The strange and perfectly unaccountable manner of Aline Rodney’s
disappearance from her home had excited a great sensation in the town
of Chester. Such a harrowing mystery had never before agitated the
pretty little country town. Mr. Rodney, Aline’s father, was the only
lawyer the town could boast, and although not wealthy, was a prominent
member of society in Chester. His two pretty daughters had been
educated as carefully as his means would allow, and were the boast of
the town for their beauty.
Effie Rodney was a hazel-eyed beauty, with soft waving tresses of
chestnut brown and a complexion of the loveliest red and white,
combined with features of the purest Grecian type. She was twenty-three
years old, and so stately, quiet, and dignified, that her more volatile
sister, Aline, audaciously dubbed her an old maid.
Mrs. Rodney was a pretty woman of the same type of beauty as Effie.
Mother and daughter were remarkably alike, both being tall, extremely
graceful in appearance, and very dignified in manner. To both of them
the wild and willful ways of blue eyed Aline were a perpetual wonder
and annoyance. They loved her, but she was a sore trial to their
patience, and their understanding. She was so gay, so willful, so
thoughtless, that, as Mrs. Rodney expressed it, she kept her family
“in hot water all the while.” They could never tell what mischievous
prank their pretty Aline would be into next. Never were two sisters
more unlike than Aline and Effie, both in mind and looks, although they
were really fond of each other. Both were beautiful, but one was like a
stately, bright-plumaged bird-of-paradise, the other like a brilliant
humming-bird, always on the wing, never at rest in its aerial flight.
Neither Mrs. Rodney nor Effie could understand Aline’s complex
character. She was wild and willful, but she was also warm-hearted and
loving. She was always getting herself into some kind of mischief,
always being blamed by mamma, and lectured by Effie. If papa had not
petted her and Max adored her she could not have stood it. But the
forces for and against being very equally divided she was enabled
to hold her own with tolerable equanimity. Sometimes, mamma, acting
upon a mistaken sense of duty, allotted to Aline some quite severe
punishments, as in the case of the imprisonment the day of the picnic;
but there was always papa to pet and soothe his injured little girl,
Max to load her with sugar-plums, and even stately Effie to lament that
her darling little sister had to be punished. So Aline, with all the
faults of her head and heart, was dearly beloved and bitterly missed
and mourned in the home from which she had so strangely dropped out
like a link from a golden chain.
The incredulous horror on returning from Walnut Grove and finding her
gone was something better imagined than described. They examined the
empty room, they peered beneath the bed, behind the curtains, within
the wardrobe, while little Max, in a fit of absent-mindedness, pulled
out the bureau drawers, and even lifted the tray of her Saratoga trunk
in a vain search for the lost one.
Beautiful Aline had flown from the dreary room like a swift-winged
bird from the prison bars of its cage. They called her name, but she
answered not. They sought her in her dearest haunts, but they found her
not. They were face to face with a mystery.
Cook had not anticipated such alarm on the part of the family. She had
missed the young lady several hours ago when she had taken up luncheon
to her, but being used to the mischievous pranks of her young mistress,
had believed that she was hiding herself somewhere within the room.
She had set down the tray on a stand and gone away, locking the door
behind her.
It was locked still when they came home from the picnic rather earlier
than they would have done, but that they were anxious over Aline--poor
Aline who had missed all the delights of the picnic because she had
been a naughty girl yesterday and left undone those things which she
ought to have done, and done those things which she ought not to have
done.
Aline had deserted the sewing-machine and the ruffles mamma had set
her to hem yesterday and gone a-fishing with ten-year-old Max and
his comrade Harry Jones. She had coaxed away from cook the sponge
cake that was destined to accompany the cream at dinner, and she had
triumphantly packed it into her lunch basket and shared it with the two
boys that day on the river bank where they cast their lines into the
waves. And she had come home with the end of her nose and the back of
her neck blistered red, her dress-skirt soiled and “brier-torn,” like
Maud Muller’s, and her pretty bare hands turned brown, while Max came
trailing behind her with his pantaloons rolled up to his knees, his
feet and limbs all yellowed with river mud, and a string of ridiculous
little shining minnows in his hands. It was bad for Max--it was utterly
disgraceful for that great girl, Aline, decided mamma and Effie. It
was a case that called for punishment, more especially as Aline could
not even be induced to repentance for her fault. She insisted that she
had not meant any harm and that she had done nothing wrong. She could
not be brought to see her error in the light that her mamma wished her
to see it in. So Mrs. Rodney, deeming this an extreme case, resorted
to extreme measures. She knew that Aline had set her heart on the
picnic in Walnut Grove--therefore she kept her away to meditate on her
misdeeds, and, if possible, to win her to repentance. She even dared
hope that under the stress of such punishment Aline might be brought to
promise “never to do so any more.”
