A Miracle in Mexico

Chapter One ~ 1889-1

Chapter One ~ 1889“If you will not marry me, I will kill myself!”

The young man spoke dramatically and then walked across the room to stare out of the window onto bustling Fifth Avenue.

Orina Vandeholt, who was sitting on the sofa, stiffened.

“Really, Clint,” she said, “how can you talk such nonsense!”

“It’s true,” he insisted, “I have loved you for months and months. I have begged you a hundred times a day to marry me. But now I have come to the end, I can go on no longer!”

He was being so theatrical that Orina rose from the sofa.

“If you talk like this,” she scolded him, “I am going to leave you.”

“No, no, listen to me! I love you! I love you. I cannot live without you.”

She looked him up and down.

He was indeed a very presentable young man.

At the same time there was something a little unbalanced and weak about him that she disliked.

She did in point of fact dislike most men and, since they had pursued her relentlessly for the last two years, she had become more and more fastidious and difficult to please.

There was always something about men who threw their hearts at her feet that she felt was disturbing and wrong.

She could not put it exactly into words.

Yet she shrank from the way they spoke and the way they endlessly grasped at her.

She had emerged from the schoolroom having been strictly brought up by English Governesses and English Tutors in an English home.

She had known nothing about men and very little about the Social world and the way that it operated.

Her mother, Lady Muriel Loth, the daughter of the Earl of Kinloth, had been swept off her feet by an American during her first London Season.

It had never entered Lady Muriel’s father’s or mother’s heads that any daughter of theirs would consider a man who had crossed the Atlantic as a suitable husband.

In fact Dale Vandeholt had been tolerated in England simply because he was extremely rich.

And as it happened he was outstandingly intelligent as well.

He had come to England with some original ideas regarding machinery, railways and ships, which had intrigued everyone he talked to about them.

And that included members of the aristocracy and even the Prince of Wales himself.

Dale Vandeholt was an extremely good-looking and personable young man.

Yet it had never crossed the minds of the parents of marriageable daughters that he might be a suitor.

Lady Muriel had known the first time she saw him that he was different from any other man that she had ever met.

Her father had thrown a large ball for her during the previous Season when she had been presented at Court and had curtseyed formally to Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace.

After that every London hostess sent her an invitation to their balls and she had been an outstanding success.

She was a very beautiful, quiet, gentle and amenable young lady.

It had therefore astounded the whole family when she had declared that she was going to marry Dale Vandeholt.

In fact she insisted upon doing so.

Her father had raged at her and her mother had cried. Her relatives had sneered at him and pleaded constantly with her.

Muriel, however, just persisted in her determination to marry the man she loved.

If her father continued with his violent opposition, she told him then that she would run away.

‘Running away’ in this instance was not a question of going to Gretna Green in Scotland or to a remote part of the British Isles.

It meant going across the Atlantic!

Finally the Earl of Kinloth had reluctantly capitulated.

Grudgingly and arguing with her father all the way to the Church, Lady Muriel was married at St. George’s in Hanover Square.

After the Marriage Service was over she and Dale Vandeholt left for New York and, despite everyone’s misgivings, the marriage had proved to be a blissfully happy one.

Dale Vandeholt was a far more civilised person than the English imagined that he would be.

To begin with his grandfather had been a Dutchman who had emigrated to America and his mother was a very beautiful and well-bred Hungarian.

Her father had been the Hungarian Ambassador to the United States of America and like Lady Muriel she had fallen in love and nothing could persuade her to return home to her own country.

Dale Vandeholt therefore had inherited the brains of his father and the delightful charm of his mother besides what he had learnt in the land of his birth, which was a forceful determination to succeed.

This invariably meant that he would always get his own way.

He wanted Lady Muriel and there was something inspiringly special between them that could not be translated into words.

Because he was determined to prove himself as wonderful as his wife thought him to be, Dale Vandeholt climbed so swiftly up the ladder of success that anyone watching him was left breathless.

Everything he touched seemed to turn instantly to gold.

When finally his land in Texas was found to contain virtually unlimited oil, his wife had laughed.

“Now you have everything you could possibly wish for, my darling,” she enthused, “and you really cannot ask for more.”

“Everything I have is entirely due to you,” her husband answered graciously. “You wanted me to be a great man and that is what I have tried to become.”

He kissed her and knew as he did so that there was no reason for her to answer him. She had always believed in him and it was that dedicated belief that had spurred him on from peak to peak.

Or rather, because it was America, from skyscraper to skyscraper!

Any sadness, if there was any, was because, after their first child, a daughter, was born and the doctors had then advised them strongly that Lady Muriel should not have any more children.

