Tracy Park: A Novel

by Mary Jane Holmes

CHAPTER LI.

UNDER THE PINES WITH HAROLD.

It seemed to Harold that it had been a thousand years since he had left Shannondale, so much had come into and so much had gone out of his life since he said good-bye to the girl he loved and to the girl who loved him. One was dead, and he had only come in time to help lay her in her grave; while the other, the girl he loved, was, some might think, farther removed from him than death itself could have removed her.

But Harold did not feel so. He had faith in Jerrie—that she would not change, though there had been a time during the first homesick weeks in Tacoma, when, knowing from his grandmother of her convalescence, and still hearing from her no explanation with regard to the diamonds, which he knew a few still suspected him of having taken, in his impatience and humiliation he had cried out, 'Jerrie has forgotten. She is not standing by me, forever and ever, amen, as she once promised to do.' But this feeling quickly passed, and there came a day when he read the judge's letter in the privacy of his room at the Tacoma, and rejoiced with an exceeding great joy for Jerrie, whose house and birthright had been so strangely restored. He never doubted the story for a moment, but felt rather as if he had known it always, and wondered how any one could have imagined for a moment that blue-eyed, golden-haired Jerrie was the child of the dark, coarse looking woman found dead beside her. 'I am so glad for Jerrie,' he said, without a thought that her relations to himself would in any way be changed.

Once, when she had told him of the fancies which haunted her so often, he had put them from him with a fear that, were they true, Jerrie would be lost to him forever. But he had no such misgivings now; and when Jerrie's letter came, urging his return, both for her own sake and Maude's, he wrote a few hurried lines to her, telling her how glad he was for her, and of his intention to start for the East as soon as possible. 'To-morrow, perhaps,' he wrote, 'in which case I may be there before this letter reaches you, for the mails are sometimes slow, and the judge's communication was overdue three or four days.'

Starting the second day after his letter, Harold travelled day and night, while something seemed beckoning him on—Maude's thin, white face, and Jerrie's, too; and when, between St. Paul and Chicago, there came a detention from a freight car off the track, he felt that he must fly, so sure was he that he was wanted and anxiously looked for at Tracy Park, where at that very time Maude was dying. The next afternoon he left Chicago, and with no further accident reached Shannondale just as the long procession was winding its way to the cemetery.

He had heard from an acquaintance in Springfield that Maude was dead, and of her request that he should be one of the pall-bearers, together with Dick, and Fred, and Billy. 'And I will do it yet,' he said, with a throb of pain, as he thought of the little girl who had died believing that he loved her. Once or twice he had resolved to write and tell her as carefully as possible of her mistake, but as often had changed his mind, thinking to wait until she was better; and now she was dead, and the chance for explanation gone forever; but he would, if possible, carry out the wish she had expressed with regard to himself.

Striking into the fields from the station, he reached the cemetery in time to take his place by Billy and carry poor little Maude to her last resting place; and then he looked for Jerrie, and felt an indefinable thrill when he saw her on her father's arm, and began to realize that she was Jerrie Tracy. But all that was over now; he had talked with her face to face, and had found her the Jerrie he had always known, and he was going to see her in her own home, at Tracy Park—the daughter of the house, the heiress of Arthur Tracy, and of more than two millions, it was said—for, despite Frank's extravagance, all of which Arthur had met without a protest, his money had accumulated rapidly, so that he was a much richer man now, than when he first came home from Europe.

Harold found the family at dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Tracy and Tom in the dining-room, and Arthur and Jerrie in the Gretchen room, to which he was taken at once.

'Come in—come in, my boy. You are just in time for dessert,' Arthur said, rising with alacrity and going forward to meet him; while Jerrie, too, arose and took his hand, and made him sit by her, and questioned him on his journey, and helped him to the fairest peach and the finest bunch of grapes, and, without seeming to do so, examined him from head to foot, and thought how handsome and grand he was, and felt sure that her father thought so too.