Mrs. Dalrymple had never felt like a well woman since the day she
kissed her daughter’s dead face and turned away from the old family
vault, feeling that her last hope in life was gone.
Alone and lonely, though she had the whole world at command by
the power of wealth, Verna Dalrymple, still a young woman, and a
magnificently beautiful one, was as wretched as the veriest beggar
starving in the streets.
Never since the moment she had turned from her angry young husband,
doubting his love and hating his poverty, had Verna Dalrymple known a
really happy hour.
Despite her pride and resentment that had driven them apart, she had
loved Leon, her husband, with the passion of her life, and realized it
too late.
The decree of divorce she had permitted her parents to secure for her
fell like the trump of doom upon her heart, and the coming of her child
had been her only consolation.
All these years she had fought down with resolution the passion of her
heart, loving and hating alternately the man whose brief appearance on
the stage of her life had been as fateful as a tragedy.
Yet she knew not if he were dead or living, for never since the moment
of their parting had she gazed on his fair, handsome face.
The divorce case, based on nonsupport and incompatibility of temper,
had been cleverly managed by her lawyers without bringing them together
again, and when she fainted on receiving the decree of divorce, all
supposed it was from hysterical excitement; none guessed that the iron
of despair had entered her soul on knowing herself parted forever from
Leon Dalrymple.
She clung to his name still, with the excuse that it was for the sake
of the unborn child, that it might bear the paternal name.
But with the coming of the beloved daughter one bitter drop always
mingled with her cup of joy.
It was that he could not share her happiness.
His child looked at her with its father’s face, and had the sunny curls
that had crowned his handsome head.
There was wordless reproach in the resemblance.
There are words of deeper sorrow
Than the wail above the dead;
Both shall live, but every morrow
Wake us from a widowed bed.
And when thou wouldst solace gather,
When our child’s first accents flow,
Wilt thou teach her to say “Father!”
Though his care she must forego?
When her little hand shall press thee,
When her lip to thine is pressed,
Think of him whose love had blessed thee,
Think of him thy love had blessed!
Four years the child remained the idol of her life, and kept alive in
her heart the father’s memory--then the blow fell that almost crushed
her--the loss of the child!
It was stolen while taking an airing in the park with its nurse.
The maid had been flirting with a policeman--she said she had only just
turned her head--when the little darling had been snatched up by a
stranger--a man with a black wig and bushy whiskers who got away with
the child in spite of her pursuit.
On being cross-questioned, the maid admitted that the little girl had
previously made the acquaintance of a blond gentleman with a melancholy
aspect, and the two--Darling and the gentlemanly stranger--had become
fast friends.
The little one would run to meet him, shouting with joy when he
appeared, usually with a sweet bunch of flowers or a new toy. They
would sit together on a bench a while, and Darling would prattle to
him joyously, then with a long-drawn sigh he would leave the spot and
reappear several days afterward, always meeting a glad welcome from the
child. She did not think it was any harm as he seemed such a perfect
gentleman. And she was sure it was not he who had kidnapped the child.
It was a dark man, all bushy, black whiskers and wig.
The girl was lying; because she had been so busy with her flirtation
that she did not know just when the child ran away to meet the blond
gentleman beckoning from a distance, and threw herself into his arms.
Then it was easy enough to whip into a carriage with her and away.
So the frightened nurse stuck to her story of the dark stranger, but
the mother’s heart was not deceived. She knew that Darling’s abductor
was no one but her father, who, cheated of her sweetness all these
years, had thus taken his revenge.
For a while the most bitter resentment possessed the mother’s heart.
She employed detectives, and spared neither time, money, nor patience
in the effort to recover the child.
For several years the search went on, ending at last without success.
Leon Dalrymple, who had placed his child with his sister, the wife of a
poor artisan in an obscure part of the city, and then sailed for Europe
himself, had so cleverly covered up his tracks that Mrs. Dalrymple’s
daughter was reared in poverty in the same city where her mother was
rolling in wealth, yet as effectively separated as if continents had
rolled between them.
So the years went on, and Mrs. Dalrymple, plunging into the social
whirl, tried to drown her grief in vain.
Her parents died, and their large fortune fell to her, the only
surviving child. Then she took her orphan niece, Cora Ellyson, into her
home and heart.
But in no sense could Cora fill the lost child’s place. She was
passionate, self-willed, imperious, and ungrateful. Her aunt wearied of
her often, despairing of any congeniality between them, and secretly
anxious that Cora should marry and thus remove to another home.
Then came the episode of Jessie Lyndon, the wonderful likeness that
startled Mrs. Dalrymple, and the discovery of the family birthmark on
the young girl’s breast.
Swiftly the links were fastened in the chain that proved the dead girl
to be the stolen child, recovered only in death.
It was cruel, cruel! The woman’s heart so long on the rack of suspense
almost broke beneath the awful strain of hope’s decay.
After Jessie’s death and Cora’s accident no one thought it strange that
she gave up society, draping herself in the deepest mourning garb.
In her restless mood before finding Jessie she had promised to marry a
titled Englishman, who, meeting her abroad, had followed her home to
plead his suit.
Now she abruptly canceled this engagement, to the despair of her
suitor, who adored her beauty as much as he did her millions.
Her heart had never been in it. No man had touched that since she had
been parted from her husband, but she had thought to fill up her empty
life with gratified vanity, to wear the tiara of a duchess.
Her heart revolted, and she realized that she would do her lover wrong
to give him the hand without the heart.
So, in spite of his entreaties, she took back her promise, and set
society caviling as much as it had done at her divorce. She did not
care. She was growing indifferent to everything now that she had found
Darling and lost her again in death.
So it happened that as time went by she lost heart and hope, sickening
of a vague disease without a name, the slow loss of interest in life
that had nothing left to make it dear.
She lay ill on her bed at last, and the old family physician came and
shook his head and said it must be nervous prostration.
“It is a breaking heart,” she replied wearily.
“No, no.”
“I tell you yes,” she cried. “It was too cruel a blow, finding Darling
and losing her again as I did. I have never recovered from it. The
thorn has been in my heart always, and I can never recover.”
“You should have married the duke. It would have diverted your mind to
wear a coronet.”
“It would only have wearied me,” she replied, and the look in her
great, languid, dark eyes made his old heart ache. “You may spare your
pills and potions, doctor. They cannot cure me, for I do not wish to
get well. I am reaping the crop of pain I sowed in my passionate youth,
and I am weary of life!”
“You should have married another man and forgotten that episode,” he
said; but she turned her face to the wall with a stifled moan:
“I could not forget!”
And he went away perplexed and unhappy, realizing that the medical art
could not avail to cure that subtle malady--hopelessness and weariness
of life.
So it happened that she grew worse and worse, weaker and weaker. She
swallowed the doctor’s tonics patiently; but they did not do her any
good, and she smiled sorrowfully when he chided her because she would
not make an effort to live.
“The world is empty,” she murmured again, turning her lovely, pallid
face to the wall.