The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

“It is so kind in you, Roy, not to care about that hanging,” she said. “I have felt the rope around my neck so many times and have dreamed that I was ’Tina. I must look like her. She was blue eyed and fair-haired and small, just like me, who am not a bit like mother. Her grave is in the Ridgefield cemetery, ’Tina’s I mean, and mother sat there on the wall right by it when father told her the story. He didn’t keep anything back, and held his head just as high when he said, ‘My great-grandmother was hung.’ His grandfather was the baby who cried for its mother. I’ve heard that, too, when I have been awake in the night and been so sorry for it. Mother says my father was very tall and fine looking, and that I have some of his ways with my eyes and hands. I have dreamed of him so often since she told me, and sometimes it seems to me he is not dead. There is no proof except that notice in the paper and a letter mother had from the mines saying some of the bodies were so crushed they could not be recognized, and as my father was known to be in the mine and never seen again, it was highly probable he was dead. Oh, if I could find him! I think you’d better hunt for him than to be building a cottage to keep ’Tina from the rain!”

She spoke lightly now. Roy evidently didn’t care and the tragedy which had cast so dark a shadow on her life when she heard of it began to lessen in its proportions.

“I hear mother,” she said at last. “I thought she was in the next room, but she is a little deaf. I don’t believe she has heard all the foolish things you have said to me. Mother, here is Roy,” she continued, as the heavy portieres parted and her mother stood before her.

CHAPTER II.
MRS. PRESCOTT.

Naturally twenty-three years had changed her somewhat. The freshness and grace of youth were gone, with much of her brilliant complexion. Her dark hair was sprinkled with grey, and her eyes had lost some of the sparkle which had lured so many suitors to her side, but she was a very beautiful woman still, whom strangers looked at a second time, inquiring who she was. She had at first rebelled against wearing widow’s weeds, but when she saw how becoming they were to her she became quite reconciled to her mourning and was beginning to feel reconciled to her widowhood, which gave her the freedom she had not enjoyed since her second marriage. She had paid a full penalty for her heartless act and had repented of her folly. There had been a year of so of perfect happiness with Mark Hilton and then the restraints of married life began to weary her. It had been her boast that because her husband knew her so well he could never find fault with her, and there she was mistaken.

He was fond of her and proud of her and glad to see her admired as long as the admiration was unsought, but when with the little arts she knew so well she tried to attract attention his jealousy was aroused, and gradually there came to be stormy scenes between them,—bitter quarrels when things were said on both sides which it was hard to forget. Finding that with all his apparent unconcern he was sore on the subject of his antecedents Helen used that as a lash and often reminded him of the difference in their social positions and the depth to which she stooped when she married him. Then they quarreled more fiercely than ever and the baby was made the instrument of goading Mark to madness. That it had a drop of blood in its veins which could be traced back to a scaffold was often a source of regret with Helen coupled with a wish that she had married Craig Mason instead of throwing herself away on a hotel clerk, with no family connections. Mark was not naturally bad-tempered; neither was Helen. They were simply wholly unsuited to each other. They had married in haste, trampling upon the rights and happiness of Craig Mason without remorse, and as a natural sequence reaped the consequence of their sin.

At last, after a sharp altercation in which Helen expressed a wish that she had never seen her husband, he left her, taking Jeff with him and leaving a note saying he should not return as he was tired of the life he was living. Urged on by her mother, who had never accepted Mark as a son-in-law, a divorce was easily obtained and Helen free from the tie which had become so distasteful to her. Chancing to know that Mark was in Denver she sent him a copy of the divorce and received in return the note of which Fanny had told Roy. After that she knew no more of him until she heard of a terrible explosion in some mine in Montana. Among the killed was Mark Hilton’s name. Then in an agony of remorse she tried to verify the report. What she learned was that none of the bodies could be identified, they were so bruised and burned. Mark was known to have been in the mine and never seen after. Of Jeff nothing was known. He might, or might not, have been in the mine. In all human probability Mark was dead, and the divorce, of which she did not like to think, need not have been obtained. She was free without it and always spoke of herself to her friends as a widow, although she wore no black. If any of her old tenderness for Mark Hilton returned to her at times she gave no sign and was outwardly unchanged, except that she was very quiet and shunned society rather than courted it.

At her mother’s request she returned to her home in New York and there at last met again the Walter Prescott whose name had been in her blue book as her possible husband before she met Craig Mason. In some respects he was like Craig, undemonstrative, caring little for society and much for books. He had never forgotten Helen and soon fell again under her spell. He knew of her divorce and would rather it had not been, but her beauty conquered him and she became his wife and mistress of one of the finest establishments in New York. With Judge Prescott, whom she respected and feared, she lived very comfortably. He was not a man to tolerate any nonsense. His wife, like Caesar’s, must be above reproach, and from the first he was master of the situation.

Helen was very fond of Fanny, who was as unlike her as it was possible for a child to be unlike its mother. “She has not a feature like me, nor like her father, either, unless it is something in the expression of her eyes and the gesture of her hands,” she often thought, as she studied Fanny’s face and wondered where she got her blue eyes and fair hair and the delicacy of her complexion and form. “I believe she gets it a hundred years back from ’Tina,” she sometimes said, and then for a while rebelled against the heritage she had given her lovely daughter. “She shall never know of it,” she thought, and kept it to herself until Judge Prescott’s death, when it seemed necessary to tell Fanny of her real father.

Seizing upon something inadvertently spoken, Fanny, who was persistent and determined, never rested until she knew the whole story as her mother knew it. Over the father killed in the mines she wept bitterly, while the tragedy filled her with horror and for a time she refused to see anyone lest they should read in her face the secret which was making her life miserable. She had been so proud of being a Prescott and proud of her supposed father that it was hard to find herself suddenly stranded with no father, no name of which to boast, and she had dreamed many a night of the scaffold and of ’Tina, whom she was sure she resembled. “What will Roy say when he knows,” had been in her thoughts all the long summer while she was with her mother in the quiet mountain resort. That Roy loved her she knew and that he would sometime tell her so she was sure. “And when he does I must tell him everything and he will not care for me any more,” she thought. He had declared his love. She had told him everything, and he did not care; he could even jest about ’Tina and talk of a cottage to shield her from the weather. The revulsion of feeling was great, and Fanny’s face was radiant with happiness, when Mrs. Prescott appeared suddenly in the door.