” he said, “but it will not prevent you from hearing me tell you that I love you and have ever since I saw you in short dresses, with your hair down your back.”

For a time Fanny listened with her face bent down, and when she turned it to him there was a troubled look upon it and her lips quivered as she said, “I do care for you, Roy, and always have; but I must not any more. You will not want me to either when you know what I do.”

“What do you know?” he asked, beginning to slide his hand under the cushions.

“Have you never heard anything bad about me or mother?” she asked, and Roy answered, with so sudden a movement that one of the cushions fell to the floor.

“Bad about you, or your mother? Never. I would have thrashed any one who insinuated anything against you. What do you mean?”

“I am not Fanny Prescott,” the girl said with a sob in her voice.

“The deuce you are not! Who are you, then, if you are not your father’s daughter?” Roy asked, and Fanny replied, “I am my father’s daughter, but my father was not Judge Prescott, as I thought. I never knew it till he died last May. Mother had to tell me then on account of some business matters and it almost broke my heart, I was so fond of him and so proud of being his daughter and he was so kind to me. I held his hand when he died and kissed him and called him father and didn’t suspect the truth. I don’t think you will care for me when you know all. I have always heard the Masons were very proud.”

“And I have always heard the Tracys were very proud. Greek meeting Greek, you see,” Roy rejoined. “But go ahead. Let’s hear the story. Nothing can ever change my love for you. Who are you? Who was your father?”

“Have you ever heard of the Prospect House in Ridgefield, Mass.?” Fanny asked, and Roy answered briskly, “I guess I have. It was there father met my mother, twenty-three years ago. I had heard piles about it and the funny little landlord before I went there this last summer with father and mother. We had a fancy to drive through the country, stopping where night overtook us, and the second day we reached the Prospect House, which looks rather old fashioned beside the fine hotel which has been built on the Common. I wanted to stop there but nothing could keep father from the Prospect House, and I was glad we went there. I wish you could see the landlord, Uncle Zach they call him. He is an old man with such a fat body and short legs and round good natured face, and what do you think he called his wife?”

Fanny could not guess, and Roy continued, “Dot, and Dotty, and I’ll bet she weighs two hundred, and is nearer eighty than seventy. Think of calling her Dotty! There is love of the right sort, isn’t it? But I shall love you just as well when you weigh three hundred and are ninety, as I do now.”

His hand had gotten quite under the cushion and had one of Fanny’s.

“You hurt,” she said, as he gave it a hard squeeze. “And you must not hold it either. You don’t know at all who I am. Did they mention Mark Hilton at the Prospect House?”

“Why, yes, I think they did,” Roy said slowly, as if trying to recall something which had slipped his memory. “Father and mother and Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were talking and I heard that name I am sure. When I joined them they stopped suddenly, as if they did not care to continue the conversation. Who was he, anyway? Some scamp?”

“He was my father,” Fanny said defiantly.

“Your father! Great Scott, why didn’t you say so?” Roy exclaimed.

“You needn’t swear if he was my father,” Fanny answered, beginning to cry.

The second cushion had followed the first to the floor by this time and Roy had his arm around Fanny, to whom he said, “Don’t cry. Great Scott isn’t a swear. I only said it because I must say something. What of Mark Hilton?”

“He was clerk at the Prospect House, and none the worse for that. The Vanderbilts and Astors and a lot more people did not have as good a beginning,” Fanny said, and Roy replied, “Of course not. Very few of us can boast of high-toned beginnings. My great-grandfather was a carpenter.”

“Pho!” Fanny said, with a laugh which had not much mirth in it. “I can beat that on a grandmother when I get to her. I don’t think a carpenter at all bad.”

“Neither do I,” Roy said, “and I don’t care if your father was a tinker. Tell me about him.”

“You see, it was this way,” Fanny began. “My mother was at the hotel the same summer with your father and mother. Mr. Hilton was very handsome and very tall and very nice. I know he was nice,” and she emphasized her words with sundry nods of her head as a warning that she was not to be disputed.

