The Letter
Despite his sense of victory the day was a long-drawn-out period of
torture for Storm.
Upon the departure of Dr. Carr and the officials, George Holworthy had
to be told in detail the story of the night’s tragic event, and its
reiteration drew heavily upon the store of self-control which was left
to his companion after the ordeal through which he had passed; but
Storm narrated it carefully, with a critical consciousness of every
effect.
“I don’t know what is the matter with me!” he cried dramatically in
conclusion. “I can’t break down, I can’t seem to feel, George! I saw
her as she lay there, I tell myself that this ghastly, unbelievable
thing is true, and yet it has no meaning for me! I catch myself
listening for her step, waiting to hear her voice! Am I going mad?”
“It’s the shock,” George said quietly. “The stark horror of the thing
has stunned you, Norman. You can’t feel it yet, you are numb, I
suppose.”
He looked curiously shrunken and withered and years older as he sat
hunched in his chair, his faded, red-rimmed eyes blinking fast. Storm
felt a sense of impatience, almost of repugnance as he regarded him.
His evident sorrow was a subtle reproach before which the other
writhed. Could he endure his presence in the days which must decently
elapse before the funeral? George would be useful, however, in the
interim, and when it was all over he could shut himself away from
everyone.
“That’s why I sent for you,” he observed. “I can’t seem to get a grip
on things, and I thought you would take charge for me and keep off the
mob of sympathizers——”
“I will. I’ll attend to everything, old man. There’s bound to be a
certain amount of publicity, you know, but I’ll see the reporters
myself, and fend off the neighbors. Carr will send in the undertaker,
and I’ll ’phone Foulkes. Is there anyone else you want me to notify?”
George did indeed prove invaluable, for Millard had spread the tidings
and soon the house was besieged by horror-stricken friends of the dead
woman. They came from all walks of life, from the humblest
country-folk about to the most arrogant of the aristocratic colony, in
mute testimony to the breadth of her kindliness and the affection she
had inspired. From earliest afternoon, too, reporters began filtering
in on every train, but George held them off with surprising tact and
diplomacy, and by nightfall a semblance of peace had fallen upon the
bereft household.
The den was restored to its normal state, the door locked, and in the
dainty drawing-room across the hall from the library Leila lay as if
asleep, her golden hair falling low to hide the cruel wound and all
about her the early spring flowers she had loved.
Now that they were alone together, George’s presence proved
insufferable, and Storm, professing complete nervous exhaustion,
suggested that they retire early.
George, worn out with his own emotions and the strain of the day,
acquiesced in evident relief. He had dreaded a night-long vigil with
his bereaved friend and rejoiced that the strange, seemingly dazed
apathy which had held him in its grip was giving way to the demands of
over-taxed nature.
Sleep, however, was furthest from Storm’s intentions. There was work
still to be done, and in secret. Foulkes had signified his intention
of coming out on the first train in the morning, and it was possible
that he might suggest going over Leila’s papers. If that letter which
she had tried to conceal the day before were found, or any other
correspondence from Brewster, it might precipitate the rise of a
suspicion which otherwise seemed now to be eliminated.
Leila’s desk was down in the library, and waiting only until he felt
assured that the occupant of the guest chamber across the hall had
fallen asleep, Storm put on soft felt slippers, drew his dressing gown
about him, and descended.
How still the house was! Still, yet vibrant with something unseen but
palpitating as though the spirit had not wholly departed from that
immobile form lying amid the blossoms, whose fragrance stole out with
cloying, sinister sweetness upon the air.
Storm closed the library door noiselessly behind him, switched on the
light and crossing to the little rose-wood desk stood transfixed.
A book lay upon it, and from between its leaves protruded, as if
carelessly or hastily thrust there, what appeared to be the very
letter he sought. “Leicester Building”. The engraved letters stood out
as he drew the envelope forth, but above them was a line which made
him start.
“National Tool & Implement Company”.
But Brewster was an insurance broker! The name had an oddly familiar
ring, too. What could it mean?
