Aline ran away to hide herself in her room in a flurry of mingled
emotions.
This was the way in which Oran Delaney had answered her pleading letter.
Not a line, not a word, only a shower of gold flung at her feet, as
if this could make up to her for all she had lost, for the pleasures
that belonged to her youth, for the love that ought to bless her
womanhood, for the worldly respect and applause that she had forfeited
so innocently and rashly.
She threw herself down into a chair and buried her face in her hands.
Stifled sobs shook her frame, and bright crystal drops fell through her
fingers.
She felt as if she hated Oran Delaney. He was cruel and heartless, she
said to herself, indignantly. What did she care for money? She had
her youth and beauty, her tender heart, her desire for the pleasures
of life. With all this heritage of youth she could have had happiness
enough if only--if only she had not lost that fair fame, that open
record of life without which all else availed her nothing.
She wept bitterly for this terrible misfortune that had fallen upon
her. She was young and beautiful and pure, but a great, horrible, inky
blot had fallen on the whiteness of her life, and she could never wipe
it out by the words of explanation that would have cleared away the
hideous stain. People believed ill of her. Women, especially young and
fair ones like herself, passed by her with sneers and averted faces.
She was as innocent and as spotless as they were, but no one would
believe it. Because she would not satisfy their curiosity they believed
she was a sinner. There was one text that every one took and preached
from. It was this: “Where there is secrecy there is guilt.”
By this standard Aline was judged and condemned. The fierce rebellion
of her heart against this unjust sentence availed her nothing. The
world’s code was many hundreds of years older than she was. It said in
so many words: “A woman’s life must be like an open book, that every
eye may read. If there is even one leaf folded down, one page the world
may not scan, then there is a shameful secret written on it.”
There was one leaf folded down in the book of her life. It was as pure
a record as any other; it only recorded the punishment that had come
to her for her girlish willfulness and folly. But no one would believe
it. She cried out against the hardness and wickedness of the world that
could so misjudge her!
“The world must be full of wickedness, or people would not be so ready
to believe evil,” she said.
The hardest part of her trouble was that her family were compelled to
be sharers in her disgrace. Because they had taken her home again,
because they would tell nothing of her absence, people were angry with
them, too. They were all under ban alike.
“My beautiful Effie, it is too bad that this shadow should rest upon
her life--she who was always so much admired and beloved!” she sighed
over and over. “Ah, me, if only I could speak!”
But the iron fetters of her vow chafed and hurt her. There was no going
back on that solemn pledge of silence. She might beat her wings as she
would against the bars that held her, but there was no escape for her,
no release from her sorrow. She could have exclaimed with the poet:
“Oh, Life, is all thy song
Endure and die?”
It seemed to her little less than an insult to offer her money to
console her for the cureless wound that had laid desolate her life. She
said to herself that she would have to be reduced to beggary--ay, that
she would starve on a crust in the street before she would touch a cent
of Oran Delaney’s money. He had refused her even a word--he had thrown
her his gold like a bone to a dog. Well, she would let him see that she
would never touch it. She would die first, she said to herself, in her
passionate pride and resentment.
So the days passed by. It was little more than a week before the news
of the money in the bank for Aline became disseminated far and wide,
thanks to the gossiping tongue of the genial Banker Linton. The busy
tongue of scandal wagged afresh over this delicious tid-bit.
Opinions were divided over Aline’s course. There were some who said
that she should have accepted the money, that was doubtless offered to
her in reparation for wrong that had been done her. This class thought
that she was very quixotic in refusing, and even very foolish. The
money would have done her a vast deal of good. She might have gone away
somewhere with it, and made herself a new home where the story of her
mysterious absence was not known. Decidedly, she had acted foolishly in
refusing, said these wiseacres.
There was another class who found Aline’s action rather admirable. They
argued that if the girl had suffered wrong at the hands of any one,
mere money could not repair the injury done. They applauded her spirit
in declining such atonement. This new element of romance added fresh
fuel to the flame of scandal. It was considered that the case against
Aline was quite proven now, for who would give her ten thousand dollars
unless to condone an irreparable wrong?
Aline was none the wiser for their praise or blame. Neither penetrated
to her quiet cottage home. Day after day dragged itself wearily along,
and a dreary, apathetic calm began to settle down on the girl. She had
lost heart and hope and given herself up to despair.
