CHAPTER XLVIII.
WHAT IS TO BE WILL BE.
Jess looked helplessly at her false friend.
“If the wedding must take place, I—I am ready!” she answered, in a low voice, which threatened to break into sobs ere she finished the sentence.
“Come along, then, my dear,” returned Queenie, ignoring the first part of the remark. “Your bridegroom-to-be is most impatient; I can hear him pacing up and down the drawing-room.”
Jess allowed Queenie to wrap the long fur cloak about her, and lead her down to the corridor below.
“Do not let him come near me, or touch my hand, or I shall surely faint!” whispered Jess, hoarsely, as she shrank behind Queenie.
The latter bit her lips fiercely, to keep back the sneering retort that sprang to them. She concluded, however, that discretion was the better part of valor, and that it would not do to seem to go against her, lest Jess should refuse to allow the marriage to take place at all, and thus upset all of their well-laid plans and her own hope of getting a good slice of the Dinsmore inheritance.
Low as Jess had uttered the words, Raymond Challoner’s quick ear had caught the words distinctly, and he crushed back an imprecation most fierce behind his white teeth.
“Ye gods! how the girl detests me!” he thought; “and by the Eternal, I’ll give her good cause to do so before I am through with her. She is expecting me to rush up and embrace her, while I feel more like making her ears tingle with a thorough boxing. I have no patience whatever with that kind of a girl—they arouse all the hatred and antagonism in my nature. When we turn from the altar, I will show her who is lord and master, confound her!”
But the suave, graceful manner in which he came forward, with his inimitable bow and smile, gave no warning of what was passing in his treacherous heart.
“Jess,” he murmured, making not the slightest attempt to offer her a caress, but simply offering her his arm, “this is the happiest day of my life. Come, the carriage is in waiting.”
Out into the bitter cold air he led her, and adown the marble steps, from which every vestige of the snow had been brushed away.
The drive to the church seemed like a dream to the girl. Queenie sat beside her, and the man whom she was to wed sat opposite. No attempt was made to keep up a conversation. Raymond Challoner was congratulating himself that he had reached the point where it was quite unnecessary.
The church was quickly reached, and the bridal party hastily entered.
“How bitter cold it is in here!” exclaimed the bridegroom-to-be, in an angry tone of voice, addressing the remark to Queenie, whom he had intrusted with the making of the hurried arrangements. “They might have had some semblance of a fire, heating up this old barn of a place. And then, again, there are half a score of people sitting about, while I ordered it to be strictly private.”
“No doubt they are the caretakers; you cannot prevent them from entering if they choose,” returned Queenie, indifferently.
It did not attract the particular attention of the bridegroom-to-be that all of the men present wore their coats turned high up around their necks, and their hats pulled well down over their faces, for he would have considered it only the usual precaution to fortify themselves against the bitter cold which permeated the edifice in great draughts.
They need have little fear of being recognized, for the light that flickered in through the stained-glass windows was unusually dim on this day, which had been ushered in so dark and dismal, with leaden skies, over which black, ominous stormclouds scudded.
“There isn’t even the sign of a minister to greet us! I hope there is to be no hitch over this affair,” he remarked to Queenie, his brows darkening perceptibly.
“He is in the pulpit, awaiting our coming; he has just entered by the side door yonder,” Queenie replied.
Jess uttered no word; she was trembling like a veritable aspen leaf; whether it was from cold, or fear, or both, Raymond Challoner could not determine, nor did he trouble himself to inquire.
It ever afterward seemed like a weird dream to Jess, whether she walked or was carried down the long, dark, cold aisle, until at length she found herself in front of the altar, where the minister stood, with his open book in his hand.
She felt as though she must turn and fly from the place, her fear was so great; but this, she feared, would be hard to accomplish, with her bridegroom on one side of her and Queenie on the other. In that moment it struck her as an evil omen that Queenie should have accompanied her to the altar, draped in crape and mourning attire.
She had little time to think of this, however, for the marriage ceremony had already begun, and the man beside her was repeating after the minister:
“I, John Dinsmore, do take thee, Jess, to be my lawful, wedded wife, to have and to hold, to cherish——”
The sentence never was finished. Up from a nearby pew sprang a tall form, and with swinging strides he came down the aisle toward the altar, crying, in a deep, sonorous voice, that struck terror to two of those hearts before the altar:
“Hold! Let not this ceremony proceed! I forbid the banns!”
As he spoke, he threw back the collar of his coat, and took off his hat.
There was a piercing cry of joy, and in an instant Jess had sprung from the side of the man at the altar and into the arms of the tall stranger.
“What is the meaning of this, sir?” cried the good minister, staring in bewildered amazement from the one to the other.
“It looks, parson, as though the game were up, and that the marriage is off, and that a more formidable game is on!” exclaimed Ray, hoarsely, as he beheld a brace of officers making for the spot where he stood, while as many more guarded each aisle, cutting off every avenue of escape.
