Dawn of the Morning. Grace Livingston Hill
married at your age, and you will soon be a lovely woman. I want you for my friend. Are you not willing?"
"I don't know," said the girl bluntly, looking troubled. "I should have to think about it, and I don't see why I should. I shall be here a whole year yet, and I shall never see you. I wish I could stay here always," she ended passionately. "I never want to go home."
"Perhaps you will not need to go there," he said insinuatingly, wondering how it was she was so different from other girls. She did not seem to understand coquetry. Her eyes met his now in mild question.
"You may marry and have a home of your own," he answered her unspoken question. A startled expression came into her eyes.
"Oh, no," she said quickly; "I don't think that will ever happen. I don't want that to happen;" and she drew away from him as if the thought frightened her. "Married people are not happy."
"Nonsense!" said the young man gayly. He had planted the seed in what looked like fallow ground, and perhaps one day it would blossom for him. "There are plenty of happy married people. I've a good old father and mother who just worship each other. They've been happy as clams all their lives, and I know a great many more.
"My father and mother were not happy," said Dawn gravely. "Friend Ruth and Friend Isaac do not seem to be very happy either, though of course this isn't a real home. But they are never cross," she added in conscientious explanation.
"If you were married, you could have a real home of your own, and have things just as you wanted them," the young man remarked cunningly.
"That would be nice," said the girl thoughtfully. "I should like that part, but I think I would like it better without being married. There are father and Friend Ruth looking for us. Let us hurry."
"But you have not told me whether you will let me be your friend," he said, detaining her under a great elm tree, and looking off toward the river, as if he were still watching the steamer. "If you will let me be your friend, I will get permission to come and see you now and then, and I will bring you a box of sweets. You will like that, won't you? All girls are fond of sweets."
"I don't know," answered Dawn slowly, looking at him with troubled eyes, and wondering why it was that his eyes reminded her of a fish.
"The other girls would like the sweets," he suggested.
"Could I give them away?" she asked with a flash of interest.
"You may do anything you like with them," he responded eagerly. "So it is all settled, then, and I may be your friend?"
"I don't know," said Dawn again. "I suppose it will have to be as father and Friend Ruth say."
"No need to consult them in the matter. Leave that to me. All I want is your consent. Remember I am going to visit you next month and bring you something nice."
But by this time the others had reached them.
"Charming view, Mr. Van Rensselaer. I had no idea you could see New York so plainly from this point," said the young man.
Dawn stepped over and stood beside Friend Ruth, looking thoughtfully down the river. She would like the box of confections well enough, for not many sweets were allowed at the school and they could have a treat down in the woods, beside the brook. But somehow she had a vague uneasiness about this friendship. She did not like the stranger's face.
Her father and the other man went away after the noonday meal. The stranger's name, she learned, was Harrington Winthrop, and that he was interested in a business enterprise with her father. The matter passed entirely from her mind, only, after that, when she sat alone to brood over her life, a new dream took the place of the old. Always there was a lovely home all her own, with comfortable chairs and plenty of books, and thin, sprigged china, such as had been her mother's. In this home she was sole mistress. Day by day she dreamed out the pretty rooms, and dwelt in them, and even occasionally let her imagination people them. The image of her beautiful mother hovered about that home and stayed, but there came into it no one to annoy or disturb.
When the two men settled themselves in the stage that night, the younger began to talk:
"Do you know you have a very beautiful daughter, Mr. Van Rensselaer?"
The father started from the reverie into which he had fallen. The look of the moonlight was reminding him of a night over sixteen years ago, when he and Mary had taken this same stage trip. Strange he could not get away from the thought of it. Ah, yes! it had been the look of his daughter that had brought back Mary's face, for the girl was grown to be the image of her mother, save for a certain sad flitting of severity. In the moonlight outside the coach he seemed to see again the sweet face in the coffin, and he compared it with the warm living face of the girl whom he had been to see that day. He knew that between his daughter and him was an impenetrable barrier that could never be removed, and the thought of it pierced his soul as it never had before. A great yearning and pity for his motherless, fatherless girl had come into his cold, empty heart as he had watched her move silently about. But ever present was the thought that he had no right—no right in her either, no matter how much he might try. No one would have suspected him of such feelings. He hid them deep under his grim and brilliant exterior, sternly self-contained in any situation. But now, in the half-darkness, a new thought came into his mind, and he started and gave his attention to the words of his companion.
"Is she your only child?"
The question made him start again. There was a long pause, so long that Harrington Winthrop thought he had not been heard; then a husky voice answered out of the shadows of the coach:
"No, there was another—a little boy. He died soon after his mother."
Outside in the moonlight, the vision of a ruddy-haired boy rode in a wreath of mist. The words were the man's acknowledgment to the two who ever attended him now through life. He did not wish to give his confidence to this business companion.
"Ah! Then this beautiful young woman will likely be sole heir to the Van Rensselaer estate," said the young man to himself, rejoicing inwardly at the ease with which he was obtaining information.
There was silence in the coach while Winthrop pondered the great discovery he had made, and how he should act upon it.
But the elder man was lost in gloomy thoughts. He had a vague feeling that Mary, out there in the moonlight with her bright-haired boy, would hold him to account for the little girl she had loved and lost in life. A sudden glimpse into the future had been given him, partly by the young man's words, partly by the beauty of Dawn herself. She was blossoming into womanhood, and with that change would come new perplexities. She could not stay always at the school. Where in the world was there a place for his child? More and more he saw that the woman whom in the fierceness of his wrath he had selected to take the place of mother to the girl was both unable and unwilling to do so. He shrank from the time when his daughter would have to come home. As he thought of it, it seemed an impossible situation to have her there; it would be almost like having Mary in the flesh to live with them, with reproachful eyes ever upon their smallest acts. At that moment it came to him that he was enduring the torments of a lost soul, his conscience having sat in judgment and condemned him.
The stage-coach rumbled on, stopping now and again through the night for a change of horses, and the two who sat within its gloomy depths said little to each other, yet slept not, for one was musing on the evil of the past and its results, while the other was plotting evil for the future.
CHAPTER III
Harrington Winthrop kept his promise about the sweets. Five times during the winter that followed his first visit with Mr. Van Rensselaer, he invented some excuse to visit Dawn.
The first time he came, he found her in the maple grove behind the pasture, with a group of other girls, all decked in autumn leaves and playing out some story that Dawn had read.
He persuaded her to walk a little way into