The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

It was late when he re-entered the house. Inez and Fanny had gone to their room and were asleep, but Tom still sat on the piazza, with his feet on the railing and his hands clasped behind his head.

“I knew he’d wait for me,” Mr. Rayborne said, “but I’ve sworn, and I’ll keep my vow, so help me God.”

He did not know that he had prayed and that God was helping him as he went to that midnight interview with Tom Hardy. There was an earnest discussion carried on in low tones lest the sleeping girls should be wakened. Then the discussion became more spirited, and angry words passed on Mr. Rayborne’s side. Tom always kept his temper, but was in deadly earnest and nothing could move him. He had no sentimental feelings, he said, with regard to a white faced, blue eyed girl, whom neither of them had either seen or heard of before, and did not propose to let a fortune slip through his fingers on her account. He had made inquiries and there had seldom been a richer party leaving the valley than was to leave on the morrow. If Mr. Rayborne did not choose to join him he would go alone.

“And if you do,” Mr. Rayborne replied, “by the old Harry I’ll circumvent you if I can, and if I can’t and you succeed I’ll give both of us up to justice and end this accursed life into which I allowed you to lead me.”

Tom laughed and replied, “I have no fear of that. You like your good name and your liberty too well to be willing to spend the rest of your days behind prison walls, an object of greater contempt because you have stood so high in the community, trusted and respected by everyone; and then there is Inez. Would you voluntarily ruin her life with a knowledge of her father’s shame?”

Tom knew what cords to touch to make the man like clay in his hands. For once, however, he had gone too far. The white faced, blue eyed girl, as Tom designated Fanny, was completing the work which Mr. Rayborne had for some time been agitating. She was Inez’s friend. She had been his guest. She trusted him, and she should not be harmed. But how to hinder it was a question which he revolved over and over again in his mind as, after leaving Tom, he sat by his window, suffering all the horrors of remorse, and once burying his face in his hands he cried, “God help me. He heard the thief on the cross; maybe he will hear me who am worse than that thief.”

The early morning was breaking in the east and on the mountains there was a glow of sunrise. Tom was up and Inez, too, busy with breakfast as the stage for Clark’s passed at a comparatively early hour. Mr. Rayborne had not been in bed at all and looked white and tired as he went out to the bench where he made his ablutions. Tom was there, trying to force down a feeling which was warning him of danger. Still he had no idea of giving up his enterprise. It had been planned for days in every particular, and he would not abandon it now. He would rather have Mr. Rayborne with him, if he could, although he was getting a little clumsy and sometimes handicapped his more agile companion with his deliberation. If he would not go, then Tom would go alone,—he was resolved on that,—and said so to Mr. Rayborne when they met by the rude washstand.

He had no fear of being circumvented by his colleague, and bidding him good-bye, kissed Inez, who came to the door just as his conversation with her father ended, and went down the hill whistling “The girl I left behind me,” while Mr. Rayborne looked after him with a feeling of pain and apprehension.

“I have sown the wind and am reaping the whirlwind, and I wish I were dead,” he thought. Then he repeated a name which only the winds heard. “What would he say, and he trusted me so fully. I am glad he don’t know. It would kill him. Nobody knows, but God and Tom. I am glad God knows; it seems as if he would show me some way to stop it.”

Just then Inez came to tell him that breakfast was ready, and bathing his hot face and eyes again in the cold water which trickled in a little stream down from the hills, he put on as cheerful a face as possible and went in to meet Fanny just coming downstairs with something in her smile which made him think again of the withered rose leaves and a summer he would have given much to recall.