CHAPTER X.

How weird the place looked, how gaunt and bare the great oak-trees looked, looming up darkly against the moonlit sky! The dead leaves rustled across her path as she crept around to the rear door.

She looked up at her mother's window, and another great chill crept over her. All was dark there. It had always been her mother's custom to place her lamp on the broad window-sill at night. Many a time it had been her beacon-light in cutting across lots from the station on evenings when she had been detained by her work. How strange it was that the light was not in the window to-night!

"Mother is not expecting me to-night," she said to herself, "that is the reason it is not there."

But ah, how she missed it! How her heart had yearned to behold it, with a yearning so great that it had been the most intense pain. She lifted the latch and entered tremblingly, hesitatingly. It had been over two months since her mother had heard from her.[41] How had her patient, suffering mother lived through it?

As she crossed the hall she heard the sound of Mrs. Deering's voice in a sharp, high key. Perhaps the horrible nephew was with her. She paused in a paroxysm of terror. She was talking to her husband, scolding him, rather.

"It isn't my fault that we lost the fortune," he was answering her meekly. "You brought your nephew out of the asylum too soon. You knew he would not be here a fortnight before he would do some terrible deed—burn the house down over our heads, or kill himself when the attendant was not watching, or some other horrible deed of that kind. When he did succeed in mutilating himself before any of us was aware of it, instead of sending him back to the asylum, to be cared for, you kept him here under lock and key thinking to cure him yourself in a couple of months or so."

"Ah!" thought Ida May, leaning faint and dizzy against the wall, "now I understand why Mrs. Deering consented to let me go away. Anything to get me out of the house while she was curing the insane nephew whom she had vowed I must wed."

The next words, while they shocked her inexpressively, lifted a world of woe from her heart.

"Well, despite our watchfulness, he succeeded in killing himself at last; so there's the end of it. The fortune is lost, and there's no use in raving over it, and in venting your bitter wrath upon everything and every one that comes within your range."

Mrs. Deering's anger was so great that she could not utter a word. She flung open the door and dashed into the hall. The very first object that met her gaze was[42] the cowering little figure leaning against the balustrade.

"You!" she cried, quite as soon as she could catch her breath. "How dare you come here, Ida May, you wicked girl! I am amazed that you have the effrontery to face honest people after what you have done! We read all about it in the newspapers—how you ran away from Newport with a gay, dashing fellow who soon after deserted you. Don't attempt to tell me anything about it. I won't listen to a word. Get out of this house as quick as you can! Go, before I bid the servants throw you from the house!"

"But my mother! Surely you will let me see my mother!" sobbed the girl, piteously. "The whole wide world may be against me, but she will believe me guiltless! Please let me see her."

A laugh that was horrible to hear broke from Mrs. Deering's thin lips.

"Your mother!" she sneered; "much you cared about her, or how your doings affected her. That article in the newspapers did the work, as you might have known it would. I carried the paper to her myself, and when she read it she fell to the floor with a bitter cry, and she never spoke again. It was her death-warrant!"

For one moment the girl looked at the woman with frightened eyes, as though she could not quite comprehend the full import of what the woman was saying.

"It killed your mother!" she repeated pitilessly. "You might have known it would. She died of a broken heart!"

A long, low moan came from the girl's lips. The awful despair in the dark eyes would have touched any other heart, even though it were made of stone; but[43] in Mrs. Deering's heart there was neither pity nor mercy.

"Go!" she repeated, threateningly, "and do not dare to ever darken my door again!"

"Will you tell me where you have buried my poor mother?" moaned Ida May, with bitter anguish.

"In the lot where the poor of the village are put," she answered, unfeelingly. "We had to have a mark put over her. You can easily find it. It's to the left-hand corner, the last one on the row. It would be better for you, you shameless girl, if you were lying beside her rather than sink to the lowest depths of the road you are traveling. Go—go at once!"

With trembling feet she crept down the broad path and out of the gate. She was drenched to the skin, and the chill October winds pierced through her thin wet clothes like the sharp cut of a knife. It did not matter much; nothing mattered for her any more. She was going to find her mother's grave, kneel down beside it, lay her tired head on the little green mound, and wait there for death to come to her, for surely God would grant her prayer and in pity reach out His hand to her and take her home. There would be a home there where her mother was, even if all other doors were closed to her.

She had little difficulty in finding the place—a small inclosure in the rear of the old church that had fallen into decay and crumbling ruins many years ago—and by the blinding flashes of lightning, she found the grave of her mother—her poor, suffering mother, the only being who had ever loved her in the great, cold, desolate earth.

"Mother," she sobbed, laying her face on the cold,[44] wet leaves that covered the mound, "mother, I have come to you to die. The world has gone all wrong with me. I never meant to go wrong. I do not know how it happened. Other young girls have married the lovers whom they thought God had sent to them, and lived happy enough lives. I built such glorious air-castles of the home I should have, the handsome, strong young husband to love and to labor for me, and how you should live with me, mother, never having to work any more. But oh, mother, all my plans went wrong! I don't know why."

Ida May crouched there among the sleeping dead, her brain in a whirl; and the long night wore on. The storm subsided, the wind died away over the tossing trees and the far-off hills, and the rain ceased. Morning broke faint and gray in the eastern sky, and the flecks of crimson along the horizon presaged a bright and gladsome day.

The station-agent, hurrying along to his duties at that early hour, was startled to see a dark figure lying among the graves. In a moment he was bending over the prostrate form. He could not distinguish in the dim light whose grave it was upon which the poor creature was lying, but as he lifted the slender figure, and the faint, early light fell upon the white, beautiful young face, he started back with an exclamation of horror.

"Great God! it is little Ida May!"

For an instant he was incapable of action, his surprise was so intense.

"Dead!" he muttered, cold drops of perspiration standing out like beads on his perturbed brow.[45] "Little Ida May dead on her mother's grave! God, how pitiful! She was so young to die!"

Then he knelt down beside her in the thick, wet grass, and placed his hand over her heart in the wild hope that a spark of life might yet be there.