CHAPTER XLVIII.
A CRUEL STRATAGEM.
Several of the friends whom Iris Hilton had visited in the days of her prosperity resided on Lexington Avenue, and she knew that the number mentioned in the dispatch was in the neighborhood of Twenty-third Street, so that she had not more than a dozen blocks to walk from Madam Ward’s establishment to her destination.
At last the goal was reached, and she stood still for one moment before she could ascend the high stone stoop, pressing her hands to her heart, and praying for strength to go through the ordeal before her.
“He must not see me looking so ill—as I feel I am looking now. Oh, my darling! My brave, strong, noble love, what can have stricken you down so soon?” she murmured; and summoning all her strength to overcome the faintness that was creeping slowly upon her, she ascended the steps and rang a soft peal at the doorbell.
A stolid-looking colored man opened the door at her summons, and the girl tried to read in his face some knowledge of the true state of affairs in his master’s household, but she might as well have sought to penetrate the countenance of a statue.
“I wish to see him—Mr. St. John—they—they telegraphed for me,” she said, with a quick, panting breath, and at her words the ebony statue smiled and opened the door wider, that she might enter.
“Oh, yes, missy, I have had my orders to admit you,” he said, and something in his careless, and even jovial manner gave Iris a hope that things were not so bad with Chester St. John as she had feared.
“Will you take me to him now—at once,” she cried. “Oh, please make no delay—I am very calm, I shall say or do nothing to excite him.”
“All right, missy, just you follow me,” replied the negro; and, still smiling blandly, he led the way to a room in the second story.
On the threshold of this room the girl paused, her heart beating tumultuously, and her fair, young face growing white as the dead.
“Oh, God, grant that he may recognize me, and that I may teach him to know that I was never false to him,” she prayed, and then, forcing back the sobs that were rising in her throat, she followed the servant into the room, stepping softly in her fear of disturbing the invalid, but recoiling with a little cry of repugnance and dismay as her eyes fell upon the face of the man who had come forward to meet her—the handsome, saturnine face of Charles Broughton.
As yet she had not conceived any idea of treachery, and after this first involuntary shrinking from the man whom, for some reason, she disliked and feared—she would not allow herself to think of anything but Chester St. John.
“Where is he?” she whispered, with a wild glance around the room; and at her words Broughton broke into a low, mocking laugh.
“My dear, you must grant me your pardon for luring you here by stratagem. Your lover is—for aught I know to the contrary—as well as you or I at this moment; but I knew of no other way of gaining an interview with you, and so took the liberty of using his name to accomplish my purpose—don’t look so horrified—I mean no harm to you—sit down, and Sam shall bring you some wine.”
There was no need for him to tell her to be seated.
She had fallen into the chair nearest her, trembling in every limb, and for the moment utterly incapable of speech or motion.
On the day subsequent to that on which Iris had left the home of Oscar Hilton, Isabel, the beloved daughter of the latter, was taken suddenly and dangerously ill, and the fond father was almost beside himself with fear for his darling’s safety.
But for this greater and all-absorbing sorrow he would have caused an immediate search to be made for Iris, as it had been no part of his policy to drive the girl from his roof.
Mrs. Hilton, as has been mentioned, was a confirmed invalid, and Iris had been her constant attendant.
She fretted and lamented her daughter’s absence now to such an extent that Mr. Hilton could not bear to enter her presence.
Evelyn Hilton had been a woman of rare and unusual beauty, and of the poor remains of this loveliness she was even now foolishly proud.
She was a vain, selfish woman, inordinately fond of dress and luxurious living, and with little affection to bestow on any object but self.
She had never seemed to bear the real mother love for her only child, being unable to understand the noble nature of Iris, a nature high above her own as the stars above the earth.
It gave her no pain now to think of her child’s probable fate, but she lamented in bitter terms the girl’s heartlessness in leaving her to the care of hirelings.
“Why did you say anything to drive her away, Oscar? You know how sadly I shall miss her. I shall never be able to sleep without her voice to read to me, and no one can soothe me as Iris could, when I suffer with that dreadful pain in my head. You must find her and bring her back to me. I cannot get along without Iris; indeed, I cannot, Oscar,” the invalid had cried to her husband; and he had promised to find the girl if possible, and would certainly have made an attempt to do so had it not been for the fact of Isabel’s alarming seizure.
This put all thoughts of Iris from his mind, and during the three days that followed the house was in a state of confusion impossible to describe.
It appeared that every doctor of note in the city was called in to prescribe for Isabel, and it soon became known throughout the circle to which proud, dark-eyed Isabel had been wont to mingle that Oscar Hilton’s daughter’s life was despaired of.
On the fourth day of Isabel’s illness Chester St. John, who had left the city on the day when Iris rejected his love, returned to his home, and, chancing to hear of the illness of Hilton’s daughter through the conversation of two gentlemen in his clubroom, at once concluded that the sufferer was the girl whom he had loved—nay, whom he still loved as he could never love another, although her own words had condemned her as a heartless coquette, and he had parted from her with bitter words of reproach and recrimination.
“Iris dying! Oh, it cannot be! My bright, beautiful love,” he groaned, and the impulse to go to her home and beg them to let him look upon her face once more was too strong to be resisted.
He remembered now, when he had believed that Heaven was taking her from him—remembered with an anguish keen as death—the last look he had seen in the deep blue eyes of Iris—the look of passionate love and bitter pain that had followed him, even while her cruel lips sent him from her.
“There was some mistake—oh, my love! My precious little Iris, if I could see you now you would make it plain to me,” he thought, and walked directly from the club to Oscar Hilton’s, his heart turning sick within him as he approached the house, and a terrible fear came to him that he might see long streamers of crape and white ribbon streaming from the bell handle.
“I think the sight would have killed me,” he murmured, as he stood on the threshold awaiting admittance a few minutes later.
On this day Isabel had been pronounced “out of danger,” and Oscar Hilton consented to leave her bedside long enough to see Mr. St. John.
The desire to win this rich man for his daughter’s husband instantly revived in the father’s heart at sight of Chester’s card, and he left the presence of the girl who had been so near to the portals of death with no prayer of thanksgiving in his heart to the God who had spared her to him, but with wild schemes running through his brain for her worldly advancement. He knew that when she gained her strength again she would stop at nothing to bring this proud, handsome Chester St. John to her feet, and he himself had a plan by which he hoped to aid her in the accomplishment of this purpose.
On entering the little reception room into which a servant had shown St. John, Mr. Hilton was startled by the almost ghastly pallor of the young man’s face. He was not long in making the discovery that it was fears for the life of Iris, and no anxiety for Isabel, that had wrought this change in the strong, proud man before him, and a fierce and unreasoning hatred sprang to life in his heart for the hapless child whose sweet, young face had had power to awaken such a wondrous depth of love in this man’s soul, a love that his own queenly Isabel had failed as yet to inspire.
The plans which had been hitherto vague and shadowy took sudden form and shape in his scheming brain, and when Chester St. John left the house, nearly an hour later, Oscar Hilton watched his retreating form with a look almost amounting to triumph.
“I have shaken his faith in her, even as she herself could not shake it, although she assured him she had no love for him, and led him to think her a coquette. He will not seek her now, although he does not as yet believe—as I hinted to him—that she has left my roof for the arms of some unworthy lover. He shall believe it, though—if Evelyn has not forgotten her cunning in imitating her daughter’s pretty penmanship.”