She rose from her sleepless bed one morning, and went to the window and
drew back the curtain, and looked at the dreary morning sky stretching
chill and cold over all the land. It was gray and sunless like her
life, she thought, wearily, and dropped her eyes and sighed heavily.
The down-dropped eyes suddenly fell on a bit of paper lying outside the
window on the narrow sill and held down by a piece of gravel. It was
addressed to herself in a strong masculine hand, and Aline’s heart beat
quickly as she lifted the sash and drew it in.
“At last,” she said, as she hurriedly tore it open and ran her eager
eyes over the clear, bold chirography.
Only a few lines, hurried and incoherent as her own had been, but
strong and earnest like the writer:
“Aline, you refused the money because you guessed that I had sent
it,” ran the brief note. “Oh, for God’s sake, take it, child, and
believe that it is your own as the gift of a heart that bleeds
because it has wronged you, and because it can make no other
atonement than what lies in sordid gold. Let your father take the
money and make a new home for you all in some distant city where this
unmerited persecution may not follow you, and where you may have all
the social pleasures due to your youth and beauty and innocence. Take
the money and use it. It is only due, and I shall never forgive you
if you continue to willfully refuse it. D.”
She ran her eyes slowly over the brief note twice. It only excited her
anger and contempt. She said to herself that he was a coward, strong
man as he was, to make a weak girl suffer for the sake of that hidden
secret he guarded so jealously. Oh, that she had never taken that oath
of silence upon her girlish lips!
How grim and gray and frowning the towers of Delaney House appeared
in the dull, cold light. All the years of her girlhood it had been a
pleasure to her to watch the mysterious mansion, with the picturesque
ivy creeping about and covering the grim, hard angles and small-paned
windows with beauty. She had watched the sunset lighting its windows
with splendor every evening; she had gazed upon the beautiful garden
with rapturous delight; she had speculated often, with girlish
curiosity, over the motives that made Oran Delaney an alien from his
kind, shut up in that gloomy house, and but seldom seen in the streets
of the town. It had not always been thus. Ten years ago, before Oran
Delaney went abroad, and before the Rodneys came to live in Chester,
he had been friendly, genial, social, mixing freely with the best
society of the town on his annual visits from college, and was liked
and admired by all. After his father’s death he had shut up the old
family mansion and gone abroad. He had remained away several years, and
returned to his home a strange and altered man. He no longer sought
society, he did not visit nor receive visits, he gave no invitations,
and accepted none. He seemed to have become an inveterate recluse,
and remained isolated in the lonely mansion, haunted by the ghosts
of his dead-and-gone ancestors, perhaps, for there were rumors of
strange sounds and blood-curdling shrieks heard by day and by night by
those who passed his home. Aline had heard all these tales from the
townsfolk, and her girlish interest had been strongly roused. Yet how
little she had dreamed of the subtle influence Delaney House and its
strange master would exert upon her life!
She held the note in her fingers, and gazed dreamily at Delaney House,
thinking, with a shudder, of the strange, horrible, unearthly creature
hidden within its walls, and of the long days of illness and sorrow she
had suffered from the creature’s rude assault.
“_He_ thinks that gold can pay me for all that I have suffered--for all
I suffer now!” she breathed, with bitter sarcasm.
As she stood there in her long white dressing-gown, with her loose dark
hair falling heavily over her shoulders, Mr. Delaney came out with his
cigar.
It was the first time that Aline had been visible at the window since
she had returned. Usually she sprung back from sight at the moment of
his appearance.
A new mood came to her now. She stood there calmly, holding the paper
in her hand, and fixing her gaze steadily upon the darkly handsome,
brooding face visible under the wide-brimmed hat. He did not see her at
first, but at length the angry intensity of her gaze seemed to draw his
eyes upward by some subtle fascination. In a moment he saw her standing
there, pale, proud, angry, holding his letter in her clinched white
hand.
Even at the distance at which he stood, he could see the angry flash of
the deep violet eyes as they steadily regarded him. Her gaze held his
a moment as if trying to pour all the wrath that filled her being into
his inner consciousness, then--
Even while he still regarded her with his dark, soulful eyes in mute
inquiry, she lifted her hands and tore the pleading letter into
fragments, that fluttered swiftly from her hands and fell down into the
garden among the winding paths. It was her only answer to his prayer.
When the last white strip had fluttered from her disdainful fingers,
she removed her magnetic gaze from his, stepped backward, without word
or sign, and dropped the white curtain between them.