 | CHAPTER XXIII.
THE TRAGEDY A MYSTERY. The Wetherel affair |  |
23. CHAPTER XXIII.
THE TRAGEDY A MYSTERY.
Lehming had a sweet tenacity of kindliness which would not let him forget
his resolution to stand by Edward Wetherel, nor neglect any opportunity
of putting his friendly purposes into practice.
“We must have that young man with us,” he said to Mrs. Dinneford.
“His excitement is too great to permit him to bear continuous fatigue and
watching. All labor is wearing to a man who is unaccustomed to it, and
when the motive of labor is anxiety or grief, the candle is lighted at both ends.
I know that he does not sleep. After a day spent in searches and inquiries
and hopes deferred, he passes the night in struggling with nightmares of murders
and kidnappings, or in feverish waiting for the dawn. He will drive
himself mad, unless he is stopped on the road by a fever, or unless we take
charge of him. The work that he is doing can all be done by others—by the
authorities and the police. There is no need of his attending to it with such
wasting and wearing vehemence. I wish you would insist with him upon his
joining us.”
“Certainly!” answered Mrs. Dinneford with energy. “Dear me, why
didn't I think of it? We can make room for him here easily enough; and it's
his own house, too, for that matter. What did I let him go back to the city
for, as if he were not one of us? Well, I suppose I know why; and I may as
well make my confession. The wretched truth is, Walter, that I did harbor a
small wicked doubt about him, though the very idea is monstrous and a temptation
of Moloch. How fearfully we are given to uncharity and backbiting,
even in the secret depths of our souls! And I couldn't help saying to myself,
too, that, if he was in the least responsible for the dreadful things that have
come to pass among us, he would be so uncomfortable here, with poor Cousin
Wetherel lying dead and poor little Nestoria gone, and the shadow of their
calamity sitting in every room of the house. It is odd and foolish enough to
tell, but it was partly pity that moved me to let him go. I should hate to
make Satan himself uncomfortable, if I was acquainted with him and had to
watch his countenance. But Edward is not guilty, and I must get all these
temptations of uncharitable doubt out of my heart; and, as you say, we must
wish you would drive up to New Haven and bring him down to us bag and
baggage, as fast as old Sorrel can hobble.”
Lehming went on his mission of mercy, and performed it with success. Edward
joined his relatives, and remained with them during their brief further
stay at Sea Lodge, and accompanied them in their mortuary journey to the
Judge's final home. The funeral took place in Brooklyn, where the old man
had resided during rather more than the last half century, and where he had
quietly grown, with the rise of landed estate, from modest beginnings to great
opulence. We will not describe it further than to say that it was one of those
events which interest a city, and that as a spectacle it was notable for solemnity
and multitudes.
The family union did not break up immediately. Mrs. Dinneford lived on
in the Brooklyn house, and the three men remained for a little time with her,
giving what blitheness they could to the bereaved abode. This was not much;
they were all more or less haunted and sobered by the tragedy; and it had
followed them from Sea Lodge like a ghost, or like the lingerings of a fever.
If they could have ruled their souls, if they had been persons of hardened
sensibilities and lumpish or seared imaginations, they might have laid
the matter aside in confidence that it would give them no imminent trouble,
or none of practical import. The Wetherel Mystery had really fallen
into blind lethargy, and for some time to come was to have no life but that
of spreading in stagnant, inscrutable pools, or rather of creeping in torpid
concealment like a river lost under “trembling prairies.” But it was very
natural that this fact should not seem possible to the people who were intimately
connected with the tragedy, and that they should still look from hour
to hour to see it emerge in startling fashion from its obscurities.
Edward Wetherel especially seemed to be in constant expectation of finding
some trace either of the murderer or of Nestoria. He was apparently busy
from morning till night in devising or setting in action some new method of
search. He haunted the police offices of Brooklyn and New York, and made
several journeys in search of intelligence to New Haven. In view of the peculiar
responsibility under which he lay, it was probably well for him that his
character drove him into these labors. The horrors of any exceptional and
frightful situation, as, for instance, a battle, a shipwreck, or a conflagration, are
alleviated by a demand for activity. The troops who may and must charge,
or otherwise exert themselves, suffer less in mind than those who are obliged
to lie still under fire. This young man was too hard worked to drift into a
melancholy, or to hearken to those vices which allure sorrow with a promise
of cheer. In the physical fatigues of every day he found an opiate which, to
his own amazement and almost indignation, brought him healthful sleep.
