"How does a woman love? Once, no more,
Though life forever its loss deplore;
Deep in sorrow, or want, or sin,
One king reigneth her heart within;
One alone by night and day
Moves her spirit to curse or pray."
—Rose Terry Cooke.
An hour's frantic search convinced Senator Winans that his daughter was not in the immense ballroom, and inquiry among the door-keepers brought to light something very startling.
A young man had left the ballroom an hour before, carrying an unconscious girl in his arms.
He had told the doorkeeper that she was his sister, that she had fainted in the crowd, and that he was going to put her in his carriage, and take her home.
When the man described the beauty of the unconscious girl, the soft white silk gown, and the long golden curls, the agonized senator could no longer doubt that his darling had been kidnaped by some villain, and carried off to some terrible unknown fate.
It was terrible to think that such a thing could be in that gala scene among those thousands of joyous people, and in that blaze of light and splendor. It was like a sword in her father's heart.
His face grew ashen, his eyes blazed, and he swore the most terrible revenge on the fiend who had stolen Precious.
"Oh, my darling, my darling, this news will break her mother's heart!" he groaned.
"But she has another daughter left to comfort her," ventured the elegant young Englishman.
"Yes, we have Ethel. She is a good daughter, but Precious was our favorite, our darling."
"But why? Miss Winans is very charming," cried Lord Chester, a little jealous for the beautiful girl he admired so much.
"Yes, Ethel is charming, but so was my little Precious. She was charming and winsome, too, my youngest born, my darling, the idol of my heart!" groaned the senator, completely overcome by his trouble.
Lord Chester began to feel an eager curiosity over the missing girl. Was she, indeed, as lovely and winsome as her father declared? She must be if her charms exceeded Ethel's.
He held out a sympathetic hand to the stricken father.
"General, pray command my services in this sad affair to assist you in all possible ways," he exclaimed cordially.
"Thank you, Lord Chester, for we must begin to follow up the clews at once. But my heart bleeds for my wife. I fear this shock will almost kill her. My lord, if you will order my carriage, I will send her home with Ethel, telling her that perhaps Precious has somehow found her way home. Not a word of the truth yet. It must be broken to her later, and very gently. She must think that I am still searching here, while in fact I shall be on the track of the kidnaper. Oh, Heavens every moment is an agony, until I find my child again!"
And later on, when his wife and daughter were gone, and he was rolling in a cab to the office of a great detective, he confided to the young Englishman a brief page from his romantic earlier life.
"My only son, Earle, who is at present in Europe, was kidnaped by a lunatic when he was an infant, and it was over four years before we recovered him. He was in my care at the time, and I was blamed for his loss. My wife had brain fever, and almost died, and the pensive shade on her face now was left there by that early grief. Think what it would be to her now to lose Precious in the same terrible fashion. She is a noble Christian woman, but I fear that she would curse me and never forgive me if our darling daughter should be lost like that while in my care. Oh, why was I so careless? Why did I not remember that there are always human wolves watching—for prey?"
Mrs. Winans sobbed bitterly all the way home from the ball, but Ethel was too angry to offer one word of comfort.
Her father's praise of Precious rankled like a poisoned arrow in her heart.
"The most beautiful girl he ever saw! How dared he say it? I wonder if Lord Chester would say so, too, if he saw her? Would he like her blue eyes better than my dark ones? Would he think her golden curls prettier than my raven tresses? Woe be to her if he did, for now he is almost my declared lover, and if she won him from me I should be tempted to take a terrible revenge on both," she thought bitterly, forgetting that the deadliest revenge often recoils on the hand that deals the blow.
They passed into the broad hall, where they were met by Mrs. Winans' privileged attendant, Norah, who had nursed all her children.
"Norah! Norah! has Precious come home?" cried her mistress anxiously.
The woman stared in surprise at the question.
"No, madam, she is not here. I thought she was to come back with you! Why, what ails you that you look so pale and wild? Oh, she is fainting! Help! help! we must carry her to her room!"
They bore the limp figure upstairs, and laid it on the bed. Ethel knelt by her, weeping.
"Mamma, dear mamma, speak to me! Oh, Norah, why does she lie still so long? Is she dead?"