“Of course he was nice, or he couldn’t have been your father,” Roy said, and Fanny continued, “Mother, you know, is very handsome now. She was beautiful then,—a belle and an heiress and a great catch. She’d had I don’t know how many offers, fifty maybe, and she has a book with all their names in it. I tried to have her show it to me once and she wouldn’t. She keeps it to remind her of other days when she feels depressed. Grandma Tracy thought she ought to marry the President, or somebody like him, but she loved my father and the same as eloped with him. She came to New York in the morning on an errand. He came in the evening and they were married the next day. Grandma wouldn’t forgive them, or see my mother until after she was divorced. I think that word has a bad sound, and I am ashamed of it, but I am telling you everything just as I made mother tell me. I was ill for weeks after it, and thought everybody who looked at me was thinking about it.”

“What a foolish little girl,” Roy said, trying to pull her head down upon his shoulder. “Lots of people are divorced and nothing is thought of it. It is quite the fashion.”

“I don’t care if they are,” Fanny replied. “I think it is wicked, and told mother so. Don’t hold my head down. I am going to keep it up as long as I can. By and by I shall want to hang it so low,—oh, so low!”

“Not on account of a divorce,” Roy said, and Fanny rejoined, “That isn’t all; there is something a great deal worse. Father and mother went to Chicago and were very happy for a while,—then not so happy, and then not happy at all. Mother says she was more to blame than he. She liked attention and had it, and that made him jealous, and she used to tell him that she stooped when she married him, and taunted him with what I’m going to tell you about by and by. I was six months old and don’t remember it of course,—their quarrelling. I mean. He loved me, I know.”

“I am sure he did,” Roy interrupted her, giving her at the same time a squeeze which she did not seem to notice, she was so absorbed in her story.

“Once mother told him she wished he would go away and never come back, and he did go, and never came back. There was a boy living with them,—Jefferson Wilkes, in whom my father was interested and who had come to them from the Prospect House. Jeff, they called him, and he went with my father. After a while mother instituted proceedings for a divorce on the ground of desertion and incompatibility and psychological repulsion. Do you know what that is?”

“I know what it isn’t,” Roy said, kissing the face which began to look very pitiful as the story progressed.

“Mother knew where father was for a time and sent him a copy of the divorce. He replied, ‘I congratulate you on your freedom. You will not have any trouble in filling my place. You are young enough and handsome enough to have twenty-two more offers. Jeff and I are off for the mines in Montana. Tell the baby, when she is old enough to understand, that, bad as I was, I loved her. Mark Hilton.’

“I was ill with diphtheria when mother received the note,—so ill that the papers, when commenting on the divorce, said that I was dead. Six months later mother saw an account of a terrible accident in some mines in Montana. In the list of killed was my father’s name, but there was no mention of Jeff. Mother tried to learn the particulars, but could not, and after a while she came back to New York deserted, divorced and widowed, but still very beautiful. We lived with grandma, a proud old lady, who had never received my father. She is dead now and I do not remember her. Among mother’s friends was Judge Prescott, whom she used to know, and who, I think, wanted her before she married my father. When I was two and a half years old she married him and at his request I took his name. I was christened Frances, but he did not like that name and I was called Fanny to please him. I like it better than Frances, don’t you?”

Roy would have liked any name which belonged to her and said so, while she continued: “You were in Europe when all this happened and knew nothing about it as you are not much older than I am.”

“Two years,” Roy said, kissing her again, while she tried to disengage herself from him, but could not, for a lock of her hair had become frightfully entangled in a button of his coat.

It took some time to disentangle it and Fanny was obliged to lie quietly upon Roy’s arm, with her face upturned to him so temptingly that not to kiss it occasionally was impossible for one of his temperament.

