Kitabı oku: «Kathleen's Diamonds; or, She Loved a Handsome Actor», sayfa 11

CHAPTER XL.
A NEW-FOUND RELATIVE

 
As I came through the Valley of Despair,
As I came through the valley, on my sight,
More awful than the darkness of the night,
Shone glimpses of a past that had been fair.
 

E. W. Wilcox.

Uncle Ben Carew stared in surprise at his niece when she made her strange declaration; but she continued, sadly:

"Uncle Ben, you must not blame papa for his seeming cruelty to you and me when I tell you all. But—but dear papa, when he died, disinherited me, and left his wealth to these two heartless women here."

"Good land! my child, what had you done to turn Vince against you?"

"Nothing, dear uncle! but I believe that cunning arts were employed by some other people to turn my father's heart against his child," answered Kathleen, spiritedly.

"Mamma, will you permit Kathleen to belittle us in our very presence, and in our own house?" exclaimed Alpine, angrily.

Kathleen looked at her step-sister, who stood at the back of the chair into which she had assisted the pale and trembling Ivan.

"I have no desire to remain in your house a moment longer than is necessary," she said, proudly. "I am going at once, and I will take my uncle with me as a guest in my friend's house. But before I go, Mrs. Carew, please give me my diamond necklace."

"There is some mistake. I know nothing about your diamonds. I did not take them from the jewellers," answered Mrs. Carew, angrily; but there was such a ring of truth in her voice that Kathleen believed her for once.

She turned to Alpine.

"Perhaps you have the diamonds?" she said, interrogatively.

"I have not. I thought you took them with you when you went away, and that they were stolen from you when you were robbed that night," answered Alpine, earnestly.

"I believe you," said Kathleen, and her burning glance fell on Ivan Belmont as he cowered before her in his seat.

"It is you," she said, shaking a disdainful finger in his face; "it is you to whom I must look for my jewels! Where are they? What have you done with them?"

He tried hard to stammer a weak denial of all knowledge of them, but even his own mother and sister knew that he was lying. Kathleen's great flashing eyes surveyed him in bitter scorn.

"Do not deny it—I can see that you are speaking falsely," she said. "You can not deny it in the face of the jewelers' assertion. Perhaps you have sold them to get money to go on with your dissipated habits. Listen: I will give you one week in which to return the diamonds, or four thousand dollars in lieu of them." She paused, and he muttered another disclaimer, but Kathleen persisted: "I can not afford to lose the small fortune that is all that remains to me of my father's gifts for a scruple of pity to those who have been pitiless to me. So unless you return the jewels or their value in a week's time, I shall hand you over to the law."

With a heightened color she took the old man's arm.

"Come, Uncle Ben, let us go," she said, and swept from the room with the air of a dethroned princess, Uncle Ben following humbly in her wake.

Jones let her out with an air of distinct approval, having hovered near the library door and heard all that transpired within.

Kathleen, going down the steps with her shabby, newly found relative, came face to face with a man going up—Ralph Chainey. A start on either side, a cold, stiff bow, then Kathleen stepped into the carriage and sunk half-fainting against the cushions.

"Who was that, my dear?" inquired her uncle, observing her agitation.

Kathleen stifled a sob, and answered:

"It was Ralph Chainey, the great actor."

"Um-hum! I have heard of him. But what made you feel so bad at seeing him, honey?"

"Oh! uncle, I used to love him, and expected to marry him; but, alas! that is all over now," sighed the young girl; and there came into her mind some of the words of Laura Jean Libbey's sweet, sad song:

 
"Lovers once, but strangers now,
Though pledged by many a tender vow;
Still I'd give the world to be
All that I was once to thee."
 

She leaned her bright head lovingly against the old man's kindly shoulder and sobbed out all the pain in her heart.

"Tell me all about it, dearie," said the old farmer, gently.

But Kathleen's heart was too full. The sight of her handsome, perjured lover, fascinating Ralph Chainey, was too much for her. Her tears flowed unrestrainedly until Mrs. Stone's house was reached.

But here Kathleen's uncle decidedly declined her invitation to enter.

"No, honey; not just now. I'm shabby looking by the side of fine city folks, and I'll go and buy me some better clothes—a new hat and a white shirt—then to-morrow I'll come back here and see your friend and yourself," he replied, and left her at the door.

Kathleen told her friend all about the morning's events, and received her very sincere sympathy.

