So back to his home Mr. Mordecai came, not in poverty and want, not in sackcloth and mourning for the slain, and yet not in joy or contentment. From the fearful day when he lost his beautiful daughter, his heart had been darkened and his hopes destroyed, and through the eventful years that had slipped on since he last beheld her face, a feeling of unrelenting bitterness had possessed his soul. Always angry with Leah and with the man who had led her into disobedience, he now felt still more bitter toward him, as he deemed him a felon, a murderer, unpunished and unforgiven. The change of place and scene, the rushing and hurrying of events during the years of refugee life, had tended somewhat to crowd from his mind the thoughts of his lost daughter; but now that he was back again, back in the old home, where every niche and corner, flower and shrub, were associated with her memory, the father was miserable indeed-miserable because he well knew that somewhere upon the broad earth, Leah, if living at all, was living in loneliness and dreariness, in poverty and sorrow.
CHAPTER XLII.
THE first spring of peace gave place to summer, a summer memorable for its intense heat. One afternoon, toward the latter part of July, clouds dark and angry overcast the sky, and peals of thunder and flashes of lightning threatened a terrific storm. Pedestrians hurried homeward, and man and beast sought safety under shelter. The waters of the quiet harbor, tossed by rude winds, grew angry and rose in white-capped breakers, that broke against the wharves, piers, and fortresses, as far as the eye could see. Sea-gulls screamed and flew wildly about at this ominous appearance of the heavens, while the songsters of the woods, and the pigeons of the barn-yard, sought shelter from the approaching tempest. At night-fall the rain descended in torrents.
Safely sheltered in his comfortable home, Mr. Mordecai sat for an hour or more, watching, from his library window, the fury of the storm. The tall, graceful cedars and olive trees that adorned the front and side gardens of his home, were swaying in the wind which rudely snatched from their trellises the delicate jessamine and honeysuckle vines that lent such delicious odor to the evening winds. It tore the flowers from their stems, and the rain pelted them into the earth in its fury. Leaves were whisked from their branches, and blown out of sight in a twinkle. A weak-hinged window-shutter of the attic was ruthlessly torn away and pitched headlong into the street. All this Mr. Mordecai watched in amazement, and then, as if some sudden apparition of thought or of sight had appeared before him, he turned from the window with a shudder, and said:
"This is a devilish wild night. I'll drop the curtain."
Seating himself then, by a brightly-shining lamp-the Queen City gas works had been destroyed by the shelling guns-he clasped his arms across his breast, and looked steadily up toward the ticking clock upon the mantel. Thus absorbed in reverie, he sat for an hour; and was only disturbed then by a loud rapping at the front door.
"By Jerusalem! who can be out this wild night?"
The rapping sounded again, louder than before.
"Mingo!" he exclaimed involuntarily. "Ah! the dog is free now, and only answers my summons at his will. Good boy, though."
The rapping was repeated.