On the wings of fate

by Effie Adelaide Rowlands

Val, it was true, was not of the usual age for such a position, but everybody knew that Sir Ambrose had placed more confidence in his nephew’s sound wisdom and practical good sense than he did in most men; and though Val was barely more than ten years his cousin’s senior, it seemed to all the little world of Dynechester the wisest and best arrangement Sir Ambrose could have made for his son’s future, when he appointed his Nephew Valentine to act as guardian to that son.

Sir Ambrose had been dead a little over four years now, and his son had attained his majority the year following his father’s decease.

Perhaps Grace alone, out of all the world, knew how much trouble and anxiety her cousin was to her brother, and even she did not know all. She had a certain weakness for Mark; he had appealed to her from the first in the same way as Alexander, or Sacha as he was always called, did.

Mark Wentworth had always been a handsome boy with endearing ways; he had been adored by his father, and this adoration was carried on now by his grandmother, whose only joy in her old age lay in the joy that Mark’s mere existence gave her.

His mother Grace had never known, young Lady Wentworth having died abroad many years before Grace could grasp much in her young brain. There were pictures of this mother at Sunstead, and Mark was wonderfully like her. He was so dark as to seem scarcely of English birth. His face was handsome, passionate, attractive, and his nature matched his face as to passion and attraction.

It was not until Grace had grown to womanhood—she was now about twenty-two—that she learned the meaning of the shadow and the anxiety that beset Val so much where Mark was concerned, and when she did learn this she found it hard to grasp at first. But Val was not a man to make a mistake. He had caught signs of Mark’s failings when his cousin had been barely more than a lad, and then he had something more than fear to lend proof to his discovery, for Val alone knew the true story of his uncle’s marriage; he alone was aware that Mark’s mother, instead of dying years before, had lived a wretched, lost existence, confined in a home for drunkards, until a few months before the accident in the hunting field that had brought Sir Ambrose Wentworth’s life to an untimely end.

Besides the instructions left in his will, Sir Ambrose had written a letter to Valentine, to be read after his death, in which the unhappy father betrayed to the younger man the anguish that had lived canker-like in his heart all the years that followed on his fatal marriage.

He was bluntly frank with Val, and he entreated his nephew by every means in his power to stand between Mark and his mother’s fate.

The trait of that mother’s horrible weakness had not been developed sufficiently in the boy at the time the father wrote this letter to cause him to regard Mark’s future as hopeless, and he relied on Mark’s affection for Val to keep his loved child safe from all temptation.

The trust left to him had been accepted by Valentine Ambleton in no half spirit. He had constituted himself Mark’s companion on all possible occasions, and when his work—he was an architect by profession—claimed him, then he looked to Grace to take his place.