Sheila Kelly shrugged her shoulders, and proceeded to fill the dying lamp with fresh oil from a tin can she had brought in her capacious basket. Then sitting down on the foot of the narrow cot, she began and recounted the events of the morning to her anxious listener, ending with:

"Shure, the mane, murtherin' Ashley is safe in jail, t' ould Leddy Ellsworth, going from one fainting fit ter another, and Masther Lovelace a-laying with ter bullet in his head, niver spakin' a worrud since he was shot, niver opening his eyes, jist a-dying by inches, sez all the docthers."

Oh, the shrieks of despair that filled the gloomy cell! They were enough to move a heart of stone; but Dainty's tormentor was cruel as a fiend.

She listened unmoved to the expressions of despair and the prayers for liberty, and laughed incredulously, when the girl cried, desperately:

"Oh, Sheila! for G.o.d's sake, let me go to the side of my dying husband!

Yes, he is my own dear husband, and my place is by him now, to soothe his last hours. We were married secretly two weeks ago, because he feared our cruel enemies would devise some scheme to tear us from each other, as indeed they have done. But now that you know the truth, you would not keep a young wife from the side of her dying husband, would you? You will set me free, to go to him?"

But the wretch shook her head, with a mocking laugh.

"You will never see the light of day again!" she said, calmly.

"Oh, Sheila, do you forget that I have a mother to mourn me as well as a husband? A poor widowed mother, who has no one but me in the wide, wide world! I am the light of her eyes and her heart. She will die of a broken heart at my mysterious fate! For her sake, Sheila, if not for my own and my husband's, I beg you for my liberty!" prayed the wretched prisoner, kneeling on the cold floor at her tormentor's feet.

But she might as well have prayed to the cold stone wall as to such a fiend in human form.

"Ye're wastin' worruds, Dainty Chase!" she said, mockingly, as she rose to go. "Ye'll niver come out of this cell alive, I tell you; so the sooner yer make up yer mind ter die, the better; and I'll kem ag'in this day week, hoping ter find yer cold corp on the bed!"

"One word!" implored the wretched girl, detaining her. "Where am I, Sheila Kelly? Is this, as I suspect, a dungeon beneath the ruined wing of Ellsworth?"

"Yes, ye're right; 'tis the underground chambers, where t' ould Ellsworths hid from the Indians and kept their prisoners, and this will be yer tomb, Dainty Chase. Better try the laudanum, and put yersilf out of misery at once!" flashing out, and locking the door on the outside as before.

CHAPTER XXIII.

AH! THE PITY OF IT!

The oaken door clanged heavily to, and the ma.s.sive bolt, as it shot into place, sounded in Dainty's ears like the trump of doom, shutting her into a living grave; for now that she had heard of her husband's condition, she had no longer the least hope of rescue.

In all the wide, cruel world, who was there that had any interest in poor Dainty Chase save her husband and her mother?

Her husband was dying, and her poor, helpless little mother was powerless to save her.

They would tell her that her fair daughter had eloped with a favorite lover; and how was she to know that the story was untrue?

In her desire to spare her gentle little mother pain, Dainty had withheld the whole story of the persecutions she had suffered at Ellsworth.

In every letter home she had written the substance of these words:

"It is very pleasant here, and I am very happy. I long for you to be with me."

And the mother's heart had rejoiced in her daughter's happiness.

When she should awaken from her drugged sleep, and hear that Lovelace was dying, and her daughter fled with another, there would be no one to comfort her, none to say that the story was untrue. She would have to simply accept it in all its horror, and her tender heart would break with the despair of it all.

"Oh, my husband; my mother!" sobbed the heartbroken girl; and she wondered how Heaven could permit such cruelties as had been practised on her by her relentless enemies.

Before the coming of her heartless jailer she had been suffering with hunger and thirst; but she forgot both now as she lay weeping and moaning and praying, until after awhile the deep sleep of exhaustion stole over her, and she slumbered for long hours, starting fitfully now and then and murmuring feverishly the name of her beloved.

