Kitabı oku: «Cynthia Wakeham's Money», sayfa 9

XVI.
A STRANGE VISITOR

Frank's visit and interview with Hermione had this advantage for the latter, that it took away some of the embarrassment which her first meeting with Emma, after the revelations of the night before, had necessarily occasioned. She had breakfasted in her own room, feeling that it would be impossible for her to meet her sister's eye, but having been led into giving such proof of her preference for Mr. Etheridge, and the extent of his influence over her, there could of course be no further question of Dr. Sellick, or any need for explanations between herself and Emma regarding a past thus shown to be no longer of vital interest to her. When, therefore, she came in from the garden and saw Emma waiting for her at the side-door, she blushed, but that was all, in memory of the past night; and murmuring some petty commonplace, sought to pass her and enter again the house which she had not left before in a full year.

But Emma, who was bright with a hope she had not felt in months, stopped her with a word.

"There is an old man waiting in the parlor who says he wants to see us. He sent in this card – it has Dr. Ruthven's name on it – and Doris says he seemed very eager and anxious. Can you guess who he can be?"

"No," rejoined Hermione, wondering. "But we can soon see. Our visitors are not so numerous that we can afford to slight one." And tripping by Emma, she led the way into the parlor.

A slight, meagre, eager-eyed man, clad in black and wearing a propitiatory smile on very thin lips, rose as she entered, and bowed with an awkward politeness that yet had something of the breeding of a gentleman in it.

Hermione did not like his looks, but she advanced cordially enough, perhaps because her heart was lighter than usual, and her mind less under the strain of one horrible fixed idea than it had been in months.

"How do you do?" said she, and looked at him inquiringly.

Huckins, with another bow, this time in recognition of her unexpected beauty and grace, shambled uneasily forward, and said in a hard, strained voice which was even more disagreeable than his face:

"I am sure you are very good to receive me, Miss Cavanagh. I – I had a great desire to come. Your father – "

She drew back with a gasp.

"My father – " she repeated.

"Was an old friend of mine," he went on, in a wheedling tone, in seeming oblivion of the effect his words had had upon her. "Did you never hear him speak of Hope, Seth Hope?"

"Never," cried Hermione, panting, and looking appealingly at Emma, who had just entered the room.

"Yet we were friends for years," declared the dissimulator, folding his hands with a dreary shake of his head.

"For years?" repeated Emma, advancing and surveying him earnestly.

"Our father was a much older man than you, Mr. – Mr. Hope."

"Perhaps, perhaps, I never saw him. But we corresponded for years. Have you not come across letters signed by my name, in looking over his effects?"

"No," answered Emma, firmly, while Hermione, looking very pale, retreated towards the door, where she stopped in mingled distress and curiosity.

"Then he must have destroyed them all," declared their visitor. "Some people do not keep letters. Yet they were full of information, I assure you; full, for it was upon the ever delightful subject of chemistry we corresponded, and the letters I wrote him sometimes cost me a week's effort to indite."

Emma, who had never met a man like this before, looked at him with wide-open eyes. Had Hermione not been there, she would have liked to have played with his eccentricities, and asked him numberless questions. But with her sister shrinking in the doorway, she dared not encourage him to pursue a theme which she perceived to be fraught with the keenest suffering for Hermione. So she refrained from showing the distrust which she really felt, and motioning the old man to sit down, asked, quietly:

"And was it for these letters you came? If so, I am sorry that none such have been found."

"No, no," cried Huckins, with stammering eagerness, as he marked the elder sister's suspicious eyes and unencouraging manner. "It was not to get them back that I ventured to call upon you, but for the pleasure of seeing the house where he lived and did so much wonderful work, and the laboratory, if you will be so good. Why has your sister departed?" he suddenly inquired, in fretful surprise, pointing to the door where Hermione had stood a moment before.

"She probably has duties," observed Emma, in a troubled voice. "And she probably was surprised to hear a stranger ask to see a room no one but the members of his family have entered since our father's death."

