Dainty's Cruel Rivals; Or, The Fatal Birthday

"Madame, after all my wrongs at your hands—" began Dainty, reproachfully; but she was cruelly interrupted:

"Assertion is not proof! Until you can bring proof of all your charges, I decline to admit them. Again, Lovelace Ellsworth is now a pauper dependent on my bounty. Raise but your voice to assert a wife's claim on him, and out he goes to become the wretched inmate of an idiot asylum. On your silence as to this trumped-up charge of a secret marriage, and also of wrongs pretended to be done by my hands, depends the comfort of Lovelace Ellsworth. Now say whether you love yourself better than you do him!"

It was a crucial test; but the girl did not hesitate.

She pressed her lips to Love's pale brow solemnly, as we kiss the dead, murmuring:

"I would sacrifice my very life to purchase any good for him!"

The man Franklin gazed on in keen sympathy for the girl and bitter disdain of the cruel woman, but he did not dare to utter a word lest he should make matters worse.

Mrs. Ellsworth's eyes flashed triumphantly at her easy victory over the broken-hearted girl.

"Very well. You have made a wise decision. You would only come to bitter grief by opposing me," she asserted, loftily; and added: "Now you must go. Here is ten dollars; take it, and go back on the first train to your mother in Richmond."

The girl clung to her husband, sobbing:

"Oh, let me stay and be his slave! I love him so I can not leave him!"

Franklin dared not open his lips, but his blood boiled at the cruel scene that followed, when Mrs. Ellsworth tore the weeping wife from her husband with resolute hands and harsh, cruel words, thrusting her outside the door as she cried:

"Go, now—leave the house at once, or I will send him instantly to an idiot asylum! What! you will not take my money? High airs for a pauper upon my word!"

She slammed the door, shutting the wretched young wife out into the hall, and turned fiercely upon Franklin.

"As you have been a witness to this scene," she cried, "I must also command your silence. Will money purchase it?"

"No, madame," he replied, with secret indignation.

"Then love for your master must be the motive," she cried, with a fierce stamp of the foot. "Do you want me to send him to an idiot asylum, where he can no longer have your faithful care?"

"No, madame, no!" the middle-aged servant replied, trembling with emotion.

"Then you will hold your tongue upon what has just occurred in this room? Do you promise?" she cried, harshly.

"I promise," replied Franklin, sadly.

"Very well. See that you do not violate it on pain of serious results to your master. I am tired of the charge of him anyhow; for who knows how soon his simple idiocy may turn to dangerous insanity? So the least provocation from you would cause me to send him to a pauper asylum for idiots!" she cried, warningly, as she hurried from the room to make sure that none of the officious servants should dare to harbor her persecuted victim.

Dainty had already dragged herself out of the house, passing an open door where Olive and Ela looked out with derisive laughter at her blighted appearance, with the golden curls all shorn away, and the pale face stained with tears, while her faded summer gown and the old-fashioned scarf drawn about her shivering form did not conduce to the elegance of her appearance.

"Ha! ha! she looks like a beggar!" sneered Olive, adding: "Let us follow, and see where she goes for shelter. Of course, she will have shocking tales to tell on us if she can get any one to listen. I should like to prevent her if I could."

"Nothing will shut her mouth but death!" returned Ela, significantly, as, unnoticed by any one, they stole out to track the despairing girl on her wretched exile.

The deep gloom of twilight had now fallen, and Dainty stood irresolute where to go, clinging forlornly to the gate, her wistful, white face turned back to Love's window, her tender heart wrung by the torture of leaving him forever.

"Oh! who could have dreamed of such a strange and cruel fate for my darling? It is indeed worse than death!" she sighed, miserably, thinking how cruel Mrs. Ellsworth had been to drive her away so heartlessly, when she had prayed to her humbly on her knees to let her remain as an humble servant and nurse him.

It seemed like the cruelest irony of fate that she, Love Ellsworth's wife, the real mistress of Ellsworth, should be driven in scorn from its gates, penniless, hopeless, and without a friend, her lips sealed to the truth of her wifehood, lest by speaking she should consign her beloved husband to a more cruel doom than he was already enduring.