“I did not have quite time enough to carry out my ingenious scheme,” he added, quickly, “or I should have been far away from here by this time; anyhow, I shall not give the real John Dinsmore, as he is waiting to proclaim himself, the joy and the fortune he is looking forward to. He shall take a trip with me!”
As he spoke, ere any one could spring forward to prevent the action, he pulled a small, silver-mounted revolver from his breast pocket, and pointing it at John Dinsmore, fired quickly. A second shot followed in less time than it takes to record it, and the second time the instrument of death was pointed against his own heart.
For the next few moments all was confusion: in the mêlée Jess had fainted, and Queenie, taking in all the situation at a glance, fled ignominiously from the scene, no one attempting to bar her exit, as it was understood by all present that this would probably be the course she would pursue.
When the smoke had cleared away, it was found that John Dinsmore was uninjured; for once the practiced hand of Raymond Challoner had fired wide of its mark. In Challoner’s own case, the result was fatal. He had met death instantly, with that sneering laugh yet lingering on his lips.
To the bewildered minister they explained all in a few words—the dastardly scheme the dead man and the woman who had just left the edifice had planned and almost executed, to rob the gentleman who stood, pale and anxiously bending over Jess, of name, wife and fortune; how his tried and true two friends had learned, through the young widow’s maid, of the marriage which was about to take place at that hour between her mistress’ pretty, young guest and the young man whom they had met emerging from the house on a former visit, and that his name was John Dinsmore. Of how fate played into their hands, when they began their search for him, by meeting in the restaurant, after which they had not lost sight of him for a moment. And, furthermore, that his death brought to an untimely end the business of the officers of the law, who had trailed him down by the triangular diamond ring he wore; and who were there to arrest him for a murder done at Saratoga some months before, and for which he would have had to pay the penalty with his life, for his guilt was assured.
Ere Jess returned to consciousness, John Dinsmore had her conveyed to a nearby hotel, and here she found herself when her thoughts became clear and her dark eyes opened to life again. She almost believed it to be a wild, delusive dream to behold him whom she loved so well—not dead, but kneeling beside her, holding her hands, and calling upon her name by every sweet word in love’s vocabulary.
One instant more and she was in his arms, her head pillowed on John Dinsmore’s sturdy breast. That was their joyful reunion; and clasped thus, heart to heart, mutual explanations followed. And to Jess, the most amazing of them all was that fate had had her own way, in spite of her willfulness, in wedding her to John Dinsmore, the co-heir of Blackheath Hall, after all.
Her husband would not allow her to talk of that scene at the church. All he would say was:
“Raymond Challoner—that was his real name—is dead; you must forget that you ever knew him, and you must also forget that false friend, Queenie, who would have lured you to a fate worse than death if I had not come in the nick of time to frustrate her designs. She kept from me the knowledge that Raymond Challoner was attempting to palm himself off for me and gain the Dinsmore fortune by marrying you.”
He was even more amazed at her crafty villainy when Jess whispered to him that she had made a confidant of Queenie, telling her of her former marriage, and how Queenie had informed her of her husband’s death through an accident, which she was too ignorant of the world’s ways to inquire into.
“Let us think of the arch plotters no more, my darling!” declared John Dinsmore, fondly clasping his beautiful, little bride the more closely in his arms, and covering her lovely, blushing, dimpled face with passionate kisses, while her white arms clung more tightly around his neck.
Never were two men more happy than were Jerry Gaines and Hazard Ballou over the happy ending of John Dinsmore’s trials and tribulations, and the joy he entered into at last, in being reunited with the bride he loved better than his own life.
“I shall never know how to do enough for you hereafter, boys!” he exclaimed that evening, holding the hands of each, while tears which were no disgrace to his noble manhood stood in his eyes.
“I am going to make you both acknowledge my true friendship in a very practical way. When I receive my share of the Dinsmore millions I am going to buy out a New York paper, and take you both in as equal partners.”
“Do you mean as artist and reporter, as we have been for years?” laughed Ballou.
“As equal partners in the enterprise,” repeated John, slowly and emphatically; and the day came, soon after, in which he kept his word; and to-day “The Trinity,” as they are still called, own and publish one of the most successful of all the great dailies in the great metropolis.
They are both constant visitors at John’s happy home, and at the end of John’s first happy year of married life, when the twin boys came, he named them after his tried and true friends, Jerry Gaines Dinsmore and Hazard Ballou Dinsmore, much to their delight. The handsome artist is still a bachelor, but at the end of the first year after John married, Jerry Gaines took to himself a bride. Guess who she was, reader mine? No less a person than Lucy Caldwell, the farmer’s daughter, whom he met while she was on a visit to Jess.
Queenie, the dashing, young widow, soon after wedded another aged man for his wealth, but she was not a happy woman, because, as she often said to herself, through her fickleness she had missed the one joy that makes life worth living—love.
She lived and died envying Jess, and the great love her husband lavished upon her, to the end of her life. And the only time her proud eyes ever shed a tear was when the thought crossed her mind:
“It might have been!”
THE END.