"But I am not a stranger," artfully pursued the cringing Huckins, making himself look as benevolent as he could. "I am an admirer, a devoted admirer of your remarkable parent, and I could show you papers" – but he never did, – "of writing in that same parent's hand, in which he describes the long, narrow room, with its shelves full of retorts and crucibles, and the table where he used to work, with the mystic signs above it, which some said were characters taken from cabalistic books, but which he informed me were the new signs he wished to introduce into chemistry, as being more comprehensive and less liable to misinterpretation than those now in use."

"You do seem to know something about the room," she murmured softly, too innocent to realize that the knowledge he showed was such as he could have gleaned from any of Mr. Cavanagh's intimate friends.

"But I want to see it with my own eyes. I want to stand in the spot where he stood, and drink in the inspiration of his surroundings, before I go back to my own great labor."

"Have you a laboratory? Are you a chemist?" asked Emma, interested in despite of the dislike his wheedling ways and hypocritical air naturally induced.

"Yes, yes, I have a laboratory," said he; "but there is no romance about mine; it is just the plain working-room of a hard-working man, while his – "

Emma, who had paled at these words almost as much as her sister had done at his first speech about her father, recoiled with a look in which the wonderment was strangely like fear.

"I cannot show you the room," said she. "You exaggerate your desire to see it, as you exaggerate the attainments and the discoveries of my father. I must ask you to excuse me," she continued, with a slight acknowledgment in which dismissal could be plainly read. "I am very busy, and the morning is rapidly flying. If you could come again – "

But here Hermione's full deep tones broke from the open doorway.

"If he wishes to see the place where father worked, let him come; there is no reason why we should hide it from one who professes such sympathy with our father's pursuits."

Huckins, chuckling, looked at Emma, and then at her sister, and moved rapidly towards the door. Emma, who had been taken greatly by surprise by her sister's words, followed slowly, showing more and more astonishment as Hermione spoke of this place, or that, on their way up-stairs, as being the spot where her father's books were kept, or his chemicals stored, till they came to the little twisted staircase at the top, when she became suddenly silent.

It was now Emma's turn to say:

"This is the entrance to the laboratory. You see it is just as you have described it."

Huckins, with a sly leer, stepped into the room, and threw around one quick, furtive look which seemed to take in the whole place in an instant. It was similar to his description, and yet it probably struck him as being very different from the picture he had formed of it in his imagination. Long, narrow, illy lighted, and dreary, it offered anything but a cheerful appearance, even in the bright July sunshine that sifted through the three small windows ranged along its side. At one end was a row of shelves extending from the floor to the ceiling, filled with jars, chemicals, and apparatus of various kinds. At the other end was a table for collecting gases, and beneath each window were more shelves, and more chemicals, and more apparatus. A large electric machine perched by itself in one corner, gave a grotesque air to that part of the room, but the chief impression made upon an observer was one of bareness and desolation, as of the husk of something which had departed, leaving a smell of death behind. The girls used the room for their dreary midnight walks; otherwise it was never entered, except by Doris, who kept it in perfect order, as a penance, she was once heard to declare, she having a profound dislike to the place, and associating it always, as we have before intimated, with some tragic occurrence which she believed to have taken place there.

Huckins, after his first quick look, chuckled and rubbed his hands together, in well-simulated glee.

"Do I see it?" he cried; "the room where the great Cavanagh thought and worked! It is a privilege not easily over-estimated." And he flitted from shelf to drawer, from drawer to table, with gusts of enthusiasm which made the cold, stern face of Hermione, who had taken up her stand in the doorway, harden into an expression of strange defiance.

Emma, less filled with some dark memory, or more swayed by her anxiety to fathom his purposes, and read the secret of an intrusion which as yet was nothing but a troublous mystery to her, had entered the room with him, and stood quietly watching his erratic movements, as if she half expected him to abstract something from the hoard of old chemicals or collection of formulas above which he hung with such a pretence of rapture.

"How good! how fine! how interesting!" broke in shrill ejaculation from his lips as he ambled hither and thither. But Emma noticed that his eye ever failed to dwell upon what was really choice or unique in the collection of her father's apparatus, and that when by chance he touched an alembic or lifted a jar, it was with an awkwardness that betrayed an unaccustomed hand.