Mrs. Ellsworth had carried things with a high hand; but she had been reasonably sure of her position, having investigated Love's story of a secret marriage, and satisfied herself that it would be well-nigh impossible to prove it.

Owing to Love's desire for secrecy, there was no record of the license on the books of the clerk of county court who had issued it. The clerk himself, a feeble, aged man, had died suddenly two months ago—the day previous to Lovelace Ellsworth's birthday.

The minister of the little church where the ceremony had been performed had also died a month previous of a malignant fever contracted in visiting a squalid settlement of shiftless sand diggers.

A terrible fatality seemed to attend poor Dainty; for in all probability these two dead men were the only persons who held the secret of her marriage, and dead men tell no tales.

As the worse than widowed bride clung to the gate, taking that farewell look at her husband's window, she suddenly remembered that she had one true though humble friend in the neighborhood—poor old black mammy.

"I will go to her cabin and stay to-night, and to-morrow I must try to go home to mamma," she sighed, turning toward the dark patch of woods where the lonely negro cabin stood, and followed by relentless fate in the shape of her pitiless rivals, Olive and Ela.

"She is going to old Virginia's cabin, but she does not know that the negroes have all moved away to the station, and that she will find it deserted," whispered Ela. "However, she can shelter herself there for the night, though it will be very cold without a fire."

"Some one ought to build one to keep her warm," Olive returned, with a significance that was not lost on her keen-witted cousin.

CHAPTER XXX.

A TERRIBLE DEED

John Franklin's manly blood had boiled with resentment at seeing poor Dainty driven away in disgrace from the home of which she was virtually the mistress, for he believed every word of the story she had told Mrs. Ellsworth.

It made his kind heart ache to realize so fully the sad mental plight of his young master, who could sit by in apathy, and suffer such a cruel wrong to be done to his unfortunate young wife.

He gloried in the pride that had made her fling back in the woman's face the offered pittance from her cruel persecutor.

"Yet, poor soul, she looked shabby and penniless. Perhaps she had not the money to pay her fare to Richmond. I wonder if the unfortunate young lady would accept a loan from her husband's servant?" he thought, anxiously.

It pained him to think of her going out into the darkness of the night, friendless and shelterless, knowing how well his master had loved her, and how worthy she was of that love.

He decided that it was his duty to follow her and proffer his services if she needed them, though in so clandestine a manner that wicked Mrs. Ellsworth need not find it out and revenge herself by cruelty to his master.

Leaving Love presently to the care of another attendant, he slipped away through the grounds to the road, wondering which way the unhappy wanderer had gone.

A little incident ended his perplexity.

While pausing under the shade of a tree, gazing anxiously up and down the road, he suddenly saw the cousins Olive and Ela, skulking like criminals out in the dusky woodland path that led to old mammy's cabin; and the light of the rising moon on their faces showed them pallid and scared-looking, as if pursued by threatening fiends. Clasping each other's hands, and panting with excitement, they fled across the road to the gates of Ellsworth, without perceiving that they were detected in something underhand by the lynx eyes of a suspicious watcher.

"They have been up to some mischief, and I will find it out if I can," he thought, darting into the woodland path, and following it with alert eyes until suddenly the darkness was illuminated by the glare of fire, and rushing forward, he discovered old mammy's cabin wrapped in flames.

A startled cry burst from the man's lips as a terrible suspicion drove the bounding blood coldly back upon his heart.

Had the deserted cabin been fired by Olive and Ela?

If so, what had been their motive? Something very important surely, for conscious guilt had looked from their pale faces, had marked their skulking flight from the scene.

If Dainty Chase had gone to the cabin to seek refuge with the old black woman, their motive was not hard to fathom, and as Franklin bounded toward the scene of the fire, it all flashed over his mind like lightning.

The life of Dainty was a menace to Mrs. Ellsworth and her nieces, for if she could prove her marriage to Lovelace Ellsworth on the middle of July, she would wrest from his step-mother the wealth she claimed by reason of his failure to marry before his birthday, and in which she was making her nieces joint sharers.

Yes, all three of them had a terrible interest in the girl's death; the man realized it fully.

