He was wandering the corridors like a helpless child, when a gentle hand fell on his arm and a soft voice whispered in his ear:
"You have a story to tell. Will you tell it to me? It may save Miss Postlethwaite"s life."
Did he understand? Would he respond if he did; or would the shock of her appeal restore him to a sense of the danger attending disloyalty? For a moment she doubted the wisdom of this startling measure, then she saw that he had pa.s.sed the point of surprise and that, stranger as she was, she had but to lead the way for him to follow, tell his story, and die.
There was no light in the drawing-room when they entered. But old Mr.
Dunbar did not seem to mind that. Indeed, he seemed to have lost all consciousness of present surroundings; he was even oblivious of her.
This became quite evident when the lamp, in flaring up again in the hall, gave a momentary glimpse, of his crouching, half-kneeling figure.
In the pleading gesture of his trembling, outreaching arms, Violet beheld an appeal, not to herself, but to some phantom of his imagination; and when he spoke, as he presently did, it was with the freedom of one to whom speech is life"s last boon, and the ear of the listener quite forgotten in the pa.s.sion of confession long suppressed.
"She has never loved me," he began, "but I have always loved her. For me no other woman has ever existed, though I was sixty-five years of age when I first saw her, and had long given up the idea that there lived a woman who could sway me from my even life and fixed lines of duty.
Sixty-five! and she a youthful bride! Was there ever such folly! Happily I realized it from the first, and piled ashes on my hidden flame.
Perhaps that is why I adore her to this day and only give her over to reprobation because Fate is stronger than my age--stronger even than my love.
"She is not a good woman, but I might have been a good man if I had never known the sin which drew a line of isolation about her, and within which I, and only I, have stood with her in silent companionship.
What was this sin, and in what did it have its beginning? I think its beginning was in the pa.s.sion she had for her husband. It was not the every-day pa.s.sion of her s.e.x in this land of equable affections, but one of foreign fierceness, jealousy, and insatiable demand. Yet he was a very ordinary man. I was once his tutor and I know. She came to know it too, when--but I am rushing on too fast, I have much to tell before I reach that point.
"From the first, I was in their confidence. Not that either he or she put me there, but that I lived with them and was always around, and could not help seeing and hearing what went on between them. Why he continued to want me in the house and at his table, when I could no longer be of service to him, I have never known. Possibly habit explains all. He was accustomed to my presence and so was she; so accustomed they hardly noticed it, as happened one night, when after a little attempt at conversation, he threw down the book he had caught up and, addressing her by name, said without a glance my way, and quite as if he were alone with her:
""Arabella, there is something I ought to tell you. I have tried to find the courage to do so many times before now but have always failed.
Tonight I must." And then he made his great disclosure,--how, unknown to, his friends and the world, he was a widower when he married her, and the father of a living child.
"With some women this might have pa.s.sed with a measure of regret, and some possible contempt for his silence, but not so with her. She rose to her feet--I can see her yet--and for a moment stood facing him in the still, overpowering manner of one who feels the icy pang of hate enter where love has been. Never was moment more charged. I could not breathe while it lasted; and when at last she spoke, it was with an impetuosity of concentrated pa.s.sion, hardly less dreadful than her silence had been.
""You a father! A father already!" she cried, all her sweetness swallowed up in ungovernable wrath. "You whom I expected to make so happy with a child? I curse you and your brat. I--"
"He strove to placate her, to explain. But rage has no ears, and before I realized my own position, the scene became openly tempestuous. That her child should be second to another woman"s seemed to awaken demon instincts within her. When he ventured to hint that his little girl needed a mother"s care, her irony bit like corroding acid. He became speechless before it and had not a protest to raise when she declared that the secret he had kept so long and so successfully he must continue to keep to his dying day. That the child he had failed to own in his first wife"s lifetime should remain disowned in hers, and if possible be forgotten. She should never give the girl a thought nor acknowledge her in any way.
"She was Fury embodied; but the fury was of that grand order which allures rather than repels. As I felt myself succ.u.mbing to its fascination and beheld how he was weakening under it even more perceptibly than myself, I started from my chair, and sought to glide away before I should hear him utter a fatal acquiescence.
"But the movement I made unfortunately drew their attention to me, and after an instant of silent contemplation of my distracted countenance, Frank said, as though he were the elder by the forty years which separated us:
""You have listened to Mrs. Postlethwaite"s wishes. You will respect them of course.""
That was all. He knew and she knew that I was to be trusted; but neither of them has ever known why.
