To make the old man speak! To force this conscience-stricken but
rebellious soul to reveal what the clock forbade! How could it be done?
This continued to be Violet’s great problem. She pondered it so deeply
during all the remainder of the day that a little pucker settled on her
brow, which someone (I will not mention who) would have been pained to
see. Mrs. Postlethwaite, if she noticed it at all, probably ascribed it
to her anxieties as nurse, for never had Violet been more assiduous in
her attentions. But Mrs. Postlethwaite was no longer the woman she had
been, and possibly never noted it at all.
At five o’clock Violet suddenly left the room. Slipping down into the
lower hall, she went the round of the clocks herself, listening to every
one. There was no perceptible difference in their tick. Satisfied of
this and that it was simply the old man’s imagination which had supplied
them each with separate speech, she paused before the huge one at the
foot of the stairs,--the one whose dictate he had promised himself
to follow,--and with an eye upon its broad, staring dial, muttered
wistfully:
“Oh! for an idea! For an idea!”
Did this cumbrous relic of old-time precision turn traitor at this
ingenuous plea? The dial continued to stare, the works to sing, but
Violet’s face suddenly lost its perplexity. With a wary look about her
and a listening ear turned towards the stair top, she stretched out her
hand and pulled open the door guarding the pendulum, and peered in at
the works, smiling slyly to herself as she pushed it back into place and
retreated upstairs to the sick room.
When the doctor came that night she had a quiet word with him outside
Mrs. Postlethwaite’s door. Was that why he was on hand when old Mr.
Dunbar stole from his room to make his nightly circuit of the halls
below? Something quite beyond the ordinary was in the good physician’s
mind, for the look he cast at the old man was quite unlike any he had
ever bestowed upon him before, and when he spoke it was to say with
marked urgency:
“Our beautiful young lady will not live a week unless I get at the seat
of her malady. Pray that I may be enabled to do so, Mr. Dunbar.”
A blow to the aged man’s heart which called forth a feeble “Yes, yes,”
followed by a wild stare which imprinted itself upon the doctor’s
memory as the look of one hopelessly old, who hears for the first time a
distinct call from the grave which has long been awaiting him!
A solitary lamp stood in the lower hall. As the old man picked his slow
way down, its small, hesitating flame flared up as in a sudden gust,
then sank down flickering and faint as if it, too, had heard a call
which summoned it to extinction.
No other sign of life was visible anywhere. Sunk in twilight shadows,
the corridors branched away on either side to no place in particular and
serving, to all appearance (as many must have thought in days gone by),
as a mere hiding-place for clocks.
To listen to their united hum, the old man paused, looking at first
a little distraught, but settling at last into his usual self as he
started forward upon his course. Did some whisper, hitherto unheard,
warn him that it was the last time he would tread that weary round?
Who can tell? He was trembling very much when with his task nearly
completed, he stepped out again into the main hall and crept rather than
walked back to the one great clock to whose dictum he made it a practice
to listen last.
Chattering the accustomed words, “They say Yes! They are all saying Yes!
now; but this one will say No!” he bent his stiff old back and laid his
ear to the unresponsive wood. But the time for no had passed. It was
Yes! yes! yes! yes! now, and as his straining ears took in the word,
he appeared to shrink where he stood and after a moment of anguished
silence, broke forth into a low wail, amid whose lamentations one could
hear:
“The time has come! Even the clock she loves best bids me speak. Oh!
Arabella, Arabella!”
In his despair he had not noticed that the pendulum hung motionless,
or that the hands stood at rest on the dial. If he had, he might have
waited long enough to have seen the careful opening of the great clock’s
tall door and the stepping forth of the little lady who had played so
deftly upon his superstition.
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 passed 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 passion 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 passion she had for her husband. It was not the
every-day passion of her sex 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 passed 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 passion, 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 succumbing 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 passion 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 associated all the boy’s prospects with
money, great money, such money as Andrew had accumulated, 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 document 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 pass 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 passion, 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 passed
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 passion 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 sexual 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 assumed the dictator’s
attitude 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 succumbed outwardly to her demands, I had not passed 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
institutions 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 superstitious 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.
“Four minutes past two! How came our old timepiece here to stop at that
exact moment on a day when Duty was making its last demand upon me to
remember Frank’s unhappy child? There was no one to answer; but as I
looked and looked, I felt the impulse of the moment strengthen into
purpose to leave those hands undisturbed in their silent accusation. She
might see, and, moved by the coincidence, tremble at her treatment of
Helena.
“But if this happened--if she saw and trembled--she gave no sign. The
works were started up by some other hand, and the incident passed.
But it left me with an idea. That clock soon had a way of stopping and
always at that one instant of time. She was forced at length to notice
it, and I remember, an occasion when she stood stock-still with her eyes
on those hands, and failed to find the banister with her hand, though
she groped for it in her frantic need for support.
