"Nina? No. Why? Is she not at Redwoods? She was to go down yesterday."
"She is not at Redwoods. I have received private and reliable information that she is to marry Richard Clough this afternoon, and I have reason to think that she is in this house."
"What? Nina going to marry that horrid little man? I don"t believe it!"
Miss Shropshire was a woman of thorough and uncompromising methods.
"Is Nina in this house or not?"
"Mr. Randolph! Of course she is not. I would have nothing to do with such an affair."
Mr. Randolph swallowed a curse, and strode up and down the room several times. Then he paused and confronted her once more.
"Molly," he said, "I appeal to you as a woman. If you have any friendship for Nina, give her up to me and save her from ruin, or tell me where she is. It is not yet too late. I will risk everything and take her abroad. She is ruining her own life and Thorpe"s and mine by a mistaken sense of duty to him, and contempt for herself: I know her so well that I feel sure that is the reason for this act she contemplates to-day. I will take her to Thorpe. He could reclaim her. Clough--you can perhaps imagine how Clough will treat her! Picture the life she must lead with that man, and give her up to me. And, if you have any heart, keep my own from breaking. She is all that I have. You know what my home is; I have lived in h.e.l.l for twenty-four years for this girl"s sake. I have kept a monster in my house that Nina should have no family scandal to reproach me with. And all to what purpose if she marries a cad and a brute? I would have endured the torments of the past twenty-five years, multiplied tenfold, to have secured her happiness. If she marries Richard Clough, it will kill me."
"She is not here," replied Miss Shropshire.
Mr. Randolph trembled from head to foot. "My G.o.d!" he cried, "have you women no heart? Are all women, I wonder, like those I have known? My wife, a demon who nursed her baby on brandy! My daughter, repaying the devotion of years with blackest ingrat.i.tude! And you--" He fell, rather than dropped to his knees, and caught her dress in his hands.
"Molly," he prayed, "give her to me. Save her from becoming one of the outcast of the earth. For that is what this marriage will mean to her."
Miss Shropshire set her teeth. "Nina is not here," she said.
Mr. Randolph stumbled to his feet, and rushed from the house. He walked rapidly down the hill toward Old Trinity in Pine Street, the church Nina attended, his dislocated mind endeavouring to suggest that he wait for her there. His agitation was so marked that several people turned and looked after him in surprise. He reached the church. A carriage approached, pa.s.sed. Its occupants were Richard Clough, a well-known gambler named Bell, and a man who carried the unmistakable cut of a parson.
Mr. Randolph rushed to the middle of the street, ordering the driver to stop. The window of the carriage was open. He caught Clough by the shoulder.
"Are you on your way to marry my daughter?" he demanded.
"My dear Uncle James," replied the young man, airily, "you are all wrong. I am on my way to marry--it is true; but the unfortunate lady is Miss McCullum."
Mr. Randolph turned to the gambler, and implored him, as a man of honour, to tell him the truth.
Bell replied: "As a man of honour, I dare not."
Mr. Randolph appealed to the clergyman, but met only a solemn scowl, and mechanically dropped back, with the sensation of having lost the good-will of all men. A moment later the carriage was rattling up the street at double speed, and he cursed his stupidity in not forcing an entrance, or hanging on behind. There was no other carriage in sight.
V
The days were very long to Dudley Thorpe. The invalid recovered slowly, and demanded much of his time. Before an answer to his letter could be expected, Harold was sufficiently mended to be removed to the house of a friend on Long Island. He declared his intention of sailing for California as soon as he could obtain the doctor"s permission to travel.
The lady to whom he was betrothed came over from England and married him; and Thorpe had little to do but to think.
He bitterly reproached himself that he had asked Nina to come to New York, instead of trusting to his brother"s recuperative powers, and starting at once for California. He dared not go now, lest he pa.s.s her.
But he was beset by doubts, and some of them were nightmares. She would come if her child had lived, and she had weathered her year. If she had not! He knew what she had suffered during that year, would have guessed without the aid of the few letters she had written after letters from him had ceased to reach California. Exposure and shame might have come to her since. If he could have been sure that she believed in him, he would have feared little; but it was not to be expected that she had received a letter he had sent her from the West Indies. The telegraph has averted many a tragedy, but there was none across the United States.
With all his will and health and wealth and love, he had been as powerless to help her in the time of her great trouble, was as powerless to help her now, as if he were in the bottom of a Haytian swamp. All that was fine in him, and there was much, was thoroughly roused. He not only longed for her and for his child, but he vowed to devote the rest of his life to her happiness. It seemed to him incredible that he could have committed such a series of mistakes; that no man who loved a woman with the pa.s.sion of his life had ever so consistently done the wrong thing. But mistakes are not isolated acts, to be plucked out of life and viewed as an art student views his first model, in which he finds only a few bald lines; even when the pressure of many details is not overwhelming it often clouds the mental vision. Years after, Thorpe accepted the fact that the great links in that year"s chain of events were connected by hundreds of tiny links as true of form; but not then.
