Kidnapped at the Altar: or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain

"Between young Mr. Varrick and a Miss Bain?"

Again the reverend gentleman inclined his head in the affirmative, remarking that the bride-to-be was as sweet and gracious as she was beautiful.

Captain Frazier looked narrowly at his companion for an instant, then he asked, quickly:

"Again I ask your pardon for the questions I wish to put to you, but are you not the same minister who was sent to perform the marriage ceremony up at the Thousand Islands? and, again, the same minister who, later on, united Mr. Varrick in marriage to the beautiful Gerelda Northrup?"

The reverend gentleman bowed, wondering vaguely why the stranger should catechise him after this fashion.

"You seem well acquainted with the family history, my friend," he remarked, slowly.

"Yes," Frazier answered, shortly, adding, in a low, smooth voice: "It was a fatal accident which robbed Hubert Varrick, some time since, of the bride whom he had just wedded. Her death has never been clearly proven, has it?"

"Oh, yes, it has," returned the minister. "Her body was among the unfortunates who were afterward recovered."

"Ah!" said Frazier, sotto voice, adding: "It is so very strange, my good sir, that after this thrilling experience, Varrick should take it upon himself to secure another wife."

The good minister looked at him, quite embarrassed. He did not care to discuss the subject with one who was an entire stranger to him, wondering that he should introduce such a personal subject, and at such a time and place.

"Excuse me, my friend, but I feel a little delicacy in discussing so personal a matter," he said, gently.

But this did not in the least abash Captain Frazier.

"It seems to me that I should insist upon proof positive – ay, proof beyond any possibility of doubt – that my first wife was dead ere I contracted a second alliance," remarked Frazier, quite significantly.

"Mr. Varrick believes that he has this, I understand," said the minister, gravely.

Frazier shrugged his shoulders, turned and looked at the man from under his lowering brows – a look which the minister did not relish.

"But, then, Varrick has always believed in second marriages," remarked Frazier, flippantly.

The minister started, giving an uncomfortable glance at the other.

"I believe the girl to whom he is about to be united is Varrick's first love?" Frazier went on, nonchalantly.

"Indeed you are mistaken," retorted his companion earnestly. "I have known Hubert Varrick for long years, and to my certain knowledge he never had a fancy for any of the fair sex previous to the time he met beautiful Miss Northrup. She was his first love. Of that I am quite positive."

By this time they had reached the bend in the road hard by the entrance gate.

The reverend gentleman could not help but notice that his companion seemed unduly excited over the questions which he had propounded and the answers which he had received thereto, and he felt not a little relieved at bidding him good-afternoon and thanking him for the service which he had rendered him; and he wondered greatly that he excused himself at the entrance gate, instead of accompanying him to the house, if he was as intimate a friend of the family as he claimed to be.

The minister proceeded slowly up the wide stone walk, from which the snow had been carefully brushed, with a very thoughtful expression on his face.

Mrs. Varrick stood at the drawing-room window, and, noticing his approach, hurriedly rang for a servant to admit him at once.

He found himself ushered into the wide corridor before he could even touch the bell. Mrs. Varrick was on the threshold of the drawing-room, waiting to greet him as he stepped forward.

"I thought I observed some one with you at the gate?" she said, as she held out her white hand, sparkling with jewels, to welcome him. "Why did you not bring your friend in with you?"

The minister bowed low over the extended white hand.

"You are very kind to accord me such a privilege," he declared, gratefully; "but the person to whom you allude is an entire stranger to me – a gentleman whom I met by the road-side, and whom I was obliged to call upon for assistance, being suddenly attacked with my old enemy, faintness. I may add, however, that he seemed to have been an acquaintance of the family."

"Perhaps he is an acquaintance of my son; his friends are so numerous that it is very hard for me to keep track of them," added Mrs. Varrick, asking: "Why did he not come into the house with you?"

"He declined, stating no reason," was the reply.

Looking through the drawing-room window a few moments later, the minister espied the stranger leaning against the gate, looking eagerly toward the house, and he called Mrs. Varrick's attention to the fact at once.