"I always felt that those Carews were mean, especially Ivan," she said. "But, never mind, dearie. When your uncle comes to-morrow we will make him remain for a long visit."

CHAPTER XLI.
RALPH'S LETTER

 
The world is naught when one is gone
Who was the world; then the heart breaks
That this is lost which once was won.
 

Arlo Bates.

But before the old gentleman called in the morning, Kathleen had a great shock of surprise.

The morning papers had not had anything so exciting to chronicle for a long time as the news that Ralph Chainey, the great actor, and the idol of the hour, had been secretly married to a beautiful ballet dancer who was no better than she ought to be, and that he had publicly applied for a legal divorce to free him from his galling fetters.

Of course the public had to know all about it, so the reporters had besieged Ralph Chainey, and he had talked freely with them, giving them all his sad story, hoping in this way to reach the obdurate heart of beautiful Kathleen.

Surely, he thought, when she heard his story aright—when she heard how cruelly he had been betrayed by the false and wicked Fedora—she must pity and pardon her unhappy lover.

Ralph Chainey was not much of a praying man, but in these hours of awful suspense his thoughts took almost the form of a prayer to God that He would help him to win his proud young love who had scorned him in such disdainful fashion.

So he told the reporters his sad story in his most eloquent fashion, and they reproduced it in glowing paragraphs, denouncing Fedora in unmeasured terms for her sins and her hypocrisy, and hinting at the beautiful love affair that had been broken off by Fedora's resurrection from the grave in which her young husband believed her resting. They did not tell the name of the actor's beautiful young love, because Ralph Chainey had been very careful not to tell them; but they dwelt eloquently on the actor's love for her, and his hope that, in the event of his securing a divorce, she would become his worshiped wife.

Kathleen read this moving story with heaving bosom and dilated eyes, and while she was yet reading it, the bell rang and a package was handed in for her with a letter.

Ralph Chainey—forgetting, like any true lover, his pride in his love—had sent to Kathleen marked copies of the morning papers and some brief, pathetic lines.

"Oh, my lost love," ran the note, "will you not read, and reading, pity and forgive me, the story of my sorrows? Oh, Kathleen! they say that you are pledged to wed another. Tell me that it is not so! My one great hope is for freedom, that I may yet have the hope of winning you. Life without that hope would be a living death. Oh, Kathleen, my love, my darling! pity me—pity yourself! You have not learned to love the man you have promised to marry. Send him from you. Wait a little, my darling, and happiness will come to us!

"Ralph."

"Oh, my poor boy—my poor boy!" sobbed Kathleen.

She forgot herself, she forgot Teddy Darrell, to whom she had promised herself, and she kissed Ralph Chainey's letter with red, clinging lips, as if it had been his handsome face.

"Why did I not listen to him that day when I was so wild with jealousy that I would not let him explain?" she cried, self-upbraidingly. "I was foolish and silly. It is a wonder that he could ever forgive me. No. I can not marry Teddy now. But—will—he release me—from—my promise?"

CHAPTER XLII.
"YOU SHALL NOT MARRY RALPH CHAINEY!" UNCLE BEN CRIED, VIOLENTLY

 
Adown my cheeks in silence
The tears came flowing free,
And, oh! I can not believe it—
That thou art lost to me.
H. Heine.
 

While Kathleen was still weeping over Ralph Chainey's appealing letter her uncle was announced.

She dried her tears and went down to welcome the old man.

Mrs. Stone had taken the children out for the morning, so Kathleen had a long interview with her new-found relative.

He was so much like her dead father in his voice and looks that he won Kathleen's heart at once, and when he expressed his love and sympathy for her in moving terms, the unhappy young girl gave him her confidence in the fullest measure.

She told him the story of her young life from the beginning—her step-mother's cruelty, Alpine's unkindness, and Ivan's attempts at courtship, which she had repelled with scorn.

Then her indignant voice softened as she murmured over the story of her happy love-dream—her first romantic meeting with Ralph Chainey, when he had saved her life, and her later acquaintance with him, down to the moment when she had repulsed him with scorn, and, in a fit of pique, engaged herself to Teddy Darrell.

"I was wrong—all wrong!" she cried, self-upbraidingly, and gave him Ralph's letter to read.

Benjamin Carew listened in dead silence to all that Kathleen told him of the young actor, and if she had observed him closely, she would have seen that his brows were drawn together by a heavy frown.

