The Lone Watcher
“Hark! to the hurried question of Despair, Where is my child?—and Echo answers—Where?”
“Colonel Japha recovered from his shock, but was never the same man again. All that was genial, affectionate and confiding in his nature, had been turned as by a lightning’s stroke, to all that was hard, bitter and suspicious. He would not allow the name of Jacqueline to be spoken in his presence; he would listen to no allusion made to those days when she was the care and perplexity, but also the light and pleasure of the house. Men are not like women, my child; when they turn, it is at an angle, the whole direction of their nature changes.
“Perhaps the news that presently came to us from Boston may have had something to do with this. It was surely dreadful enough; Jacqueline’s perfidy had slain her lover. Mr. Robert Holt, the cultured, noble, high-souled gentleman, had been found lying dead on the floor of his room, a few days after the events I have just related, with a lady’s diamond ring in his hand and the remnants of a hastily burned letter in the grate before him. He had burst a blood-vessel, and had expired instantly.
“This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of Jacqueline’s history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and the story of her lover’s death was not generally known, while the fact of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny.