Chapter II: Mrs. Prescott

Naturally twenty-three years had changed her somewhat. The freshness and grace of youth were gone, with much of her brilliant complexion. Her dark hair was sprinkled with grey, and her eyes had lost some of the sparkle which had lured so many suitors to her side, but she was a very beautiful woman still, whom strangers looked at a second time, inquiring who she was. She had at first rebelled against wearing widow’s weeds, but when she saw how becoming they were to her she became quite reconciled to her mourning and was beginning to feel reconciled to her widowhood, which gave her the freedom she had not enjoyed since her second marriage. She had paid a full penalty for her heartless act and had repented of her folly. There had been a year of so of perfect happiness with Mark Hilton and then the restraints of married life began to weary her. It had been her boast that because her husband knew her so well he could never find fault with her, and there she was mistaken.

He was fond of her and proud of her and glad to see her admired as long as the admiration was unsought, but when with the little arts she knew so well she tried to attract attention his jealousy was aroused, and gradually there came to be stormy scenes between them,—bitter quarrels when things were said on both sides which it was hard to forget. Finding that with all his apparent unconcern he was sore on the subject of his antecedents Helen used that as a lash and often reminded him of the difference in their social positions and the depth to which she stooped when she married him. Then they quarreled more fiercely than ever and the baby was made the instrument of goading Mark to madness. That it had a drop of blood in its veins which could be traced back to a scaffold was often a source of regret with Helen coupled with a wish that she had married Craig Mason instead of throwing herself away on a hotel clerk, with no family connections. Mark was not naturally bad-tempered; neither was Helen. They were simply wholly unsuited to each other. They had married in haste, trampling upon the rights and happiness of Craig Mason without remorse, and as a natural sequence reaped the consequence of their sin.

At last, after a sharp altercation in which Helen expressed a wish that she had never seen her husband, he left her, taking Jeff with him and leaving a note saying he should not return as he was tired of the life he was living. Urged on by her mother, who had never accepted Mark as a son-in-law, a divorce was easily obtained and Helen free from the tie which had become so distasteful to her. Chancing to know that Mark was in Denver she sent him a copy of the divorce and received in return the note of which Fanny had told Roy. After that she knew no more of him until she heard of a terrible explosion in some mine in Montana. Among the killed was Mark Hilton’s name. Then in an agony of remorse she tried to verify the report. What she learned was that none of the bodies could be identified, they were so bruised and burned. Mark was known to have been in the mine and never seen after. Of Jeff nothing was known. He might, or might not, have been in the mine. In all human probability Mark was dead, and the divorce, of which she did not like to think, need not have been obtained. She was free without it and always spoke of herself to her friends as a widow, although she wore no black. If any of her old tenderness for Mark Hilton returned to her at times she gave no sign and was outwardly unchanged, except that she was very quiet and shunned society rather than courted it.

At her mother’s request she returned to her home in New York and there at last met again the Walter Prescott whose name had been in her blue book as her possible husband before she met Craig Mason. In some respects he was like Craig, undemonstrative, caring little for society and much for books. He had never forgotten Helen and soon fell again under her spell. He knew of her divorce and would rather it had not been, but her beauty conquered him and she became his wife and mistress of one of the finest establishments in New York. With Judge Prescott, whom she respected and feared, she lived very comfortably. He was not a man to tolerate any nonsense. His wife, like Caesar’s, must be above reproach, and from the first he was master of the situation.

Helen was very fond of Fanny, who was as unlike her as it was possible for a child to be unlike its mother. “She has not a feature like me, nor like her father, either, unless it is something in the expression of her eyes and the gesture of her hands,” she often thought, as she studied Fanny’s face and wondered where she got her blue eyes and fair hair and the delicacy of her complexion and form. “I believe she gets it a hundred years back from ’Tina,” she sometimes said, and then for a while rebelled against the heritage she had given her lovely daughter. “She shall never know of it,” she thought, and kept it to herself until Judge Prescott’s death, when it seemed necessary to tell Fanny of her real father.

Seizing upon something inadvertently spoken, Fanny, who was persistent and determined, never rested until she knew the whole story as her mother knew it. Over the father killed in the mines she wept bitterly, while the tragedy filled her with horror and for a time she refused to see anyone lest they should read in her face the secret which was making her life miserable. She had been so proud of being a Prescott and proud of her supposed father that it was hard to find herself suddenly stranded with no father, no name of which to boast, and she had dreamed many a night of the scaffold and of ’Tina, whom she was sure she resembled. “What will Roy say when he knows,” had been in her thoughts all the long summer while she was with her mother in the quiet mountain resort. That Roy loved her she knew and that he would sometime tell her so she was sure. “And when he does I must tell him everything and he will not care for me any more,” she thought. He had declared his love. She had told him everything, and he did not care; he could even jest about ’Tina and talk of a cottage to shield her from the weather. The revulsion of feeling was great, and Fanny’s face was radiant with happiness, when Mrs. Prescott appeared suddenly in the door.