"No, it's only a swoon. I've brought her safely through many like it, poor dear. But tell me what has happened, Miss Ethel? Where is your father and your sister, my little nursling?"
Ethel told her briefly what had happened, adding:
"Papa sent us home and remained, to search for Precious."
"Heaven have mercy!" sobbed nurse Norah, then she busied herself about her mistress.
Ethel stood idly watching her, with dazed eyes, her head in a whirl. She was not thinking of her lost sister, nor her stricken mother. Her restless thoughts had gone back to her handsome English lover.
She was thinking:
"When mamma came upon us so suddenly he was about to make a declaration of his love. I saw it in his eyes, it was trembling on his lips; but mamma came between with the name of Precious—that name that always comes between me and everything! Was it an evil omen, I wonder, or will he tell me to-morrow that he loves me?"
"My hope was still in the shadow,
Hers lay in the sun:
I longed in vain: what she asked for
It straightway was done,
Once I staked all my heart's treasure,
We played—and she won!"
—Adelaide Procter.
In the gray dawn of the wild March morning Senator Winans came home alone, looking ten years older, the stamp of despair on his dark, handsome face.
He went at once to his wife, and found her lying awake in a fever of suspense and anxiety.
When she saw him enter alone she started up with a cry of keen despair:
"Precious! Oh, where is Precious?"
Her husband knelt by her side, clasped the feverish little hands, and kissed the woeful white face, all wet with tears, like a rain-drenched lily.
"Be brave, be patient, my dearest, for you must bear this cruel suspense yet a little longer," he sighed.
"Oh, Paul, you have not found her yet? Then she must be dead, our little darling!"
He had decided to tell her the truth. It would be better than the anguish of wretched uncertainty, so he broke it to her gently, the story of the golden-haired girl who had been carried out of the ballroom unconscious.
"It must have been our golden-haired darling. I believe she has been kidnaped for the sake of a ransom; so cheer up, my darling, for the wretches will not harm our pet; they will keep her safe and well to earn the reward they will expect to be offered in the morning papers. And I have attended to that already, Grace, for my advisers think it will be best to give great publicity to the affair, as in that case it may come to the knowledge of some persons who may be able to give us an unexpected clew. Oh, my wife; do not sob so bitterly. Our darling shall soon be found, I swear it," and for the sake of the anguish she saw in his eyes the poor mother fought with her sorrow, and tried to find a glimmer of light in the Cimmerian darkness.
But it was cruel, cruel, for the horror of the present was only augmented by the memory of the past. Her eldest born, her precious boy, had been stolen in his babyhood, and four years elapsed before he was recovered. It had taken all the strength of youth and hope to endure that cross. Now she was older, frailer, and she knew she could not bear another such agony and live.
But her husband's seeming hopefulness put a gleam of sunshine in her heart, and for his sake, because she loved him very dearly, she would not add to his remorseful grief by one reproachful word.
The morning papers in glaring black headlines chronicled the abduction of the senator's favorite daughter and the princely ransom he had offered for her restoration. Excitement ran high over the terrible sensation, and stories of the girl's wonderful grace and beauty passed from lip to lip. The studio of a famous artist who had but just completed the portrait of Precious for her father was thronged with gazers. He could not deny them, for it was hoped that familiarity with her looks might in some way help the search for the missing girl.
Among the first of the curious visitors to the studio was handsome Lord Chester.
The senator's earnest praises of his favorite child rang continuously in the young man's head.
His eager curiosity drove him to the studio of the famous artist, and when he stood at last before the full-length portrait he could not turn his eyes away; they lingered in rapture on the pictured loveliness of Precious Winans.
"Sweet face, swift eyes and gleaming
Sun-gifted rippling hair—
Lips like two rosebuds dreaming
In June's fruit-scented air:
Life when her spring days meet her,
Hope when her angels greet her,
Is not more calm—nor sweeter;
And love is not more fair.
"God bless your thoughts, my sweet one,
Whatever they may be!
Youth's life is but a fleet one,
Foam from an ebbing sea.
Time, tide, and fate o'erturn all,
Save one thing ever vernal,
Sweet love that lives eternal,
Life of eternity!"
