The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

Tom didn’t know, and his face was very grave as he looked at his old comrade, who was so surely dying. Spring came early that year and as soon as it was at all practicable Tom took Mark by easy stages to the cottage. He had been there himself to see that it was made ready for the sick man and had passed a most uncomfortable time. He was neither a coward, nor superstitious, but during the three days and nights he spent alone in the cottage he suffered what he called the tortures of the damned. He heard or saw Inez everywhere. Saw her flitting in and out from room to room; heard her singing as she used to sing in her glad girlhood, and felt her kisses on his cheeks just as he felt them on the night of their betrothal. They were real kisses then which made his pulse beat with ecstasy; they were shadowy kisses now, which burned where they touched him, while his lips were purple with cold. Once he called to her, “Inez, Inez, do you know I am here?”

Then in his disordered imagination he fancied he heard again the shriek which had curdled his blood when she sprang over the wheel and confronted him.

“I am not afraid,” he said to himself, “but I wish Mark was here, or even Nero. I ought to have brought the dog, although he does not take to me as he used to do. I believe he knows something. Lucky he can’t talk.”

A week later Mark was there in the old familiar place, where everything spoke to him of Inez. He had no such fancies as Tom, and took Inez’s room for his own, sleeping in her bed, sitting in her chair by the window watching the light of the first summer days as it crept over the mountains, and knowing it was for the last time. Once he went to the closet where Inez’s dresses were hung, and taking them down looked at them with eyes, which could not shed a tear. On the one she wore on the day of the hold-up he gazed the longest. It was the last in which he had ever seen her and he recalled just how she looked in it when he helped her to a seat by the driver and remembered with a pang her soiled, crumpled condition when she came back with a look on her face he would never forget. There was a bit of dry mud still clinging to the skirt and he brushed it off carefully and shook from the dress every particle of soil and dirt and hung it away with the other gowns, leaving the closet door open so that from his bed where he lay a good part of the time he could see them and feel through them a nearness to Inez.

Everything he could do for him Tom did, and the two men lived alone through the months of May and June, when the tourist season commenced and the valley was again full of life and stir, and pilgrimages were made to Inez’s grave as to the grave of a saint. It was covered with flowers and some of these Mark pressed and sent to Fanny, who wrote to him every week and whose letters helped to prolong his life. But like Inez, he had lost his grip, and early in July he died quietly, like going to sleep, and there were three graves on the hill behind the cottage.

Tom was alone, with only Nero for company. Since the hold-up he had fancied that the dog avoided him. He had been much in Inez’s room during her illness and constantly with Mark until he died. He had stood by Inez’s grave when she was lowered into it and had lain by it for days after as if watching for her reappearance. And now he and Tom stood by Mark’s grave, the only mourners there, and Tom’s hand rested on Nero’s head as if asking for sympathy, which the sagacious animal gave. He seemed to know they were alone, and when the burial, which took place at sunset, was over and the people gone and Tom sat in the gathering twilight with his head upon a table and his hand hanging at his side, Nero crept to his feet, licking his hand and rubbing against him as he had not done in a year. Then Tom cried, as he said, “Bless you, Nero; if you have forgiven me I am not quite alone in the world. We will stick together, old fellow, but not here. You may like to sit by their graves, wondering why they don’t come back, but I can’t endure it. I am going away and you are going with me,—miles and miles away, old chap, where it will not be as lonesome as it is here, and where one at least will be glad to see me.”

A letter received by Mark from Fanny a few days before he died had decided Tom upon his future, and three weeks later, when a carriage full of tourists came from a hotel to see the grave of the girl who was always spoken of as “the heroine of the valley,” the cottage was closed and Tom was gone.

CHAPTER XVII.
IN RIDGEFIELD.

Fanny and Roy had been married amid flowers and music and crowds of people and the grand event chronicled in the Boston and New York papers. That the bride’s own father was living was not mentioned. The reporters had not gotten upon that item of gossip and Helen did not enlighten them. Fanny was the only daughter of Judge and Mrs. Prescott, and when she read one of the lengthy articles describing the wedding and her dress and her mother’s dress and dwelling at length upon the position and wealth of the Tracys and Prescotts and Masons she rebelled against it almost as hotly as years before Uncle Zach had rebelled against the advertisement her father had written of the Prospect House.

“I wish I had kept my own name, or taken it when I knew who I was. I am not Fanny Prescott,” she said, hotly, while Roy rejoined, “Of course not. You are Fanny Mason, my wife.”