With shaking fingers he drew the enclosure from the envelope and read:
Mrs. Norman Storm:
Dear Madam:-
I have reconsidered my decision of this morning and am willing to
sell to you the strip of land adjoining your property at the price
you named, on condition that the deal be consummated with you
personally. I will enter into no negotiations with your husband. If
you will call at my office to-morrow, the ninth inst., with your
check I will have the deed and bill of sale ready.
Your obedient servant,
Alpheus Jaffray
Storm crushed the letter in his hands. The trout stream! Leila had
bearded their irascible neighbor in his town office and induced him to
sell her the property which he himself had been unable to force or
cajole the old scoundrel to relinquish! But why had she been so
secretive about it? Why had she lied about her presence in town,
sought to conceal the letter, striven to make a mystery where no cause
for one existed?
The queries which hammered at his brain were swiftly swept aside by
the one dominating fact. Her visit had not concerned Brewster, her lie
had concealed no act of guilt or even indiscretion! What if—Great God!
If he had made a hideous mistake——? But no! He had seen them together,
she and her lover, in that very room not twenty-four hours before; had
heard Brewster’s impassioned words, witnessed his act of devotion!
Whatever motive had prompted her secret purchase of the trout stream,
it was beside the point at issue. There must be proof in her desk,
proof to augment and support the evidence of his own eyes.
He tore the drawers open one after another, scattering the neat piles
of correspondence, social notes, cards of invitation, receipted bills,
memoranda and household accounts—his feverish fingers sought in vain
among them for a single line of an intimate or sentimental nature. But
then, Leila would scarcely have kept secret love letters in an open
desk. Somewhere in her apartments upstairs, perhaps, she had arranged
a hiding place for them.
Then a swift remembrance came to him. The secret compartment! Back of
the small drawer between the pigeon-holes on the desk top was a small
space to which access could be had only by pressing a hidden knob.
Leila had found it by accident one day and had been almost childishly
delighted with her discovery.
Storm removed the drawer, pressed the spring, and the false back slid
aside revealing two packets of letters. One was bound by a bit of
white satin ribbon, yellowing now and slightly frayed; the other
encircled with a rubber band.
The sight of them brought a grimace of triumph, to Storm’s lips, but
it changed quickly as he tore the ribbon from the first packet. The
letters were all postmarked prior to ten years ago and were in his
handwriting—his own love letters, written during the period of their
engagement and before. One end of the ribbon was knotted about a dried
flower; an orange blossom! It must have been from her wedding bouquet.
A strange tightness constricted his throat, and he thrust the packet
hastily aside. He did not want to be reminded at this hour of the
happiness, the fool’s paradise in which he had lived before
enlightenment came. No sentimentality about the past must be permitted
to weaken his self-control now.
But the second packet, too, contained only his letters; those written
since their marriage, mere notes of a most prosaic sort, some of them,
sent to her during his infrequent absences from home and reminding her
of trivial, every-day matters which required attention. The last,
dated only a month before, concerned the reinstatement of MacWhirter,
their ante-bellum gardener. Why had Leila kept every scrap of his
handwriting as though she treasured it, as though it were precious to
her?
For a long time he sat there staring at the scattered envelopes, the
first vague, terrible stirring of doubt which had come when he read
Jaffray’s letter returning again to torture his spirit. Then once more
the scene of the previous night in that room arose in reassuring
condemnation, and with a smothered oath he seized the letters and tore
them viciously, the older packet with the rest, until nothing remained
but a heap of infinitesimal scraps and the bit of yellowed ribbon.
He wanted them out of his sight, destroyed utterly, but where——? The
fire in the kitchen range would have been banked for the night, but he
could rake the coals aside. Sweeping the torn letters into a newspaper
together with the ribbon, he made his way quietly to the kitchen. The
range balked him at first. He strove vainly to coax a blaze from the
livid coals, but with the aid of kindling wood and after much
manipulation of the dampers he succeeded in producing a tiny flame.
Upon this he thrust handfuls of the paper scraps, and when they caught
and blazed up he thrust the ribbon deep among them.
How slowly they burned! The edges of the ribbon charred and it curled
up, writhing like a living thing in agony. The flame was dying down,
and Storm had turned frantically to the wood-box to pile on more fuel,
when suddenly there came a grayish puff, a leaping tongue of fire, and
the ribbon vanished, leaving only a heap of pale flakes against the
darker, coarser ashes.
