Chapter I: Ashes to Ashes

Slowly and solemnly the village church-bells tolled while the funeral cortège wound its way to the grave, followed by the long train of mourners.

The richest man in the country was dead, and the whole neighborhood had turned out to do honor to his obsequies.

The chief mourners were his two sons, Byrd and Delmar Barrington, his widowed sister, Mrs. French, and his adopted daughter, Maisie Van Allyn.

These four stood in silent grief by the grave while the preacher’s voice droned over the burial service, shuddering as the clods began to fall upon the splendid casket, but waiting till the mound was shaped and covered with floral tributes before they turned away and left the dead to his long repose.

No violent grief had been shown by the mourners, and nothing but subdued respect by the sympathetic friends, and as the crowd dispersed there was not one who said feelingly:

“There is another good man gone!”

The minister who had preached his funeral sermon had very pertinently remarked before launching into an eloquent discourse upon death:

“The deceased is too well known to you all for me to dilate at length upon his characteristics. He has made his way among you from obscurity to wealth and position.”

What the reverend man said was perfectly true. Any of Augustus Barrington’s neighbors could have sketched the outlines of his biography.

Augustus Barrington had prided himself upon being a self-made man.

He had been reared on a Virginia farm, and at fifteen years of age he ran away to the nearest town, disgusted with poverty, and determined to make his own way in life. Securing a position as errand-boy in a bank, he improved his education by attending night-school. By thrift and rigid attention to business he rose by successive gradations to the honorable position of cashier of the bank.

By this time he had been received into the best society of the town, and his vaulting ambition prompted him to seek in an advantageous marriage still further advancement in life.

It was supposed that he would marry well; indeed, every one generously agreed that such a plucky fellow deserved it, but even his nearest friends scarcely expected him to lift his eyes to an heiress, daughter of the richest man in town, the president of the bank in which he was simply the cashier.

To be brief, he aspired and won, to the surprise of the whole town.

Perhaps he had had one advantage in wooing Miss Byrd. She was not pretty, and in spite of her father’s wealth she was so diffident that her bashfulness, mistaken for pride, had daunted other suitors. So she had reached the same age as Barrington, twenty-five, when his bold and determined siege conquered the citadel of her tender heart.

It was a misalliance in the eyes of the world, but Miss Byrd was fond and romantic, and this only added zest to her love-affair. She coaxed her rather reluctant parents to consent.

They were married and settled down at Castellane with the old folks, who in a few years died and left their daughter half a million of money.

One would have thought that Barrington’s gratitude would have surrounded with an atmosphere of adoration the fond wife who had brought him wealth and position, added to worshiping love.

Not so. He was selfish to the core and incapable of gratitude, while his pretended love had been but a sham. Secretly he adored beauty, and his homely, devoted wife had no share in his heart.

Neglect and indifference became her portion, Barrington proceeding to enjoy himself on her money, allowing himself more relaxation from business now that he was rich, having succeeded his late father-in-law as owner and president of the bank by the weakness of his wife, who, in her pitiful attempts to buy his love, permitted him to have the mastery of her fortune.

The day came when, through her inability to cope with the keen, avaricious man of business, he became owner of everything, and she could not command a dollar save by his will.

Then he dropped every pretense of affection, and the ghastly reality stared her in the face. Barrington had married the heiress, not the woman. He had her money now, and only tolerated her because she was the mother of his son, and held the position of his wife. He did not dare outrage society by extreme measures, but he outraged her heart in every conceivable fashion, so that she began to die by inches of a strange decline--the malady of a broken heart.

So the woman’s wounded love, changing slowly to jealous pain and fierce resentment, died the death, leaving in its place a thirst for revenge. She dragged through nine wretched years and died.

Three children had been born to her, but only the eldest one survived. He was her constant companion, worshiping her as an angel, and to the boy of eight years, mature and thoughtful for his age, she confided all her sorrows, and bequeathed him, alas, a legacy of hate!

“Listen, dear,” she had told him, over and over; “when I am dead your father, who married me for my money and broke my heart, will some day bring home another wife. He will marry for love the next time, and he will endow her with the gold he has wrested from me. This wealth should all come to you, Byrd, but there will be other children who will wish to share your inheritance.”

“They shall not!” cried the boy of eight, his proud blue eyes flashing.

