Kitabı oku: «Cynthia Wakeham's Money», sayfa 14
XXV.
EDGAR AND FRANK
Frank, who had been reading these words as if swept along by a torrent, started to his feet with a hoarse cry, as he reached this point. He could not believe his eyes, he could not believe his understanding. He shrank from the paper that contained the deadly revelation, as though a snake had suddenly uncoiled itself from amid the sheets. With hair slowly rising on his forehead, he stared and stared, hoping wildly, hoping against hope, to see other words start from the sheet, and blot out of existence the ones that had in an instant made his love a horror, his life a desert.
But no, Heaven works no such miracle, even in sight of such an agony as his; and the words met his gaze relentlessly till his misery was more than he could endure, and he rushed from the room like a madman.
Edgar, who was busy over some medical treatise, rose rapidly as he heard the unsteady footsteps of his friend.
"What is the matter?" he cried, as Frank came stumbling into his presence. "You look – "
"Never mind how I look; comfort me, Edgar, comfort me!" and in his anguish he burst into irrepressible sobs "Hermione is – " He could not say what, but drew his friend after him to the room where the letter lay, and pointed to the few ghastly lines which had undone him. "Read those," he panted. "She had suffered; she was not herself, but, oh – " He broke down again, and did not try to speak further till Edgar had read the hideous confession contained in those closing lines, and some of the revelations which had led up to it. Then he said: "Do not speak to me yet; let me bear the horror alone. I loved her so; ah, I did love her!"
Edgar, who had turned very pale, was considerate enough to respect this grief, and silently wait for Frank to regain sufficient composure to talk with him. This was not soon, but when the moment came, Edgar showed that his heart beat truly under all his apparent indifference. He did not say, "I bade you beware"; he merely took his friend's hand and wrung it. Frank, who was almost overwhelmed with shame and sorrow, muttered some words of acknowledgment.
"I must get out of the town," said he. "I feel as if the very atmosphere here would choke me."
Here came again the long, doleful drone of the foghorn. "How like a groan that is," said he. "An evil day it was for me when I first came within its foreboding sound."
"We will say that when all is over," ventured Edgar, but in no very hopeful tones. "You should not have shown me these words, Frank; the wonder is that she was willing to show them to you."
"She could not otherwise get rid of my importunities. I would take no hint, and so she tells me the truth."
"That shows nobleness," remarked Edgar. "She has some virtues which may excuse you to yourself for the weakness you have shown in her regard."
"I dare not think of it," said Frank. "I dare not think of her again. Yet to leave her when she is suffering so! Is not that almost as cruel a fate as to learn that she is so unworthy?"
"I would you had never come here!" exclaimed Edgar, with unwonted fervency.
"There are more words," observed Frank, "but I cannot read them. "Words of sorrow and remorse, no doubt, but what do they avail? The fact remains that she gave her father in his agony another dose of the poison that was killing him, instead of the antidote for which he prayed."
"Yes," said Edgar, "only I feel bound to say that no antidote would have saved him then. I know the poison and I know the antidote; we have tested them together often."
Frank shuddered.
"He had the heart of a demon," declared Edgar, "to plan and carry out such a revenge, even upon a daughter who had so grievously disappointed him. I can hardly believe the tale, only that I have learned that one may believe anything of human nature."
"She – she did not kill him, then?"
"No, but her guilt is as great as if she had, for she must have had the momentary instinct of murder."
"O Hermione, Hermione! so beautiful and so unhappy!"
"A momentary instinct, which she is expiating fearfully. No wonder she does not leave the house. No wonder that her face looks like a tragic mask."
"No one seems to have suspected her guilt, or even his. We have never heard any whispers about poison."
"Dudgeon is a conceited fool. Having once said overwork, he would stick to overwork. Besides that poison is very subtle; I would have difficulty in detecting its workings myself."
"And this is the tragedy of that home! Oh, how much worse, how much more fearful than any I have attributed to it!"
The Doctor sighed.
"What has not Emma had to bear," he said.
"Emma!" Frank unconsciously roused himself. "If I remember rightly, Hermione has said that Emma did not know all her trouble."
