Dawn of the Morning

by Grace Livingston Hill

"No, I have no right."

Then with a sudden movement he turned toward the child as if he would claim something there, but the baby hid his face and clung to his grandfather's neck.

"I have no right," he said again. One last look he gave the sweet dead face, as though he would ask forgiveness, then turned and went unsteadily from the room.

The old father followed him silently, as though to complete some ceremony, and, closing the door softly behind him, spoke a few words of explanation, facts that had they been brought forth sooner might have made all things different. It was Mary's wish that no word should be spoken in her vindication while she lived. If her husband could not trust what she had told him when he first came home, it mattered not to her what he believed. The hope of her life was crushed. But now that she was beyond further pain, and for the boy's sake, her father had sent for him that he might know these things before the wife he had wronged was laid to rest.

Then Van Rensselaer felt himself dismissed, and with one last look at the huddled figure of his little son, who still kept his face hid, he went down the path again, his pride utterly crushed, his life a broken thing.

After him echoed the sound of a baby's voice, "Go away, bad man!" and then the great oak door closed quickly behind him for the last time.

He trod the streets of the village as in a nightmare, and knew not that there were those in his way who would have tarred and feathered him if it had not been for love of the honored dead and her family. Straight into the country he walked, to the next village, and knew not how far he had come. There he hired a horse and rode to the next stage route, and so, resting not even at night, he came to his home. But ever on the way he had been attended by a vision, on the left a sweet-faced figure in a coffin, with one white rose whose perfume stifled him, and on the right by a bright-haired boy with eyes that pierced his very soul. And whether on horseback or by stage, in the company of others or alone in a dreary woodland road, they were there on either hand, and he knew they would be so while life for him should last.

He reached home in the gray of a morning that was to become a gray day, and sent up word that his little daughter should come down to his study when her early tasks were finished.

He had not said a word to his wife as yet, though she had suspected where he was going when he told her that Mary Montgomery was dead. It lifted a great load from her shoulders to know that the other wife was no longer living. She had been going about these three days with almost a smile upon her hard countenance, and the little girl had had no easy time of it with her father away.

It was very still in the study after Dawn sat down in the straight-backed chair opposite her father. She could hear the old clock tick solemnly, slowly. It said, "Poor-child! Poor-child! Poor-child! Poor-child!" until the tears began to smart in her eyes.