Once or twice he seemed about to speak to her, but checked himself abruptly and waited.

Kathleen, as soon as he had finished the letter, cried out, eagerly:

"Do you not see that I was wrong to judge him so hardly?"

Uncle Ben looked gravely into his niece's face and answered, almost sternly:

"No; you were right, for appearances were against him."

"But, dear Uncle Ben, all that is explained away now, and I know that I was wrong not to trust my lover," cried the girl, anxiously.

But he answered, firmly:

"You must not call that actor your lover. You are betrothed to Mr. Darrell."

"But Teddy will release me if I ask him."

"Would you wound your true lover so cruelly?" asked the old man, almost angrily.

The beautiful dark eyes were raised to his, swimming in tears.

"Oh, how unhappy I am!" cried poor Kathleen. "I am the most wretched girl in the whole world! Every one is against me!"

The old man did not answer. He regarded her with sad, troubled eyes through his smoky glasses.

"You, too, Uncle Ben, have turned against me just when I thought you would be such a comfort to me," sobbed his niece.

"You are willful and unjust, my child, if you expect me to counsel you to throw over your lover for the sake of a man who has a wife already," was the mild reply.

"But he will be divorced, uncle, and then we will be free to love each other."

"And this honorable young man, Mr. Darrell, will be thrown over remorselessly for the world to laugh at as a jilted man!"

"Uncle Ben, I can explain it all to Teddy. He is so good and kind he will forgive me. He would not want to marry me if he knew that I loved another man."

Her heart, thrilling with the intensity of her love, lent fire to her eyes and passion to her voice. She felt that it would be a sin to marry Teddy with her heart so full of Ralph.

But the old man she had thought so kind and gentle rose up angrily and caught her hand.

"You are mad—mad, girl, to think of throwing over Teddy Darrell for this miserable actor! You shall not do it!" he cried, violently.

Kathleen tore her little white hand from his clasp in haughty amazement.

"You have no right to control my actions!" she exclaimed; and he sunk back into his chair and covered his face with his hand.

"True, true!" she heard him murmur, dejectedly. "I have no authority over my brother's child. I am only a poor, humble old farmer, and my advice is not desired, even though I would save my brother's only child from wrecking her life for the sake of an unwise love! So be it. I will go now, a sadder, wiser old man."

The pitiful words touched the girl's heart, melting her resentment.

She knelt by him and drew the hand away from his moist eyes, murmuring, remorsefully:

"Dear Uncle, forgive me. I was hasty, and am sorry that I wounded you. What would you have me do?"

"To marry Mr. Darrell," he replied, firmly.

"How can I?" she moaned, wearily.

"At least say nothing to any one of your change of mind just yet, Kathleen. Think a moment. Ralph Chainey may not get his divorce. Then, were it not better, child, for you not to compromise yourself by declaring your love for him?"

"Perhaps so," she replied, dejectedly.

"Then you promise me not to have anything to say to Ralph Chainey until the divorce is secured?" he went on, eagerly.

"I promise," answered the girl, with a long, heart-breaking sigh. "Oh!" she thought, "how cold and cruel old people are! Surely they forget they were ever young, or that they ever loved!"

But she could not bear to grieve the poor old man, and so she gave him her promise.

"It is not for long, anyhow," she consoled herself with thinking, for she thought it could not be long before Ralph secured the divorce.

"Then nothing on earth shall keep us apart," she thought, blissfully. "Poor Teddy! he will soon get over his disappointment and love some other girl."

Mrs. Stone came in at this juncture, and Kathleen began to feel quite conscience-stricken over the treachery she was meditating to the kind lady's cousin.

Strangely enough, after she had cordially welcomed Uncle Ben Carew, Mrs. Stone plunged into the subject of which they had been speaking—Ralph Chainey.

"I've just met the young actor," she said; "and congratulate me, my dear, for he likes my plot, and I am to write him a play. Won't that be nice? For he will make it famous. Teddy has been begging me to create a part in it for him, and to ask Mr. Chainey to take him into the company. Isn't it ridiculous in that spoiled boy? Why, he will be a married man then, with no time for acting."

Kathleen turned the subject as quickly as she could, and then Mrs. Stone devoted herself to Uncle Ben, persuading him to become her guest for a week.

"I shall be delighted to have you, and Teddy will be glad to have the pleasure of showing you the great sights of Boston," she declared.

