"Yes, we've had bad luck," said Mr. Wright, "we mostly have had all kind of misfortunes; but the Lord has blessed that little girl to us, for all."
That firmness of will, that selfishness of purpose, which is apt to accompany the intense pride and jealousy of a disposition like Dr. Carollyn's, was already working out the problem in his mind of how he was to separate his child from these associations in which she had grown up. This very evening, while moved to agony and remorse keen as that he felt the first day of his desolation, and amid the very gratitude the recital of these kind-hearted people awakened, he was conscious of regret that the ties between them and his should be so strong, and of a resolve that they must be severed. Yet he was far too generous and noble to wish to wrong the feelings of any; he did not intend to hint at any abrupt or long-continued separation; he wished to reward, as far as money could, the care and expense his child had been to these adopted relatives, to lighten the burden of their poverty, while into the heart of his daughter he thought to win his way gradually, and when he once had her to himself, he feared not but that the awakening of dormant tastes, the bewitching influences of ease and refinement, would complete the work of alienation. The proud love of his passionate nature, so long doomed to suspense and solitude, fixed now upon his child, as it had once fixed on the orphan Annie St. John, with the wish to absorb and possess its object utterly. Could he then brook a rival at the very onset?—that rival a lover, and a man of the stamp of Nat Wolfe? He had other dreams for this beautiful girl—"sole daughter of his house and heart"—and the hunter, walking his impatient beat a mile away, knew it as well as himself—knew it better, for Dr. Carollyn had not yet realized the actualities of the case. If he took Elizabeth away with him to his eastern home, that, of course, would be the end of any incipient fancy which might be growing in her mind for her dashing preserver.
Every glance of Dr. Carollyn's at the ungainly calico frock which his daughter wore, every illiterate expression of her friends, grated upon his feelings. It was to him the most powerful evidence of the deadly nature of the blow he had struck into the heart of his sensitive, confiding wife, that she had sternly resolved to leave her little one with such people, rather than send her to him—"cruel and cold strangers," she had said, but she had meant him, or, at least when she felt that her own protection could no longer be exercised over their babe, she would have consigned it to him. He dared not linger upon the history of that past time—but now, if his wife could look from the heaven where she was sheltered from the cruelties of earth, she should see that the tenderness in which he should wrap their child from every breath of any chilling care or sorrow, would satisfy her yet.
As for Elizabeth, she was absorbed in conjecturing what the difficulty could have been which alienated such a mother from such a father in the very honeymoon of their wedded youth—of this she was thinking far more than of the change in her own prospects.
CHAPTER VIII.
FIRE IN THE FOREST.
What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys.
Locksley Hall.
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire!
The Bells.
Nat Wolfe and Buckskin Joe were traversing a wild pine forest on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. As they came out on a projecting ledge of rock from which they had a view of the mountain and plain beneath them, they turned to look back over the ground they had passed. Through the clear, bracing September air they distinctly saw where the little cluster of cabins was gathered about Pike's Peak, twenty miles away, by the smoke of the chimneys hovering over the settlement.