“Roy Mason!” she exclaimed, “You must not kiss and squeeze me the way you are doing, and I not able to get away, with my hair all snarled up in your buttons. It is mean in you, and I’ll call mother if you don’t stop. I believe she is in the next room, listening, perhaps.”

“Let her listen. She was young once,” Roy said, going on very deliberately, while Fanny, from necessity, lay passive on his arm.

When the hair business was settled she moved away from him, and picking up a cushion put it between them again.

“I was telling you about Judge Prescott, whom I called my father, although now I have a faint recollection of a time when there was no gentleman in our house,” she said. “When he died mother told me everything. I don’t think she meant to tell me the whole dreadful story, but she gave some hints and I would not let her stop. I said I’d go to Ridgefield and inquire, and so she had to tell me, and if there is more to know I do not care to hear it. I feel now as if my life had been all a lie. Fanny Prescott, indeed! When I am really Fanny Hilton, and that is not the worst of it. Stop, Roy! You shall _not_ touch me again till I’m through,” she said, as Roy’s arm came over the cushion toward her hand.

“Did you ever hear of a haunted house in Ridgefield, where a woman in a white gown and blue ribbons walks at night and a drowning man calls for ’Tina. That’s the woman’s name, and she sat still and let him drown, and a baby cries at all hours for its mother? That is ’Tina, too,—who—who—was hung!”

“By Jove, that’s a corker for a story!” Roy replied. “I never heard of it before, but I like haunted houses, with women in white and blue ribbons and cries for ’Tina, who was hung! Tell me about it, and what it has to do with you.”

In as few words as possible Fanny told the story of the Dalton tragedy as she had heard it from her mother, while Roy listened with absorbing interest.

“What do you think now of the great-great-granddaughter of ’Tina?” Fanny asked when the story was ended.

“I think her the sweetest, dearest little girl in all the world, and do not care a continental for the woman in white and blue ribbons, or the haunted house. You say there is only a cellar hole there now and that it belongs to you or your mother,” Roy answered, throwing the cushion half way across the room and putting both arms around Fanny, who was crying, but who sat very still while he went on, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do when we are married. We will build a pretty cottage there,—a real up to date one, with bay windows and wide piazzas and give ’Tina a chance to perambulate under cover rainy nights. You say she takes such times to walk in preference to pleasant weather. I should think that white dress would be rather frayed and draggled and the blue ribbons slimpsy by this time.”

He was making light of the matter and a load was lifted from Fanny’s heart, for she had dreaded telling him the story which had weighed so heavily upon her since she heard it.

“It is so kind in you, Roy, not to care about that hanging,” she said. “I have felt the rope around my neck so many times and have dreamed that I was ’Tina. I must look like her. She was blue eyed and fair-haired and small, just like me, who am not a bit like mother. Her grave is in the Ridgefield cemetery, ’Tina’s I mean, and mother sat there on the wall right by it when father told her the story. He didn’t keep anything back, and held his head just as high when he said, ‘My great-grandmother was hung.’ His grandfather was the baby who cried for its mother. I’ve heard that, too, when I have been awake in the night and been so sorry for it. Mother says my father was very tall and fine looking, and that I have some of his ways with my eyes and hands. I have dreamed of him so often since she told me, and sometimes it seems to me he is not dead. There is no proof except that notice in the paper and a letter mother had from the mines saying some of the bodies were so crushed they could not be recognized, and as my father was known to be in the mine and never seen again, it was highly probable he was dead. Oh, if I could find him! I think you’d better hunt for him than to be building a cottage to keep ’Tina from the rain!”

She spoke lightly now. Roy evidently didn’t care and the tragedy which had cast so dark a shadow on her life when she heard of it began to lessen in its proportions.

“I hear mother,” she said at last. “I thought she was in the next room, but she is a little deaf. I don’t believe she has heard all the foolish things you have said to me. Mother, here is Roy,” she continued, as the heavy portieres parted and her mother stood before her.