All for Love: or Her Heart's Sacrifice by Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller - HTML preview

CHAPTER XLVII.
 A VAIN THREAT.

“What!” she said, in a loud, aggressive voice, “you’ll let this thing go on? You’ll let your brother’s daughter be put on the stage and made a spectacle of, and you won’t pay me my price to prevent it?”

“I will not pay you one penny—no, not even one farthing—to prevent that or any other piece of blackguardism you may contemplate committing. The girl is nothing to me, less than nothing since she is your daughter. Do what you please with her; it is a matter of perfect indifference to me, but I warn you that if you take liberties with my name in the manner you propose to do, it will be actionable, and I shall instruct my lawyer to prosecute.”

For one moment Rosalind stood irresolute, rage tearing at her like a ravenous wolf and the fumes of the wine she had drank mounting higher and higher until her head swam. Then, of a sudden, she lurched away from the rail of the veranda and leaped forward like a cat springing at a mouse, her two hands reaching out and shutting upon Berry’s throat.

“You’re a pig, you’re a stingy, spiteful, vicious old pig!” she said, as she shook her with all her strength. “I’ll make you suffer for this! I will, as I’m a living woman! Those bills go up in the morning—do you hear me? and you can send some one to Crumplesea Opera House to-morrow night, if you think I’m afraid of your threats of prosecution and won’t disgrace your name as I said I would. Defy me, will you? You’ll see what it costs, you’ll see, you’ll see!”

And here, with one final shake, she pushed from her, and scudded out of the veranda and ran dizzily down the path to the waiting vehicle.

Mr. Bodwin and Mr. Milton Dante, who were anxiously awaiting her return, saw her the very instant she appeared.

“I say! it is really you at last,” said Mr. Dante, as she came reeling up to the vehicle. “We began to think you were never coming, and——Hello! what’s up? You look as though you were in a dickens of a temper. Has the old girl been using you roughly, and wouldn’t she pay the price, after all?”

“She wouldn’t pay any price, even a farthing’s worth!”

“You don’t mean to say that she intends to let it go on?”

“Never mind what I intend to say, I’ll tell you in time enough. Turn the horse round a bit, the wheel is in the way of the step and I want to get in. What’s the matter with you two? Don’t you know how to manage a horse? You keep the thing prancing about so much I can’t get on the step.”

“It—it’s not me, Miss Vance,” declared Mr. Bodwin; “it’s you; you’re frightening it by rattling that bell and slipping off the step so often, and it simply won’t stand still!”

“Oh! it won’t, eh? Thinks it can play tricks on me like every one else this evening, does it? I’ll show it—the beast!”

Her temper was up now in real earnest.

She lurched away from the side of the vehicle after still another futile effort to keep her foothold upon the step, and by the time the two men divined her intention she was halfway to the horse’s head.

“Stop!” screeched out Mr. Milton Dante.

“Miss Vance, for Heaven’s sake!” began Mr. Bodwin; but both cries fell upon deaf ears.

Blind with rage and maddened with drink, she rushed at the horse’s head, caught at the bridle with one hand, and with the other struck it full in the face.

“Defy me, will you, you beast?” she began, and then—spoke never again!

The reins that Mr. Bodwin was holding slackened suddenly and curved in a loop between his knees for one instant before they drew taut again; the horse reared in terror, an awful figure in the dark of the night, over the small slight shape which for two seconds stood erect in the pathway, then came a thud of descending hoofs and a little bleat of agony, and in the winking of an eye men and vehicle were being whirled off through the darkness by a runaway horse, and all that was mortal of the woman whose loveliness had charmed all Crumplesea to-night lay huddled up in the dust with one arm twisted under it and its skull crushed in like an eggshell.

On the following day, Berry—who had lain awake all night, wondering what she ought to do, and finally resolving to find her niece and save her from the disgrace that threatened her—lost no time in tracing the unhappy girl.

To her surprise, she was charmed with her niece, after only an hour’s talk with Dora. Childless herself, and loving children dearly, Berry welcomed Dora to her heart and home; and when Charles returned from America, he, too, rejoiced in Berry’s happiness.

Thus Dora found in Berry a mother who deserved and won her love, and in Charles a kind father, to take the place of one whom she had never known.

THE END.