King Midas: A Romance | Page 8

he was. "Oh, she is so beautiful!" he cried, his face a picture of rapture.
"So beautiful!"
And he started through the forest as wildly as any madman, now
muttering to himself and now laughing aloud and making the forest
echo with Helen's name. When he stopped again he was far away from
the path, in a desolate spot, but tho he was staring around him, he saw
no more than before. Trembling had seized his limbs, and he sank
down upon the yellow forest leaves, hiding his face in his hands and
whispering, "Oh, if I should lose her! If I should lose her!" As old
Polonius has it, truly it was "the very ecstasy of love."

CHAPTER II

"A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay."
The town of Oakdale is at the present time a flourishing place,
inhabited principally by "suburbanites," for it lies not very far from
New York; but the Reverend Austin Davis, who was the spiritual
guardian of most of them, had come to Oakdale some twenty and more
years ago, when it was only a little village, with a struggling church
which it was the task of the young clergyman to keep alive. Perhaps the
growth of the town had as much to do with his success as his own
efforts; but however that might have been he had received his temporal

reward some ten years later, in the shape of a fine stone church, with a
little parsonage beside it. He had lived there ever since, alone with his
one child,--for just after coming to Oakdale he had married a daughter
of one of the wealthy families of the neighborhood, and been left a
widower a year or two later.
A more unromantic and thoroughly busy man than Mr. Davis at the age
of forty-five, when this story begins, it would not have been easy to
find; but nevertheless people spoke of no less than two romances that
had been connected with his life. One of them had been his early
marriage, which had created a mild sensation, while the other had come
into his life even sooner, in fact on the very first day of his arrival at
Oakdale.
Mr. Davis could still bring back to his mind with perfect clearness the
first night he had spent in the little wooden cottage which he had hired
for his residence; how while busily unpacking his trunk and trying to
bring the disordered place into shape, he had opened the door in answer
to a knock and beheld a woman stagger in out of the storm. She was a
young girl, surely not yet out of her teens, her pale and sunken face
showing marks of refinement and of former beauty. She carried in her
arms a child of about a year's age, and she dropped it upon the sofa and
sank down beside it, half fainting from exhaustion. The young
clergyman's anxious inquiries having succeeded in eliciting but
incoherent replies, he had left the room to procure some nourishment
for the exhausted woman; it was upon his return that the discovery of
the romance alluded to was made, for the woman had disappeared in
the darkness and storm, and the baby was still lying upon the sofa.
It was not altogether a pleasant romance, as is probably the case with a
good many romances in reality. Mr. Davis was destined to retain for a
long time a vivid recollection of the first night which he spent in
alternately feeding that baby with a spoon, and in walking the floor
with it; and also to remember the sly glances which his parishioners
only half hid from him when his unpleasant plight was made known.
It happened that the poorhouse at Hilltown near by, to which the infant
would have gone if he had left it to the care of the county, was at that
time being "investigated," with all that the name implies when referring
to public matters; the clergy of the neighborhood being active in
pushing the charges, Mr. Davis felt that at present it would look best

for him to provide for the child himself. As the investigation came to
nothing, the inducement was made a permanent one; perhaps also the
memory of the mother's wan face had something to do with the matter.
At any rate the young clergyman, tho but scantily provided for himself,
managed to spare enough to engage a woman in the town to take care
of the young charge. Subsequently when Mr. Davis' wife died the
woman became Helen's nurse, and so it was that Arthur, as the baby
boy had been christened, became permanently adopted into the
clergyman's little family.
It had not been possible to keep from Arthur the secret