“Another child would kill her,” they said sternly to her husband.

Dale Vandeholt would have liked a dozen sons, but, because it was impossible, he forced himself to be content with his only child, his daughter, Orina.

Then tragedy struck.

When Orina was only ten years old, Lady Muriel died.

It was peritonitis for which there was no known cure and no operation had yet been discovered to prevent the victims from dying quickly and painfully.

Dale Vandeholt was heartbroken.

He felt that everything he had striven for was worthless compared to the loss of his beloved wife.

It would be true to say that if he had had a choice of being penniless and having Lady Muriel with him, he would not have hesitated.

Lady Muriel’s father, who was not yet an old man, then wrote to him with a proposition.

He said in his letter,

“Without anybody to guide my granddaughter, Orina, I think it would be in the child’s best interests if you would allow her to be educated in England or at least for some months of the year.

I am sure that Muriel, if she was alive, would want her daughter to acquire the grace that is perhaps a little lacking in such a new country as yours and also that she should meet members of the family who Muriel grew up with.

They will be her friends and, of course, prospective husbands when she eventually makes her debut – ”

Dale Vandeholt knew exactly what his father-in-law was saying.

He was implying in a not very subtle manner that it would be a mistake for his daughter to marry an American and that one in the family was already quite enough.

Over the years the Earl had become reconciled to the fact that his daughter was ecstatically happy living in America.

Also every year her husband became richer and even more important in his own country.

Dale Vandeholt was very intelligent, which was rather different from being just clever.

When he thought it over, he knew the reason why he had loved his wife so deeply. It was that she was so different from the brash rather hard-voiced American women he met.

He had always found them lacking in the polish and what the Earl called ‘the grace’ that was to be found in England.

Making what was a supreme sacrifice on his part, he sent Orina to her grandfather, but only after making it crystal clear that she would spend at least two months of any year with him.

The Earl was overjoyed at this arrangement.

He missed his daughter and he was insular enough to think that, however rich she might be, she had lowered herself socially and personally by marrying an American.

Orina had indeed enjoyed living in her grandfather’s delightful ancestral home in Huntingdonshire.

It was an extremely fine house with a large estate and she quickly learnt to appreciate the many pictures on the walls. Also that all the treasures that the house contained were part of the family history.

She was astute enough to realise that the antiques that packed the drawing rooms on Fifth Avenue were slightly out of place in heavy brownstone houses. They managed somehow to appear alien to their surroundings.

She thought that they seemed to look disdainfully down on their owners because they had acquired rather than inherited them.

So she saw both sides of the Atlantic.

While she appreciated the bustle and ‘go’ of New York City and that her father always had something new and exciting to show her, she loved the peace and serenity of England especially the English countryside.

Everything seemed so well ordered and delightful, slower and calmer.

She would watch her grandmother receiving her guests for a dinner party with unhurried dignity.

It all seemed to her like the movements of a ballet.

She watched the servants at mealtimes, never making a mistake and performing their duties as if some unseen voice directed them.

The guests themselves, she noticed, behaved in a very different manner from the noise and chatter of Americans. There the conversations took place across the table more than to those on their left and right.

At the same time she thought that her father’s horses on his Ranch in Texas more spirited than those she rode in England.

However she did not tell her grandfather this, but she well knew the difference in their breeding and training.

Hers was a double-sided education, which was certainly different from any other girls of her age.

In both countries she naturally had the best of everything.

Her grandfather was a rich man, but her father insisted on paying for everything that she required.

He sent her to England with an embarrassingly large Bank Account which she could draw on whenever she pleased.

Because her grandfather had pleaded that she should have her first Season in London, she was presented at Court by her grandmother.

She was taken to ball after ball.

She sat in the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot Races and was undoubtedly, although it seemed somewhat unfair, the most beautiful girl of the Season.

It was, of course, not only her beauty that made her receive proposal after proposal of marriage.

The stories of her father’s fortune and the fact that she was an only child lost nothing in the telling.

Orina would have been less than human if, by the end of June, she had not gained a very good appreciation of herself.

It was then on her father’s orders that she sailed for New York.

She was attended by a chaperone, a Courier and a lady’s maid.

The very best suite in the Liner was naturally put at her disposal.

Her father met her in New York and there were as many pressmen waiting to photograph her as if she had been Royalty.

Dale Vandeholt had already arranged the most enormous ball that New York had ever seen.

He gave a dinner party for nearly three hundred people before it took place and a number of other guests came in afterwards.

Everybody present received a gift, which was made of gold and was embellished with Orina’s initials.

There were three orchestras to play for the dancers and one was the best known and most sought after in the whole of New York.