The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

When the stage disappeared from her sight Inez was standing as motionless as a statue, with a look in her eyes which made Tom half afraid to go near her.

“Inez,” he said, at last, as she did not move. “Inez, shall we go now?”

“Bring up the mare,” was her answer.

He brought her, and pointing to the stump of a tree near by Inez continued, “Take her there.”

He took her there, and held out his hand to help Inez mount. She motioned him aside and seated herself in the saddle, which did not inconvenience her at all, as she was accustomed to it. She was shaking like a leaf, but did not know it or feel any fatigue as she started on the road, followed by Tom and Nero. The latter alone seemed to have any life in him. He was glad to go home and showed his gladness by barking and jumping alternately at Inez and the mare. At last, as no attention was paid to him, it seemed to occur to his canine sagacity that something was wrong and had been all the time, and he, too, subsided into silence and trotted demurely by Inez’s side. Once when a feeling of dizziness came over her, making her sway in the saddle, Tom, whose eyes were constantly upon her, put his arm upon her waist to steady her. Recoiling from him as from a viper she said, “Don’t touch me, Tom Hardy, nor speak to me until this mood is past. Your revolver is in my pocket. Father says there is murder in my blood, and I might kill you.”

Tom fell back behind her, while she straightened herself and sat erect as an Indian, but made no effort to guide the horse, who took her own gait, a rather slow one, with which Tom could easily keep pace. What his thoughts were during that long walk it were difficult to guess. His hands were in his pockets and his head was down, hiding his face from Inez, who glanced at him once as the mare stopped a moment under the shade of a tree and he passed on in advance. If, as her father had said, there was murder in her blood, it was boiling now and had been since she bounded from the coach.

“I could rid the world of him so easily,” she thought, and her hand went into her pocket, but with a sob which seemed to rend her heart in two, she drew it back, and whispered, “I have loved him so much. I cannot harm him now.”

They had reached a point from which the cottage could be seen, with her father on the piazza looking in their direction. At sight of him Tom turned to Inez and said, “You are not to despise your father as you do me. I led him into it. I am to blame.”

Inez made no answer, but her face softened a little; then hardened again when, as she drew near the cottage, she saw her father coming to meet her. He had felt all the morning that the crisis he had so long expected was close at hand. The net of sin he had woven was closing round him and, but for his daughter, who believed in him so fully, he did not care how soon it enfolded him and he stood unmasked before the world which now respected him so highly.

The reader has, of course, long suspected that Mr. Rayborne and Long John and Mark Hilton were one. How he came to be what he was he could scarcely tell. He had loved Helen Tracy devotedly. He sometimes thought he loved her still in spite of the bitterness which had sprung up between them, he hardly knew how or why, as he looked back upon it. She had thought herself safe with him because he knew the worst there was of her. But because he knew it he was, after the first few months of feverish adoration were over, more on the alert, perhaps, than he should have been. He did not trust her and she knew it and grew restive under his watchful surveillance. He had no right to distrust her,—no right to be jealous,—no right to criticise her actions, and because he did, she, in a spirit of retaliation, taunted him with his birth and position and poverty, until he could endure it no longer and left her, half resolving, before a week was passed, to go back, for his little baby daughter had, if possible, a stronger hold upon him than her mother. Then his pride came up and he said, “I’ll stay away till she sends for me. She knows where I am.” But she did not send, and from some source he heard she was getting a divorce. This hurt him more than all the hard words she had ever said to him, as it cut him off from her forever. But there was still the baby. “For her sake I’ll be a man and some day I’ll go to her and tell her I am her father,” he thought.