"Thank God! May she never be enlightened."
"Edgar," whispered Frank, "I do not think I can let you read all that letter, though it tells much you ought to know. I have yet some consideration – for – for Hermione – " (How hard the word came from lips which once uttered it with so much pride!) – "and she never expected any other eyes than mine to rest upon these revelations of her heart of hearts. But one thing I must tell you in justice to yourself and the girl upon whom no shadow rests but that of a most loyal devotion to a most wretched sister. Not from her heart did the refusal come which blighted your hopes and made you cynical towards women. There were reasons she could not communicate, reasons she could not even dwell upon herself, why she felt forced to dismiss you, and in the seemingly heartless way she did."
"I am willing to believe it," said Edgar.
"Emma is a pure and beautiful spirit," observed Frank, and gave himself up to grief for her who was not, and yet who commanded his pity for her sufferings and possibly for her provocations.
Edgar now had enough of his own to think of, and if Frank had been less absorbed in his own trouble he might have observed with what longing eyes his friend turned every now and then towards the sheets which contained so much of Emma's history as well as her sister's. Finally he spoke:
"Why does Emma remain in the house to which the father only condemned her sister?"
"Because she once vowed to share that sister's fate, whatever it might be."
"Her love for her sister is then greater than any other passion she may have had."
"I don't know; there were other motives beside love to influence her," explained Frank, and said no more.
Edgar sank again into silence. It was Frank who spoke next.
"Do you think" – He paused and moistened his lips – "Have you doubted what our duty is about this matter?"
"To leave the girl – you said it yourself. Have you any other idea, Frank?"
"No, no; that is not what I mean," stammered Etheridge. "I mean about – about – the father's death. Should the world know? Is it a matter for the – for the police?"
"No," cried Edgar, aghast. "Mr. Cavanagh evidently killed himself. It is a dreadful thing to know, but I do not see why we need make it public."
Frank drew a long breath.
"I feared," he said, – "I did not know but you would think my duty would lie in – in – "
"Don't speak of it," exclaimed Edgar. "If you do not wish to finish reading her confession, put it up. Here is a drawer, in which you can safely lock it."
Frank, recoiling from the touch of those papers which had made such a havoc with his life, motioned to Edgar to do what he would with them.
"Are you not going to write – to answer this in some way?" asked Edgar.
"Thank God she has not made that necessary. She wrote somewhere, in the beginning, I think, that, if I felt the terror of her words too deeply, I was to pass by her house on the other side of the street at an early hour in the morning. Did she dream that I could do anything else?"
Edgar closed the drawer in which he had hidden her letter, locked it, and laid the key down on the table beside Frank.
Frank did not observe the action; he had risen to his feet, and in another moment had left the room. He had reached the point of feeling the need of air and a wider space in which to breathe. As he stepped into the street, he turned in a contrary direction to that in which he had been wont to walk. Had he not done this; had he gone southward, as usual, he might have seen the sly and crouching figure which was drawn up on that side of the house, peering into the room he had just left through the narrow opening made by an imperfectly lowered shade.
BOOK III.
UNCLE AND NIECE
XXVI.
THE WHITE POWDER
It was nine o'clock in the morning, and Hermione stood in the laboratory window overlooking the street. Pale from loss of sleep and exhausted with the fever of anxiety which had consumed her ever since she had despatched her letter to Mr. Etheridge, she looked little able to cope with any disappointment which might be in store for her. But as she leaned there watching for Frank, it was evident from her whole bearing that she was moved by a fearful hope rather than by an overmastering dread; perhaps because she had such confidence in his devotion; perhaps because there was such vitality in her own love.
Her manner was that of one who thinks himself alone, and yet she was not alone. At the other end of the long and dismal apartment glided the sly figure of Huckins. No longer shabby and unkempt, but dressed with a neatness which would have made his sister Cynthia stare in amazement if she could have risen from her grave to see him, he flitted about with noiseless tread, listening to every sigh that escaped from his niece's lips, and marking, though he scarcely glanced her way, each turn of her head and each bend of her body, as if he were fully aware of her reasons for standing there, and the importance of the issues hanging upon the occurrences of the next fifteen minutes.
