“Hark! to the hurried question of Despair,
Where is my child?—and Echo answers—Where?”—Byron.
“Colonel Japha recovered from his shock, but was never the same man again. All that was genial, affectionate and confiding in his nature, had been turned as by a lightning’s stroke, to all that was hard, bitter and suspicious. He would not allow the name of Jacqueline to be spoken in his presence; he would listen to no allusion made to those days when she was the care and perplexity, but also the light and pleasure of the house. Men are not like women, my child; when they turn, it is at an angle, the whole direction of their nature changes.
“Perhaps the news that presently came to us from Boston may have had something to do with this. It was surely dreadful enough; Jacqueline’s perfidy had slain her lover. Mr. Robert Holt, the cultured, noble, high-souled gentleman, had been found lying dead on the floor of his room, a few days after the events I have just related, with a lady’s diamond ring in his hand and the remnants of a hastily burned letter in the grate before him. He had burst a blood-vessel, and had expired instantly.
“This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of Jacqueline’s history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and the story of her lover’s death was not generally known, while the fact of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny.
“My child, you have a brow like snow, and a cheek like roses; you know little of life’s sorrows and little of life’s sins. To you the skies are blue, the woods vernal, the air balmy; the sad looks upon men’s and women’s faces, tell but shallow tales of the ceaseless grinding of grief in their pent up souls. But you are gentle, and you have an imagination that goes beyond your experience; perhaps if you pause and think, you can understand what a tale could be told of the weeks and months and years that now followed, without hint or whisper of the fate of her who had gone out from amongst us with the brand of her father’s curse upon her brow. At first we hoped, yes, he hoped,—I could see it in his eyes when there came a sudden ring at the bell,—that some sign of her penitence, or some proof of her existence, would come to relieve the torture of our fears, if not the shame of our memories. But the door that closed upon her on that fatal eve, had shut without an echo. While we vainly waited, time had ample leisure to carve the furrows of age as well as of suffering on the Colonel’s once smooth brow, and to change my daily vigil into a custom of despair, rather than of hope. Time had also leisure to rob us of much of our worldly goods and to make our continued living in this grand old house, an act that involved constant care and the closest economy. That we were enabled to preserve appearances to the day that beheld the Colonel laid low by the final stroke of his dread disease, was only due to the secret charity of a certain gentleman, who, declaring he was indebted to us, secretly supplied me with means of support.
“But of all this you care little.
“You had rather hear about the evening watch with its hopeful assurance, ‘Yet another day and she will be here,’ to be followed so soon by the despairing acknowledgement, ‘Yet another day and she has not come!’ or of those dark hours when the Colonel lay blank and white upon his pillow, with his eyes fixed on the door which would never open to the beating of a daughter’s heart, while the gray shadow of an awful resolution deepened upon his immovable face. What that resolution was I could not know, but I feared it, when I saw what a sternness it gave to his eye, what a fixedness to his set and implacable lip; and when in the waning light of a certain December afternoon, the circle of neighbors about his bed gave way to the stiff and forbidding form of Mr. Phelps, I felt a thrill of mortal apprehension and only waited to hear the short, ‘It shall be done,’ of the lawyer to some slowly whispered command of the colonel, to rise from my far off corner and stand ready to accost Mr. Phelps as he came from the bedside of the dying man.
“‘What is it?’ I asked, rushing up to him as he issued forth into the hall, and seizing him by the arm, with a woman’s unreasoning impetuosity. ‘I have nursed his daughter on my knee; tell me, then, what it is he has ordered you to do in this final moment?’
“Mr. Phelps for all his ungainly bearing, is not a hard-hearted man, as you know, and he doubtless saw the depth of the misery that made me forget myself. Giving me a look that was not without its touch of sarcasm, he replied, ‘The colonel has made me promise, to see that a plank is nailed across the front door of this house, after his body has been carried out to burial.’