A month later her child came, and was welcomed as though it were the first to bear his name. It was a boy, and their satisfaction was so great that I looked to see their old affection revive. But it had been cleft at the root, and nothing could restore it to life. They loved the child; I have never seen evidence of greater parental pa.s.sion than they both displayed, but there their feelings stopped. Towards each other they were cold. They did not even unite in worship of their treasure.
They gloated over him and planned for him, but always apart. He was a child in a thousand, and as he developed, the mother especially, nursed all her energies for the purpose of ensuring for him a future commensurate with his talents. Never a very conscientious woman, and alive to the advantages of wealth as demonstrated by the power wielded by her rich brother-in-law, she a.s.sociated all the boy"s prospects with money, great money, such money as Andrew had acc.u.mulated, and now had at his disposal for his natural heirs.
"Hence came her great temptation,--a temptation to which she yielded, to the lasting trouble of us all. Of this I must now make confession though it kills me to do so, and will soon kill her. The deeds of the past do not remain buried, however deep we dig their graves, but rise in an awful resurrection when we are old--old--"
Silence. Then a tremulous renewal of his painful speech.
Violet held her breath to listen. Possibly the doctor, hidden in the darkest corner of the room, did so also.
"I never knew how she became acquainted with the terms of her brother-in-law"s will. He certainly never confided them to her, and as certainly the lawyer who drew up the doc.u.ment never did. But that she was well aware of its tenor is as positive a fact as that I am the most wretched man alive tonight. Otherwise, why the darksome deed into which she was betrayed when both the brothers lay dying among strangers, of a dreadful accident?"
"I was witness to that deed. I had accompanied her on her hurried ride and was at her side when she entered the inn where the two Postlethwaites lay. I was always at her side in great joy or in great trouble, though she professed no affection for me and gave me but scanty thanks."
"During our ride she had been silent and I had not disturbed that silence. I had much to think of. Should we find him living, or should we find him dead? If dead, would it sever the relations between us two?
Would I ever ride with her again?"
"When I was not dwelling on this theme, I was thinking of the parting look she gave her boy; a look which had some strange promise in it. What had that look meant and why did my flesh creep and my mind hover between dread and a fearsome curiosity when I recalled it? Alas! There was reason for all these sensations as I was soon to learn.
"We found the inn seething with terror and the facts worse than had been represented in the telegram. Her husband was dying. She had come just in time to witness the end. This they told her before she had taken off her veil. If they had waited--if I had been given a full glimpse of her face--But it was hidden, and I could only judge of the nature of her emotions by the stern way in which she held herself.
""Take me to him," was the quiet command, with which she met this disclosure. Then, before any of them could move:
""And his brother, Mr. Andrew Postlethwaite? Is he fatally injured too?"
"The reply was unequivocal. The doctors were uncertain which of the two would pa.s.s away first.
"You must remember that at this time I was ignorant of the rich man"s will, and consequently of how the fate of a poor child of whom I had heard only one mention, hung in the balance at that awful moment. But in the breathlessness which seized Mrs. Postlethwaite at this sentence of double death, I realized from my knowledge of her that something more than grief was at prey upon her impenetrable heart, and shuddered to the core of my being when she repeated in that voice which was so terrible because so expressionless:
""Take me to them.""
They were lying in one room, her husband nearest the door, the other in a small alcove some ten feet away. Both were unconscious; both were surrounded by groups of frightened attendants who fell back as she approached. A doctor stood at the bed-head of her husband, but as her eye met his he stepped aside with a shake of the head and left the place empty for her.
"The action was significant. I saw that she understood what it meant, and with constricted heart watched her as she bent over the dying man and gazed into his wide-open eyes, already sightless and staring.
Calculation was in her look and calculation only; and calculation, or something equally unintelligible, sent her next glance in the direction of his brother. What was in her mind? I could understand her indifference to Frank even at the crisis of his fate, but not the interest she showed in Andrew. It was an absorbing one, altering her whole expression. I no longer knew her for my dear young madam, and the jealousy I had never felt towards Frank rose to frantic resentment in my breast as I beheld what very likely might be a tardy recognition of the other"s well-known pa.s.sion, forced into disclosure by the exigencies of the moment.
"Alarmed by the strength of my feelings, and fearing an equal disclosure on my own part, I sought for a refuge from all eyes and found it in a little balcony opening out at my right. On to this balcony I stepped and found myself face to face with a star-lit heaven. Had I only been content with my isolation and the splendour of the spectacle spread out before me! But no, I must look back upon that bed and the solitary woman standing beside it! I must watch the settling of her body into rigidity as a voice rose from beside the other Postlethwaite saying, "It is a matter of minutes now," and then--and then--the slow creeping of her hand to her husband"s mouth, the outspreading of her palm across the livid lips--its steady clinging there, smothering the feeble gasps of one already moribund, till the quivering form grew still, and Frank Postlethwaite lay dead before my eyes!