When she started broad awake at last, the lamp had burned low, and she knew by this that another day must have pa.s.sed.

Her lips were parched with thirst, and she seized the bottle of water, and drank feverishly, though she thought bitterly:

"Most likely it is poisoned, and the draught will bring me a horrible death! But what matter? A speedy death is better than dying by inches in a living tomb!"

But she was mistaken--the water was not drugged. Her enemies would have been shocked at the idea of a downright murder.

When she died of the foul air and deprivation and grief, they would complacently call it the visitation of G.o.d. If she was driven to swallow the poison they had sent her, it would be by her own choice that she had died a suicide's death. It would not rest like a weight on their consciences; and they hoped she would do it, for then they would place the body where it might conveniently be found, and the coroner's verdict would say she died from laudanum administered by her own hand.

Oh, the fiendish deed had been plotted well! And when Mrs. Ellsworth revived next day, and heard from Sheila Kelly the story of Dainty's despair, she was well pleased, saying to herself, excusingly:

"I would not have done it, only that she wilfully defied me, and thwarted all my plans for marrying Love to one of my favorite nieces.

But it can not be helped now, and her death is quite necessary to my plans; for if Love dies, as they say he is bound to, I should inherit all his money, unless Dainty should return and prove the marriage that he claims took place between them weeks ago. How fortunate he was shot down before he could make the story public; for now it is known to none but me, and it shall never pa.s.s my lips--not even to my nieces. Dainty will soon die of her imprisonment, even if she is not tempted to end her sufferings speedily with the laudanum, and then I shall adopt the two girls as my heiresses, and take them here to live with me. As for Mrs.

Chase, I hardly know what to do with the woman. They say she woke up soon after the shooting, and is taking on pitiably about Dainty's flight and Love's condition. I shall have to show her some kindness, I suppose, just to keep up appearances."

If she could have looked into the prison to which she had heartlessly consigned her fair young niece, she would have felt encouraged in her schemes; for the lovely girl was fading like some fair flower rudely broken from its stem.

Weeping and praying ceaselessly, she had eaten but a few morsels of the stale bread, for her anguish made her incapable of hunger; but the water was all gone in four days, though Dainty tried to husband it longer; for a fever had seized on her, and she was almost crazed by thirst, raving now and then deliriously in the darkness, for the tiny can of oil was exhausted, too, and the blackness of the tomb brooded over the cell.

She had sobbed till her throat was dry and parched and aching; she had wept till her tears were all exhausted in their fountains; she was so weak that she could not stand upright on the floor, and she could only lie like a stony image of despair on her bed and wait for death.

And she had looked forward so happily to this wretched week--she and Love. They were to have been upon the ocean now, en route for foreign lands, so happy in their love that listening angels might have envied their bliss. Ah, the pity of it, this terrible reality of pain!

At times, when she was not asleep or delirious, her thoughts flew to Love. She wondered if he were dead yet, and prayed for his spirit to come and visit her in her loneliness.

So the awful hours dragged by, though Dainty did not know whether they were days or months, in the bewilderment of her mind. They seemed to her like endless years; and the time came when she could bear her agony no longer, when, in burning fever and delirium, she prayed for death, and recalled her enemy's subtle temptation.

In the black darkness, the weak, white hand groped for the laudanum and unstoppered it.

"G.o.d forgive me!" cried the maddened girl, pressing the bitter draught to her fever-parched lips.

Then the vial crashed in fragments on the stone floor, and all was still.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE DARKEST HOUR.

A week had pa.s.sed since the fatal birthday of Lovelace Ellsworth, and at the quiet twilight hour he lay among his pillows, a pale, breathing image of the splendid man whose life had been so cruelly blighted on his wedding morn.

It was the strangest thing the medical fraternity had ever heard of--how the young man lingered on with a bullet in his brain; but it was certain, they said, to have a fatal ending soon. The strange, speechless stupor in which he had lain for a week would soon close with death.