Chapter XLIII

Mr. Rodney regarded his daughter with a disappointed and baffled air. He had set a trap to surprise all the details of her secret from her, deeming it no harm to do so. But she had been too quick-witted for him. He saw that he was to learn nothing from her that he did not already know.

He was bitterly angry with her. His outraged pride prompted him to denounce her in the bitterest terms, and to drive her forth from his roof as one unworthy to dwell in the home she had dishonored. Something stronger than his own will held him back.

As he gazed at her clinging feebly to the back of the chair, weak and white from the effects of her accident yesterday, and with that look of helpless innocence on the fair young face, his conviction of her guiltiness was staggered. In the face of all the evidence, in the face of her terrible silence, he could scarcely believe that his beautiful, petted daughter was a deliberate sinner. Yet what was the meaning of the mystery in which she shrouded her absence from her home? Why had she gone to Delaney House, and what had she been doing there? If Oran Delaney had wronged his little darling, he said to himself, fiercely, his life should pay the forfeit.

“Aline,” he said to her with startling abruptness; “tell me, what is Oran Delaney to you?”

She shivered and started as if an icy wind had swept across her.

“Tell me,” he repeated sharply, “what is Oran Delaney to you?”

The sweet, frank blue eyes lifted earnestly to his face.

“He is nothing, papa,” she replied.

“Nothing _now_, you mean,” he said. “Well, I will put my query in another shape. What _has_ he been to you?”

Her heart thrilled bitterly at the pointed question.

An impulse came over her to tell him the truth--to say, bitterly and truly, “He has been the evil genius of my life; he has spoiled my life for me; he has blighted all the budding hopes of my youth, and made earth a wide Sahara, where I must walk with blistered feet and a fainting heart.”

This would have been the truest answer she could have made, she said, bitterly, to herself; but she shut her lips over the unspoken words--they were not for her to say.

“You do not answer me, Aline,” said her father, and then she answered, gravely:

“I can only repeat what I said to you before. He is nothing to me.”

He walked away from her, and went over to the window that overlooked Delaney House and its beautiful spacious grounds. Drawing aside the curtain, he looked out upon the scene. The winter snow was falling in soft, thick flakes, and had been falling thus all day. The ground was covered with a soft, white carpet, pure and unspotted, for no footfall had smirched its virgin purity. Through the veil of softly falling flakes the gloomy gray outline of Delaney House glimmered indistinctly like a picture. To his wretched, distracted mind, filled with harrowing suspicions of his child, recurred a line or two from a familiar poem:

“Once I was pure as the snow, but I fell--
Fell, like the snow-flakes, from heaven to hell!”

A groan forced itself through his pale, drawn lips.

“My God!” he said, hoarsely. “Only to think, Aline, that while we were distracted over your unknown fate, while we sought you everywhere, while sleep was a stranger to our eyes and food tasted bitter on our lips, through the terrible strain of our anxiety for you, that you were hidden away in my neighbor’s house, within a stone’s throw of your own home! It was wicked, cruel, heartless!”

“Heartless!” she echoed, with weary bitterness, and a look of agony came over the white face. She recalled that time so well when she had sorrowed to feel what they would think of her at home; how they would miss her and grieve for her, blaming her for the terrible silence she was forced to keep.

“Aline, will you tell me one thing?” he asked. “I suppose it cannot greatly matter in the keeping of your secret. I am most curious to know how you left your room that day.”

“I went through that window, papa,” she answered, thinking that she might tell him the truth thus far, at least.

“But how?” he inquired, in palpable astonishment.

“Down a ladder,” she replied.

“Placed there by Oran Delaney?” he inquired, smothering a terrible imprecation on his writhing lips.

“Yes, papa,” she answered, wearily, for she was weak and tired, and in his excitement he had not thought of sparing her feeble strength.

“So then there was really an intrigue carried on between you?” he burst out, wrathfully.

“No, papa, there was not. I had never spoken to Mr. Delaney in my life until that day,” she replied, with such candor that he could not but believe her.

“How then did it happen that you allowed him to place a ladder for you to descend upon?” he asked.

The pale face grew suddenly scarlet again.

“Papa, it was the fault of my own willfulness,” she sighed.