She may have known of his presence, and she may not. Her preoccupation was great, and her attention fixed not upon anything in the room, but upon the street without. Yet she may have felt the influence of that gliding Evil, moving, snake-like, at her back. If she did she gave no sign, and the moments came and went without any change in her eager attitude or any cessation in the ceaseless movements with which he beguiled his own anxiety and the devilish purposes which were slowly forming themselves in his selfish and wicked mind.
At length she gave a start, and leaned heavily forward. Huckins, who was expecting this proof of sudden interest, paused where he was, and surveyed her with undisguised eagerness in his baleful eyes, while the words "She sees him; he is coming" formed themselves upon his thin and quivering lips, though no sound disturbed the silence, and neither he nor she seemed to breathe.
And he was right. Frank was coming down the street, not gayly and with the buoyant step of a happy lover, but with head sunk upon his breast and eyes lowered to the ground. Will he lift them as he approaches the gate? Will he smile, as in the olden time – the olden time that was yesterday – and raise his hand towards the gate and swing it back and enter with that lightsome air of his at once protecting and joy-inspiring? He looks very serious now, and his steps falter; but surely, surely, his love is not going to fail him at the crisis; surely, surely, he who has overlooked so much will not be daunted by the little more with which she has tried his devotion; surely, surely – But his eyes do not lift themselves. He is at the gate, but his hand is not raised to it, and the smile does not come. He is going by, not on the other side of the street, but going by, going by, which means —
As the consciousness of what it did mean pierced her heart and soul, Hermione gave a great cry – she never knew how great a cry – and, staring like one demented after the beloved figure that in her disordered sight seemed to shrink and waver as it vanished, sank helpless upon the window sill, with her head falling forward, in a deadly faint.
Huckins, hearing that cry, slowly rubbed his hands together and smiled as the Dark One might smile at the sudden downfall of some doubtful soul. Then he passed softly to the door, and, shutting it carefully, came back and recommenced his restless pacings, but this time with an apparent purpose of investigation, for he opened and shut drawers, not quietly, but with a decided clatter, and peered here and there into bottles and jars, casting, as he did so, ready side-glances at the drooping figure from which the moans of a fatal despair were now slowly breaking.
When those moans became words, he stopped and listened, and this was what he heard come faltering from her lips:
"Twice! twice! Once when I felt myself strong and now when I feel myself weak. It is too much for a proud woman. I cannot bear it."
At this evidence of revolt and discouragement, Huckins' smile grew in its triumph. He seemed to glide nearer to her; yet he did not stir.
She saw nothing. If she had once recognized his presence, he was to her now as one blotted from existence. She was saying over and over to herself: "No hope! no hope! I am cursed! My father's hate reaches higher than my prayers. There is no escape; no love, no light. Solitude is before me; solitude forever. Believing this, I cannot live; indeed I cannot!"
As if this had been the word for which he was waiting, Huckins suddenly straightened up his lean figure and began himself to talk, not as she did, in wild and passionate tones, but in low, abstracted murmurs, as if he were too intent upon a certain discovery he had made to know or care whether there was or was not any one present to overhear his words.
And what did he say? what could he say at a moment like this? Listen and gauge the evil in the man, for it is deep as his avarice and relentless as his purpose to enjoy the riches which he considers his due. He is standing by a cabinet, the cabinet on the left of the room, and his hand is in a long and narrow drawer.
"What is this?" (Mark the surprise in his tone.) "A packet labelled Poison? This is a strange thing to find lying about in an open drawer. Poison! I wonder what use brother Cavanagh had for poison?"
He pauses; was it because he had heard a moan or cry break from the spot where Hermione crouched against the wall? No, there was silence there, a deep and awful silence, which ought to have made the flesh creep upon his bones, but which, instead, seemed to add a greater innocence to his musing tones.
"I suppose it was what was left after some old experiment. It is very dangerous stuff. I should not like to drop these few grains of white powder upon my tongue, unless I wanted to be rid of all my troubles. Guess I had better shake the paper out of the window, or those girls will come across it some day, and may see that word Poison and be moved by it. Life in this house hasn't many attractions."
