Otho Maury’s tone was light and contemptuous, but at heart he was
furious. He had a _penchant_ for Florence Fane himself, and dreaded a
rival in this man whose face had paled at the sight of her, and whose
voice had trembled as he asked her name--ay, whose very heart shone in
his splendid eyes as he leaned over the gate watching the flying wheel
and its graceful rider like one in a dream--a dream of love, for his
pulse beat fast, his heart leaped wildly, his very soul was stirred
within him in strange, delirious ecstasy.
Maybelle came down the graveled walk to them, beautiful in a dainty
white gown with purple lilacs at her slender waist.
But St. George Beresford did not turn to meet her gaze, and Otho said,
sneeringly:
“Beresford has been struck dumb by the sight of a beauty on a bicycle.”
“A beauty?” frowningly.
“Yes. Little Fly-away Floy.”
“Nonsense, _she_ is no beauty, only a mischievous little hoiden! Don’t
let her turn your head, Mr. Beresford; she isn’t in _our_ set at all.
Her father is a mechanic, and her mother a seamstress.”
“Ah!” he exclaimed, carelessly, turning around and flashing her a
bright, quizzical glance, in which he seemed to dismiss the thought of
Florence Fane.
He was very proud, and did not wish her to know that he had been
fascinated by one so far below him in social position.
But Maybelle had equivocated, and she hoped ardently that he would not
find it out.
A flavor of romance and mystery hung around Florence Fane’s origin.
John Banks, the kind-hearted carpenter, had taken the sobbing child
nine years ago from the side of her dead mother and carried her home to
his childless wife, who, because Floy seemed to have no kith or kin,
had taken her into her heart and called her daughter, and both lavished
a world of tenderness on the seven-year-old child. But save in nobility
of nature and a tender heart, she was no more like the homely pair than
a restless humming-bird is like a toiling honey-bee. She was rarely,
exquisitely beautiful, lovable after an imperious fashion, but willful
and untamable in disposition, the result of spoiling by a too fond and
overindulgent mother, who at the last had deserted her by fleeing from
life’s pains and penalties by the forbidden path of suicide.
Floy was heiress by her birth to a small estate and to a terrible taint
of blood--the mania for suicide.
She was a descendant of the Nellest family, that for forty years had
numbered in each decade a suicide among its members.
The scene of these tragedies was at an old farm-house on a lonely road
two miles from Mount Vernon.
The house, a substantial and somewhat pretentious structure of rough
dark stone, overgrown picturesquely in many places with creeping ivy,
stood back from the road in a magnificent grove of old oak-trees, and
twenty-five acres of rich farming land stretched away in the rear.
But so grewsome was the reputation of the place, that for nine years it
had had no tenants, and its name had changed, by tacit consent of the
neighborhood, from Nellest Farm to Suicide Place.
The Nellest family had owned and tilled this farm almost a hundred
years, but in the middle of the century the head of the family had
committed suicide by cutting his throat, and just ten years later, his
only son was found hanging from a tree near the spot where his father
died.
The widow of the son, with her only daughter, continued to reside at
the farm, employing a competent man to manage it. But when another
decade rolled around, the neighborhood was horrified to learn that the
manager had shot himself in the head, adding the third to the list of
deaths by suicidal mania.
Horrified and unnerved by all these tragedies, Widow Nellest fled from
the place with her beautiful young daughter, leaving the property in
the hands of a lawyer for rent or sale.
But neither buyer nor tenant could be found, and successive crops of
weeds ripened and died on the untilled acres. The poorest beggar would
have refused to live there rent-free.
At almost the end of the next decade the daughter of Widow Nellest
returned to the place in widow’s weeds, and with a child seven years
old. Her mother had died of a broken heart, she said, and she herself
had been married and widowed.
In spite of the horror of the neighborhood, she took up her abode
at Suicide Place, declaring herself poor and unable to make a home
elsewhere. Here she lived alone with her child, as neither man-servant
nor maid-servant would have gone inside the gates for love or money.
And here, after a few months’ solitude, Mrs. Fane, overcome by the
terrible, mysterious spirit of the old place, succumbed to the mania of
her family and poisoned herself.
John Banks, who had been employed by the woman to mend her gates, heard
the frightened shrieks of little Floy one morning when he came to his
work, and most reluctantly entered the house.
He found Mrs. Fane dead, with a bottle of poison clutched in her
stiffened hand. She had been dead for hours.
The carpenter took the orphan child to his own home, and into his big,
generous heart. Then he reported the case, after which there was a
coroner’s inquest and a verdict of suicide by poison.
Enough money was found in the house to bury her decently, and then the
old place was left to its grim solitude again.
This was Florence Fane’s inheritance--the old farm that none would
rent or buy, and the terrible taint of blood that made her an object
of a romantic interest and pity to the many who knew what must be her
probable fate.
But, strange to say, the child herself knew and laughed at these
whisperings. She had no superstition in her make-up; and, although
forbidden by her adopted parents to enter even the gates, she was in
the habit of going secretly to the old house and rambling through it at
will. She even declared that she would go and live there, if any one
would bear her company; but no one accepted her defiant challenge to
fate.
Meanwhile, the time was approaching when the grim, unappeasable Moloch
of the place would demand, in all probability, its fifth victim. It was
shunned like the plague, for all remembered that not only the family,
but one of no kith or kin, had met self-sought death there. None but
Floy ventured near the place--willful Floy, who laughed to scorn their
predictions that she would be the next sacrifice. When they tried to
reason with her, she would not listen to their warnings, darting away
like a gay, elusive little humming-bird.
When St. George Beresford turned away from the gate where he had
watched Fly-away Floy out of sight, he knew that his heart had gone
with her forever, and that he never had, and never could love Maybelle
Maury as she wished to have him do--for he had long since fathomed the
tender secret of her heart. The knowledge made him feel very pitiful
toward the poor girl, and rendered him so abstracted that she guessed
the change in him directly, and became furiously jealous of her
unconscious rival, merry little Floy.
He tried to smile and chat as usual with Maybelle and Otho, but his
thoughts wandered from them in spite of himself.
Oh, how strange it was--how strange! Only a careless glance from a pair
of blue eyes, as the girl had smiled and nodded at Otho Maury, and all
the world had changed for St. George Beresford. He wondered vaguely if
_his glance_ had made any impression on the girl’s heart.