With a mother’s intuition Mrs. Prescott had foreseen the probable result of Roy’s intimacy with her daughter, and nothing could please her more than to see Fanny his wife and connected with the Mason family. Consequently when she entered the room and saw Fanny’s confusion and Roy’s exultation she guessed the truth and was prepared to hear all Roy had to say, as in a straight-forward, manly way he told her what his wishes were and asked her consent.

“Has she told you everything?” Mrs. Prescott said. “Your parents know it all, of course. They were a part of the drama played that summer which seems to me ages ago. Nor can I realize that I am the person who was guilty of that heartless escapade.”

She was thinking of Craig Mason, while Fanny, who knew nothing of that page in her mother’s life, thought only of her father, and said, “Oh, mother, you are not sorry you married my father? You can’t be, if you love me. Where would I have been if you hadn’t married him? He was nice, I know he was.”

The brave little girl, who was fighting down all her pride of family and birth, would be loyal to the father she had never known and it touched her mother closely.

“I was thinking of the way I married him,” she said, sitting down by Fanny and smoothing her hair, which was still a good deal disordered from contact with Roy’s buttons and coatsleeves. “One always regrets the foolishness of youth which might have been avoided.”

Turning now to Roy she continued, “When I married Judge Prescott it was his wish that Fanny should take his name, and mine to forget the past so far as possible. Your parents were abroad, but I wrote asking them to be reticent on the matter.”

“And they have been,” Roy answered quickly. “I never heard of Mr. Hilton until to-day; nor of his grandmother; nor do I care how many he had, nor how they died. I dare say half of mine ought to have been hung, if the truth were known. That has nothing to do with my love for Fanny. I want her, and right off, too,—the sooner the better. Father and mother knew my business here. I talked it all over with them and they would rather have Fanny for a daughter than anyone they know. When can I take her?”

He was very impetuous, and Mrs. Prescott could not repress a sigh as she looked at his flushed, eager face and remembered her own youth so far in the past.

“You can have my daughter,” she said, “but not yet. She is not quite twenty and you are only twenty-two, both children in experience. You must wait a year at least; that will soon pass. I cannot spend another winter in this climate. I have tried Florida and do not like it, and have decided upon California, and Fanny will go with me. In June or July we shall visit the Yosemite, and when we return home it will be time to think of bridal festivities.”

She was very firm, as she usually was when her mind was made up. All summer she had been planning this trip to California, intending, either on her way there, or on her return, to visit the mines in Montana where Mark had met his death. She would not like to admit to anyone the great desire she had to see some of the people who had known him and, if possible, to learn what had become of Jeff. For a brief space of time she had loved Mark passionately, and she always thought of him now with regret for the bitter things she had said to him. He had once told her there was in him, about equally balanced, the making of an angel or a devil, and a woman’s hand would turn the scale. She had turned it and sent him to destruction, and the widow’s weeds she wore were almost as much for Mark Hilton as for the courtly Judge Prescott. Sometimes in her sleep she heard Mark’s voice calling to her from beyond the Rockies and bidding her come to him with their child. Again she sat with him in the ghost-haunted room in Ridgefield and promised to prove false to the vows made to Craig only the night before. On such occasions she would wake suddenly, bathed with perspiration and thank God it was all a dream. She did not wish Mark back. Their paths diverged more widely now than when they separated. It was her treatment of him which she regretted, and her many sleepless nights and restless days had undermined her health, until a change was necessary. She must go to California and Roy must wait for his bride until another year.

“Why can’t I go with you? You need some man to take care of you, especially in the Yosemite, where the brigands are so thick that the stages are stopped every few days,” Roy said.

But Mrs. Prescott was not afraid of the brigands, and didn’t need a man as an escort, and Roy was compelled to acquiesce in waiting a year, which seemed to him as endless. Mrs. Prescott promised to bring Fanny to Boston before leaving for California, and with this to comfort him he left New York the following day, anxious to carry the glad news of his engagement to his father and mother. He made very short work of it.

“I have asked Fanny to be my wife, and she has consented,” he said. “She is not Fanny Prescott at all, but Fanny Hilton. I know all about it, ’Tina and all, and don’t care.”

Craig and Alice did not care, either. To them it was an old story nearly forgotten, and they congratulated their son and at once forwarded a letter to Helen inviting her and Fanny to spend Thanksgiving with them.