Tracy Park: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

'Tom Tracy! If you mean to insinuate a thing which is not good and pure against Gretchen, I'll never speak to you as long as I live! Take back what you said about Mr. Arthur's casting her off! She was his wife, and you know it? Dead, perhaps—I think she is; but she was his wife—his true and lawful wife; and—I—sometimes—'

She could not add 'think she was my mother,' for the words stuck in her throat, where her heart seemed to be beating wildly and choking her utterance.

'Why, Jerrie,' Tom said, startled at her excited appearance, and anxious to appease her, 'what can ail you? I hardly know what I said, and if I have offended you, I am sorry, I know nothing of Gretchen; her face is a good one and a pretty one, and Maude says you look like her; though I don't see it, for I think you far prettier than she. Perhaps she was my uncle's wife—I guess she was: but that does not injure my prospects, for of course she is dead, or she would have turned up before this time. We have nothing to fear from her.'

'She may have left a child. What then?' Jerrie asked, with as steady a voice as she could command.

'Pshaw! humbug!' Tom replied, with a laugh. 'That is impossible. A child would have been heard from before this time. There is no child; I'm sure I hope not, as that would seriously interfere with our prospects. Think of some one—say a young lady—walking in upon us some day and claiming to be Arthur Tracy's daughter!'

'What would you do?' Jerrie asked, in a tone of smothered excitement.

'I believe I'd kill her,' Tom said, laughingly, 'or marry her, if I had not already seen you. But don't worry about that. There is no child; there is nothing between us and a million, and you have only to appoint the day which will make me the happiest of men, and free you from a drudgery, which just to think of sets my teeth on edge. Will you name the day, Jerrie?'

If it had been possible for a look to have annihilated Tom, the scorn which blazed in Jerrie's eyes would have done so. To hear him talk as if the matter were settled and the money he was to inherit from his uncle could buy her made her blood boil, and seizing her poor parasol, still standing up so straight in the piny sand, she stepped backward from him and said, in a mocking voice:

'Thank you, Tom, for the honor you would confer upon me, and which I must decline, for I would rather wash grandma's stockings all my life, and Harold's overalls, too, than marry a man for money.'

'Jerrie, oh, Jerrie, you don't mean it! You do not refuse me!' Tom cried, in alarm, stretching out his arm to reach her but touching only the parasol, to which he clung desperately as a drowning man to a straw.