Storm scattered them and was placing an extra stick of wood upon the
glowing coals to make sure that the evidences of his work would be
wholly obliterated, when the utterance of his name in surprised
accents made him wheel as though a blow had been dealt to him from
behind.
“Norman! I thought you were in bed!” George, his short, obese figure,
grotesque in an ugly striped bathrobe, stood blinking in the doorway.
“What on earth are you doing down here? And what’s burning? There’s a
funny odor——”
“Wretched green wood. No wonder the cook grumbles about this range; I
thought I should never get it going!” Storm interrupted hastily. “I
couldn’t sleep, and wanted a cup of coffee. There was no use in
disturbing the servants.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” demanded the other. “I could have made it
for you. You look all done up, Norman. Did you take that sleeping
stuff Carr left for you?”
Storm shook his head.
“It would take more than that to bring sleep to me to-night,” he said.
“Well, anyway, I don’t know what you are poking about in here for!”
objected George. “You’re a chump to try to get the range going at this
hour when you’ve got that electric percolator in the dining-room.
Here’s the coffee; come on in there and I’ll have it ready for you in
no time!”
Storm followed him in silence, only too glad to get him away from the
kitchen, and watched him as in deft bachelor fashion he manipulated
the percolator.
Storm drank the coffee when it was made and then dragged George off to
the library where the latter at length fell asleep upon the couch; but
Storm sat huddled in his chair, dry-eyed and brooding, until the dawn.
Wendle Foulkes appeared at nine o’clock, his keen old face very
solemn, and almost his first words, when his condolences were made,
set at rest a question which Daly had raised on the previous day.
“You know, of course, that Leila left no will,” he began. “At least,
none to my knowledge, and I am certain she would have consulted me had
she entertained any thought of making one. Death was farthest from her
imagining, poor child! What she left is yours, of course, but we will
have to comply with the law and advertise for heirs.”
Storm made a gesture of wearied impatience, and the attorney went on:
“There is something I must tell you, Norman. You were not my first
visitor on Monday morning. Leila had been before you; she left only a
few minutes before your arrival, but she had requested me to say
nothing to you of her coming.”
“But why?” Storm stared.
“She came to consult me about a piece of property which she wanted to
buy: that strip of land next your place here, over which you and
Alpheus Jaffray have haggled and fought for years. She had gotten in
the old man’s good graces somehow, and she believed that she could
persuade him to sell it to her even though he was so violently
antagonistic to you. I don’t mind telling you frankly that I advised
against it, Norman. It would have taken all that she had left of her
original capital, and I knew how yours was dwindling, but she won me
over.” He paused and wiped his eyeglasses, clearing his throat
suspiciously meanwhile. “She ordered me to keep the proposed
transaction a secret from you, and I promised, but now it is only
right that you should know. She left to go to Jaffray’s office, over
in the Leicester Building.”
George Holworthy, who was hovering in the background, drew in his
breath sharply, but Storm repeated with dogged insistence:
“Why should my wife have wanted to keep such a secret from me? I
cannot understand it! She told me everything——” He paused
involuntarily, biting his lip. There was one other thing she had not
told him, had not confessed even at the last!
“You would not have been kept in ignorance long.” The attorney’s tone
was pitying. “Have you forgotten what day to-morrow is?”
“‘To-morrow?’” Storm repeated blankly.
“Your birthday.”
“God!” The exclamation came from George. “And the funeral!”
Storm sat as if turned to stone. It had been for him! Her secret trip
to town, her innocent, pitiful subterfuges, her joy over the letter
which had told her that the surprise she had planned was within her
grasp! All for him!
Then a swift revulsion of feeling came. Bah! It may have been to throw
more dust in his eyes, to render his confidence in her doubly assured;
a sop to her own conscience, perhaps. The infinite reproach in her
eyes when he had accused her there in the den, her air of conscious
righteousness when she had said: “You will regret that accusation
bitterly when you learn the truth——” What a consummate actress she had
become!
Fate had played into his hands, though; he had witnessed her perfidy
with his own eyes. Had it not been for his opportune return that
night, how easily his suspicions would have been allayed! How contrite
he would have been at his doubt of her, and how she and her lover
would have gloated over the ease with which he had been deceived!
