The Paternoster Ruby

by Charles Edmonds Walk

And Clara favored the poor young man. He went forth from Merton resolved to wrest a fortune from the world and lay it at his sweetheart's feet. She promised to wait for him until he returned with the fulfilment of his ambitious aims.

Alas, though, for the fiery Felix: she was not of a very resolute character, being easily influenced by her sterner parents, whose patrician eyes looked askance upon the presumptuous lover's claims. Besides, Felix was absent—supposedly engaged in his laudable enterprise of wresting a fortune from the world—while Alfred, handsome, polished of manner, patient and persistently attentive, was ever at her elbow.

Then, too, there was Miss Clara's family, to the last one of them espousing Alfred's cause. In the end the girl allowed herself to drift with the current. Felix would have accomplished more to his purpose had he remained at home and married Clara, and then gone after the fortune. At any rate, after one or two letters from Felix, which glowed with hope and boundless zeal, she ceased to hear from him. Doubtless he had come to realize that the wresting operation demanded all his powers; but his silence was easily made to appear of more significance than it deserved. It was construed—for Miss Clara, not by her—as indisputable evidence of forgetfulness. Within the year she married Alfred Fluette.

Six years passed. Alfred Fluette had migrated with his bride to the city. Then Felix Page returned triumphant to Merton. His triumph, however, was short-lived. He was well on the road, even then, to his subsequent commercial success; a good deal of the wresting had been accomplished; but the girl he had steadfastly loved, whom he had never for one instant put out of his thoughts, had married his rival.

To get together most of her report Genevieve had been obliged to labor patiently and painstakingly; when it came to the events associated with Felix Page's return to his birth-place, her task was suddenly transformed from one of gleaning to another equally arduous, of selecting from the plethora of material at her disposal.

One gathers the idea, after reading it all, that his rage was that of a cave-man who returns from the day's hunt to find that his home in the hillside cliff has been despoiled. One thing stands out clear and unmistakable; from that hour his life was embittered, his character warped with the shattering of his ideals. He registered a solemn vow of vengeance against Alfred Fluette, then disappeared.

So much for this portion of the report. Nothing in the subsequent relations of the two men was now obscure.

And here, too, we are given a new light upon Alexander Burke, oiling door-hinges that he might the better spy upon his employer, patiently working out the combination of the hidden safe and running to Alfred Fluette with the old love-letters and mementos—for a price, of course,—playing the vindictiveness of the one against the hatred and fear of the other, and scrupling not to gain profit for himself whenever and wherever he might.

But it is proverbial that a woman invariably reserves the most interesting and important item for the postscript. And it was so with Genevieve's report. I quote the concluding paragraphs in toto.

On the very first day of my arrival, and from the very first person to whom I confided the nature of my errand, I received the surprising intelligence that I was not the first to pursue similar inquiries in Merton. Said my informant: "Why, there was a man here two or three weeks ago, trying to find out all he could about the Pages and the Coopers and the Fluettes. Has some one of them died and left a lot of money?"