One day a budget of mail got through the lines, and in it was a letter for him. It was from Nina, and was dated shortly after the last he had found awaiting him when he arrived from Cuba.
I don"t know where you are, if you will ever get this; but I must write to you. The baby is dead. It was a little girl. It is buried in the forest.
NINA.
The steamer by which he expected her arrived a few days later. It brought him the following letter:
I was married yesterday. My name is Mrs. Richard Clough. My husband is the son of a Haworth cobbler. I received your letter.
NINA RANDOLPH CLOUGH.
VI
Mr. and Mrs. Harold Thorpe sailed on the next steamer for California.
Dudley Thorpe worked his way South, offered his services to the Confederacy, fought bitterly and brilliantly, when he was not in hospital with a bullet in him, rose to the rank of colonel, and made a name for himself which travelled to California and to England. At the close of the war, he returned home and entered Parliament. He became known as a hard worker, a member of almost bitter honesty, and a forcible and magnetic speaker. Socially he was, first, a lion, afterward, a steady favourite. Altogether he was regarded as a success by his fellow-men.
It was some years before he heard from his brother. Harold was delighted with the infinite variety of California; his health was remarkably good; and he had settled for life. Only his first letter contained a reference to Nina Randolph. She had lived in Napa for a time, then gone to Redwoods. She never came to San Francisco; therefore he had been unable to call, had never even seen her. All Thorpe"s other friends had been very kind to himself and his wife.
Thorpe long before this had understood. The rage and disgust of the first months had worn themselves out, given place to his intimate knowledge of her. Had he returned to California it would have been too late to do her any good, and would have destroyed the dear memory of her he now possessed. He still loved her. For many months the pain of it had been unbearable. It was unbearable no longer, but he doubted if he should ever love another woman. The very soul of him had gone out to her, and if it had returned he was not conscious of it. As the years pa.s.sed, there were long stretches when she did not enter his thought, when memory folded itself thickly about her and slept. Time deals kindly with the wounds of men. And he was a man of active life, keenly interested in the welfare of his country. But he married no other woman.
It was something under ten years since he had left California, when he received a letter from his sister-in-law stating that his brother was dead, and begging him to come out and settle her affairs, and take her home. She had neither father nor brother; and he went at once, although he had no desire to see California again.
There were rails between New York and San Francis...o...b.. this time, and he found the latter a large flourishing and hideous city. The changes were so great, the few acquaintances he met during the first days of his visit looked so much older, that his experience of ten years before became suddenly blurred of outline. He was not quite forty; but he felt like an old man groping in his memory for an episode of early youth. The eidolon of Nina Randolph haunted him, but with ever-evading lineaments.
He did not know whether to feel thankful or disappointed.
He devoted himself to his sister-in-law"s affairs for a week, then, finding a Sunday afternoon on his hands, started, almost reluctantly, to call on Mrs. McLane.
South Park was unchanged.
He stood for a moment, catching his breath. The city had grown around and away from it; streets had multiplied, bristling with the ugliest varieties of modern architecture; but South Park, stately, dark, solemn, had not changed by so much as a lighter coat of paint. His eyes moved swiftly to the Randolph house. Its shutters were closed. The dust of summer was thick upon them. He stood for fully five minutes staring at it, regardless of curious eyes. Something awoke and hungered within him.
"My vanished youth, I suppose," he thought sadly. "I certainly have no wish to see her, poor thing! But she was very sweet."
He walked slowly round the crescent on the left, and rang the bell at Mrs. McLane"s door. As the butler admitted him he noted with relief that the house had been refurnished. A buzz of voices came from the parlour.
The man lifted a portiere, and Mrs. McLane, with an exclamation of delight, came forward, with both hands outstretched. Her face was unchanged, but she would powder her hair no more. It was white.
"Thorpe!" she exclaimed. "It is not possible? How long have you been here? A week! Mon Dieu! And you come only now! But I suppose I am fortunate to be remembered at all."
Thorpe a.s.sured her that she had been in his thoughts since the hour of his arrival, but that he wished to be free of the ugly worries of business before venturing into her distracting presence.
"I don"t forgive you, although I give you a dinner on Thursday. Will that suit you? Poor little Mrs. Harold! We have all been attention itself to her for your sake. Come here and sit by me; but you may speak to your other old friends."
Two of the "Macs" were there; the other was dead, he was told later.
Both were married, and one was dressed with the splendours of Paris.