“He is able to bear his great load,” said the rejoiced Lehming to Mrs
Dinneford. “Not only is he bearing it, but he is drawing strength from it;
he is already a greater and better man than he was a month since. In order
to do him full justice, we must consider what temptations he is resisting. A
thoroughly hardened and worldly spirit would find his situation quite endurable,
and would settle down under it into an egoistic tranquillity. Suspected
men, if they are able and prosperous, easily live down suspicion. All that Edward
has to do, in order to win the world's respect and even its admiration,
is to keep his uncle's estate, heap it up into millions, and become a powerful
capitalist, able to help or hinder others. Hospitality and generosity would
he might enjoy it to the full, as of old; he might divert himself with incessant
gayeties. But we see nothing in him of either Midas or Sardanapalus.
A new nature has appeared; a new soul has been born. Not a new one,
either; it is the grave, earnest soul of the Wetherels; it is the resurrection of
his Puritan ancestors. While he had nothing in his life to give him pause, he
rushed on in the natural ways of untrammelled youth, too exuberant and fortunate
for self-control. But a great spiritual paroxysm has brought the foundation
granite to the surface. The moment he was driven to feel and reflect, he
became the traditionary Wetherel. My hope is, yes, and my confident trust
also, that his future life will be one of duty.”
“I do fervently join with you in that hope and trust,” replied Mrs. Dinneford.
“And I must quote Tupper. Don't you remember that passage about
the generous heart, lit by unhallowed fire? And then he goes on: `Yet I
walted a little year, and the mercy thou hadst forgotten hath purged that
aoble spirit, washing it in waters of repentance.' I can't help looking for
speech to Tupper. He says just what plain people think, better than they can
say it for themselves.”
“We must reckon conscience a constitutional trait,” put in oracular John
Bowlder, struck by Lehming's ethnological explanation of the change in Edward's
character, and continuing the subject with a pleasing sense of originality.
“The Germanic races, who discovered truth-telling, practise it as no
other breed does. I would not be sure that a Wetherel of ancient days, as
long ago perhaps as the reign of Odin, did not discover the sense of duty.
Edward retains that kind of pulse. He will be a good man.”
“Cousin Bowlder, you are little better than one of the heathen,” smiled
Mrs. Dinneford. “You might as well trace up godliness to the giants before
the flood, and not stop for it in the times of Balder bold, whom Gray tells us
about; and a very pretty poem it is, too, though not equal to his `Elegy' by a
great deal.”
“Nature and grace combine to evolve character,” observed Lehming.
“They are both forces under the command of the same great Creator of character.”
“There is another thing which I reverence in Edward,” continued the mystical
Bowlder, too indifferent to orthodox criticism to defend himself against
it. “It is his health. He is not one of those who have cold feet and torpid
digestions. He can run and think all day. I consider myself burly, but he
canters me blind. Such a man, a man with sense of duty for a boiler and with
driving wheels that never burst, will achieve results. We shall yet brag of Edward!”
In partial correction of these kindly judgments and vaticinations, we must
observe that Edward's spiritual spread of wing was not as yet a notably broad
one, nor such as promised to indifferent beholders any wondrous loftiness of
flight. To the common eye he was simply a decent, serious, fairly able and
hard-working young man. He evidently had a purpose in life; but it was
directly and narrowly connected with the event which had roused him out of
his epicurean egotism; it was a simple determination to clear himself of the
suspicion which had fallen upon him, and to find the missing Nestoria. At
the same time he exhibited ordinary foresight with regard to the possibilities
of his own future. Remembering that the lost will might be recovered, and
that in such case he might be obliged, or feel obliged, to support himself, he
he labored daily at the complicated task of settling the estate, and thus
familiarized himself with the mystery of investments and the details of business.
