IN THE POWER OF A FIEND.
"The bard has sung: God never formed a soul
Without its own peculiar mate, to meet
Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole
Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most complete.
"But thousand evil things there are that hate
To look on happiness. These hurt, impede,
And, leagued with time, space, circumstance, and fate,
Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine and bleed."
Cissy went back to her lonely rooms, stirred up the fire to a brighter
blaze in the tiny stove, then sat down to a dreary retrospection of
past days, her small hands folded idly in her lap, her dark head bowed
in sadness.
The sight of the handsome actor-manager, Cameron Clemens, had brought
her memories from the past sweet and bitter in a breath, kindling old
love and renewing old pain.
"How dared he come? He must have known that Geraldine was with me!
Did he think I would ever willingly meet him again?" she murmured,
bitterly; then started to her feet, for there was another masculine rap
upon the door.
"Who is it this time?" she wondered, as she opened the door.
A cry of surprise came from her lips for there stood Harry Hawthorne,
handsome as a picture, in citizen's dress, his fireman's uniform laid
aside, his stately figure looking its best in a long fur-lined overcoat.
"Good-evening, Miss Carroll. May I come in?" he asked, gayly, with
that ring of happiness in his musical voice one hears from a recently
accepted lover.
"Come in," Cissy answered, mechanically, in her amazement, letting him
enter and close the door ere she asked, uneasily:
"Where's Geraldine? Didn't she come back with you?"
"With me? I don't understand you. I've just got away from my duties
at the engine-house, and I thought if you and Geraldine didn't mind
going out at night, we could have our sleigh-ride yet. There will be
moonlight after a while."
Cissy grasped the back of a chair to steady herself. Her face was pale,
her dove-eyes dilated.
"But--didn't you send a sleigh here just now for Geraldine?" she gasped.
It was his turn now to look startled, and his eyes went from her face
to the next room as he exclaimed:
"Isn't Geraldine here now?"
"No, no--of course not. Didn't I just tell you that she went away
just now in a sleigh that you sent to bring her to the engine-house?"
answered Cissy, turning up the light in a mechanical way, as women will
attend to trifles even in trouble.
She saw that he was deadly pale and excited, and he said, in a strained
voice:
"But I did not send any sleigh. There must be some mistake."
"There is treachery somewhere. Oh, why did I let her go, poor child?"
cried Cissy, with a sudden awful presentiment of evil.
He sank into a chair, trembling with dread.
"Tell me quickly what you mean--give me every clew you can--for I must
go in search of her," he exclaimed, anxiously.
And Cissy told him about the man, Jem Rhodes, and the note, and the
elegant sleigh in which Geraldine had gone away so blithely, her rosy
face radiant with joy, thinking to meet her lover.
"Why, there is the note now," she said, taking it up from the table
where Geraldine had left it, and handing it to Hawthorne.
He ran over it hastily, his blue eyes flashing with anger and
apprehension.
"I never wrote this note--it is not in my writing! How did Geraldine
ever make such a mistake?" he cried, hoarsely.
"She read it hastily by a dim light," said Cissy.
"And there is just enough likeness to my hand to have deceived her that
way," he cried, in anguish, for the conviction of something dreadful
had come to him. "Oh, my darling, you are the victim of some cruel
plot," he groaned, his handsome face blanching to a deathly hue.
Poor Cissy breathed, faintly:
"Oh, who could have planned this outrage? Clifford Standish is the only
man I know likely to be guilty of it. But he is in prison."
"Have you not heard? The villain escaped from the officers at the door
of the Chambers street court-house this morning, and is still at large.
No doubt he wrote this fraudulent note; no doubt it was he who carried
Geraldine off. Tell me what the wretch looked like."
Then Cissy remembered that the man Rhodes had refused to enter the
lighted room, and had been strangely taciturn, speaking only when
necessity required, and then in a low, muffled voice.
"Oh, I ought to have suspected him then. I was culpably careless and
thoughtless, letting that poor child go with him," she thought, in an
agony of distress.
When she had described the man to Hawthorne, he declared his belief
that Standish himself, with but slight disguise, had personated the
mythical Jem Rhodes.
"She is in the power of that fiend at this moment!" he exclaimed,
starting up in a passion of grief and anguish that made poor Cissy
burst out into hysterical weeping.
He was rushing to the door, and he looked back at the sound of her
sobs, and said, gently:
"Don't take it so hard, Miss Carroll, for Heaven's sake. You are not to
blame, neither was she, for that note was plausible enough to deceive
any one. But I'll find her and bring her back to you, or I'll have that
villain's cursed life!"