"I saw, and made no outcry, but she did, bringing the doctor back to her side with the startled exclamation:
""Dead? I thought he had an hour"s life left in him, and he has pa.s.sed before his brother."
"I thought it hate--the murderous impulse of a woman who sees her enemy at her mercy and can no longer restrain the pa.s.sion of her long-cherished antagonism; and while something within me rebelled at the act, I could not betray her, though silence made a murderer of me too.
I could not. Her spell was upon me as in another instant it was upon everyone else in the room. No suspicion of one so self-repressed in her sadness disturbed the universal sympathy; and encouraged by this blindness of the crowd, I vowed within myself never to reveal her secret. The man was dead, or as good as dead, when she touched him; and now that her hate was expended she would grow gentle and good.
"But I knew the worthlessness of this hope as well as my misconception of her motive, when Frank"s child by another wife returned to my memory, and Bella"s sin stood exposed."
"But only to myself. I alone knew that the fortune now wholly hers, and in consequence her boy"s, had been won by a crime. That if her hand had fallen in comfort on her husband"s forehead instead of in pressure on his mouth, he would have outlived his brother long enough to have become owner of his millions; in which case a rightful portion would have been insured to his daughter, now left a penniless waif. The thought made my hair rise, as the proceedings over, I faced her and made my first and last effort to rid my conscience of its new and intolerable burden.
"But the woman I had known and loved was no longer before me. The crown had touched her brows, and her charm which had been mainly s.e.xual up to this hour had merged into an intellectual force, with which few men"s mentality could cope. Mine yielded at once to it. From the first instant, I knew that a slavery of spirit, as well as of heart, was henceforth to be mine.
"She did not wait for me to speak; she had a.s.sumed the dictator"s att.i.tude at once.
""I know of what you are thinking,"" said she, "and it is a subject you may dismiss at once from your mind. Mr. Postlethwaite"s child by his first wife is coming to live with us. I have expressed my wishes in this regard to my lawyer, and there is nothing left to be said. You, with your close mouth and dependable nature, are to remain here as before, and occupy the same position towards my boy that you did towards his father. We shall move soon into a larger house, and the nature of our duties will be changed and their scope greatly increased; but I know that you can be trusted to enlarge with them and meet every requirement I shall see fit to make. Do not try to express your thanks. I see them in your face."
"Did she, or just the last feeble struggle my conscience was making to break the bonds in which she held me, and win back my own respect? I shall never know, for she left me on completion of this speech, not to resume the subject, then or ever.
"But though I succ.u.mbed outwardly to her demands, I had not pa.s.sed the point where inner conflict ends and peace begins. Her recognition of Helena and her reception into the family calmed me for a while, and gave me hope that all would yet be well. But I had never sounded the full bitterness of madam"s morbid heart, well as I thought I knew it. The hatred she had felt from the first for her husband"s child ripened into frenzied dislike when she found her a living image of the mother whose picture she had come across among Frank"s personal effects. To win a tear from those meek eyes instead of a smile to the sensitive lips was her daily play. She seemed to exult in the joy of impressing upon the girl by how little she had missed a great fortune, and I have often thought, much as I tried to keep my mind free from all extravagant and unnecessary fancies, that half of the money she spent in beautifying this house and maintaining art industries and even great charitable inst.i.tutions was spent with the base purpose of demonstrating to this child the power of immense wealth, and in what ways she might expect to see her little brother expend the millions in which she had been denied all share.
"I was so sure of this that one night while I was winding up the clocks with which Mrs. Postlethwaite in her fondness for old timepieces has filled the house, I stopped to look at the little figure toiling so wearily upstairs, to bed, without a mother"s kiss. There was an appeal in the small wistful face which smote my hard old heart, and possibly a tear welled up in my own eye when I turned back to my duty."
"Was that why I felt the hand of Providence upon me, when in my halt before the one clock to which any superst.i.tious interest was attached--the great one at the foot of the stairs--I saw that it had stopped and at the one minute of all minutes in our wretched lives: Four minutes past two? The hour, the minute in which Frank Postlethwaite had gasped his last under the pressure of his wife"s hand! I knew it--the exact minute I mean--because Providence meant that I should know it.
There had been a clock on the mantelpiece of the hotel room where he and his brother had died and I had seen her glance steal towards it at the instant she withdrew her palm from her husband"s lips. The stare of that dial and the position of its hands had lived still in my mind as I believed it did in hers.