Any sound now from that dim, distant corner? No, silence is there still; deadly silence. He smiles darkly, and speaks again; very low now, but oh, how clearly!
"But what business is it of mine? I find poison in this drawer, and I leave it where I find it, and shut the drawer. It may be wanted for rats, and it is always a mistake for old folks to meddle. But I should like to; I'd like to throw this same innocent-looking white powder out of the window; it makes me afraid to think of it lying shut up here in a drawer so easily opened – My child! Hermione!" he suddenly shrieked, "what do you want?"
She was standing before him, a white and terrible figure.
"Nothing," came from her set lips, in a low and even tone; but she laid one hand upon the drawer he had half shut and with the other pointed to the door.
He shrank from her, appalled perhaps at his work; perhaps at her recognition of it.
"Don't," he feebly protested, shaking with terror, or was it with a hideous anxiety? "There is poison in that drawer; do not open it."
"Go for my sister," was the imperious command. "I have no use for you here, but for her I have."
"You won't open that drawer," he prayed, as he retreated before her eyes in frightened jerks and breathless pauses.
"I tell you I do not need you," she repeated, her hand still on the drawer, her form rigid, her face blue-white and drawn.
"I – I will bring Emma," he faltered, and shambled across the threshold, throwing back upon her a look she may have noted and may not, but which if she had understood, would certainly have made her pause. "I will go for Emma," he said again, closing the door behind him with a touch which seemed to make even that senseless wood fall away from him. Then he listened – listened instead of going for the gentle sister whose presence might have calmed the turbulent spirit he had just left. And as he listened his face gradually took on a satisfied look, till, at a certain sound from within, he allowed his hands the luxury of a final congratulatory rub, and then gliding from the place, went below.
Emma was standing in the parlor window, fixed in dismay at the sight of Frank's going by without word or look; but Huckins did not stop to give her the message with which he had been entrusted. Instead of that he passed into the kitchen, and not till he had crossed the floor and shambled out into the open air of the garden did he venture to turn and say to the watching Doris:
"I am afraid Miss Hermione is not quite well."
XXVII.
THE HAND OF HUCKINS
Frank exhausted his courage in passing Hermione's door. When he heard the cry she gave, he stopped for a moment, then rushed hastily on, not knowing whither, and not caring, so long as he never saw the street or the house or the poplars again.
He intended, as much as he intended anything, to take the train for New York, but when he came sufficiently to himself to think of the hour, he found that he was in a wood quite remote from the station, and that both the morning and noon trains had long since passed.
It was not much of a disappointment. He was in that stage of misery in which everything seems blurred, and life and its duties too unreal for contemplation. He did not wish to act or even to think. The great solitude about him was more endurable than the sight of human faces, but I doubt if he would have been other than solitary anywhere, or seen aught but her countenance in any place where he might have been.
And what made this the more torturing to him was the fact that he always saw her with an accusing look on her face. Never with bowed forehead or in an attitude of shame, but with the straightforward aspect of one utterly grieved where she had expected consideration and forbearance. This he knew to be a freak of his fancy, for had he not her words to prove she had merited his condemnation? But fancy or not, it followed him, softening unconsciously his thought of her, though it never for an instant weakened his resolve not to see her again or exchange another word with one whose conscience was laden with so heavy a crime.
The wood in which he found himself wandering skirted the town towards the west, so that when, in the afternoon, hunger and weariness drove him back to the abodes of men, he had but to follow the beaten track which ran through it, to come out at the other end of the village from that by which he had entered.
The place where he emerged was near a dark pool at the base of the hill on which was perched the Baptist church.
As he saw this pool and caught a sight of the steeple towering above him in the summer sky, he felt himself grow suddenly frantic. Here she had stood with Emma, halting between life and death. Here she had been seized by her first temptation, and had been saved from it only to fall into another one immeasurably greater and more damning. Horrible, loathsome pool! why had it not swallowed her? Would it not have been better that it had? He dared to think so, and bent above its dismal depths with a fascination which in another moment made him recoil and dash away in horror towards the open spaces of the high-road.