"You do not hold a retort in that way," she finally remarked, going up to him and taking the article in question out of his hand. "This is how my father was accustomed to handle them," she proceeded, and he, taken aback for the instant, blushed and murmured something about her father being his superior and she the very apt pupil of a great scholar and a very wise man.

"You wanted to see the laboratory, and now you have seen it," quoth Hermione from her place by the door. "Is there anything else we can do for you?"

The chill, stern tones seemed to rouse him and he turned towards the speaker.

"No, no, my dear, no, no. You have been very good." But Emma noticed that his eyes still kept roaming here, there, and everywhere while he spoke, picking up information as a bird picks up worms.

"What does he want?" thought she, looking anxiously towards her sister.

"You have a very pleasant home," he now remarked, pausing at the head of those narrow stairs and peering into the nest of Hermione's own room, the door of which stood invitingly open. "Is that why you never leave it?" he unexpectedly asked, looking with his foxy eyes from one sister to the other.

"I do not think it is necessary for us to answer you," said Emma, while Hermione, with a flash in her eye, motioned him imperiously down, saying as she slowly followed him:

"Our friends do not consider it wise to touch upon that topic, how much more should a stranger hesitate before doing so?"

And he, cowering beneath her commanding look and angry presence, seemed to think she was right in this and ventured no more, though his restless eyes were never still, and he appeared to count the very banisters as his hand slid down the railing, and to take in every worn thread that showed itself in the carpet over which his feet shuffled in almost undignified haste.

When they were all below, he made one final remark:

"Your father owed me money, but I do not think of pressing my claim. You do not look as if you were in a position to satisfy it."

"Ah," exclaimed Emma, thinking she had discovered the motive of his visit at last; "that is why you wanted to see the laboratory."

"Partly," he acknowledged with a sly wink, "but not altogether. All there is there would not buy up the I. O. U. I hold. I shall have to let the matter go with other bad debts I suppose. But three hundred dollars is a goodly sum, young ladies, a goodly sum."

Emma, who knew that her father had not been above borrowing money for his experiments, looked greatly distressed for a moment, but Hermione, who had now taken her usual place as leader, said without attempting to disguise the tone of suspicion in her voice:

"Substantiate your claim and present your bill and we will try to pay it. We have still a few articles of furniture left."

Huckins, who had never looked more hypocritically insinuating or more diabolically alert, exclaimed,

"I can wait, I can wait."

But Hermione, with a grand air and a candid look, answered bitterly and at once:

"What we cannot do now we can never do. Our fortunes are not likely to increase in the future, so you had better put in your claim at once, if you really want your pay."

"You think so?" he began; and his eye, which had been bright before, now gleamed with the excitement of a fear allayed. "I – "

But just then the bell rang with a loud twang, and he desisted from finishing his sentence.

Emma went to the door and soon came back with a letter which she handed to Hermione.

"The man Jerry brought it," she explained, casting a meaning look at her sister.

Hermione, with a quick flush, stepped to the window and in the shadow of the curtains read her note. It was a simple word of warning.

Dear Miss Cavanagh:

I met a man at your gate who threatened to go in. Do not receive him, or if you have already done so, distrust every word he has uttered and cut the interview short. He is Hiram Huckins, the man concerning whom I spoke so frankly when we were discussing the will of the Widow Wakeham.

Yours most truly,

Frank Etheridge.

The flush with which Hermione read these lines was quite gone when she turned to survey the intruder, who had forced himself upon her confidence and that of her sister by means of a false name. Indeed she looked strangely pale and strangely indignant as she met his twinkling and restless eye, and, to any one who knew the contents of the note which she held, it would seem that her first words must be those of angry dismissal.

But instead of these, she first looked at him with some curiosity, and then said in even, low, and slightly contemptuous tones:

"Will you not remain and lunch with us, Mr. Huckins?"

At this unexpected utterance of his name he gave a quick start, but soon was his cringing self again. Glancing at the letter she held, he remarked:

"My dear young lady, I see that Mr. Etheridge has been writing to you. Well, there is no harm in that. Now we can shake hands in earnest"; and as he held out his wicked, trembling palm, his face was a study for a painter.

