A HARVEST OF WOE.
Devereaux's thoughts clung persistently to Liane. He could not shut
away from his mind her haunting image.
Pity blended with tenderness, as putting himself and his own
disappointment aside, he gave himself up to thoughts of bettering her
poverty-stricken life, so toilsome and lonely.
He took up his pen and wrote feelingly to Edmund Clarke, telling him
how and where he had found Liane again, and of his full belief in
her purity and innocence, despite the cruel slanders circulating in
Stonecliff, the work, no doubt, he said, of some jealous, unscrupulous
enemy.
He assured Mr. Clarke that he was ready to assist in any way he might
suggest in bettering the fair young girl's hard lot in life.
The letter was immediately posted, and went on its fateful way to fall
into jealous Roma's hands and work a harvest of woe.
Affairs at Cliffdene were already in a critical stage, and it wanted
but this letter to fan the smoldering flames into devastating fury.
Mr. Clarke, impatient of his lingering convalescence, had taken a
decisive step toward recovering his lost daughter.
He had written a letter summoning old Doctor Jay, of Brookline, on a
visit, and he had explained it to his wife by pretending he wished to
avail himself of the old man's medical skill.
Doctor Jay was the physician who had attended Mrs. Clarke when her
daughter was born, and he received a warm welcome at Cliffdene, a guest
whom all delighted to honor; all, at least, but Roma, who immediately
conceived an unaccountable aversion to the old man, perhaps because his
little hazel-gray eyes peered at her so curiously through his glasses
beneath his bushy gray eyebrows.
There was something strange in his intent scrutiny, so coldly curious,
instead of kindly, as she had a right to expect, and she said pettishly
to her mother:
"I detest Doctor Jay. I hope he is not going to stay long."
"Oh, no, I suppose not, but I am very fond of Doctor Jay. He was very
kind and sympathetic to me at a time of great suffering and trouble,"
Mrs. Clarke replied so warmly that she aroused Roma's curiosity.
"Tell me all about it," she exclaimed.
Mrs. Clarke had never been able to recall that time without suffering,
but she impulsively told Roma the whole story, never dreamed of until
now, of the loss of her infant and its mysterious restoration at the
last moment, when her life was sinking away hopelessly into eternity.
Roma listened with startled attention, and she began to ask questions
that her mother found impossible to answer.
"Who had stolen away the babe, and by what agency had it been
restored?" demanded Roma.
Mrs. Clarke could not satisfy her curiosity. The subject was so painful
her husband would never discuss it with her, she declared, adding that
Roma must not think of it any more, either.
But, being in a reminiscent mood, she presently told Roma how she had
been deceived in old Granny Jenks' identity, and how indignantly the
old woman had denied the imputation of having been her nurse.
"I was so sure of her identity that her anger was quite embarrassing,"
she said.
Roma's thoughts returned to granny's affection for herself, and she
felt sure the old woman had lied to her mother, though from what object
she could not conceive. Her abject affection for herself seemed fully
explained by the fact of her having been her nurse child.
But she was, somehow, ill at ease after hearing her mother's story, and
longed eagerly to know more than she had already heard.
"I wonder if I dare question papa or the old doctor?" she thought when
her mother had left her alone, resting easily in her furred dressing
gown and slippers before a bright coal fire, while in the room beyond
Dolly Dorr was getting her bath ready.
Roma was devoured by curiosity. She sat racking her brain for a pretext
to intrude on her father and the old doctor, who were still in the
library together, chatting over old times when the Clarkes had lived in
Brookline.
A lucky thought came to her, and she murmured:
"I will pretend to have a headache, and ask Doctor Jay for something to
ease it. Then I will stay a while chatting with them and making myself
very agreeable until I can bring the subject around, and get the
interesting fact of my abduction out of them."
Stealing noiselessly from the room, she glided downstairs like a
shadow, pausing abruptly at the hall table, for there lay the evening's
mail, just brought in by a servant from the village post office.