Edgar had just come in from his round of visits when Frank appeared before him. Having supposed him to be in New York, he uttered a loud exclamation. Whereupon Frank exclaimed:
"I could not go. I seemed to be chained to this place. I have been wandering all day in the woods." And he sank into a chair exhausted, caring little whether Edgar noted or not his weary and dishevelled appearance.
"You look ill," observed the Doctor; "or perhaps you have not eaten; let me get you a cup of coffee."
Frank looked up but made no further sign.
"You will stay with me to-night," suggested Edgar.
"I am chained," repeated Frank, and that was all.
With a look of sincerest compassion the Doctor quietly left the room. He had his own griefs, but he could master them; beside, the angel of hope was already whispering sweet messages to his secret soul. But Frank's trouble was beyond alleviation, and it crushed him as his own had never done, possibly because in this case his pride was powerless to sustain him. When he came back, he found Frank seated at the desk poring over the fatal letter. He had found the key of the drawer lying where he had left it, and, using it under a sudden impulse, had opened the drawer and taken out the sheets he had vowed never to touch again.
Edgar paused when he saw the other's bended head and absorbed air, and though he was both annoyed and perplexed he said nothing, but set down the tray he had brought very near to Frank's elbow.
The young lawyer neither turned nor gave it any attention.
Edgar, with the wonted patience of a physician, sat down and waited for his friend to move. He would not interrupt him, but would simply be in readiness to hand the coffee when Frank turned. But he never handed him that cup of coffee, for suddenly, Frank, with a wild air and eyes fixed in a dazed stare upon the paper, started to his feet, and uttering a cry, began turning over the two or three sheets he was reading, as if he had made some almost incomprehensible discovery.
"Edgar, Edgar," he hurriedly gasped, "read these over for me; I cannot see the words; there is something different here; we have made a mistake! Oh, what has happened! my head is all in a whirl."
He sank back in his chair. Edgar, rushing forward, seized the half dozen sheets offered him and glanced eagerly over them.
"I see no difference," he cried; but as he went on, driven by Frank's expectant eye, he gave a surprised start also, and turning back the pages, read them again and again, crying at last:
"We must have overlooked one of these sheets. We read her letter without this page. What a mischance! for with these words left in it is no longer a confession we have before us, but a narrative. Frank, Frank, we have wronged the girl. She has no crime to bemoan, only a misery to relate."
"Read it aloud," broke from Frank's lips. "Let me hear it from your mouth. How could we have overlooked such a page? Oh, my poor girl! my poor girl!"
Edgar, beginning back a page or two from the one which had before escaped their attention, read as follows. The portion marked by brackets is the one that was new to both their eyes:
"But before the doctor appeared that morning father had called me for the third and last time to his side.
"'I wish to see my eldest daughter alone,' he declared, as Emma lingered and Doris hovered about the open door. They at once went out. 'Now shut the door,' said he, as their footsteps were heard descending the stairs.
"I did as I was bid, though I felt as if I were shutting myself in with some horrid doom.
"'Now come in front of me,' he commanded. 'I want to look at you; I have just five minutes left in which to do it.'
"'Five minutes!' I repeated hoarsely, creeping round with tottering and yet more tottering steps to where he pointed.
"'Yes; the poison has done its work at last. At eight o'clock I shall be dead.'
"'Poison!' I shrieked, but in so choked a tone the word sounded like a smothered whisper.
"But he was alarmed by it for all that.
"'Do not tell the world,' he cried. 'It is enough that you know it. Are you pleased that you have driven your father to self-destruction? Will it make your life in this house, in which you have vowed to remain, any happier? I told you that your sin should be on your head, and it will be. For, listen to me: now in this last dreadful hour, I command you, heartless and disobedient one, to keep that vow. By this awful death, by the despair which has driven me to it, beware of leaving these doors. In your anger you swore to remain within these walls; in your remorse see that you keep that oath. Not for love, not for hatred, dare to cross the threshold, or I will denounce you in the grave where I shall be gone, and my curse shall be upon you.'