She touched the bell quickly, and to the servant who appeared, she gave hurried instructions concerning the man.

"I have sent out to invite the gentleman to come into the house," she explained. "Hubert will be in directly, and I know that this will meet with his approval. He has very little time to spare to any one just now," she explained, with a smile, "he is so wrapped up in his fiancée, and will be, I suppose, from now on."

"Naturally," responded the minister, with a twinkle in his grave eyes.

Chapter XXXI.

THE MIDNIGHT VISITOR

But we must now return to Gerelda. She fell back, pale and trembling, among the cushions of the carriage, her brain in a whirl, her heart panting almost to suffocation.

At the entrance gate of the old mansion, Gerelda dismissed the cab. Stealing around by the rear wall, she entered the grounds by an unused gravel walk, and gained the arbor. Then she crept up to one of the windows whose blind had swung open from a fierce gust of wind. The room into which she gazed had not changed much. A bright fire glowed cheerily in the grate, its radiance rendering all objects about it clear and distinct.

She distinguished two figures standing hand in hand in the softened shadows. The girl's face, radiant with the light of love, was upturned toward the handsome one bending over her. He was talking to her in the sweet, deep musical voice Gerelda remembered so well.

She saw the girl lay one little hand caressingly on his arm, and droop her pretty, golden head until it nearly rested on his broad shoulder. Then Gerelda heard him say, "I have in my pocket the wedding-gift with which I am to present you. It is not so very costly, but you will appreciate it, I hope," disclosing as he spoke a ruby velvet case, the spring of which he touched lightly, and the lid flew back, revealing a magnificent diamond necklace and a pendant star.

"Oh, Hubert, you can not mean that that is for me!" cried Jessie.

But the second dinner-bell rang, and ere the sound died away, Mrs. Varrick and a few guests entered the room. All further private conversation was now at an end, but from that moment all sights and sounds were lost to the creature outside. She had fallen in a little dark heap on the ice-covered porch, lost to the world's misery in pitiful unconsciousness.

The house was wrapped in darkness when she woke to consciousness. Gerelda struggled to her feet, muttering to herself that it was surely death that was stealing slowly but surely over her.

Slowly, from over the distant hills, she heard some church-clock ring out the hour. "Eleven!" she counted, in measured strokes. As the sound died away, Gerelda crept round the house to the servants' entrance.

To her intense delight, the door yielded to her touch, and Gerelda glided noiselessly across the threshold. The butler sat before the dying embers of the fire, his paper was lying at his feet, and his glasses were in his lap. So sound was his slumber that he did not awaken as the door opened. Gerelda passed him like a shadow and gained the door-way that led into the corridor.

She knew Hubert's custom of going to the library long after the rest of the family had retired for the night. She would make her way there, and confront him. As she reached the door she heard voices within. She recognized them at once as Hubert's and his mother's.

She crouched behind the heavy velvet portières of the arched door-way, until his mother should leave.

"Good-night again, Hubert," the mother said.

"Good-night mother," he answered.

He flung himself down in the soft-cushioned arm-chair beside the glowing grate, drew a cigar from his pocket and lighted it, dreamily watching the curling rings. Suddenly he became aware that there was another presence within the room beside his own.

His eyes became riveted upon a dark object near the door-way. It occurred to him how strangely like a woman the dark shadow looked.

And as he gazed, lo! it moved, and to his utmost amazement, advanced slowly toward him. For an instant all his powers seemed to leave him.

"Gerelda, by all that's merciful," he cried.

"Yes, it is I, Gerelda!" she cried, hoarsely, confronting him. "I have come back from the grave to claim you!"

She did not heed his wild cry of horror, but went on, mockingly: "You do not seem pleased to see me, judging from your manner."

For an instant the world seemed closing around Hubert Varrick.

She cried, "I repeat that I am here to claim you!" flinging herself in an arm-chair opposite him.

"Now that your wife is with you once again, you are saved the trouble – just, in time, too – of wedding a new one;" adding: "You are not giving me the welcome which I expected in my husband's home. Turn on the lights and ring for every one to come hither!" she said. "If you refuse to ring the bell, I shall."