Roma turned over the letters and papers, finding none for any one but
her father, but the superscription on one made her start with a stifled
cry.
She recognized the elegant chirography of Jesse Devereaux on the back
of one letter.
"Now, why is he writing to papa?" she wondered, eagerly turning the
letter over and over in her burning hand, wild with curiosity that
tempted her at last to slip the letter into her bosom.
Then, taking the rest of the mail in her hand, Roma went to the
library, thinking that the delivery of the mail would furnish another
plausible pretext for her intrusion.
There was a little anteroom just adjoining the library, and this she
entered first to wait a moment till the fierce beating of her heart
over Devereaux's letter should quiet down.
Her slippered feet made no sound on the thick velvet carpet, and, as
she rested for a moment in a large armchair, she could hear the murmur
of animated voices through the heavy portières that hung between her
and the library.
Believing that the whole family had retired, and that they were safe
from interruption, Doctor Jay and his host had returned to the tragedy
of eighteen years before--the loss of the infant that had nearly cost
the mother's life.
Roma caught her breath with a stifled gasp of self-congratulation,
hoping now to hear the whole interesting story without moving from her
chair.
In her hope she was not disappointed.
"I have never ceased to regret the substitution of that spurious infant
in place of my own lovely child," sighed Mr. Clarke.
Roma gave a start of consternation, and almost betrayed herself by
screaming out aloud, but she bit her lips in time, while her wildly
throbbing heart seemed to sink like a stone in her breast.
Doctor Jay said questioningly:
"You have never been able to love your adopted daughter as your own?"
"Never, never!" groaned Edmund Clarke despairingly.
"And her mother?"
"She knows nothing, suspects nothing; for the one object of my life has
been to keep her in ignorance of the truth that Roma is not her own
child. She has an almost slavish devotion to the girl, but I think in
her inmost heart she realizes Roma's lack of lovable qualities, though
she is too loyal to her child to admit the truth even to me."
"It is strange, most strange, that no clue has ever been found that
would lead to the discovery of your lost little one," mused the old
doctor, and after a moment's silence the other answered:
"One thing I would like to know, and that is the family from which Roma
sprang. It must have been low, judging frankly from the girl herself."
The listener clinched her hands till the blood oozed from the tender
palms on hearing these words, and she would have liked to clutch the
speaker's throat instead.
But she sat still, like one paralyzed, a deadly hatred tugging at her
heartstrings, listening as one listens to the sentence of death, while
Doctor Jay cleared his throat, and answered:
"I am sorry, most sorry, that your surmises are correct, but naturally
one would not expect to find good blood in a foundling asylum, though
when I sent Nurse Jenks for the child, I told her to get an infant of
honest parentage, if she could."
"Then you know Roma's antecedents?" Mr. Clarke questioned anxiously.
"My dear friend, I wish that you would not press the subject."
"Answer me; I must know! The bitterest truth could not exceed my
suspicions!" almost raved Mr. Clarke in his eagerness, and again the
clinched hands of the listener tightened as if they were about his
throat.
Hate, swift, terrible, murderous, had sprung to life, full grown in the
angry girl's heart.
She heard the old doctor cough and sigh again, and a futile wish rose
in her that he had dropped down dead before he ever came to Cliffdene.
Doctor Jay, all unconscious of her proximity and her charitable wishes,
proceeded hesitatingly:
"Since you insist, I must own the truth. Nurse Jenks deceived me."
"How?" hoarsely.
"She never went near the foundling asylum. She had at her own home an
infant, the child of a worthless daughter, who had run away previously
to go on the stage. Leaving this child on her mother's hands, the
actress again ran away, and the old grandmother palmed it off on you as
a foundling."
"My God! I see it all," groaned Edmund Clarke. "The old fiend exchanged
infants, putting her grandchild in the place of my daughter, and
raising her in poverty and wretchedness. I have seen my child with her,
my beautiful daughter. Listen to my story," he cried, pouring out to
the astonished old physician the whole moving story of Liane Lester.