So it was arranged, and Mr. Darrell manfully fell into the line of duty, escorting Uncle Ben to all the places of interest in the city, feeling fully rewarded for all his trouble by the murmured thanks of his beautiful betrothed.

So three days passed by peacefully, and although Kathleen wept bitter tears, when alone, over the dear letter her uncle had forbidden her to answer, she managed to preserve a calm aspect before her friends, and they did not guess how her heart was aching with its secret pain. It grieved Teddy that she seemed to shrink from him a little, but he kept on hoping he would win her love in the end.

Toward the middle of the week a great surprise came to Kathleen.

The long-hoped-for letter came at last.

The Southern relatives, so long deaf to her loving appeals, wrote at last to say that they wanted Kathleen to come and live with them. They were rich now, and could make her life as gay and luxurious as it was before her father's death.

"I should like to go and visit them. My heart always yearned for my mother's people," Kathleen said, wistfully.

Uncle Ben was thoughtfully perusing the letter. He answered:

"I will take you to them, my dear. I should not like for you to travel alone any more."

"Oh, how good you are, dearest uncle!" cried the girl, gladly. "But do you see they want me to come right away? They want me to be there at the celebration of my grandmother's birthday, which, she says, will be quite an event in the Franklyn family, so that all the clan will be gathered at the old homestead, and I can see all of them."

"We can start for Richmond to-morrow," her uncle answered, smilingly.

CHAPTER XLIII.
THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER'S STORY

 
I can not rise, my darling,
My breast is bleeding—see!
I stabbed myself, thou knowest,
When thou wast reft from me!
 

H. Heine.

"But my diamonds, Uncle Ben. I must wait here for them, you know," said Kathleen.

"Pooh! We can leave that affair in the hands of a lawyer," he replied, carelessly.

He was determined that nothing should hinder this opportune trip.

He was anxious to get Kathleen away from Boston, where Ralph Chainey was playing every night to crowded houses. It would seem as if Uncle Ben had as vigorous a dislike for actors as his dead brother had cherished.

So he carefully smoothed away all her objections, declaring that he had money enough to take them both to Richmond, and that she could repay him, if she insisted on it, when she got back her diamonds.

"I wonder if papa thought, when he gave them to me, that some day they would be my sole little fortune!" sighed the young girl.

Uncle Ben did not answer. He was looking out of the window at the country scenery, for they were on their journey now. Kathleen was sitting opposite to him in the parlor car, with a big bouquet of roses in her lap, the gift of the adoring Teddy, from whom she had just parted at the station.

"A noble young fellow," Uncle Ben had said, and his niece answered, with a little sigh:

"He has been very good to me; but, Uncle Ben, he is called the greatest flirt in Boston, and I shouldn't wonder if he threw me over at any time for a newer fancy."

"You are just wishing he would!" the old man exclaimed, curtly, and she replied only by a roguish laugh.

The train rushed on and on through the wintry landscape, and both of them grew very thoughtful. At last Kathleen touched her uncle's arm with a timid hand.

"Uncle Ben, this going home to my mother's people makes me think so much about her to-day. Tell me, did you ever see mamma?"

The man's strong arm trembled under the pressure of her little white hand, and he answered in a voice that was hoarse with emotion:

"Yes, I knew little Zaidee—poor little darling!"

"Was she as beautiful as the portrait a great artist made of her? There is one that hangs in my room at my old home. It is beautiful as an angel, and papa used to come there often to look at it. I don't think he cared for my step-mother to know how often he came."

"Zaidee was more beautiful than the portrait," answered the old man, in a low voice.

He pressed her little hand tenderly as it rested on his arm, and said:

"Tell me all that you know about your mother, my child."

"They have told me that she died by her own hand. Was it not terrible?" whispered the young girl, with paling lips.

"Terrible!" he echoed, with emotion; and then she asked:

"Uncle Ben, who was to blame for that awful tragedy?"

"No one," he answered, sadly. "Zaidee was passionate, willful, jealous. She became madly jealous of a governess—a young widow who was employed in the house to teach her painting and music. Before poor Vincent at all comprehended the situation, his young wife, in a fit of anger, destroyed herself by thrusting a little jeweled dagger into her breast."