To the day of his death Arthur, Lord Chester, carried this picture in his memory and his heart—this picture of a girl standing by a magnificent large mastiff with one tiny white hand holding his silver collar. Beneath her fairy feet was daisied grass, and her simple white gown and the broad straw hat she carried on her arm seemed to fit the spring-time that was imaged in the golden lengths of rippling hair. So she stood—"a sight to make an old man young"—Ethel's younger sister, the senator's favorite.
The words of a poet of his own fair land leaped to his lips:
"Sovereign lady in fair field
Myself for such a face had boldly died."
Later in the day he called at the Winans mansion, and Ethel received him alone. Her mamma was too ill and nervous to see any one.
Never had the queenly Ethel looked more charming. No shade of anxiety dimmed the dark radiance of her eyes. She had slept long and late, and when she awoke and heard that Precious was not yet found she laughed and said that she was sure that her sister had eloped with some handsome young man, and would be coming home in a few days from her bridal tour, with her husband, to ask papa's forgiveness.
And she repeated this to Lord Chester when he expressed solicitude over her sister's fate.
"I am not at all uneasy, my lord," she cried lightly; "I think it very likely that Precious has eloped with one of her tutors. Papa had several young men coming here to teach my sister music, and drawing, and dancing. Of course her French governess was always present. But she scarcely understood a word of English, so it was easy enough for one of them to make love to her if he wished, and Precious was just the kind of pretty, willful simpleton to fall in love with a nobody and marry him."
A keen, inexplicable pain tore the young man's heart at those words, and it seemed to him that Ethel's levity amounted to heartlessness. He looked gravely at her with his dark-gray eyes, and it seemed to him that there was something lacking in her beauty that he had not missed last night, but he did not realize as yet that the change was in himself.
He would have denied it if any one had taxed him with being in love with a girl whom he knew only by her portrait.
Only last night he had adored charming Ethel Winans. It was only her mother's interruption that had prevented him from laying his heart and title at her feet. The words had trembled on his lips while he looked at her with his heart in his eyes.
Why did he not speak to-day?
The opportunity was very favorable, for it was but seldom he could find the brilliant belle alone.
And Ethel's languid air, just touched with the softness of love, was very inviting. It was just the gentle mood in which a girl is likely to accept a proposal.
But he did not propose, although he said to himself that really he ought to, and he was afraid she expected it, after last night. But really it might not be quite correct to speak just now when the family was crushed with grief over the kidnaping of a beloved daughter. He would postpone the declaration.
In truth last night's zest was lacking. Last night Ethel had seemed to him a peerless goddess. To-day she was only an ordinary mortal—beautiful, but—not as divine as her younger sister.
If he had dreamed of the mad passion of jealousy surging under her calm exterior he would never have uttered his next words:
"I saw your sister's portrait at Valentine's studio to-day. Her beauty merits all her father's praise."
She bit her scarlet lip and tore to pieces a rose in her fingers.
"The portrait is flattered. Precious is not half so beautiful," she answered coldly, and a sudden constraint came between them. Lord Chester, blind to the smoldering fury under the long black lashes, thought her weary of him, and soon took leave.
Ethel, left alone in the splendid room, with the scattered rose petals at her feet, flung out her arms with a gesture of rebellious despair, and moaned bitterly:
"She has won my lover's heart with that fatal, luring, childish beauty! How can I help but hate her now?"
The evening's post brought a mysterious type-written letter to Senator Winans. It ran thus:
"You have made a mistake. I did not steal Precious for a ransom, but for love of her fair face. Do not be uneasy. I shall not harm your beautiful daughter. She is safe in the care of a kind, motherly woman, but she is also my prisoner, and will remain so until she consents to become my bride. After she is married to me you shall see her again, but never before; so you must be patient, for she is a little obdurate now, but in the end I shall win her consent."
The letter had no date or signature, but it was postmarked Washington.
"Didn't I say it was an elopement?" cried Ethel, in scornful triumph, but her father turned on her a lightning glance of reproof, and cried sternly:
"Never dare, Ethel, to repeat that false word elopement of your innocent sister again. You have just read in this letter that it was an abduction, not an elopement. So do not make another such mistake."
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