"He had risen in his passion as he uttered these words, but he sank back as he finished, and I thought he was dead.
"Terrified, crushed, I sank upon my knees, having no words with which to plead for the mercy for which I now longed. The next minute a horrible groan burst upon my ear.
"'It eats – it burns into my vitals. The suffering has come, – the suffering which I have often noted with unconcern in the animals upon which I had tested it. I cannot bear it; I had rather live. Get me the antidote; there, there in the long, narrow drawer in the cabinet by the wall! Not there, not there!' he shrieked, as I stumbled over the floor, which seemed to rise in waves beneath my feet. 'The other cabinet, the other drawer; you are where the poison is.'
"I halted; weights seemed to be upon my feet; I could not move. He was writhing in agony on the floor; he no longer seemed to know where I stood.
"'The antidote!' he moaned, 'the antidote!' I burst the bonds which held me, and leaving open the drawer which I had half pulled out in my eagerness to relieve him, I rushed across the room to the cabinet he had pointed out.
"'The long drawer,' he murmured, 'the one like the other. Pull it hard; it is not locked!'
"I tried to do as he commanded, but my hand slid helplessly from drawer to drawer. I could hardly see. He moaned and shrieked again.
"'The long one, I say, the long one!'
"As he spoke my hand touched it.
"'I have it,' I panted forth.
"'Open it – the drawer,' he cried. 'Bring me what is in it.'
"I reached out my hand; heaven and earth seemed to stand still; red lights danced before my eyes; I drew out the drawer.
"'Quick, quick, the powder!' he moaned; 'fetch it!'
"I was staring at him, but my hand groped in the drawer. I felt a little packet of powder; I took it and crossed the room. As soon as I was near him he stretched out his hand and grasped it. I saw him empty it into his mouth; at the same instant his eyes fixed themselves in horror on the drawer I had left open behind me, the drawer in which the poison was kept.
"'Curse you for a – ' He never said what. With this broken imprecation upon his lips, he sank back upon the floor, dead."
"God, what a difference!" cried Edgar. But Frank, trembling from head to foot, reached out and took the sheets, and laying them on the desk before him, buried his face in them. When he looked up again, Edgar, for all his own relief, was startled by the change in him.
"Her vindication comes late," said he, "but I will go at once and explain – "
"Wait; let us first understand how we both were led to make such a mistake. Could the leaves have stuck together?"
There were no signs of this having happened. Yet who could say that this was not the real explanation of the whole matter? The most curious feature of the occurrence was that just the missing of that one sheet should have so altered the sense of what they read. They did not know then or ever that this very fact had struck Huckins also in his stolen reading of the same, and that it had been his hand which had abstracted it and then again restored it when he thought the mutilated manuscript had done its work. They never knew this, as I say, but they thought the chance which had occurred to them a very strange one, and tried to lay it to their agitation at the time, or to any cause but the real one.
The riddle proving insolvable, they abandoned it, and Frank again rose. But Edgar drawing his attention to the few additional sheets which he had never read, he sat down again in eagerness to peruse them. Let us read them with him, for in them we shall find the Hermione of to-day, not the angry and imperious woman upon whom her father revenged himself by a death calculated to blot the sun from her skies and happiness from her heart forever.
"When Emma came to the room she discovered me kneeling, rigid and horror-stricken, above my father's outstretched form. She says that I met her eyes with mine, but that there was no look of life within them. Indeed, I was hardly alive, and have no remembrance of how I was taken from that room or what happened in the house for hours. When I did rouse, Emma was beside me. Her look was one of grief but not of horror, and I saw she had no idea of what had passed between my father and myself during the last few days. Dr. Dudgeon had told her that our father had died of heart-disease, and she believed him, and thought my terror was due to the suddenness of his end and the fact that I was alone with him at the time.
"She therefore smiled with a certain faint encouragement when I opened my eyes upon her face, but pushed me back with gentle hand when I tried to rise, saying:
"'All is well with father, Hermione, – so think only of yourself just now; I do not think you are able to get up.'
