CHAPTER I.
"THE OTHER CHILD."
Baffled schemer!
In the dim hour which comes before the break of day, Colonel Tarleton was hurrying rapidly along the silent and deserted street.
Broadway, a few hours since, all light, and life, and motion, was now lonely as a desert. Gathering his cloak over his white coat, and drawing his cap lower upon his brows, Tarleton hurried along with a rapid and impetuous step, now and then suffering the thoughts which filled him, to find vent in broken ejaculations.
"Baffled schemer!" he exclaimed aloud, and then his thoughts arranged themselves into words:—"Why do those words ring in my ears? They do not apply to me; let me but live twenty-four hours, and all the schemes which I have worked and woven for twenty-one long years, will find their end in a grand, a final triumph. Baffled schemer! No,—not yet, nor never! This boy who was to marry Frank, will fade away in a few hours, and make no sign; and now for the other child. I must hasten to the house of old Somers,—his 'private secretary' must be mine before daybreak. The hour is unusual, the son lies dead in one room,—the father in the other; but I must enter the house at all hazards, for,—for,—the only remaining child of Gulian Van Huyden, must be in my power before daybreak."
And he hurried along toward the head of Broadway, through the silent city. Even in the gloom, the agitation which possessed him, was plainly discernible. The hand which held the cloak upon his breast was tightly clenched, and, as he passed through the light of a lamp, you might note his compressed lip, his colorless cheek, and eyes burning with intense thought. His whole life swept before him like a panorama. The day when the wife and mother lay dead in her palace home, while Gulian, his brother, clutched him with a death-grip as he plunged into the river,—the years which he had gayly passed in Paris, and the horrible years which he had endured in the felon's cell,—the happy childhood, and the irrevocable shame of his daughter, sold by her own mother into the arms of lust and gold,—his duel with young Somers, whom he had first murdered, and then smuggled his corpse into his father's home,—the scenes which he had this night witnessed in the Temple, beginning with his interview with Ninety-One, and ending in the marriage of Frank and Nameless, and the apparition of Mary Berman,—all flitted before him like the phantoms of a spectral panorama.
"And the next twenty-four hours will decide all! Courage, brain, you have never yet despaired,—" he struck his clenched hand against his forehead,—"do not fail me now!"
Turning from Broadway, as the night grew darker, he entered the street in which the house of Evelyn Somers, Sr., was situated. He was rapidly approaching that house,—cogitating what manner of excuse he should make to the servants for his call at such an unusual hour,—when he was startled by the sound of footsteps. He paused, where a street lamp flung its light over the pavement. Shading his eyes, he beheld two figures approaching through the gloom. He glided from the light, and stationed himself against the wall, so that he could see the figures as they passed, himself unseen. The steps drew near and nearer, and presently from the gloom the figures passed into the light. A man, wrapped in a cloak, with a broad sombrero drooping over his face, supported on his arm the form of a youth, who, clad in a closely buttoned frock-coat, trembled from weakness, or from the winter's cold. The face of the man was in shadow, but the light shone fully on the face of the youth as he passed by.