But, after all, she had been sorry to punish her bright Aline so
hardly. She thought about it at the picnic. It rather damped her
pleasure in the gay and festive scene. She told herself that if Aline
was brought to a proper state of submission she would make it up to
her. She had kept the girl back somewhat, deeming her childish and
unformed. She would lengthen her dresses now, put up her careless,
girlish ringlets, and let her take her place in Chester society as a
grown-up young lady. Perhaps the importance of the change might thrust
dignity, as it were, upon the willful girl.
She confided her plans to Effie when she could get her away for a
moment from the knot of admirers who always surrounded the pretty Miss
Rodney. Effie coincided with her mother. She was too secure in the
consciousness of her own beauty to be jealous of her younger sister’s
charms, and she thought that it was quite time for Aline to give over
childish ways.
So they went home sorry for Aline’s long day of confinement, and full
of kindly intentions toward her, eager to hear of her repentance,
and to give her the kiss of pardon; and they found her place vacant,
her chair empty. They were full of incredulous dismay at first. They
thought it must be one of her practical jokes, and that she would
return to them presently full of glee over the fright she had given
them, and eager to hear how they had passed the day from whose
pleasures she had been ruthlessly debarred.
In the meantime, they were full of wonder over the way in which the
runaway had escaped from her room. The little chamber formed a small
wing of itself on the left side of the cottage. It had three windows,
one of which looked down upon the front of the street, another into
the small, brick-paved back yard, and the third into the beautiful,
neglected garden of Delaney House. It was quite impossible, they
thought, that Aline could have escaped through either of these
second-story windows unless she had made a rope from the sheets of her
bed. But the downy little nest where Aline rested her fair form nightly
was undisturbed in its snowy order. She had certainly not escaped that
way, but had gone through the door, and the Rodneys were fain at first
to accuse the woman whom they had left in charge of connivance at her
freedom.
Cook denied the accusation sturdily, and, having a good reputation for
veracity, no one presumed to doubt her vehement asseverations.
The mystery thickened. They discussed the possibility of Aline having a
skeleton-key to the door, and inclined to that belief. In no other way
could they account for her absence.
Night fell; and now, indeed, they began to grow alarmed. Aline was
known to be an arrant little coward in the dark. Her little feet would
have carried her flying homeward long before night overtook her.
“She has gone to some of the neighbors,” Mrs. Rodney suggested, and her
husband and little Max set out to see.
She was not found at any of the neighbors. She did not come home that
night, nor for many another succeeding night. It grew into a most
absorbing mystery, the strange disappearance of a young girl from her
home. It was not a matter of local interest merely, but of general.
From the local papers the item was copied into the papers all the
country over. It excited a great interest and sympathy. It became one
of the sensations of the day. Search was made far and near. Personals
appeared in the newspapers; the largest rewards Mr. Rodney could afford
were offered for his daughter’s return. He was half mad with cruel
anxiety; he hurried hither and thither in search of the lost one.
But, in all his grief and anxiety, in all his suspicions, no warning
instinct ever prompted him to look into his neighbor’s house.
It was the strangest thing that had ever happened in Chester. In the
pretty quiet town no such sensation had ever been heard of before.
A young girl locked into her room in the safe sanctuary of home had
disappeared in the strangest manner, and not the slightest clew could
be found to the mystery. Add to this that the missing girl had been
a general favorite, loved for her winning ways, and admired for her
beauty, and you may form some idea of how Aline Rodney was missed and
mourned.
The panic only became greater as days went by, and there came no
tidings of her fate. People were frightened. Young girls shivered in
their rooms by day and by night. What if a like fate should befall them?
Mrs. Rodney’s grief and remorse were extreme. The thin crust of pride
and dignity melted around her heart, and she realized that she had been
hard and stern to the lost one. She blamed herself as the cause of
Aline’s flitting, and her self-reproach was most bitter. When proud,
hard natures melt, no one can calculate the effect. Mrs. Rodney’s
sorrow and remorse completely prostrated her. She became seriously
ill, and her physician declared that there was no telling how her low,
nervous fever would end, unless her terrible suspense could be broken
by news of her lost daughter.
Those were weary days for the Rodneys. Effie was wretched, her mother
ill, Mr. Rodney worn to a shadow, and little Max’s grief unceasing.
They began to realize what a sunbeam in the house had been the
bright-eyed girl whom they had blamed so often. Now, when she was worse
than dead to them, mamma and Effie began to realize her worth. Papa and
Max had known it all the while.
Two weeks had elapsed, and Effie was sitting by the bedside of her sick
mother one evening, when a stranger’s card was brought to her. She
looked at it in some surprise. “Dr. Anthony,” she read, slowly. “Why,
mamma, have you called a new physician?”
“No, I have not,” said Mrs. Rodney. “It is a stranger, dear. Go to him
quickly, please. Perhaps he brings us news.”
Her eyes grew bright with hope and excitement, and Effie’s heart beat
a trifle quicker, too. What if her mother’s surmise were true, and
they were about to hear news of Aline? She did not even stop for the
customary womanly peep into the mirror, but hastened down to the parlor
to meet the stranger.