XVII.
TWO CONVERSATIONS

That afternoon, as Emma was sitting in her own room, she was startled by the unexpected presence of Hermione. As they were not in the habit of intruding upon each other above stairs, Emma rose in some surprise. But Hermione motioning her back into her chair, fell at her feet in sudden abandon, and, laying her head in her sister's lay, gave way to one deep sob. Emma, too much astonished to move at this unexpected humiliation of one who had never before bent her imperious head in that household, looked at the rich black locks scattered over her knees with wonder if not with awe.

"Hermione!" she whispered, "Hermione! do not kneel to me, unless it be with joy."

But the elder sister, clasping her convulsively around the waist, murmured:

"Let me be humble for a moment; let me show that I have something in me besides pride, reckless endurance, and determined will. I have not shown it enough in the past. I have kept my sufferings to myself, and my remorse to myself, and alas! also all my stern recognition of your love and unparalleled devotion. I have felt your goodness, oh, I have felt it, so much so, at times, that I thought I could not live, ought not to live, just because of what I have done to you; but I never said anything, could not say anything! Yet all the remorse I experienced was nothing to what I experience now that I know I was not even loved – "

"Hush," broke in Emma, "let those days be forgotten. I only felt that you ought to know the truth, because sweeter prospects are before you, and – "

"I understand," murmured Hermione, "you are always the great-hearted, unselfishly minded sister. I believe you would actually rejoice to see me happy now, even if it did not release you from the position you have assumed. But it shall release you; you shall not suffer any longer on my account. Even if it is only to give you the opportunity of – of meeting with Dr. Sellick, you shall go out of this house to-day. Do you hear me, Emma, to-day?"

But the ever-gentle, ever-docile Emma rose up at this, quite pale in her resolution. "Till you put foot out of the gate I remain this side of it," said she. "Nothing can ever alter my determination in this regard."

And Hermione, surveying her with slowly filling eyes, became convinced that it would be useless to argue this point, though she made an effort to do so by saying with a noble disregard of her own womanly shame which in its turn caused Emma's eyes to fill:

"Dr. Sellick has suffered a great wrong, I judge; don't you think you owe something to him?"

But Emma shook her head, though she could not prevent a certain wistful look from creeping into her face. "Not what I owe to you," said she, and then flushed with distress lest her sister should misjudge the meaning of her words.

But Hermione was in a rarely generous mood. "But I release you from any promise you have made or any obligations you may consider yourself to be under. Great heaven! do you think I would hold you to them now?"

"I hold myself," cried Emma. "You cannot release me, – except," she added, with gentle intimation, "by releasing yourself."

"I cannot release myself," moaned Hermione. "If we all perish I cannot release myself. I am a prisoner to this house, but you – "

"We are sister prisoners," interpolated Emma, softly. Then with a sudden smile, "I was in hopes that he who led you to break one resolution might induce you to break another."

But Hermione, flushing with something of her old fire, cried out warmly: "In going out of the house I broke a promise made to myself, but in leaving the grounds I should – oh, I cannot tell you what I should do; not even you know the full bitterness of my life! It is a secret, locked in this shrinking, tortured heart, which it almost breaks, but does not quite, or I should not linger in this dreadful world to be a cause of woe to those I cherish most."

"But Hermione, Hermione – "

"You think you know what has set a seal on my lips, the gloom on my brow, the death in my heart; but you do not, Emma. You know much, but not the fatal grief, the irrepressible misery. But you shall know, and know soon. I have promised to write out the whole history of my life for Mr. Etheridge, and when he has read it you shall read it too. Perhaps when you learn what the real horror of this house has been, you may appreciate the force of will-power which it has taken for me to remain in it."

Emma, who had never suspected anything in the past beyond what she herself knew, grew white with fresh dismay. But Hermione, seeing it, kissed her, and, speaking more lightly, said: "You kept back one vital secret from me in consideration of what you thought the limit of my endurance. I have done the same for you under the same consideration. Now we will equalize matters, and perhaps – who knows? – happier days may come, if Mr. Etheridge is not too much startled by the revelations I have to make him, and if Dr. Sellick – do not shrink, Emma – learns some magnanimity from his friend and will accept the explanations I shall think it my duty to offer him."

