THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
The day came when Rosalind Whitney realized that she must come to the
parting of the ways.
Laurie Willoughby, the husband of another, grew every day more fatally
dear to her heart.
She could not blot from her mind the memory of the hour when he had
placed on her finger the beautiful ring that had so nearly cost her her
life.
If she had not known that Laurie could never love any one but Lelia all
his life, she would have believed that his looks and words and touch
meant the sweet, new dawn of love.
What brief, happy moments she had spent under the spell of the ring
before Lelia’s murderous onslaught had laid her low!
And when she recovered in the gipsies’ tent from her long
unconsciousness, a sudden hope was born in her mind.
As remembrance slowly came back she recalled with joy that Lelia had
told her that her engagement was broken.
“What if--what if? Oh, that warm, close pressure of his hand, that
glance of penetrating sweetness, those murmured tones, the gift of the
ring--might they not mean more than Lelia guessed, the rebound of a
heart?”
That night when Laurie was married and Miss Willoughby died, she had
stolen from the gipsy tent and dragged herself painfully up to The
Crags, with a fell purpose in her mind.
She would denounce Lelia for her crime, she would turn her lover’s
heart away, she would win him for herself, her life would be hereafter
a dream of love and happiness.
But we have seen that as she gazed with eager eyes into the window, she
became a witness of the wedding, and realized that the man she loved
was lost to her forever.
With a moan of despair she sank back from their startled sight, and
managed to hide until the hue and cry was over.
Then she hastened back to the gipsies, half-determined to cast her lot
with them forever.
Again on her way she encountered Laurie Willoughby, and shrank from
his sight, wondering why he was going away from his bride in the first
hours of their happiness.
She knew not that death had cast its shadow over their bridal, or that
the dear old lady she loved so well was no more.
Oh, the wretched night hours, how slowly they crept, filled with
jealous, maddening pain. He whom she loved and had dreamed of winning
was plighted to another!
And when morning dawned another thorn was pressed into her heart.
She heard the gipsies telling that Miss Willoughby was dead, and
that the grand estate would pass to one they hated for her father’s
sake--Lelia, the beautiful, blue-eyed bride.
“We had as well get ready to move on, she will give us orders as soon
as the will is read,” they said bitterly.
But the gipsy queen shook the gray head that had been black as the
raven’s wing in Colonel Ritchie’s time.
“I am not going to move on!” she averred stoutly, and added:
“Magdala’s curse did not allow Colonel Ritchie’s daughter to inherit
The Crags. Woe be unto her for her father’s sin!”
And she turned aside with a mocking laugh of sure triumph, for
Magdala’s husband had lain ill of a fever when they were driven from
the land, and by reason of the removal he had died.
Magdala could neither forget nor forgive. She rejoiced when she heard
that the harsh soldier had fallen at the hands of hostile Indians, and
she bided her time for the hour of Lelia’s calamity.
When she heard who had been named as the heiress, she laughed in
incredulous joy.
“The curse worked, it worked--only in one instance did it fail! And
time may remedy that!”
No one knew what she meant, but the truth was that Magdala had been
bitterly chagrined over Laurie’s marriage to Lelia.
The infant had been left in the woods to further Magdala’s scheme of
revenge.
She knew from the gossip of the servants at The Crags that the family
had planned a match between Laurie and Lelia, expecting them to be
endowed with the Willoughby fortune.
In a spirit of bitter spite, to punish Colonel Ritchie’s brutality, she
had left the infant Rosalind, hoping that Miss Willoughby might adopt
it and give it her fortune. If it grew up as beautiful and charming
as the mother and grandmother, she did not doubt but that it would
supplant Lelia in Laurie’s heart.
Magdala thought that the curse had worked out almost all she had
wished; she did not realize that Lelia’s inherited ill temper had
wrought out all her personal ill.