"And you are sure no one was to blame?" she persisted and after a moment's hesitation he replied:

"Perhaps Vince was to blame; but he did not realize it then, poor fellow! You see, Kathleen, he worshipped his lovely little bride, and it grieved him that she was lacking in certain accomplishments familiar to most young girls in his cultured set. To remedy this, he employed teachers and Zaidee learned rapidly until–" he passed the back of his hand across his eyes and groaned.

"Until–" repeated Kathleen.

"Quite unexpected by him—for she was probably too proud to betray herself to him—Zaidee became quite jealous of that pretty young widow, Mrs. Belmont, and in a fit of madness took her own life, and nearly broke her husband's heart."

"He married the young widow in a little more than a year," the girl replied, unable to resist this bitter fling at her dead father's memory.

He winced, the poor old man, as she spoke thus of her father, and answered, almost excusingly:

"He was so wretched, and Mrs. Belmont comforted him. She, too, had loved Zaidee, and shared his grief with him. That was how she made herself so necessary to the unhappy man."

"The fiend!" broke hissingly from Kathleen's white lips.

He turned to her in amazement.

"What do you mean?" he asked, hoarsely.

It was well that they were alone in the car, for Kathleen's excitement was terrible. Her eyes blazed, her cheeks paled, her heart beat violently against her side.

"Uncle Ben, I am speaking of that woman who so unworthily took my dead mother's place!" she exclaimed. "Yes, she is a fiend! She to pretend that she loved the memory of the woman she goaded to madness—perhaps murdered; for no one saw my poor young mother drive the fatal steel into her heart. Oh, God! what deceit—what treachery!"

He grasped her wrist with steely fingers, his eyes flashed with a fire akin to hers, and he whispered;

"Hush! You must not dare accuse her so! You drive me mad! Oh, it can not be!"

"You take that false woman's part, then, Uncle Ben, against me and my poor young mother? Listen, then; let me tell you all I know—a secret I kept from my dead father, because I believed in him, trusted him, in spite of the servants' gossip that accused him of complicity in his young wife's death."

"They dared, the hounds! accuse m-my brother thus?" he breathed, fiercely, the perspiration starting out on his brow, his strong frame trembling.

"Yes, they accused him," answered the girl. "Do not take it so hard, Uncle Ben. He was innocent, I know; but that fiendish woman played her part to perfection. She made my mother believe that Vincent Carew wished her out of the way, so that he might wed her, the traitress! She made the servants believe the same. She even plotted–" But suddenly the girl paused with clasped hands. "Oh! uncle, dear, it will wound you if I mention this; it will blacken my father's memory in your eyes—and I always loved him—I love him still, in spite of what he has done to me, and I ought to spare him."

"Go on, Kathleen. I command you to tell me everything. I have a sacred right to know," commanded the agitated man by her side.

"Listen, then, dear uncle: Just a few months before my father went away on that foreign tour, from which he never returned alive, I received a message from an old woman calling me to her death-bed in the suburbs of the city. I went, taking my maid with me. In a secret interview that followed the dying woman told me she had been housekeeper at the Carew mansion in my mother's time. She could not die easy without revealing to me a secret she had carried untold for sixteen years."

"That secret?" questioned Benjamin Carew, wildly.

"Was this," replied the girl, solemnly: "On the day of the tragedy, Mrs. Belmont sought the housekeeper, pretending to be overcome with grief, surprise, and indignation. She confided to the woman that Vincent Carew had been making secret love to her ever since she first entered the house, and that day had openly declared his passion, begging her to fly with him to Europe, saying that his ignorant child-wife would then secure a divorce, and he could then marry his heart's best love. With tears and shame, Mrs. Belmont owned that she could not help loving her handsome employer, but that she had repulsed him with scorn, and resigned her situation to take leave immediately. Mrs. Belmont was too much overcome to explain to her pupil, and wished the housekeeper to tell Mrs. Carew the whole cause of her leaving."

"My God!" groaned the old man at Kathleen's side; but the girl hurried on, with blazing eyes.

"The housekeeper, after the fashion of most servants, was too ready to believe a tale of scandal, and to excite a sensation. She did not think of doubting Mrs. Belmont then, although grave doubts assailed her after the tragedy. Well, with her heart on fire with sympathy for her wronged mistress, she did not think for a moment of sparing her the whole cruel truth. She blurted it all out in burning words, and advised the outraged wife to forsake her monster of a husband and return to her own relatives. Within the hour mamma was found dead."