"I was only too happy not to make the effort. If only my eyes had never opened! If only I had sunk from unconsciousness into the perfect peace of death! But even that idea made me quake. He was there, and I had such a horror of him, that it seemed for a moment that I would rather live forever than to encounter him again, even in a world where the secrets of all hearts lie open.
"'Did not father forgive you?' murmured Emma, marking perhaps the expression of my face.
"I smiled a bitter smile.
"'Do not ever let us talk about father,' I prayed. 'He has condemned me to this house, and that will make me remember him sufficiently without words.'
"She rose horror-stricken.
"'O Hermione!' she murmured; 'O Hermione!' and hid her face in her hands and wept.
"But I lay silent, tearless.
"When the funeral procession passed out of the house without us, the people stared. But no thought of there being anything back of this seeming disrespect, save the caprice of two very whimsical girls, seemed to strike the mind of any one. The paper which had held the antidote I had long ago picked up from the laboratory floor; while the open drawer with the packet in it marked Poison had doubtless been shut by Doris on her first entrance into the room after his death. For I not only found it closed, but I never heard any one speak of it, or of any peculiar symptoms attending my father's death.
"But the arrow was in my heart for all that, and for weeks my life was little more than a nightmare. All the pride which had upheld me was gone. I felt myself a crushed woman. The pall which my father had thrown over me in his self-inflicted death, hung heavy and stifling about me. I breathed, but it seemed to be in gasps, and when exhausted nature gave way and I slept, it was to live over again in dreams those last fearful moments of his life, and hear, with even more distinctness than in my waking hours, the words of the final curse with which he sank to the floor.
"I had not deserved it – that I felt; but I suffered all the same, and suffered all the more that I could take no confidant into my troubles. Emma, with her broken life, had had disappointments enough without this revelation of a father's vindictiveness, and though it might have eased me for the moment to hear her words of sympathy, I knew that I should find it harder to face her day by day, if this ghost of horror once rose between us. No; the anguish was mine, and must be borne by me alone. So I crushed it down into my heart and was silent.
"Meantime the command which had been laid upon me by my father, never to leave the house, was weaving a chain about me I soon found it impossible to break. Had I immediately upon his death defied his will and rushed frenziedly out of the gate, I might have grown to feel it easy to walk the streets again in the face of a curse which should never have been laid upon me. But the custom of obeying his dying mandate soon got its hold upon me, and I could not overcome it. At the very thought of crossing the threshold I would tremble; and though when I looked at Emma heroically sharing my fate without knowing the reasons for my persistency, I would dream for a moment of breaking the spell those dying lips had laid upon me, I always found myself drawing back in terror, almost as if I had been caught by fleshless fingers.
"And so the weeks passed and we settled into the monotonous existence of an uninterrupted seclusion. What had been the expression of my self-will, became now a species of expiation. For though I had not deserved the awful burden which had been imposed upon me of a father's death and curse, I had deserved punishment, and this I now saw, and this I now endeavored to meet, with something like the meekness of repentance. I accepted my doom, and tried not to dwell so much upon my provocations as upon the temper with which I met them, and the hardness with which I strove to triumph over my disappointments. And in doing this I became less hard, preparing my heart, though I did not know it, for that new seed of love which fate was about to drop into it.
"Mr. Etheridge, I have told you all my story. If it strikes you with dismay and you shrink in your noble manhood from a woman whom, rightfully or wrongfully, is burdened with the weight of a father's death, do not try to overcome that shrinking or defy that dismay. We could never be happy if you did. Nothing but whole-souled love will satisfy me or help me to forget the shadows that bear so heavily upon my head. You say you love me, but your emotions upon reading this letter will prove to yourself what is the true strength and nature of your feelings. Let them, then, have their honest way. If they are in my favor I shall be the happiest girl alive, but if they lead you to go by on the other side of the street, then will I strive to bear this sorrow also, as one who has been much to blame for the evils which have befallen her."
That was all. As Frank folded the last sheet and put it and the rest quietly away in his pocket, Edgar saw, or thought he saw, that happier hours were about to dawn for Hermione Cavanagh. It made him think of his own love and of the claims of the gentle Emma.