And Mrs. Ellsworth but a little while ago had given him a deep insight into her evil nature.

Perhaps she had sent her nieces—as wicked as herself—to follow poor Dainty and devise means for getting her out of the way.

It was horrible to think of such a crime, but he made haste to verify his suspicions by darting around to an end window not yet wreathed in the leaping flames and peering into the house, though the heat scorched him and the smoke was stifling.

He drew back with a cry of horror and indignation.

Yes, Dainty was there!

On gaining the shelter of the cabin, seeking the protection of the old mammy, whom she counted as her only friend, the girl, in her grief and sorrow and cruel disappointment at finding the place untenanted, had sunk into a heavy swoon on the hard floor.

Doubtless her cruel rivals, following and beholding her piteous plight, had seen their opportunity and taken instant advantage of it.

Roused from her unconsciousness by the crackling flames and stifling smoke, the girl was just rising from the floor, and the despair on her face as she comprehended her terrible environment would haunt John Franklin to his dying day.

The great, sublime pity that rose to flood-tide in the man's tender heart submerged every thought of self in an instant.

No escape seemed possible for Dainty. The inflammable log cabin was surrounded by fire, and she stood in the center of the awful glare like some pale, beautiful martyr at the stake.

Franklin caught up a great bowlder from the ground and dashed it again and again against the sash till it was broken in, then, stripping off his coat, muffled his head in it, and sprang like a hero through smoke and flame to the rescue of his master's bride, catching her up in his strong arms, and bearing her, after a fierce conflict with the fire, back through the broken sash to life and safety.

And not a moment too soon, for the roof of the cabin crashed in on the burning walls ere he had staggered three yards from the scene of his heroic deed, and the fierce flames, leaping higher, conveyed to two anxious watchers at Ellsworth the news that they had succeeded in their damnable crime.

Franklin realized that it was best to let them hug that belief to their hearts, so all that he did afterward that night was under the veil of secrecy.

He succeeded in getting an old buggy and conveying Dainty to the station, where he placed her on the midnight train and bought her a ticket for Richmond.

No one but black mammy was let into the secret, and unseen by any one in the gloom of the midnight hour and in the scarcity of travel that night, she was sent on her way to her mother, Franklin saying to her earnestly:

"Let me advise you, Mrs. Ellsworth, to keep close to your mother, and away from the fiendish enemies who are seeking to compass your death. I will take the best care of your husband, and may God send him recovery from his hurt, that he may restore you to your rightful position, and punish the wretches who have wronged you both!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

LOST! LOST! LOST!

"Stop! stranger; may I speak with you?—Ah, yes, you needn't fear—While I whisper through the grating,I wouldn't have them hear.These jailers, if a bodyBut chance to speak her name,They roll their eyes so savage,As if they meant to tameSome wild beast, and they scare me.Come nearer, nearer yet;Come near me till I whisper,'Have you seen her?—seen Annette?'"What did they bring me here for?I say, I want to go!How shall I ever find herWhen I am locked in so?They lied to me—'Twas once there in the street,Where I sat on a doorstepTo rest my aching feet.They say, 'We'll lead you to her,'And many times said, 'Come,'At last I followed, eagerTo find my little one.But when I bid them bring her.They answer, 'By and by.'Just turn the key, please, won't you,And let me slip out sly?"

One of the most troublesome patients at the Virginia Asylum for the Insane in Staunton was a pretty, pale little woman named Mrs. Chase.

To look at her sitting very quiet—sometimes with her fair little hands meekly folded, and a brooding sorrow in her tearful, deep blue eyes—you would have said she was a most interesting patient, and could not surely give any one trouble.

But the women attendants in her ward could have told you quite a different story.

Mrs. Chase had a suicidal mania, and had to be watched closely all the time to keep her from taking her own life.

These attendants would have explained to you that all insane people have some hobby that they ride industriously all the time.

There was the man who believed himself to be Napoleon reincarnated, and amused everybody with his military toggery and braggadocio.

There was the lady who called herself Queen Victoria, and was never seen without a huge pasteboard crown.

There were the two men who each claimed to be the Christ, and frowned disapproval on the claims of each other.