But at this suggestion, so unlike any that had ever come from Hermione's lips before, the younger sister first stared, and then flung her arms around the speaker, with cries of soft deprecation and shame.

"You shall not," she murmured. "Not if I lose him shall he ever know why that cruel letter was written. It is enough – it shall be enough – that he was dismissed then. If he loves me he will try his fate again. But I do not think he does love me, and it would be better for him that he did not. Would he ever marry a woman who, not even at his entreaty, could be induced to cross the limits of her home?"

"Mr. Etheridge should not do it either; but he is so generous – perhaps so hopeful! He may not be as much so when he has read what I have to write."

"I think he will," said Emma, and then paused, remembering that she did not know all that her sister had to relate.

"He would be a man in a thousand then," whispered the once haughty Hermione. "A man to worship, to sacrifice all and everything to, that it was in one's power to sacrifice."

"He will do what is right," quoth Emma.

Hermione sighed. Was she afraid of the right?

Meantime, in the poplar-walk below, another talk was being held, which, if these young girls could have heard it, might have made them feel even more bitterly than before, what heavy clouds lay upon any prospect of joy which they might secretly cherish. Doris, who was a woman of many thoughts, and who just now found full scope for all her ideas in the unhappy position of her two dear young ladies, had gone into the open air to pick currants and commune with herself as to what more could be done to bring them into a proper recognition of their folly in clinging to a habit or determination which seemed likely to plunge them into such difficulties.

The currant bushes were at the farther end of the garden near the termination of the poplar-walk, and when, in one of the pauses of her picking, she chanced to look up, she saw advancing towards her down that walk the thin, wiry figure of the old man who had taken luncheon with the young ladies, and whom they called, in very peculiar tones, she thought, Mr. Huckins. He was looking from right to left as he came, and his air was one of contemplation or that of a person who was taking in the beauties of a scene new to him and not wholly unpleasant.

When he reached the spot where Doris stood eying him with some curiosity and not a little distrust, he paused, looked about him, and perceiving her, affected some surprise, and stepped briskly to where she was.

"Picking currants?" he observed. "Let me help you. I used to do such things when a boy."

Astonished, and not a little gratified at what she chose to consider his condescension, Doris smiled. It was a rare thing now for a man to be seen in this lonesome old place, and such companionship was not altogether disagreeable to Mistress Doris.

Huckins rubbed his hands together in satisfaction at this smile, and sidled up to the simpering spinster with a very propitiatory air.

"How nice this all is," he remarked. "So rural, so peaceful, and so pleasant. I come from a place where there is no fruit, nor flowers, nor young ladies. You must be happy here." And he gave her a look which she thought very insinuating.

"Oh, I am happy enough," she conceded, "because I am bound to be happy wherever the young ladies are. But I could wish that things were different too." And she thought herself very discreet that she had not spoken more clearly.

"Things?" he repeated softly.

"Yes, my young ladies have odd ideas; I thought you knew."

He drew nearer to her side, very much nearer, and dropped the currants he had plucked gently into her pail.

"I know they have a fixed antipathy to going out, but they will get over that."

"Do you think so?" she asked eagerly.

"Don't you?" he queried, with an innocent look of surprise. He was improving in his dissimulation, or else he succeeded better with those of whom he had no fear.

"I don't know what to think. Are you an old friend of theirs?" she inquired. "You must be, to lunch with them."

"I never saw them before to-day," he returned, "yet I am an old friend. Reason that out," he leered.

"You like to puzzle folks," she observed, picking very busily but smiling all the while. "Do you give answers with your puzzles?"

"Not to such sharp wits as yours. But how beautiful Miss Cavanagh is. Has she always had that scar?"

"Ever since I knew her."

"Pity she should have such a blemish. You like her, don't you, very much?"

"I love her."

"And her sister – such a sweet girl!"

"I love them both."

"That is right. I should be sorry to have any one about them who did not love them. I love them, or soon shall, very much."

"Are you," Doris inquired, with great inquisitiveness, "going to remain in Marston any time?"

"I cannot say," sighed the old man; "I should like to. I should be very happy here, but I am afraid the young ladies do not like me well enough."