Hubert Varrick cried out that he could not bear it; he pleaded with her to leave the house with him; that since Heaven had brought her back to him, he would make the best of it; all that he would ask would be that she should come quietly away with him.

This did not suit Gerelda at all; she had set her heart upon abusing Jessie Bain, and she would brook no refusal. She sprang hastily for the bell-rope. Divining her object, he caught her arm.

If he had not been so intensely excited he would have realized, even in that dim light, that there was something horribly wrong about her; that once more reason, which had been until so lately clouded, wavered in the balance.

"Unhand me, or I shall scream!" she cried.

Varrick placed one hand hurriedly over her mouth, in his agony, hardly heeding what he was doing.

"For the love of Heaven, I beg you to listen to me!" he cried. "You must – you shall!"

She sprang backward from him, falling heavily over one of the chairs as she did so. There was a heavy thud which awakened with a start the sleeping butler on the floor below. With one bound he had reached the door that opened upon the lower corridor.

"Thieves! robbers!" he ejaculated under his breath.

His first impulse was to cry aloud, but the next moment it occurred to him that the better plan would be to break upon the midnight intruder unawares, and assist his master in vanquishing him. The door was ajar, and in the semi-darkness he beheld Hubert Varrick, his master, struggling desperately with some dark, swaying figure. In that same instant Varrick tripped upon a hassock and fell backward, striking his head heavily against the marble mantel.

The butler lost no time. Quick as a flash he had cleared the distance between the door-way and that other figure – which attempted to clutch at him in turn – and raising the knife he had caught up from the table of the room below, he buried it to the hilt in the swaying, writhing form. The next instant it fell heavily at his feet. A moan, that sounded wonderfully like a woman's, fell upon his horrified ear.

Varrick did not rise, though the terrified butler called upon him vehemently. He had the presence of mind, even in that calamity, to turn on the gas, and as a flood of light illumined the scene, he saw that it was a woman lying at his feet – ay, a woman into whose body he had plunged that fatal knife! – while his master lay unconscious but a few feet distant.

"Help! I am dying!" gasped the woman.

Those words recalled his scattered senses. Self-preservation is strong within us all. As in a glass, darkly, the terrified butler, realizing what he had done, saw arrest and prison before him, and realized that the gallows yawned before him in the near future.

The thought came to him that there was but one thing to do, and that was to make his escape.

Every moment was precious. His strained ear caught the sound of a commotion on the floor above. He knew in an instant more they would find him there with the tell-tale knife, dripping with blood, in his hand.

He flung it from him and made a dash from the room. It was not a moment too soon, for the opposite door, which led to the private stair-way, had barely closed after him ere the sound of approaching footsteps was plainly heard hurrying quickly toward the library.

In that instant Hubert Varrick – who had been dazed by his fall, and the terrible blow on his head caused by striking it against the mantel – was struggling to a sitting posture. Varrick had scarcely regained his feet ere the portières were flung quickly aside, and his mother and half a dozen servants appeared.

A horrible shriek rent the air as Mrs. Varrick's eyes fell upon her son, and the figure of a woman but a few feet from him with a knife lying beside her.

"What does it mean?" cried Mrs. Varrick.

He pointed to the fallen figure.

"Gerelda has come back to torture me, mother!" he cried.

By a terrible effort Gerelda struggled to her knees.

"Hear me, one and all!" she cried. "Listen; while yet the strength is mine, I will proclaim it! See, I am dying – that man, my husband, is my murderer! He murdered me to keep me from touching the bell-rope – to tell you all I was here!"

With this horrible accusation on her lips, Gerelda sunk back unconscious.

Who shall picture the scene that ensued?

"It is false – all false – so help me Heaven!" Hubert panted. That was all that he could say.

The sound of the commotion within had reached the street, and had brought two of the night-watchmen hurrying to the scene. Their loud peal at the bell brought down a servant, who admitted them at once. In a trice they had sprung up the broad stair-way to the landing above, from whence the excited voices proceeded, appearing on the threshold just in time to hear Gerelda's terrible accusation. Each laid a hand on Hubert Varrick's shoulder.