“But no command came from her to remove the worn-out piece, and soon its
tricks, and every lesser thing, were forgotten in the crushing calamity
which befell us in the sickness and death of little Richard.
“Oh, those days and nights! And oh, the face of the mother when the
doctors told her that the case was hopeless! I asked myself then, and I
have asked myself a hundred times since, which of all the emotions I saw
pictured there bit the deepest, and made the most lasting impression
on her guilty heart? Was it remorse? If so, she showed no change in her
attitude towards Helena, unless it was by an added bitterness. The sweet
looks and gentle ways of Frank’s young daughter could not win against a
hate sharpened by disappointment. Useless for me to hope for it. Release
from the remorse of years was not to come in that way. As I realized
this, I grew desperate and resorted again to the old trick of stopping
the clock at the fatal hour. This time her guilty heart responded. She
acknowledged the stab and let all her miseries appear. But how? In a way
to wring my heart almost to madness, and not benefit the child at all.
She had her first stroke that night. I had made her a helpless invalid.
“That was eight years ago, and since then what? Stagnation. She lived
with her memories, and I with mine. Helena only had a right to hope,
and hope perhaps she did, till--Is that the great clock talking? Listen!
They all talk, but I heed only the one. What does it say? Tell! tell!
tell! Does it think I will be silent now when I come to my own guilt?
That I will seek to hide my weakness when I could not hide her sin?”
“Explain!” It was Violet speaking, and her tone was stern in its
command. “Of what guilt do you speak? Not of guilt towards Helena; you
pitied her too much--”
“But I pitied my dear madam more. It was that which affected me and
drew me into crime against my will. Besides, I did not know--not at
first--what was in the little bowl of curds and cream I carried to the
girl each day. She had eaten them in her step-mother’s room, and under
her step-mother’s eye as long as she had strength to pass from room
to room, and how was I to guess that it was not wholesome? Because
she failed in health from day to day? Was not my dear madam failing in
health also; and was there poison in her cup? Innocent at that time, why
am I not innocent now? Because--Oh, I will tell it all; as though at the
bar of God. I will tell all the secrets of that day.
“She was sitting with her hand trembling on the tray from which I had
just lifted the bowl she had bid me carry to Helena. I had seen her so
a hundred times before, but not with just that look in her eyes, or just
that air of desolation in her stony figure. Something made me speak;
something made me ask if she were not quite so well as usual, and
something made her reply with the dreadful truth that the doctor had
given her just two months more to live. My fright and mad anguish
stupefied me; for I was not prepared for this, no, not at all;--and
unconsciously I stared down at the bowl I held, unable to breathe or
move or even to meet her look.”
As usual she misinterpreted my emotion.
“‘Why do you stand like that?’ I heard her say in a tone of great
irritation. ‘And why do you stare into that bowl? Do you think I mean
to leave that child to walk these halls after I am carried out of them
forever? Do you measure my hate by such a petty yard-stick as that? I
tell you that I would rot above ground rather than enter it before she
did?’
“I had believed I knew this woman; but what soul ever knows another’s?
What soul ever knows itself?
“‘Bella!’ I cried; the first time I had ever presumed to address her
so intimately. ‘Would you poison the girl?’ And from sheer weakness my
fingers lost their clutch, and the bowl fell to the floor, breaking into
a dozen pieces.
“For a minute she stared down at these from over her tray, and then she
remarked very low and very quietly:
“‘Another bowl, Humphrey, and fresh curds from the kitchen. I will do
the seasoning. The doses are too small to be skipped. You won’t?’--I had
shaken my head--‘But you will! It will not be the first time you have
gone down the hall with this mixture.’
“‘But that was before I knew--’ I began.
“‘And now that you do, you will go just the same.’ Then as I stood
hesitating, a thousand memories overwhelming me in an instant, she added
in a voice to tear the heart, ‘Do not make me hate the only being left
in this world who understands and loves me.’
“She was a helpless invalid, and I a broken man, but when that word
‘love’ fell from her lips, I felt the blood start burning in my veins,
and all the crust of habit and years of self-control loosen about my
heart, and make me young again. What if her thoughts were dark and her
wishes murderous! She was born to rule and sway men to her will even to
their own undoing.”
“‘I wish I might kiss your hand,’ was what I murmured, gazing at her
white fingers groping over her tray.
“‘You may,’ she answered, and hell became heaven to me for a brief
instant. Then I lifted myself and went obediently about my task.
“But puppet though I was, I was not utterly without sympathy. When I
entered Helena’s room and saw how her startled eyes fell shrinkingly on
the bowl I set down before her, my conscience leaped to life and I could
not help saying:
“‘Don’t you like the curds, Helena? Your brother used to love them very
much.’