There was the youth who imagined himself a violin virtuoso, and fiddled all day long, varying his performance by pausing to pass around the hat for pennies, of which he had accumulated, it was said, more than a gallon already.

There was the forsaken bride who was waiting every day for the false lover to return and bear her away on a blissful wedding-tour.

There was the man who believed himself already dead, and solemnly recounted to you the particulars of the horrible death he had died, adding that he was detained from his grave by the delay of the cruel undertakers in taking his measure for the coffin. He had actually been known to slip into the dead-house one day, and lie down in a casket intended for a real corpse, having to have force employed to eject him from his narrow abode.

Again, there was the man who imagined himself to be a grain of corn, and fled with screams of alarm from the approach of a chicken. These, and scores of others with hobbies, tragic or ridiculous, as the case might be; but not one of them all, said the attendants, needed such care and watching as pale, pretty, meek little Mrs. Chase.

Her hobby was a lost or stolen child.

No one knew whether or not there was any truth in her claim. She had been brought there from Richmond, a friendless stranger, who had been found wandering homeless in the street, raving of a lost child.

Her story was just as likely to be false as true, they said, for lunatics imagined many things. It might be her child had died; for she was always praying for death, that she might find her lost darling again.

It was melancholy madness. The hardest to cure of all, said the doctors, and she had been frustrated in several frantic attempts to end her life. She was so clever and so cunning that they had to watch her constantly; but even the most impatient of the attendants could not give her a cross word, her grief was so pathetic, and she seemed so sorrowfully helpless in her frail, gentle prettiness.

"Have you seen my daughter, my darling little Dainty? She is lost; stolen away from me while I slept," she would say to every strange person she saw, and her pale face would glow as she added, proudly: "She was the prettiest girl in the world. I have often heard people say so. She was as beautiful as a budding rose, with hair like the sunshine, and eyes as blue as the sky. Her little hands were white as lilies, and her feet so tiny and graceful, every one turned to watch her as she passed; and was it any wonder she caught such a grand, rich lover? She would have married him if she had not been lost that night. Oh, let me out! let me go and find my darling! You have no right to lock me in here!"

Then she would fly into paroxysms of anger, trying to batter down the walls and escape from what she called her stony prison; and at other times she would pray for death, crying:

"Oh, God! send me death; for surely my darling must be dead, or she would have come back to me long before they locked me up here! They stole her away and killed her, my sweet Dainty, the cruel enemies who hated and envied her so much for her angelic beauty and her noble lover! Oh, who would keep me back from death, when only through its dark gates can I find my child again?"

But they watched her carefully; they allowed her no means of ending the life of which she was so weary; and so the months flew by from September to spring, and it was almost a year since Dainty had left her home so gladly for the country visit that had ended so disastrously, and with such a veil of mystery over her strange fate.

"Where is Annette? Where is she?Does anybody know?"

CHAPTER XXXII.

IT WAS THE OVERFLOWING DROP OF SORROW IN THE CUP THAT ALREADY BRIMMED OVER

"Alone with my hopeless sorrow,No other mate I know!I strive to awake tomorrow,But the dull words will not flow.I pray—but my prayers are drivenAside by the angry Heaven,And weigh me down with woe!"

Young, beautiful, penniless, and alone in the world! Oh, what a cruel fate!

Dainty realized it in all its bitterness when she arrived in Richmond that dull October day, and found the first snow of the season several inches deep on the ground, making her shiver with cold in her thin summer gown and straw hat.

But her heart was warm with the thought of the dear mother she was going to rejoin.

What a glad reunion it would be for both in spite of her bitter troubles, when, clasped in that dear mother's arms, she should lay her weary head on that dear breast, and sob out all her grief to sympathizing ears.

She had a little money in a small purse that Franklin had forced her to take as a loan, and she hired a cab to take her to her old home, where she had not a doubt of still finding her mother.

Alas! what was her horror to find the small house burned to the ground!

Dismissing the cab, she started on a round of the neighborhood, seeking news of the dear one.

But there were new neighbors in the sparsely settled place, and no one knew anything about the little lady who had kept boarders at the house on the corner.