"You will have to come with us," they said.

Mrs. Varrick sprung forward and flung herself on her knees before them.

"Oh, you must not, you shall not take him!" she cried; "my darling son is innocent!"

It was a mercy from Heaven that unconsciousness came upon her in that moment and the dread happenings of the world were lost to her. There were the bitterest wailings from the old servants as the men of the law led Hubert away.

In the excitement no one had remembered Gerelda; now the servants carried her to a boudoir across the hall, and summoned a doctor.

"If this poor girl recovers it will be little short of a miracle," he said.

Through all this commotion Jessie Bain slept on, little realizing the tragic events that were transpiring around her. No one thought of awakening her. The sun was shining bright and clear when she opened her eyes on the light the next morning.

How strangely still the house seemed! For a moment Jessie was bewildered. Had it not been that the sun lay in a great bar in the center of the room – and it never reached this point until nearly eight in the morning – she would have thought that it was very, very early.

"My wedding-day!" murmured the girl, slipping from her couch and gazing through the lace-draped windows on the white world without. But at that moment a maid entered and she told Jessie Bain the story of the tragedy.

A thunder-bolt from a clear sky, the earth suddenly opening beneath her feet, could not have startled Jessie Bain more. A few minutes later she recovered her composure and hurried to Mrs. Varrick's room.

Mrs. Varrick reached out her hand to Jessie, and the next moment they were sobbing wildly in each other's arms. Little by little the girl's noble spirit in all its grandeur gained the ascendency. Slowly she turned to the housekeeper, who was sobbing over the fact that there was no one to take care of Hubert's wife, until a trained nurse the doctor had expected should arrive.

"She shall be my care," said Jessie, determinedly. "I will go to her at once; lead the way, please."

Who shall picture the dismay of Jessie when she looked upon the face of the woman who had come between her and the man she was to have wedded that day and found that it was the very creature whom she herself had sheltered – the girl whom she had known as Margaret Moore?

The doctor was greatly moved at the heroic stand Jessie Bain proposed to take in nursing her rival back to health and strength.

"Not one woman in a thousand would do it," he declared. "May Heaven bless you for it! Besides," he added in a low, grave voice, "you could serve poor Hubert Varrick in no better way than by restoring her. If she dies it will go hard indeed with young Varrick."

Jessie realized this but too well, and bent all her energies to nurse her back to health and strength, though what she suffered no one in this world could tell.

If Margaret recovered, she knew that she would go away with Hubert. He might not love her, but he would be obliged to live his whole life out with her. If she died, he would hang for it. Better that he should live, even with the other one, than die.

Her heart went out to Hubert Varrick in the bitterest of sorrow. She realized what he must be suffering. She would have flown to him on the wings of love, but she dared not.

She wrote a letter to him for his mother, at her dictation, adding a little tear-blotted postscript of her own, making no mention of her own great love and the sorrow that had darkened her young life. In that letter she urged him to keep up brave spirits; that everything was being done for Gerelda, his wife, that could be done; that she was sitting up night and day nursing her.

When Hubert Varrick received that tear-stained missive, in the loneliness of his desolate cell he bowed his head and wept like a child, crying out to Heaven that he was surely the most wretched man on God's earth.

He tried to think out all the horrors of that bitter midnight tragedy, which seemed more like a dream to him than a reality. He could not understand how Gerelda came by that wound, unless, through her terrible rage, she had attempted to take her life by her own hand; and through the same intense rage, strong even in death, wanted to persecute him even after she had known that her moments were numbered.

As for Gerelda, her life hung by the slenderest of threads for many days after, and during these anxious hours no one could induce Jessie Bain to leave her bedside. But at last the hour came when the doctors pronounced Gerelda out of danger.

Chapter XXXII.

CAPTAIN FRAZIER PLOTS AGAIN

We must return to Captain Frazier, whom we left standing at the gate when he had parted from the minister, who had gone into the Varrick mansion to make arrangements for the wedding which was to take place on the morrow.

