"YOU ARE DISINHERITED--EVERYTHING IN THIS HOUSE IS MINE."
Faynie had indeed departed from that humble home as she had entered it,
in the dark, dim silence of the bitter-cold night.
She made her way as best she could to the station which, fortunately
enough, was not far distant. The station master was old and anxious to
get home, and therefore paid little heed to the little dark-robed figure
who bought a ticket to New York, and soon after crept silently aboard of
the train which steamed into the little depot of the hamlet, almost
buried in the snowdrifts across the hills.
Weak and faint from her recent illness, Faynie, the beautiful, petted
little heiress of a short time before, huddled into a corner of the seat
by the door, and drawing her veil carefully over her face, wept silently
and unheeded as the midnight express bore her along to her destination.
She was going home to Beechwood; going back to the home she had left in
such high spirits to join the lover who was to be all in all to her
forever more; the lover who was to shield her henceforth and forever
from the world's storms, and was to be all devotion to her and love her
fondly until death did them part. And this had been the end of it. Her
high hopes lay in ruins around her. Her idol had been formed of
commonest clay, and lay crumbled in a thousand fragments at her feet.
Surely, no young girl's love dream ever had such a sad awakening, and
was so cruelly dispelled.
She would go home to her haughty old father, tell him all, then lie down
at his feet and die. That would end it all. Even in that moment lines
she had once read came back to her with renewed meaning:
"And this is all! The end has come at last!
The bitter end of all that pleasant dream,
That cast a hallow o'er the happy past,
Like golden sunshine on a summer stream.
"Sweet were the days that marked life's sunny slope,
When we together drew our hearts atune,
And through the vision of a future hope,
We did not dream that they would pass so soon.
"In happy mood fair castles we upreared,
And thought that life was one long summer day;
We had no dread of future pain, nor feared
That shadows e'er should fall athwart our way.
"But sunken rocks lie hid in every stream,
And ships are wrecked when just in sight of land;
So we to-day wake from our pleasant dream
To find our hopes were builded on the sand.
"I do not blame you that you do not keep
The troth you plighted e'er your heart you knew;
Better the parting now than wake to weep,
When time has robbed life's roses of their dew.
"Another face will help you to forget,
The idle dream that had its birth in trust,
And other lips will kiss away regret,
For broken faith and idols turned to dust,
"Ah, well, you chose, perhaps, the better way;
Another love may in your heart be shrined;
And I--I shall go down my darkened way,
Seeking forever what I ne'er shall find."
It was two o'clock by the church belfry when she reached Beechwood, and
a quarter of an hour later when she reached the great mansion that stood
on the brow of the hill.
She remembered that one of the rear doors, seldom used, was never
fastened, and toward this she bent her faltering footsteps. It yielded
to her touch, and like a ghost she glided through it and up the wide,
familiar corridors, her tears falling like rain at every step.
She knew it was her father's custom to spend long hours in his library,
sometimes far into the gray dawn. He found this preferable to the
presence of his sharp-tongued second wife, who was always nagging him
for more money, or to put his property into her name as proof positive
of his unbounded, undying affection for her.
In his library, among his books, there was no nagging. Here he found
peace, silence and quiet.
Therefore, toward the library, late as the hour was, Faynie made her
way, stealing along quietly as a shadow.
The door stood slightly ajar, and a ray of light, a narrow, thread-like
strip, fell athwart the dim corridor.
When Faynie reached the door she paused, trembling with apprehension, a
feeling of intense dread, like a presentiment of coming evil, stealing
over her like the shadow of doom.
She was prepared for his bitter anger, for the whirlwind of wrath that
would be sure to follow, but she would cast herself on her knees at his
feet, and with head bowed, oh, so lowly, so piteously, wait for the
hurricane of his rage to exhaust itself. Then she would bend over her
head still lower, her pride crushed, her pitiful humiliation complete,
and sue on her bended knees, with her hands clasped for his pardon and
his love again.
She would plead for it for the sake of the fair, hapless young mother
whom she had loved and lost in his early youth. Surely, for her sake he
would find mercy, perhaps pardon, for the child she had left behind her,
the fair, petted, hapless daughter, who had been so lonely, and whose
heart yearned so for love ever since he had brought in a second wife to
rule over his household.
Ay, from that hour he and his daughter had seemed to drift apart.
Nerving herself for the ordeal, the girl crept to the door and timidly
swung it back.
There was a figure bending over the writing desk; not the tall form of
her father, but her stepmother.
Faynie drew back with a startled cry.
In a single instant, with the swiftness of a lioness, the woman who had
been examining the desk, cleared the space that divided her from the
girl, and clutched her by the shoulder.
"You!" she panted, in a voice that was scarcely human, it was so full of
venomous hatred. "You!" she repeated, flinging the girl from her, as
though she had been something vile to the touch. "How dare you come
here?"
Faynie looked at her for a moment with dilated eyes gazing out from her
pale face.
Had her stepmother suddenly gone mad? was the thought that flashed
through the girl's brain.
"I--I have come back to my father, and--and to his home--and mine. Any
explanation I have to offer will be made to him alone."
The woman laughed a sneering, demoniac laugh, and her clutch on the
girl's shoulder grew stronger, fiercer.
"How lovely, how beautifully worded, how dutiful!" she sneered. "By that
I judge that you have not been keeping abreast of the times, or you
would have known, girl, that your father is dead, and that he has
disinherited you, leaving every dollar of his wealth to me."
"Dead!" Faynie repeated the words in an awful whisper.
It seemed to her that every drop of blood in her veins seemed suddenly
turned to ice. A mist swam before her eyes and she put out her hand
gropingly, grasping the back of the nearest chair for support.
She did not even hear the last of the sentence. Her thoughts and hearing
seemed to end with that one awful word.
"That is what I said," replied her stepmother, nonchalantly, "and you
are his murderess, girl, quite as much as though you had plunged a
dagger in his heart. Your elopement caused him to have a terrible
hemorrhage. He knew all the details about it in less than an hour's
time, learning from one of the servants how you stole out of the house
and met the tall man at the gate, who took you off in a closed carriage,
and just as he made this discovery one of the maids handed him your
note, which you left pinned to the pillow, addressed to him. He had no
sooner read it than he fell into a rage so horrible that it ended as I
have said, in a hemorrhage. Within ten minutes' time your name, which he
cursed, was stricken from his will, and he left everything to me,
disinheriting you. Do you comprehend the force of my remark?"
The steady, awful look in the young girl's eyes made the woman quail in
spite of her bravado. "I--I do not care for my father's wealth, but that
he should curse me--oh, that is too much--too much. Oh, God, let me die
here and now, that I may follow him to the Great White Throne and there
kneel before him and tell him all my pitiful story!"
"That is a pretty theory, but people cannot go to and come at will from
the Great White Throne, as you call it. You had better get back to the
realities of life on this mundane sphere, where you find yourself just
at present. I repeat for the third time that you are disinherited. I
cannot seem to make you grasp that fact. This home and everything in it
belongs absolutely to me."
Faynie heard and realized, and without a word, turned and staggered like
one dying toward the door, but her stepmother put herself quickly before
her.
"Sit down there. I have something else to say to you," she added in a
shrill whisper, pushing the girl into the nearest seat.
"I must go. I will not listen," cried Faynie, struggling to her feet.
"Yes, you shall listen and comply with my proposition," exclaimed her
stepmother, her glittering eyes fastened on the beautiful face of the
girl she hated so intensely.