The Living Link | Page 3

any thing more than short, formal notes. Such neglect was keenly felt, and Edith, unwilling to blame her father altogether, tried to make some one else responsible for it. As she knew of no other human being who had any connection with her father except this agent, she brought herself gradually to look upon him as the cause of her father's coldness, and so at length came to regard him with a hatred that was unreasoning and intense. She considered him her father's evil genius, and believed him to be somehow at the bottom of the troubles of her life. Thus every year this man, John Wiggins, grew more hateful, and she accustomed herself to think of him as an evil fiend, a Mephistopheles, by whose crafty wiles her father's heart had been estranged from her. Such, then, was the nature of Edith's bereavement; and as she mourned over it she did not mourn so much over the reality as over her vanished hope. He was gone, and with him was gone the expectation of meeting him and winning his affection. She would never see him--never be able to tell how she loved him, and hear him say with a father's voice that he loved his child!
These thoughts and feelings overwhelmed Edith even as she held the letter in her hand for a new perusal, and she read it over and over without attaching any meaning to the words. At length her attention was arrested by one statement in that short letter which had hitherto escaped her notice. This was the name of the place where her father's death had occurred--Van Diemen's Land.
"I don't understand this," said she. "What is the meaning of this--Van Diemen's Land? I did not know that poor papa had ever left India."
Miss Plympton made no reply to this for some time, but looked more troubled than ever.
"What does it mean," asked Edith again--"this Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land? What does it mean?"
"Well, dear," said Miss Plympton, in strangely gentle and mournful voice, "you have never known much about your poor father, and you have never known exactly where he has been living. He did not live in India, dear; he never lived in India. He lived in--in--Van Diemen's Land."
Miss Plympton's tone and look affected Edith very unpleasantly. The mystery about her father seemed to grow darker, and to assume something of an ill-omened character. The name also--Van Diemen's Land--served to heighten her dark apprehensions; and this discovery that she had known even less than she supposed about her father made it seem as though the knowledge that had thus been hidden could not but be painful.
"What do you mean?" she asked again; and her voice died down to a whisper through the vague fears that had been awakened. "I thought that poor papa lived in India--that he held some office under government."
"I know that you believed so," said Miss Plympton, regarding Edith with a look that was full of pity and mournful sympathy. "That was what I gave out. None of the girls have ever suspected the truth. No one knows whose daughter you really are. They do not suspect that your father was Dalton of Dalton Hall. They think that he was an Indian resident in the Company's service. Yes, I have kept the secret well, dear--the secret that I promised your dear mother on her death-bed to keep from all the world, and from you, darling, till the time should come for you to know. And often and often, dear, have I thought of this moment, and tried to prepare for it; but now, since it has come, I am worse than unprepared. But preparations are of no use, for oh, my darling, my own Edith, I must speak, if I speak at all, from my heart."
These words were spoken by Miss Plympton in a broken, disconnected, and almost incoherent manner. She stopped abruptly, and seemed overcome by strong agitation. Edith, on her part, looked at her in equal agitation, wondering at her display of emotion, and terrified at the dark significance of her words. For from those words she learned this much already--that her father had been living in Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony; that around him had been a dark secret which had been kept from her most carefully; that her parentage had been concealed most scrupulously from the knowledge of her school-mates; and that this secret which had been so guarded was even now overwhelming Miss Plympton so that she shrunk from communicating it. All this served to fill the mind of Edith with terrible presentiments, and the mystery which had hitherto surrounded her father seemed now about to result in a revelation more terrible than the mystery itself.
After some time Miss Plympton rose, and drawing her chair nearer,