But the others were looking at him, amazed at his silence, and with an
effort he pulled himself together.
“Her last thought was for me!” His voice shook with the irony of it,
but to the two men it was an evidence of purely natural emotion. “The
thought of it only makes what has come harder for me to bear! Her
unselfishness, her devotion——!”
“I know, boy, I know.” Foulkes laid his hand for a moment on Storm’s
shoulder. “You must try to remember that you have been far luckier
than most men; you have had ten years of such perfect happiness as
falls to the lot of few of us!”
“That is true.” Storm bowed his head to conceal the sneer of
bitterness which rose unbidden to his lips. “I cannot realize that it
has come so suddenly, so horribly to an end!”
A brief discussion of business affairs ensued, and then Wendle Foulkes
took his departure. A silence had fallen between the other two which
was broken at last by George.
“So that was it!” he murmured as if to himself. “That was why she
invented that luncheon at the Ferndale Inn—”
“What?” demanded Storm, aghast. How much did George know? “Invented
what luncheon?”
“Don’t you remember when I dined here with you——God! Was it only last
Monday night?—and Leila told us she had lunched that day at the
Ferndale Inn, when in reality she had been to the city? I repeated
that remark, because I could scarcely believe my ears, but she stuck
to her little fib. I did wonder at your surprise for I had seen you
both in town at noon.”
“You had—seen us both?” Storm repeated.
“Yes. I was going through Cortlandt Street coming out of the Leicester
Building and saw you standing there staring after her as though you
had seen a ghost,” George explained innocently. “I started to hail you
and tried to cross, but a line of traffic got in the way and when the
street was clear you had disappeared. I meant to tell you that night
but I didn’t.”
“Why, that’s so! It must have been Leila, after all, whom I saw.”
Storm weighed each word carefully. “I wasn’t sure, you know, she
passed me so quickly, and when she spoke that night of having been to
the Ferndale Inn I naturally concluded that I must have been mistaken;
it couldn’t have been she I saw. It did not occur to me for a moment
that she was telling even a little white lie, for Leila has never kept
anything from me in all her life, George.”
He spoke with a deliberate emphasis, striving desperately to eradicate
from the other’s mind the thought that he had been aware of her
deception. Confound the fellow! Why had he, out of all in the city,
been the one to witness that unexpected meeting! His silence later was
significant, too. Had he an inkling of Storm’s state of mind that
night?
“I see. Couldn’t imagine why she should have kept her little
expedition to herself, but it wasn’t any affair of mine, of course.”
George spoke with an elaborate carelessness which did not seem wholly
convincing to the critical ears of the other man. “Funny it should
have deceived you, for she didn’t take me in for a minute, she fibbed
so—so clumsily, bless her! I thought it probably some little joke she
was planning, but your approaching birthday never occurred to me. It
is odd, isn’t it, that we should have talked of old Jaffray and that
trout stream when you walked to the station with me later?”
“Leila knew how I had set my heart upon it,” Storm returned. It would
do no good to revert to the topic of the lie. Reiterated explanation
of his attitude would only deepen any suspicion which George might
still entertain. To ignore it, to pass it by as a thing of no moment,
was the only course. “Do you remember that she complained of feeling
ill that night?”
George nodded.
“That was the first thing I thought of when Millard broke the news to
me, after I could begin to think at all,” he observed. “She must have
had a warning that one of those attacks was coming on. I spoke of it
to her, as you may recall, but she denied it; afraid of worrying you,
I suppose. To think that it should have come the very next night when
she was alone and helpless!”
Storm drew a deep breath. At least, George had no shadow of a
suspicion as to the real cause of her death.
“Don’t talk about it!” he implored. “I’ve reproached myself a hundred
times with not being at hand, but how could I know?”
“Forgive me! You couldn’t, of course. No one could have anticipated
it. It was to be, that’s all one could say, though God only knows why!
You were not to blame.”
He threw his arms across the other’s shoulders in an affectionate,
consoling clasp, and in his mild, candid eyes Storm read only pity,
sorrow and an abiding trustfulness.