“The walls of your flimsy social fortification will fall around you at my touch. Tell me, where have you hidden our child—your child, Margaret Cranstoun! My child!” And a new fear had entered into the mother’s soul, all bereft of a husband’s love.
The Senator’s appeal was the hoarse, pleading cry of a last despair, and in it were the echoes of the last agony of a desperate man. There before him, still defiant, stood the wife of his youth, glowing in her autumn beauty, and at the last, madly desired by the revenge of an outraged love.
All the triumphs of his life were only Dead Sea fruit, apples of Sodom. For he knew that the proud, silent lips before him might tell the story of a father’s shame to that unknown girl whose lovely face now haunted him. The girl whose picture still rested on the heart of the yet unbought Vreeland. For the schemer had carefully reclaimed his property.
“The past is sealed. You shall never hear her call you father. Mine she is forever, brought forth in tears, nurtured in sorrow and mine alone,” defiantly cried Elaine. “I have bought my freedom, with all these long and lonely years, and it is Nature’s revolt against the recreated passion of your youth.
“Tell me,” she sternly said, “had you found me poor, faded, broken, in obscurity, would you have then begged to atone?” She faced him like a tigress.
His quivering lips refused to lie, but he drew nearer to her menacingly. “Stand off!” she panted. “Your ownership is forfeit. The brute tyranny of marriage as made by man; you can not reforge the chain I wore once. Every fiber of my flesh revolts against your touch. And she—the pure, the innocent, you shall never see. I swear it!” He had thus raged at her side in brutal menaces.
“I go now to Alynton. They shall know whom they trust with secrets that would shake a nation,” the passion-blinded man growled, forgetting that he had dropped to the mere bully. But the victorious woman laughed him to scorn.
“I hold them, you and your masters, in the hollow of my hand,” the defiant woman said. “At bay, a true woman fears nothing. Your ruin and public shame await you. I will deal with them alone.” And so he had failed.
When James Garston was gone, his mad thoughts goading him on to the final purchase of Vreeland as the seal of his revenge, the exhausted woman had sought her room. “I must telegraph for Judge Endicott,” she muttered. “This paper must be placed where neither murder nor millions can reach it.” She slowly examined the dangerous envelope, and then her stricken heart stopped beating as the blank paper fluttered down at her feet. Gone—when—where—how? A thousand times she had felt it there resting on a heart now thrilled with a loving hunger for the beautiful girl who was far away over the yeasty Atlantic surges, with the one woman whom she could trust in life and death, Sara Conyers.
She had hardly felt the clasp of her daughter’s loving arms before fate sundered them. Fate and fear had parted them.