TINA.
Reinette kept saying the name over to herself after Margery left her,
and when at last she was in bed it repeated itself again and again in
her brain, while a horrible suspicion, the exact nature of which she
could not define, was forcing itself into her mind. To sleep was
impossible, and with all her old wakefulness upon her, she tossed
restlessly from side to side until she heard the clock strike one.
“I cannot lie here,” she said, and putting on her dressing-gown she drew
her chair to the grate where the fire which Pierre had replenished just
before she retired was burning, and with her face buried in her hands,
began to think such thoughts as made the drops of perspiration stand
thickly upon her forehead and about her lips.
“Who was the Tina who wrote to my father?” she asked herself.
Not Christine; that would be too horrible. Christine had been her
mother’s maid, and it was not like a proud man like Frederick Hetherton
to think of such as she. There were other Tinas in the world. The writer
of the letter was some bright-eyed, bright-faced girl of humble origin,
who had caught her father’s fancy for a few days and been flattered by a
kind word from him, and possibly, he was for the moment more interested
in her than he ought to have been. That was all; and she was foolish to
be so disquieted.
Thus Queenie reasoned, or tried to, but all the time a terrible fear was
tugging at her heart, and she was living over again that dreadful death
scene on the ship when her father made her swear to forgive him whatever
might come to her knowledge. She had thought at first that he meant her
American relations, of whom he had never told her, and she had forgiven
that long ago. Then came the mystery concerning Christine and her
concealment of her identity, but Reinette had recovered from that and
still there was a nameless terror at her heart, as she sat alone in her
room while the clock struck the hours two and three, and the fire in the
grate grew lower, and the winter night seemed to grow thicker and colder
around her.
At last, when she could keep still no longer, she arose, and pacing the
room hurriedly, beat the air with her hands, as she was wont to do under
great excitement.
“What is it I fear?” she asked herself. “What is it I suspect? Let me
put it into words, and see if it sounds so very dreadful. I suspect that
Christine Bodine, in her girlhood—when, I dare say, she was rather
pretty and piquant, after mother died made herself very necessary to my
father and attracted him more than she ought to have done. Such people
are very ambitious, and susceptible, too; and if my father was at all
familiar in his manner toward her, she probably was flattered at once,
and maybe cheated herself, into the belief that he would marry her, when
such an idea never existed in his brain. She probably wrote to him, and
he answered and at last made her see how mistaken she was in supposing
he could ever think of her after having known my mother. And then, by
way of amends, he settled that money upon her. Yes, that is probably the
fact of the case,” she continued, and the tightness around her heart
gave way. She could breathe more freely, and her hands ceased to beat
the air, until like lightning there flashed into her mind:
“But where was Mr. La Rue, and where was Margery, when Christine wrote
those letters to my father? Christine told me she was married soon after
mother died, and that father was angry about it, as it took her from me.
Oh, if I only knew the truth—and I can know it, in part, at least, by
reading those letters which I hid away, swearing never to touch them,
unless circumstances should seem to make it necessary; and it is
necessary, I am sure. I must know the truth, or lose my mind. I am so
unsettled since poor Phil died, and to brood over this will make me
crazy in time. Yes, I must know who was the _Tina_ who wrote those
letters to father.”
Reinette had reached a decision; and, lighting her candle, she opened
the door of the closet where she had hidden the letters months before.
There was the box on the upper shelf just where she had left it, and
where she could not reach it without a chair. This she brought from her
room, and stepping into it, stood a moment looking at the box, while a
feeling of terror began to take possession of her, and she felt as if
the dead hand of her father were clutching her arm and holding her back.
“I do not believe I will do it,” she said, as she came down from the
chair with a sense of that dead hand’s touch still upon her arm. “It
seems just as if father were speaking to me and bidding me let the
letters alone. I wish I had burned them when I found them, and then I
should not be tempted. And why not burn them now, and so put it out of
my reach to read them?” she continued, as she stood shivering before the
hearth and listening to the storm which was beginning to beat against
the windows.
February was coming in with gusts of snow and the shrieks of the wild
north wind, which swept furiously past the house, and seemed to Reinette
to have in it a sound of human sobbing. She thought of her father in the
quiet grave-yard in Merrivale, with the tall pine overhanging his
grave—of her mother, far off in Rome, where the violets and daisies
blossom all the year round—and of Phil, asleep beneath the Eastern
waters, with nothing to mark his grave, and her heart ached with a
keener pain than she had ever felt before as she stood in her slippers
and dressing-gown and shivered in the cold, gray, winter night. And
always above everything else the name of _Tina_ was in her mind, with a
burning desire to solve the mystery and know who _Tina_ was, and what
she had been to Mr. Hetherton.
“I may as well burn them first as last,” she thought, and going again to
the closet and mounting upon the chair she took the box from the shelf,
and carrying it to the fire sat down upon the floor and began to open
it.
There were four boxes in all, one within another, and Queenie opened
each one till she came to the last and smallest, where lay the envelope
containing the letters.
“There can be no harm in glancing at the handwriting, and then if I ever
see Christine’s, as I sometime may, I shall know if they are the same,”
she thought, and took out the yellow, time-worn package, which seemed to
her so different from anything pertaining to herself or to her
surroundings.
Looking at the outside begat an intense longing to know what was
inside—to have her doubts confirmed or scattered to the winds, and at
last she made a desperate resolve, and jerking her arm, which it seemed
to her the dead hand still held firmly, she said, aloud:
“I shall read these letters now, though a thousand dead hands hold me.”
Queenie felt herself growing very calm as she said this, and though
outward the storm raged with greater fury, and the sobbing of the wind
was wilder and louder than before, she neither heeded nor heard it, for
she had opened the letters, and selecting that which bore date farthest
back, began to read. And as she read, she forgot how cold she was—forgot
that the fire was going out—forgot the fearful storm which shook the
solid foundations of the great house, and screamed like so many demons
past the windows—forget even that Phil was dead in the Indian sea, so
horrible were the sensations crowding upon her and overmastering every
thought and feeling save the one dreadful conviction that _now_ she knew
who Tina was, and that the knowledge paralyzed for the time every other
sensation.