This job, by the way, supported him; he paid all his expenses, personal
and extraordinary, out of his administrator's fees; not a dollar of the
principal would he as yet apply to his own purposes.
This estate, this million which had not been meant for him, weighed upon
his mind. As things stood, the whole of it was his; but under the circumstances
he could not allow himself to claim his entire legal right; and there
was the perplexing question how the property should be divided. As time
went on, the matter became urgent, and at last he was driven to a decision.
One evening he called the family together—Mrs. Dinneford, and Alice, and
Lehming, and John Bowlder—and with some embarrassment opened his
burden.
“I want to consult you about an affair which concerns four of us very seriously,”
he said. “I wish it concerned you too, Mr. Bowlder. It is this estate.
You know of course that I have taken out letters of administration, and that I
have been acting under them. I thought it the best way. I wanted the matter
entirely in my own hands, so that I could settle it as might seem to me
right.”
“Has the Judge come to life again!” thought John Bowlder, while Edward
paused to consider his next words. “How the boy shoulders his responsibility,
and stays himself on his conscience! Business and duty are matters of inheritance,
as much in the blood as certain diseases.”
“It has not been an easy question to handle,” resumed the young man.
“But I have reached a conclusion. You shall hear. I am not the intended
heir. My conscience will not let me lay hands on this wealth which the law
offers me. You three—Mrs. Dinneford, Alice, and Lehming—you must take
it and keep it, at the sole charge of fulfilling the bequests.”
“Not while I live, Edward!” shouted John Bowlder, springing to his feet
and plunging about the room like a happy rhinoceros. “I'll murder them all
three, if they do. We will have no such greediness and griping in this house,
so long as I can procure instruments of death. The gods have righted injustice.
Let it stay righted in the name of the gods. Keep your pelf or give it
out of your own hand to the needy or worthy, but don't whimper that it isn't
yours and drop it like a scared child. Mrs. Dinneford, what do you say to
this ascetic, sitting upon his pillar? He is a man, isn't he, with a heart too big
for his head? What word have you for such a soul as that?”
“But it's out of the question, Edward,” cried Mrs. Dinneford, so moved by
the young fellow's proffer that she did not hear Bowlder's sentimental uproar,
or notice the whimsical generosity with which he refused money that had
been offered to other people. “We can't accept your gift. None of us consented
to that will of Cousin Wetherel's. We”—and she faltered at the foot
of a great and difficult steep of heroism—“we claim nothing. It is all yours.
Do with it as seemeth to you good.”
“Certainly,” added Walter Lehming, with a composure which was more
decisive than any clamor could be.
“I expected as much,” said Edward, drawing a sigh of relief. “And yet
I would have surrendered all, if you had accepted. Well, now I must act.
John Bowlder is quite right in saying that I must give this pelf out of my own
hand, and not wait for others to take it. I shall divide the estate according to
each receive what my uncle allotted to them. If I do not owe this to you
three, I owe it to him. The remainder—that portion which was devised to
charities—I shall keep. I have my own purposes of justice and benevolence.”
“This is a distressing subject,” observed Lehming. “I answer for myself
alone. I refuse.”
“You will be powerless,” said the inexorable Edward. “Your portion
will be trusteed to you. Why do you wish to embarrass me?”
“Another time,” persisted Lehming, rising and walking to the door. “We
will discuss this again, when we are calmer. I am too much agitated now,
and so are you. But let me tell you that, while I cannot submit to you, I reverence
you.”
“Edward,” said Alice, taking her cousin's arm, “I would fall in love with
you if you wanted it. What else can a girl do?”
Meantime Mrs. Dinneford and John Bowlder had each seized a hand of
the young fellow.
Tears of gratitude and happiness stood in his eyes; these people, at least,
did not believe him a criminal.
But we must turn aside from Edward Wetherel for a little while to see
what had been the fate of Nestoria Bernard.
| CHAPTER XXIII.
THE TRAGEDY A MYSTERY. The Wetherel affair | |