“That is spoken well, my son, but you will have to fight for your rights to the bitter end. Remember, you are to hate your stepmother and every child she bears; you are to stand between them and your father so that neither he nor she shall ever have any real happiness. Poison his heart against her if you can, and scheme in every way possible to prevent them ever inheriting when he dies a single dollar of the money that should rightfully fall to you. All this may seem strange to you now, but as you grow older you can think of many cunning schemes for repaying your cruel father for breaking your loving mother’s heart. Swear now that you will faithfully carry out my wishes!” cried the frenzied mother, joining the little white hands of her son, while she made him take a solemn vow of obedience and secrecy.

He never forgot the grateful kiss she pressed on his brow, her lips were so hot and burning with the fever that was consuming her life.

So, for the remaining days of her short life, the wronged, half-maddened wife hugged to her heart the thought of the vengeance that would go on beyond the grave, and died, without ever revoking her baleful legacy of hate.

The boy Byrd grieved for her with unavailing regret, and bided his time for vengeance.

It was not long in coming, for at the end of the second year of bereavement his father married a second time.

And this time, as the dead wife had predicted, it was for love--love so passionate that it overruled prudence.

He lost his heart to a girl of nineteen, while he was nearly forty, and looked even older, and laid siege to her heart with such ardor that she capitulated and accepted, but then she was very poor, and her family, broken-down aristocracy, could not make both ends meet, so they dazzled her with his wealth and power, and persuaded her that gratitude and respect were as good as love.

She was beautiful and charming, and seemed like a living bit of sunshine in gloomy, grand old Castellane, but her stepson hated her from the very beginning, and repulsed friendly overtures with scorn.

He was ten years old now, and his cunning brain devised many plans of annoying the usurper of his mother’s place.

At the same time he managed to keep always in his father’s favor while devising each day new schemes to destroy his happiness.

“Papa,” he said once, drawing him aside into the library and whispering, “I have a secret to tell you.”

“Yes, Byrd.”

“It is this: your new wife did not marry you for love, as my dear mama did! She married you for money!”

“How dare you?” cried the man, stung by the assertion of what he already dreaded, and wondering at the boy’s cleverness.

“But, papa, it is the truth. Do you know that that proud old woman, her mother, comes here to beg money of her daughter? But she never gives her any, so Mrs. Delmar was rather angry yesterday. She cried, and said: ‘Kathleen, I never thought you could be so heartless as to refuse your poor mother a few dollars when you are rolling in gold.’”

“Ah!” cried Barrington angrily.

“I was hid behind the curtains. I could hear all plainly,” continued the boy. “The new wife cried, too, and told Mrs. Delmar that you had never given her a dollar of her own to spend. She had asked you for a little money several times, but you said: ‘Never mind the money. Buy the things you want and send the bills to me.’”

His father cried breathlessly:

“What next?”

“Then your new wife went on complainingly:

“‘Mama, I see that I made a terrible mistake--marrying him. I was dazzled by his money and the thought of what I could do for you all. I wanted to send Hugh and Rob to school, to hire a servant to do the work for you, and to buy you a black silk gown. Perhaps I can manage the gown, because he gave me carte blanche to buy what I chose. But as for the rest, you see how it is, mama; he is miserly and will not allow me a penny of my own. And the worst of it is, I am getting disgusted with his stinginess, and can hardly respect him, much less love him! Oh, how different it is from what we expected! Just think! if he would have let me share my good fortune with the needy ones at home, I think I should have loved him out of pure gratitude and joy, but now--now’--and she cried so hard she could not go on, so her mother kissed her twice and went home.”

How every inflection of the childish voice stung, as Byrd meant it should, taking revenge for his mother’s wrong.

Augustus Barrington, face to face with the truth, chafed in fury.

He did not try to buy Kathleen’s love by indulgence; he was too stubborn and angry. He punished her innocent fault by indifference and neglect, thinking to pique her into tenderness; but ere he saw any signs of success, the brief story of Kathleen’s life ended suddenly with the birth of a little dark-eyed son ere she was twelve months a wife.

“Call him Delmar!” she said with her dying breath.

So she passed away soon from her short earth life, and was buried by the side of Byrd’s mother, with a space between them for the husband who had broken both their hearts. Now the third tenant was come, but was it possible he could rest there in peace?