“I told you so, Aline. I always knew that your willful ways would bring you into trouble,” cried poor, half-dazed Mrs. Rodney.

“Yes, mamma, dearest, and your words came true--as true as any words ever spoken in this world,” cried Aline, meekly; and she added, with a long, heavy sigh, “I do not believe any one ever paid a greater price for an innocent folly than I have done.”

Her mother broke into low, heart-broken sobbing, and buried her face in her handkerchief.

“Tell us how it came about, Aline,” said her father, impatiently.

“It was just in this way, papa. I was angry because I was left at home that day, and I threw the book mamma had given me to read out of my window into Mr. Delaney’s garden.”

“Well, go on,” he said, as she paused a moment.

Aline continued:

“You see, papa and mamma, I had no idea Mr. Delaney was walking in his garden that morning. But he was, and when I threw the book it struck him sharply on his head. He looked up and saw me, and then I was frightened at what I had done. I spoke to him. I apologized to him and explained that it was an accident.”

“And then?” asked Mr. Rodney.

“He excused me after amusing himself with me a little while. He evidently thought me nothing but a child,” said Aline. “I am sure I acted like a child. I told him how much I wanted some of the beautiful roses in his garden. So he brought an old step-ladder, placed it under the window, and told me to come down and take all the flowers I wanted.”

“My God!” groaned her father, gazing at her in despair.

“I did not mean to do anything wrong. It was only one of my willful escapades, and I never thought that it could end more seriously than my other girlish freaks. I went down the ladder, papa, but, indeed, indeed, I did not mean to stay ten minutes. I just meant to have one breath of the sweet air under those shady trees, and a bunch of the roses, and then to come back before cook should find out my absence.”

“Why, then, did you stay?” he inquired.

“That, too, was the result of my thoughtlessness and folly. When I found myself in the garden, among the beautiful flowers, I wandered away by myself, absorbed in the pleasant task of gathering a huge bouquet to brighten my lonely room. I was so charmed that I forgot everything else in my fascinating task. The poet has given us a pretty and appropriate quotation, papa,” she said, looking at him with a faint, quivering smile on her marble-white face.

She repeated it softly:

“Too late I stayed--forgive the crime!
Unheeded flew the hours.
How noiseless falls the foot of Time
That only treads on flowers!”

Then she resumed, in a low, sad voice:

“It was just like that with me, papa. I did not remember anything but my pleasure in the sweet, fragrant flowers. I kissed their fragrant velvety faces a hundred times. I patted them softly with loving hands. I knelt down and whispered to them as if they had been sentient, human beings. I was filled with pleasure at their lovely forms and exquisite colors. I gathered one here, another there, until my hands were full. Never did Time fly so fast. It trod on flowers, indeed, but, ah me! ah me!” she sighed, clasping her small hands together in agony, “since then its flight has been slow and dreary, over thorny paths with bleeding feet.”

They gazed upon her in troubled silence, knowing not what to say.

“Even then, papa, mamma, if I had come home when I found out that it had grown so late all might have been well,” she said. “But the fatal curiosity our common Mother Eve bequeathed us led me on to my fate.”

Again they had nothing to say to her. They hung eagerly on her next words.

“A bell rang from the house, then, for luncheon, and Mr. Delaney came to ask me to go to share it,” she went on. “It was then that my inexcusable folly began. If I had come back home all would have been well. My foolish curiosity led me to enter the great house of which I had heard so much.”

Mrs. Rodney groaned aloud in bitterness of spirit.

“I went into the grand dining-room and had my lunch--a delicate, luxurious lunch that appeared to have been spread by invisible hands, for no one appeared except Mr. Delaney and myself. I feasted luxuriously, then came out into the hall to return home, full of sudden dread that the cook had discovered my protracted absence.”

“And then?” inquired Mr. Rodney, anxiously.

A look of fear and dread and bitter regret came over the white face of the tortured young girl. She answered, slowly:

“Then something happened that was the cause of my remaining hidden away wretched and maddened for three long months, that seemed longer to me than all the years of my life that had gone before.”

“And that something? You must tell us what it was, Aline,” said her father, sternly.

“No, papa, I cannot tell you. I have sworn never to reveal it,” Aline replied, despairingly.