"Gerelda must have made herself known to them by this time, and a lively scene is probably ensuing," he muttered. "I should like to have seen Varrick when Gerelda confronted him, and cheated him out of Jessie Bain. In that moment, perhaps, it occurred to him what I must have suffered when he cheated me out of winning lovely Gerelda Northrup at the Thousand Islands last summer – curse him for it! How strange it is that from that very date my life went all wrong! I invested every dollar I had in that stone house on Wau-Winet Island, and that fire wiped me out completely. I have had the devil's own luck with everything I touched. Everything has gone back on me, every scheme has fallen through, and the best of plans panned out wrong. I should say that I am pursued by a relentless Nemesis. I am growing desperate. Why should Hubert Varrick have so much of this world's good things and I so little? I am reduced to very near my last dollar. I have scarcely enough in my pocket to pay a week's lodging; and when that goes, the Lord knows what the outcome of it will be. Up to date, I am 'too proud to beg, too honest to steal,' as the old song goes; but when a man reaches the end of his resources there's no telling what he may do."

He walked away swiftly among the trees and threaded his way quickly through the net-work of streets, until he found himself at last standing before a dingy little two-story brick house in a narrow court. Advancing hurriedly up to the stone flagging, he knocked loudly. There was no response.

"Evidently no one is in," he muttered. "I will call later in the evening."

He retraced his steps back to the heart of the city, and feeling exceedingly fatigued, he entered a café.

"I have almost got to the end of my rope," he muttered, mechanically picking up a newspaper. "If my luck doesn't change within the next few days, I shall do something so desperate that people will never forget the name of Captain Frazier."

He ran his eye idly down the different columns. Suddenly a paragraph attracted his attention. He read it over slowly half a dozen times; then, without waiting to partake of the repast he had ordered, he hurried to the desk, paid his bill, and rushed out into the street.

"I have no time to lose," he muttered; "this country is getting too hot for me. I must get away at once. If I but had the wherewith I would take the first outgoing steamer. What a capital idea it would be!" he cried, laughing aloud, grimly. "If I could manage to abduct Hubert Varrick's intended bride and hold her for a ransom? I made a success of it with Gerelda Northrup when she stood at the very altar with him; and what a man does once he can do again. The first time it was done for love's sake; now it would be a question of money with me. I have but little time to lose."

Again he made his way to the lonely, red-brick house on the side street, taking good care that he was not observed. In response to his repeated knocks, the door was opened at length by a small, dark-complexioned man.

"Captain Frazier! by all that's amazing!" he cried. "When did you blow into port, I should like to know?"

"I came in this morning," was the reply.

"I am never quite sure what you want of me," replied the other, eyeing the captain suspiciously in the dim twilight. "But come in – come in," he added, hastily. "We are just sitting down to supper. Come and take something with us, if you're not too proud to sit at our humble table."

"I've got over being proud long ago," said the captain, following the other along a very narrow hall.

The interior of the room into which he was ushered bespoke the fact that it was inhabited by men – presumably sailors, from the nautical implements thrown promiscuously about. It was unoccupied, and Captain Frazier took his seat at the head of the table.

"Some of the boys left very hurriedly when they heard the loud, resounding knock on the front door," his companion said, laughingly, as he heaped the tempting viands on Frazier's plate.

The captain, whose appetite had been sadly neglected, paid great attention to the savory dishes before him.

"We have been accustomed to talking and eating at the same time," he began.

"Of course," returned the other.

"When do you make your next trip out?"

"In a week's time, probably, if all is favorable."

"I think I shall ship with you," said the captain. "This part of the country is getting too unsafe for me. I see by to-day's paper that they are searching for me."

"Well, you must have expected that."

"Yes, I have determined to leave the country," Captain Frazier repeated; "but I do not propose to go alone."

His companion looked at him curiously, wondering what was coming; then, leaning nearer him, the captain whispered a plot in his ear that made his friend open his heavy eyes wide in amazement.

"I haven't a cent of money," admitted the captain; "but if you will work with me, you shall have half the ransom."

"A woman is a nuisance on board of a boat like ours," said the other; "but if you are sure so large an amount will be paid for her return, it will be well worth working for."