Doris had cherished some such idea herself an hour ago, and had not wondered at it then, but now her feelings seemed changed.

"Was it to see them you came to Marston?" said she.

"Merely to see them," he replied.

She was puzzled, but more eager than puzzled, so anxious was she to find some one who could control their eccentricities.

"They will treat you politely," she assured him. "They are peculiar girls, but they are always polite."

"I am afraid I shall not be satisfied with politeness," he insinuated. "I want them to love me, to confide in me. I want to be their friend in fact as I have so long been in fancy."

"You are some relative of theirs," she now asserted, "or you knew their father well or their mother."

"I wouldn't say no," he replied, – but to which of these three intimations, he evidently did not think it worth while to say.

"Then," she declared, "you are the man I want. Mr. Etheridge – that is the lawyer from New York who has lately been coming here – does not seem to have much confidence in himself or me. But you look as if you might do something or suggest something. I mean about getting the young ladies to give up their whims."

"Has this Mr. – Mr. Etheridge, did you call him? – been doing their business long?"

"I never saw him here till a month ago."

"Ah! a month ago! And do they like him? Do they seem inclined to take his advice? Does he press it upon them?"

"I wish I knew. I am only a poor servant, remember, though my bringing up was as good almost as theirs. They are kind to me, but I do not sit down in the parlor; if I did, I might know something of what is going on. I can only judge, you see, by looks."

"And the looks? Come, I have a great interest in the young ladies – almost as great as yours. What do their looks say? – I mean since this young man came to visit them? He is a young man, didn't you say?"

"Yes, he is young, and so good-looking. I have thought – now don't spill the currants, just as we have filled the pail – that he was a little sweet on Miss Hermione, and that that was why he came here so often, and not because he had business."

"You have?" twitted the old man, almost dancing about her in his sudden excitement. "Well, well, that must be seen to. A wedding, eh, a wedding? That's what you think is coming?" And Doris could not tell whether it was pleasure or alarm that gave so queer a look to his eyes.

"I cannot say – I wish I could," she fervently cried; "then I might hope to see a change here; then we might expect to see these two sweet young ladies doing like other folks and making life pleasant for themselves and every one about them. But Miss Hermione is a girl who would be very capable of saying no to a young man if he stood in the way of any resolve she had taken. I don't calculate much on her being influenced by love, or I would never have bothered you with my troubles. It is fear that must control her, or – " Doris paused and looked at him knowingly – "or she must be lured out of the house by some cunning device."

Huckins, who had been feeling his way up to this point, brightened as he noticed the slyness of the smile with which she emphasized this insinuation, and from this moment felt more assured. But he said nothing as yet to show how he was affected by her words. There was another little matter he wanted settled first.

"Do you know," he asked, "why she, and her sister, too, I believe, have taken this peculiar freak? Have they ever told you, or have you ever – " how close his head got to hers, and how he nodded and peered – "surprised their secret?"

Doris shook her head. "All a mystery," she whispered, and began picking currants again, that operation having stopped as they got more earnest.

"But it isn't a mystery," he laughed, "why you want to get them out of the house just now. I know your reason for that, and think you will succeed without any device of love or cunning."

"I don't understand you," she protested, puckering her black brows and growing very energetic. "I don't want to do it now any more than I have for the last twelve months. Only I am getting desperate. I am not one who can want a thing and be patient. I want Miss Hermione Cavanagh and her sister to laugh and be gay like other girls, and till they give up all this nonsense of self-seclusion they never will; and so I say to myself that any measures are justifiable that lead to that end. Don't you think I am right?"

He smiled warily and took her pail of currants from her hand.

"I think you are the brightest woman and have one of the clearest heads I ever knew. I don't remember when I have seen a woman who pleased me so well. Shall we be friends? I am only a solitary bachelor, travelling hither and thither because I do not know how else to spend my money; but I am willing to work for your ends if you are willing to work for mine."

"And what are they?" she simpered, looking very much delighted. Doris was not without ambition, and from this moment not without her hopes.

"To make these young ladies trust me so that I may visit them off and on while I remain in this place. I thought it was pleasant here before, but now– " The old fellow finished with a look and a sigh, and Doris' subjugation was complete.