Peg O' My Heart Part 23

She bent down and straightened the furrows in his forehead with the tips of her fingers, and kissed him and then whistled to the wistful "MICHAEL" and together they went running down the street toward the little patch of green where the children played, and amongst whom "MICHAEL" was a prime favourite.

Sitting, his head in his hands, his eyes staring into the past, O'Connell was facing the second great tragedy of his life.

CHAPTER II

WE MEET AN OLD FRIEND AFTER MANY YEARS

While O'Connell sat there in that little room in New York trying to decide Peg's fate, a man, who had played some considerable part in O'Connell's life, lay, in a splendidly furnished room in a mansion in the West End of London--dying.

Nathaniel Kingsnorth's twenty years of loneliness and desolation were coming to an end. What an empty, arid stretch of time those years seemed to him as he feebly looked back on them!

After the tragedy of his sister's reckless marriage he deserted public life entirely and shut himself away in his country-house--except for a few weeks in London occasionally when his presence was required on one or other of the Boards of which he was a director.

The Irish estate--which brought about all his misfortunes--he disposed of at a ridiculously low figure. He said he would accept any bid, however small, so that he could sever all connection with the hated village.

From the day of Angela's elopement he neither saw nor wrote to any member of his family.

His other sister, Mrs. Chichester, wrote to him from time to time--telling him one time of the birth of a boy: two years later of the advent of a girl.

Kingsnorth did not answer any of her letters.

In no way dismayed, Mrs. Chichester continued to write periodically.

She wrote him when her son Alaric went to school and also when he went to college. Alaric seemed to absorb most of her interest. He was evidently her favourite child. She wrote more seldom of her daughter Ethel, and when she did happen to refer to her she dwelt princ.i.p.ally on her beauty and her accomplishments. Five years before, an envelope in deep mourning came to Kingsnorth, and on opening it he found a letter from his sister acquainting him with the melancholy news that Mr.

Chichester had ended a life of usefulness at the English bar and had died, leaving the family quite comfortably off.

Kingsnorth telegraphed his condolences and left instructions for a suitable wreath to be sent to the funeral. But he did not attend it.

Nor did he at any time express the slightest wish to see his sister nor did he encourage any suggestion on her part to visit him.

When he was stricken with an illness, from which no hope of recovery was held out to him, he at once began to put his affairs in order, and his lawyer spent days with him drawing up statements of his last wishes for the disposition of his fortune.

With death stretching out its hand to s.n.a.t.c.h him from a life he had enjoyed so little, his thoughts, coloured with the fancies of a tired, sick brain, kept turning constantly, to his dead sister Angela.

From time to time down through the years he had a softened, gentle remembrance of her. When the news of her death came, furious and unrelenting as he had been toward her, her pa.s.sing softened it. Had he known in time he would have insisted on her burial in the Kingsnorth vault. But she had already been interred in New York before the news of her death reached him.

The one bitter hatred of his life had been against the man who had taken his sister in marriage and in so doing had killed all possibility of Kingsnorth succeeding in his political and social aspirations.

He heard vaguely of a daughter.

He took no interest in the news.

Now, however, the remembrance of his treatment of Angela burnt into him. He especially repented of that merciless cable: "You have made your bed; lie in it." It haunted him through the long hours of his slow and painful illness. Had he helped her she might have been alive to-day, and those bitter reflections that ate into him night and day might have been replaced by gentler ones and so make his end the more peaceful.

He thought of Angela's child and wondered if she were like his poor dead sister. The wish to see the child became an obsession with him.

One morning, after a restless, feverish night, he sent for his lawyer and told him to at once inst.i.tute inquiries--find out if the child was still living, and if so--where.

This his lawyer did. He located O'Connell in New York, through a friend of his in the Irish party, and found that the child was living with him in rather poor circ.u.mstances. He communicated the result of his inquiries to Kingsnorth. That day a letter was sent to O'Connell asking him to allow his child to visit her dying uncle. O'Connell was to cable at Kingsnorth's expense and if he would consent the money for the expenses of the journey would be cabled immediately. The girl was to start at once, as Mr. Kingsnorth had very little longer to live.

When the letter had gone Kingsnorth drew a breath of relief. He longed to see the child. He would have to wait impatiently for the reply.

Perhaps the man whom he had hated all his life would refuse his request. If he did, well, he would make some provision in his will for her--in memory of his dead sister.

The next day he altered his entire will and made Margaret O'Connell a special legacy. Ten days late a cable came:

I consent to my daughter's visiting you.

FRANK OWEN O'CONNELL.

The lawyer cabled at once making all arrangements through their bankers in New York for Miss O'Connell's journey.

That night Kingsnorth slept without being disturbed. He awoke refreshed in the morning. It was the first kindly action he had done for many years.

How much had he robbed himself of all his life, if by doing so little he was repaid so much!

CHAPTER III

PEG LEAVES HER FATHER FOR THE FIRST TIME

O'Connell had a hard struggle with Peg before she would consent to leave him. She met all his arguments with counter-arguments. Nothing would move her for hours.

"Why should I go to a man I have never seen and hate the name of?"

"He's your uncle, Peg."

"It's a fine uncle he's been to me all me life. And it was a grand way he threated me mother when she was starvin'."

"He wants to do somethin' for ye now, Peg."

"I'll not go to him."

"Now listen, dear; it's little I'll have to lave ye when I'm gone,"

pleaded O'Connell.

"I'll not listen to any talk at all about yer goin'. Yer a great strong healthy man--that's what ye are. What are ye talkin' about? What's got into yer head about goin'?"

"The time must come, some day, Peg."

"All right, we'll know how to face it when it does. But we're not goin'

out all the way to meet it," said Peg, resolutely.

"It's very few advantages I've been able to give ye, me darlin'," and O'Connell took up the argument again.