“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.
MISSING: PAGE THIRTEEN, by Anna Katharine Green
“One more! just one more well paying affair, and I promise to stop; really and truly to stop.”
“But, Puss, why one more? You have earned the amount you set for yourself,—or very nearly,—and though my help is not great, in three months I can add enough—”
“No, you cannot, Arthur. You are doing well; I appreciate it; in fact, I am just delighted to have you work for me in the way you do, but you cannot, in your present position, make enough in three months, or in six, to meet the situation as I see it. Enough does not satisfy me. The measure must be full, heaped up, and running over. Possible failure following promise must be provided for. Never must I feel myself called upon to do this kind of thing again. Besides, I have never got over the Zabriskie tragedy. It haunts me continually. Something new may help to put it out of my head. I feel guilty. I was responsible—”
“No, Puss. I will not have it that you were responsible. Some such end was bound to follow a complication like that. Sooner or later he would have been driven to shoot himself—”
“But not her.”
“No, not her. But do you think she would have given those few minutes of perfect understanding with her blind husband for a few years more of miserable life?”
Violet made no answer; she was too absorbed in her surprise. Was this Arthur? Had a few weeks’ work and a close connection with the really serious things of life made this change in him? Her face beamed at the thought, which seeing, but not understanding what underlay this evidence of joy, he bent and kissed her, saying with some of his old nonchalance:
“Forget it, Violet; only don’t let any one or anything lead you to interest yourself in another affair of the kind. If you do, I shall have to consult a certain friend of yours as to the best way of stopping this folly. I mention no names. Oh! you need not look so frightened. Only behave; that’s all.”
“He’s right,” she acknowledged to herself, as he sauntered away; “altogether right.”
Yet because she wanted the extra money—
The scene invited alarm,—that is, for so young a girl as Violet, surveying it from an automobile some time after the stroke of midnight. An unknown house at the end of a heavily shaded walk, in the open doorway of which could be seen the silhouette of a woman’s form leaning eagerly forward with arms outstretched in an appeal for help! It vanished while she looked, but the effect remained, holding her to her seat for one startled moment. This seemed strange, for she had anticipated adventure. One is not summoned from a private ball to ride a dozen miles into the country on an errand of investigation, without some expectation of encountering the mysterious and the tragic. But Violet Strange, for all her many experiences, was of a most susceptible nature, and for the instant in which that door stood open, with only the memory of that expectant figure to disturb the faintly lit vista of the hall beyond, she felt that grip upon the throat which comes from an indefinable fear which no words can explain and no plummet sound.
But this soon passed. With the setting of her foot to ground, conditions changed and her emotions took on a more normal character. The figure of a man now stood in the place held by the vanished woman; and it was not only that of one she knew but that of one whom she trusted—a friend whose very presence gave her courage. With this recognition came a better understanding of the situation, and it was with a beaming eye and unclouded features that she tripped up the walk to meet the expectant figure and outstretched hand of Roger