“‘His were--’
“‘What, Helena?’
“‘What these are not,’ she murmured.
“I stared at her, terror-stricken. So she knew, and yet did not seize
the bowl and empty it out of the window! Instead, her hand moved slowly
towards it and drew it into place before her.
“‘Yet I must eat,’ she said, lifting her eyes to mine in a sort of
patient despair, which yet was without accusation.
“But my hand had instinctively gone to hers and grasped it.
“‘Why must you eat it?’ I asked. ‘If--if you do not find it wholesome,
why do you touch it?’
“‘Because my step-mother expects me to,’ she cried, ‘and I have no other
will than hers. When I was a little, little child, my father made me
promise that if I ever came to live with her I would obey her simplest
wish. And I always have. I will not disappoint the trust he put in me.’
“‘Even if you die of it?’
“I do not know whether I whispered these words or only thought them. She
answered as though I had spoken.
“‘I am not afraid to die. I am more afraid to live. She may ask me some
day to do something I feel to be wrong.’
“When I fled down the hall that night, I heard one of the small clocks
speak to me. Tell! it cried, tell! tell! tell! tell! I rushed away from
it with beaded forehead and rising hair.
“Then another’s note piped up. No it droned. No! no! no! no! I stopped
and took heart. Disgrace the woman I loved, on the brink of the
grave? I--, who asked no other boon from heaven than to see her happy,
gracious, and good? Impossible. I would obey the great clock’s voice;
the others were mere chatterboxes.
“But it has at last changed its tune, for some reason, quite changed
its tune. Now, it is Yes! Yes! instead of No! and in obeying it I save
Helena. But what of Bella? and O God, what of myself?”
A sigh, a groan, then a long and heavy silence, into which there finally
broke the pealing of the various clocks striking the hour. When all were
still again and Violet had drawn aside the portiere, it was to see
the old man on his knees, and between her and the thin streak of light
entering from the hall, the figure of the doctor hastening to Helena’s
bedside.
When with inducements needless to name, they finally persuaded the young
girl to leave her unholy habitation, it was in the arms which had upheld
her once before, and to a life which promised to compensate her for her
twenty years of loneliness and unsatisfied longing.
But a black shadow yet remained which she must cross before reaching the
sunshine!
It lay at her step-mother’s door.
In the plans made for Helena’s release, Mrs. Postlethwaite’s consent
had not been obtained nor was she supposed to be acquainted with
the doctor’s intentions towards the child whose death she was hourly
awaiting.
It was therefore with an astonishment, bordering on awe, that on their
way downstairs, they saw the door of her room open and herself standing
alone and upright on the threshold--she who had not been seen to take a
step in years. In the wonder of this miracle of suddenly restored power,
the little procession stopped,--the doctor with his hand upon the rail,
the lover with his burden clasped yet more protectingly to his breast.
That a little speech awaited them could be seen from the force and
fury of the gaze which the indomitable woman bent upon the lax and
half-unconscious figure she beheld thus sheltered and conveyed. Having
but one arrow left in her exhausted quiver, she launched it straight
at the innocent breast which had never harboured against her a defiant
thought.
“Ingrate!” was the word she hurled in a voice from which all its
seductive music had gone forever. “Where are you going? Are they
carrying you alive to your grave?”
A moan from Helena’s pale lips, then silence. She had fainted at that
barbed attack. But there was one there who dared to answer for her and
he spoke relentlessly. It was the man who loved her.
“No, madam. We are carrying her to safety. You must know what I mean by
that. Let her go quietly and you may die in peace. Otherwise--”
She interrupted him with a loud call, startling into life the echoes of
that haunted hall:
“Humphrey! Come to me, Humphrey!”
But no Humphrey appeared.
Another call, louder and more peremptory than before:
“Humphrey! I say, Humphrey!”
But the answer was the same--silence, and only silence. As the horror of
this grew, the doctor spoke:
“Mr. Humphrey Dunbar’s ears are closed to all earthly summons. He died
last night at the very hour he said he would--four minutes after two.”
“Four minutes after two!” It came from her lips in a whisper, but with
a revelation of her broken heart and life. “Four minutes after two!”
And defiant to the last, her head rose, and for an instant, for a mere
breath of time, they saw her as she had looked in her prime, regal in
form, attitude, and expression; then the will which had sustained her
through so much, faltered and succumbed, and with a final reiteration of
the words “Four minutes after two!” she broke into a rattling laugh, and
fell back into the arms of her old nurse.
And below, one clock struck the hour and then another. But not the big
one at the foot of the stairs. That still stood silent, with its hands
pointing to the hour and minute of Frank Postlethwaite’s hastened death.