Thursday morning dawned fair and sunny with all traces of Tuesday
night’s storm swept away--the streets clean, the skies blue, the
air crisply cold--the day set for Jessie Lyndon’s funeral and Frank
Laurier’s wedding.
In the grand parlor of Mrs. Dalrymple’s home the dead girl lay like one
asleep, in a white casket banked with rarest flowers whose delicate
perfume pervaded the whole house. In yesterday’s newspapers a brief
announcement had been made:
“DIED.--Suddenly, at her mother’s residence, No. 1512A Fifth Avenue,
Tuesday evening, Darling, only daughter of Mrs. Verna Dalrymple.
“Friends and relatives of the family are respectfully invited to
attend the funeral services from the family residence, Thursday noon.
Interment at Greenwood.”
In other columns of the newspaper longer paragraphs were given to the
grand noon wedding of the young millionaire, Frank Laurier, to the
brilliant society belle and heiress, Miss Cora Ellyson. It would be a
grand church wedding and the floral decorations were superb, while the
trousseau, lately arrived from Paris, was simply magnificent. Pictures
of the prospective bride and groom, intertwined with true-lovers’
knots, were duly printed for the benefit of an admiring public.
As the hour of noon drew near, Mrs. Dalrymple’s house was filled with
sympathetic guests, to whose ears had floated rumors of the sad ending
of her long grief for her stolen child--recovered only in death. When
they saw Darling Dalrymple in her coffin--her mother had never given
her any name but Darling--they wept in sympathy with the bereaved heart
from whom this lovely treasure had been so cruelly wrested by the grim
King of Terrors.
The beautiful Episcopal service was read, the mother’s farewell kiss
pressed on the cold, white brow, the casket closed, and borne out to
the white-plumed hearse, the carriages were filled with the mother and
friends, and the solemn cortège moved away to Greenwood, where the grim
family vault had been opened to receive another scion of the old house
of Van Dorn, the fairest of all its fair daughters.
At the same time only a block away, on the same avenue, a bridal train
was leaving the Van Dorn mansion for the church.
Life and death jostling each other almost side by side!
In one carriage sat the bride, with her cousins, the Van Dorns, and her
dark, brilliant beauty was at its best, enhanced by the snowy bridal
robes and the joy that flashed from her eyes at the thought that she
would soon be the bride of the man she adored.
Laurier and his best man were to meet them at the church, the
bridegroom having recovered sufficiently from his sprain that he could
walk without a crutch.
In the sunshine of the brilliant day the two processions met and passed
each other, the bridal train and the funeral cortège--Cora going to
her bridal, her rival to her grave!
The bride’s eyes were riveted on the white, flower-banked casket, and
her florid color faded to ashen pallor while she shrank back shuddering:
“It is an evil omen to meet a corpse on the way to one’s wedding!”
“Do not give way to such fancies, dear,” Mrs. van Dorn answered
soothingly, but she also grew pale with superstition, though having
heard all about Jessie from Cora, she thought inwardly:
“Though it is evil-omened to meet a funeral on the way to one’s
wedding, yet I fancy Cora is more fortunate to meet her rival dead
than living. Though Frank Laurier treated that poor girl very badly, I
believe that a secret remorse is gnawing at his heart, and if she had
lived, who knows how it all might have turned out? Frank Laurier has
appeared very strange to me these past two days--pale, distrait, and
sad--the result of keen remorse, no doubt, but does he love Cora as
well as before, I wonder! This encounter with the dead girl has shaken
my nerves, and I feel uneasy. I wish the wedding was well over, and the
knot safely tied for Cora’s sake. I hope he will be sure to meet us
promptly at the church!”