The Lonesome Chap
Summary
Stuart Kirkward, a taciturn magnate whose pick-axes have bled the earth of its gold, erects a palatial manor as a wedding reliquary for Peggy Carter, a spirited girl whose smile he has kept in his mind’s pocket like a lucky nugget. On the eve of vows, Peggy is lured away by George Rothwell, a velvet-tongued promoter whose matrimonial ledger is already double-stamped; at the whistle-stop Rothwell’s abandoned wife appears, her grief a public scaffold that strips the elopement of its glamour. Peggy bolts bareback into a bruised twilight; Rothwell gallops after; hooves skid on scree, bodies arc like meteors, silence claims them. In the same instant Stuart, now custodian to Renee—the orphaned moppet of a dead comrade—dispatches her to distant halls of ink and Latin. Years unspool, seasons calcify into ledgers of absence, until Renee returns a sylph in silk, her laugh a bright seam in the mute mansion. Stuart’s guardianship mutates into a slow fever; he watches her as one might watch a sunset one has been told is forbidden. At a lantern-lit fête he presumes her heart belongs to young Rothwell—son of the ghost who once stole his future—and prepares to surrender. The final revelation lands softly: Renee’s pulse beats for the very man who raised her, the past dissolves like salt in rain, the house that once echoed with jilted bells now thrums with consummated dusk.
Synopsis
Stuart Kirkward, a wealthy miner, has built a magnificent house in preparation of his marriage to Peggy Carter, who elopes on the eve of her wedding with George Rothwell, a mining promoter, who is already married. At the station they meet Rothwell's wife, who tells Peggy the truth about him. Peggy in endeavoring to escape from the unpleasant scene rides away on her horse, only to be followed by Rothwell. Both meet with an accident, are hurled to their doom over a steep cliff. Just before this, Stuart had assumed the guardianship of a little daughter of a friend of his, and in connection with the accident he finds himself with the girl on his hands. He sends her away to boarding school, where she meets the son of George Rothwell, the man who had eloped with Stuart's intended bride. When the girl, whose name is Renee, comes back from school to her guardian, he finds that she has grown to be a full-fledged lady, and begins to feel more than a fatherly affection for her. Some time later, at a house party, Stuart is led to believe that she loves the son of George Rothwell, and, although bearing in mind that he is the son of the man who was his bitterest enemy, he decides to give the boy a chance. It is here that he makes the great discovery that, instead of Rothwell, Jr., it is he whom Renee loves. All the past is forgotten and they turn their thoughts to the future.