Half frozen with the bitter cold, she dragged herself to the corner grocery, thinking that Mr. Sparks could surely give her some information.

His stolid, well-fed face was the first familiar one she had met, and she wondered why he wore that broad band of crape about his coat-sleeve.

"Is it really you, Miss Chase? Well, well! you're quite a stranger! Been ill? You don't look as blooming as when you went away in the summer. Well, it was hard on you losing your little mother in that cruel fashion! But death is no respecter of persons. He robbed me of my ailing wife about the same time your mother was called. What! you don't understand? Bless me! the girl's dropped like I'd shot her! Ailsa! Ailsa!" he called in alarm, as he picked up the unconscious girl, and hurried with her to the back of the store, which was also his dwelling.

Then a pretty, brown-eyed girl, sitting with several noisy children, sprang up, and cried in wonder:

"What is the matter?"

"Here's your old neighbor and school-mate, Ailsa, little Dainty Chase. She came into the store, and I was talking to her about the death of my wife and her mother, when she dropped in a sort of fit. See to her, will you, while I run back to my customers?"

Pretty Ailsa Scott hastened to resuscitate her old school-mate, and when she revived, was startled to hear her sob, hysterically:

"I came to find my mother, Ailsa. I have been lost from her for wretched months; but your step-father told me she was dead! Oh, it can not be true! God would not be so cruel!"

Ailsa Scott had passed through the recent loss of her own mother, and she knew what a blow it would be to Dainty when she heard the cruel truth; but there was no escaping it, so she clasped her gentle arms about the stricken girl, saying sadly:

"It makes my heart ache for you, dear Dainty, but it would be useless to deceive you. About the time that mother lay in her last sickness it was rumored that your mother came back here the very day after the house was burned. I did not see her myself, but it was in all the papers that she went suddenly insane, and after wandering wildly about the city all day, calling for you, took poison and died in an alley. I do not know where she is buried, for mother was so very ill, and died the same week. Since then I've had my heart and hands both full with the care of the children, and teaching school, too, for I would not depend on my step-father for a penny. You know"—whispering—"I always hated him, and there wasn't much love lost between us. Indeed, I wouldn't have stayed here a day after mother's death only for my little half-brothers and sisters. He had no relations to help him, and hired help is not very reliable. He keeps a servant, but they tell me she is unkind to the children when I'm at school. If you have no friends to go to, dear, I wish you would stay with me awhile, and look after the little ones while I'm away."

It was a delicate offer of a shelter, for Ailsa's eyes had taken in the poverty of her guest, and Dainty was but too glad of a refuge in which to nurse her deep despair.

When Ailsa informed her step-father questioningly of her offer, he smiled approval, and made Dainty welcome in his simple home, while tender-hearted Ailsa soothed her all she could in the bitterness of her bereavement.

"We are both orphans, dear, and we can sympathize with each other," she said, tenderly, and helped her friend to get some neat mourning gowns, in which she looked so frail and lily-like that she seemed to be fading away like a broken flower.

She tended patiently on the little children and won their love, and the exuberant gratitude of their father, this latter so effusive that it grew irksome to the sorrowful, reserved girl.

"Oh, Ailsa, I do not wish to seem ungrateful, but I dislike the man as much as you do, and his attentions are getting too pointed to be agreeable. I am afraid I shall have to leave you and the dear children, much as I love you," she sighed, in December, after two quiet months in the little house; and her friend rejoined, indignantly:

"I see he is trying to court you, although his wife, my dear mother, has been dead but a few months. Oh, why did she ever marry such a brute? I believe he broke her heart, for it was a strange decline of which she died. He was always flirting with his women customers, and scolded his wife harshly when she objected. He made her bitterly unhappy, the coarse, unfaithful wretch, and that is why I hate him so for my own papa never spoke an unkind word to her up to the day of his death. You will have to repulse him, but not too unkindly to arouse his enmity."

But the crisis came suddenly the next day while Ailsa was at school. Mr. Sparks boldly proposed marriage to the indignant girl.

Her blue eyes flashed disdain upon him, as she cried:

"How can you be so coarse and unfeeling, sir, showing so little respect to the memory of the wife dead but a few months?"