Dawn of the Morning. Grace Livingston Hill
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slants from the mullioned window over the front door. It was dreadful indeed when the jolly sun and moon looked grave.
She paused before the heavy door of the study and held her breath, dreading the ordeal that was to come. Then, gathering courage, she knocked timidly, and heard her father's instant, cold "Come."
With trembling fingers she turned the knob and went in.
There were heavy damask curtains at the windows, reaching to the floor, caught back with thick silk cords and tassels. They were a deep, sullen red, and filled the room with oppressive shadows in no wise relieved by the heavy mahogany furniture upholstered in the same red damask.
Her father sat by his ponderous desk, always littered with papers which she must not touch.
His sternly handsome face was forbidding. The very beauty of it was hateful to her. The look on it reminded her of that terrible day, now nearly three years ago, when he had returned from a journey of several months abroad in connection with some brilliant literary enterprise, and had swept her lovely mother out of his life and home, the innocent victim of long-entertained jealousy and most unfounded suspicion.
The little girl had been too young to understand what it was all about. When she cried for her she was forbidden even to think of her, and was told that her mother was unworthy of that name.
The child had declared with angry tears and stampings of her small foot, that it was not true, that her mother was good and dear and beautiful; but they had paid no heed to her. The father had sternly commanded silence and sent her away; and the mother had not returned.
So she had sobbed her heart out in the silence of her own room, where every object reminded her of the lost mother's touch and voice and presence, and had gone about the house in a sullen silence unnatural to childhood, thereby making herself more enemies than friends.
Of her father she was afraid. She shrank into terrified silence whenever he approached, scarcely answering his questions, and growing farther away from him every day, until he instinctively knew that she hated him for her mother's sake.
When a year had passed he procured a divorce without protest from the innocent but crushed wife, this by aid of a law that often places "Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne." Not long after, he brought to his home as his wife a capable, arrogant, self-opinionated woman, who set herself to rule him and his household as it should be ruled.
The little girl was called to audience in the gloomy study where sat the new wife, her eyes filled with hostility toward the other woman's child, and was told that she must call the lady "Mother."
Then the black eyes that held in their dreamy depths some of the gunpowder flash of her father's steely ones took fire; the little face darkened with indignant fury; the small foot came down with fierce determination on the thick carpet, and the child declared:
"I will never call her mother! She is not my mother! She is a bad woman, and she has no right here. She cannot be your wife. It is wicked for a man to have two wives. I know, for I heard Mary Ann and Betsey say so this morning in the kitchen. My mother is alive yet. She is at Grandfather's. I heard Betsey say that too. You are a wicked, cruel man, and I hate you. I will not have you for a father any more. I will go away and stay with my mother. She is good. You are bad! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! And I hate her!"—pointing toward the new wife, who sat in horrified condemnation, with two fiery spots upon her outraged cheeks.
"Jemima!" thundered her father in his angriest tone.
But the little girl turned upon him furiously.
"My name is not Jemima!" she screamed. "I will not let you call me so. My name is Dawn. My mother called me Dawn. I will not answer when you call me Jemima."
"Jemima, you may go to your room!" commanded the father, standing up, white to the lips, to face a will no whit less adamant than his own.
"I will not go until you call me Dawn," she answered, her face turning white and stern, with sudden singular likeness to her father on its soft round outlines.
She stood her ground until carried struggling upstairs and locked into her own room.
Gradually she had cried her fury out, and succumbed to the inevitable, creeping back as seldom as possible into the life of the house, and spending the time with her own brooding thoughts and sad plays, far in the depths of the box-boarded garden, or shut into the quiet of her own room.
To the new mother she never spoke unless she had to, and never called her Mother, though there were many struggles to compel her to do so. She never came when they called her Jemima, nor obeyed a command prefaced by that name, though she endured in consequence many a whipping and many a day in bed, fed on bread and water.
"What is the meaning of this strange whim?" demanded the new wife, with set lips. Her position was none too easy, nor her disposition markedly that of a saint.
"A bit of her mother's sentimentality," explained the chagrined father. "She objected to calling the child for my grandmother, Jemima. She wanted it named for her own mother, and said Jemima was harsh and ugly, until one day her old minister, who was fully as sentimental as she, if he was an old man, told her that Jemima meant 'Dawn of the Morning.' After that she made no further protest. But I had no idea she had carried her foolishness to this extent, nor taught the child such notions about her honest and honorable name."
"It won't take long to get them out of her head," prophesied the new-comer, with the sparkle of combat in her eye. Yet it was now nearly three years since the little girl had seen or heard from her mother, and she still refused to answer to the name of Jemima. The step-mother had fallen into the habit of saying "you" when she wanted anything done.
Of the events which preceded her father's summons this morning, Dawn knew nothing.
Three days before he had received an urgent message from his former wife's father, stating that his daughter was dead, and demanding an immediate interview. It was couched in such language that, being the man he was, he could not refuse to comply.
He answered the summons immediately, going by horseback a hard six-hours ride that he might catch an earlier stage than he could otherwise have done. He was the kind of man that always did what he felt to be his duty, no matter how unpleasant it might be. It was the only thing that saved his severity from being a vice. His father-in-law had laid this journey upon him as a duty, and though he had no definite idea of the reason for this sudden demand, he went at once.
No one but his Maker can penetrate the soul of a man like Hamilton Van Rensselaer to know what were his thoughts as he walked up the rose-bordered path to the fine old brick house, which a few years before he had trod with his beautiful young bride leaning upon his arm.
With grave ceremony, the old servant opened the door into the stately front room where most of Van Rensselaer's courting had been done, and left him alone in the dim light that sifted through partly drawn shades.
He stood a moment within the shadowed room, a sense of the past sweeping over him with oppressive force, like a power that might not be resisted. Then as his eyes grew accustomed to the half-darkness, he started, for there before him was a coffin!
His father-in-law's message had not led him to expect to see his former wife. He had gathered from the letter that she might have been dead some weeks, and that the matter to be discussed was of business, though probably painfully connected with the one who was gone.
While the news of her death had given him a shock which he had not anticipated, he had yet had time in his long journey to grow accustomed to the thought of it. But he was in no wise prepared to meet the sight of her lying there in her last sleep, so still and white.
Strangely moved, he stepped nearer, not understanding why he felt thus toward one whom he firmly believed had made utter wreck of his life.
She lay in a simple white gown like the one she used to wear when he first knew her. In her hand was one white rose. It might have come from her wedding bouquet. The soft fragrance of it floated up and smote him with keen and unexpected pain. The rose had reached