Alfred Rice - An Oregon Girl - A Tale of American Life in the New West

“Away with him!” repeated Mr. Harris, gesticulating with his arms wildly.

The two lackeys advanced, encouraged no doubt by the assurance of Sam’s assistance.

They were brought to an abrupt halt by Corway, who stepped in front of them and declared with heat, “Stand back! I demand an explanation!”

In a low, hoarse voice that quivered with the intensity of his passion, with ghastly white face, and glittering eyes that flashed the lie to his forced calmness, Thorpe replied: “You shall have it – blackguard, liar, and coward!” With which he struck Corway on the mouth with the back of his closed hand.

Corway passionately rushed at him and attempted to strike, but Mr. Harris sprang between them and caught his upraised arm, and with the help of Sam, separated them.

When Sam sprang down the steps to his uncle’s assistance, Virginia was left standing on the piazza watching the progress of the quarrel with intense interest and also evidently alarmed at the violent passion her brother displayed.

With a woman’s intuition, she surmised that Rutley had worked on John’s jealous susceptibilities with merciless finesse.

Rutley, who was watching her, noted her alarmed expression, and feeling it to be a sign of weakening purpose, stepped over and stood beside her, so silently that she was quite unaware of his presence.

“It’s a horrible wrong,” she muttered.

The words were caught by Rutley, and he whispered, so close as to startle her, “Remember the wrong Corway has done you.”

The excited men barely had been separated when Corway spoke with passionate emphasis, “You shall hear from me.”

“Quite soon enough for your courage,” sneered Thorpe.

“No, no, my brother shall not fight with him!” exclaimed Virginia, appalled at the magnitude the quarrel had assumed.

Swiftly she glanced at Rutley and said with tremulous lips: “What have you told him to cause such fearful passion?”

“What you bade me,” he coolly replied, and with a gloating smile on his lips, added: “The result is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“Not so terrible,” she gasped. “There must be some awful mistake.”

And Rutley’s smile deepened, but as he looked into her horrified eyes and blanched face, and noted the change from vengeance to anxiety and consternation fast coming over her, he knew but too well when the change was complete, in a moment of frenzied zeal to explain and save her brother, she, womanlike, was likely to undo and wreck all his work.

He realized that the moment was fraught with the gravest danger to his plans and person, and he acted quickly, but with the utmost coolness.

Her hand held straight down by her side was closed tightly, expressive of immediate and determined action.

He gripped her wrist. It hurt her. The action concealed from others by the folds of her dress, succeeded in diverting her attention, and he followed it up by whispering, so that she alone heard him, “Remember – the material you gave me; Corway has met his deserts and you are avenged!”

And then the voice of Constance cleft the air, in a wild, terrifying scream. “John, John! Save Dorothy! She’s adrift on the water.”

Her piercing cry freighted with a mother’s anguish, at once filled all who heard it with consternation, in the midst of which Mrs. Harris exclaimed, “Dear me, how dreadful it all is!”

All turned in the direction of the cry and almost immediately Constance, in an agony of despair, and deathly white, frantically rushed among them.

She looked appealingly from one to the other, her heart in her throat and pathos in her voice. “I heard her cry, ‘Mama! Papa! Help! Save me!’ Oh, will no one rescue my darling?”

“I’m off,” said Sam, in his short, sententious way, and rushed toward the river.

The sudden strain on her nerves was greater than Constance could bear.

Naturally of a weak constitution, the ordeal was overpowering; the mother’s affection, forming a magnetic part of her heart, leapt out to her child and left her numb and cold almost unto death, and then her limbs trembled, and with Sam’s words ringing in her ears, down she sank, a senseless being.

Virginia’s consternation was complete. She rushed down the steps, knelt beside her prostrate form, thrust her arm lovingly under her head and sobbed: “Constance! Dear Constance! Don’t give way so. Dorothy will be found.”

When Constance revived, she found herself in a quiet room remote from noise or intrusion, whither she had been tenderly carried. Virginia was with her, and with the aid of a professional nurse, who lived near by and was called in by Mrs. Harris, had been successful in restoring her to consciousness.

The reception was still swinging along at its full height, and while a few of the guests had heard in an indifferent way of some trouble on the lawn, the reports were so varied and coupled with the fact that no names were obtainable to give the reports zest, the incident was soon forgotten, and by the great mass of the guests was not even heard of.

It was a sore spot in her breast that throbbed and beat heavily upon the door of its prison as later she was being driven home in her carriage. Not a word from John to soothe the aching void. She did not even inquire about him, contenting herself with the simple assurance that he was doing his best to find Dorothy.

For two days the strain was upon her, breaking down by its heart violence her constitution, already frail to the declining point. Scarcely more than a year had passed since Constance had been stricken down with typhoid fever of a malignant type.

She had never regained her usual health and strength, and though the family physician had pronounced her recovery complete, there were those of her friends who, with bated breath, questioned his conclusion and predicted an after effect which in time would develop some strange and serious ailment.

Telephone inquiries regarding the lost child began to come in the second day, but none of any comfort to the distracted mother.

Not one intimation of her husband’s quarrel with Corway had reached her. Mrs. Harris had been careful, upon Constance’s recovery at the reception, not to breathe a word, or to allow, where she could control it, the faintest whisper likely to arouse her suspicion.

And as for Hazel, she had not clearly understood Mr. Thorpe’s drift when he assaulted Corway. Nevertheless, she somehow had a vague idea that Constance was the cause; but being a discreet young woman, she had refrained from mentioning anything about it to her, thus leaving Constance completely ignorant of the true cause of John Thorpe’s absence from home.

Perhaps if she had not been so absorbed in the recovery of Dorothy, her attention would have been arrested on perusing one of the daily papers by an ambiguous paragraph referring to a choice morsel of scandal on the “tapis” in a prominent family, and which was likely to terminate in a tragedy. It was a society paragraph separate from the report of the probable drowning of the child, Dorothy Thorpe. Several personal acquaintances had become aware, through the crafty Rutley, of a serious difference having arisen between John Thorpe and his beautiful wife, and some of these personal acquaintances, with significant looks, at once connected it with the mysterious disappearance of the child.

The fact that none of the fashionable set had visited her since the reception did not suggest a thought of being shunned. And so she waited for news of her child – waited with heart leaden with the chill of hope deferred – waited in momentary expectation of the home-coming of John.

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