University of Virginia Library

35. CHAPTER XXXV.
DOLOROUS EAVESDROPPING.

As Lehming was mounting the first stair of the tenement-house he came to
a sudden halt and clung to the banister, panting.

“What is the matter?” asked Wetherel seizing his little friend's arm, and
marvelling to find it tremulous and palpitating. “I have walked too fast for
you. You should have remonstrated.”

“I am driven to confession,” gasped Lehming, who could not, however,
tell all the causes of his agitation. “I have—so my doctor tells me—a heart
disease. Don't mind it—and don't apologize. I am fairly punished for not
being willing to avow my infirmities. I have so many of them!”

“A heart disease!” repeated Wetherel, surveying the sufferer with that
superficial pity which a strong man may accord to an invalid, but at the same
time able to admire him for not complaining. “You are an example to me.
Do you smile at all your troubles?”

“I have learned to do it,” replied Lehming. “Do you remember that
comic martyr, that model of patient endurance, in the `Book of Nonsense'?

That whimsical verse has been a prodigious support to me in my various
little worries. The cow has bellowed and pushed a good deal, but I have generally
been able to smile, and it has helped. Well, let us get on. I can storm
a few more stairs now. How I should like to make one of a scaling-party!”

Reaching the foot of the last stairway, he looked up with some anxiety.
He remembered that, whenever any one mounted to that floor, Nettie Fulton
was apt to step out of the study and glance over the banister, as if to spy into
the nature of the visitor. Would she now make this little sally of inspection?
Yes; there was her shadow against the wall; then it disappeared with a hurried
rustle of female vesture. At once it seemed certain to Lehming that Nettie
Fulton was Nestoria Bernard, and his heart fell to beating again with such
violence that he had to pause for another rest.

“We seem to have disturbed some one,” tranquilly observed Wetherel,
whose unconsciousness of the real nature of this scene is surely a striking feature
of it.

“One of my fellow-lodgers, probably,” panted Lehming, as he slowly resumed
his ascent. When he entered the reading-room his usually dark and
sallow face was so ashy that his companion was alarmed by it.

“Lie down on your sofa,” said Wetherel with a sort of dictatorial kindness,
quite natural to him. “These piles of stairways are too much for you. You
must positively give up this nonsense of refusing advances out of the estate,
and take enough to put you in comfortable lodgings. A man with a heart
disease mustn't have his bedroom on the top of St. Simeon's pillar.”

Lehming thought to himself that, if Edward knew who was near, he also
might turn pale. Then his mind glanced to Nestoria, hidden away in her own
room, doubtless in extreme terror, perhaps fainting. But he kept his lips
sealed upon the mystery; the time had not come for revelations.

“Don't disturb yourself about me,” he muttered. “Take a seat and tell
me the news.”

Wetherel related the story of his southern expedition: how he had searched
New Orleans for the murderer of his uncle; how he had searched, and found
not. Lehming listened to him as one listens to a hum of conversation in another
apartment, the sound of which is audible, but the words indistinguishable.
His mind was filled, to the almost complete exclusion of other ideas,
by a constant reiteration of two tremendous queries. Was this girl, who had
just fled from Edward's presence, Nestoria Bernard? And, if so, what unendurable
emotion, what terrible secret, had driven her to evade her betrothed
lover? She might be the murderer; but no, that was impossible. She might
know that Wetherel was the murderer; but no, that also could not be accepted.
Tossed and whirled by these scaring suspicions and desperate denials, no wonder
that Lehming listened without hearing.

But there was another auditor, who was even far more agitated than he,
and who could scarcely be said to draw the breath of the living. It must be
explained that, when Nestoria looked over the stairway rail and saw her
former lover, she lost her self-possession and fled, as thoroughly frightened and
bewildered people do, without considering whither. Instead of rushing to
her own room, she had leaped back through the open door of the study, and

then, driven on by the noise of advancing feet, had taken refuge in a closet.
The closet was large and nearly empty; it contained nothing but a timeworn
chair which had been set aside by some bygone lodger; but this chair saved
the girl from falling, and so from discovery.

Dropping into it, she at first leaned back against the wall; but presently it
seemed to her that the wild beating of her heart would surely be audible
through the partition; and bending forward, she rested her arms upon her
knees, with her head drooping. In this posture, and absolutely without stirring
a muscle, she sat through the whole interview. Is it not easy to imagine
the whirling tumult of struggling thoughts and emotions which filled the girl's
brain and heart while she listened to Edward's voice and heard his story?
Was it true that he had been seeking for the murderer? What could it mean?
Was he innocent? Or was this search only a piece of monstrous and desperate
hypocrisy? How could she disbelieve in his guilt? With her own eyes
she had seen him strike the blow. And yet he had the assured tone of one
whose soul is laden by no crime. There were moments when she was upon
the point of rushing into the room and throwing her arms around his neck, or
rather falling at his feet. Then the bloody scene in Judge Wetherel's study
rose before her, and she shrank within herself at the thought of touching such
a criminal.

Still, she could not denounce him; somehow he was yet too sweet and
beautiful to be brought to public scorn and to punishment; she felt that, even
if she should face him with that intent, her tongue would be palsied. So she
sat quiet, and listened; she answered and disputed him without being heard;
she took such part in the dialogue as a ghost might. Indeed, it seemed to her
at times as if she were really dead, and only present there as a helpless,
speechless, and utterly wretched spirit. Then there was an impression of another
ghost, the spectre of the murdered Judge Wetherel, crouching in the
darkness beside her and hearkening to the discourse without. She almost felt
this terrible visitant, and yet she did not stir a finger's breadth. She was
tempted to scream aloud, and she withstood the scared urgency. Only an imagination
made potent by lifelong familiarity with spiritualized beliefs could
have inflicted such suffering. Only a character of singular firmness and self-command
could have endured such an ordeal.

But we must return to the audible and visible participants in this extraordinary
scene. By the time that Wetherel had finished the narrative of his
adventures in New Orleans Lehming had recovered his power of attention.

“And so you learned nothing,” he said. “The supposed trace was a delusion
of the police.”

“I merely wasted my time,” replied Edward. “Of course that is no matter.
It is my duty to give my life to this mystery so long as there is a gleam
of hope that it can be cleared up. To sit down quietly would be to confess
myself a villain and to be one. How can I draw an easy breath until I have
taken this noose of guilt and peril from around my own neck and put it where
it belongs? You don't know how horrible I find it to be pointed at in the
streets. The other day a boy called out, `There he is.' He meant some one
else, but I thought he referred to me, and I stopped as if a policeman had collared
me. I am sometimes weak enough and babyish enough to declare that
there never was any torture like mine.”

“How many innocent ones, since the foundation of the world, have suffered
likewise!” sighed Lehming. “It perplexes and pains one's spirit to think of

the mass of calumniation and undeserved sorrow that has been borne in all
the ages. We suffer for each other's misdeeds as often as for our own.”

“There was one Innocent who suffered for all the guilty,” said Wetherel.
“But for the remembrance of that, I think that I might have been driven to
suicide.”

At hearing these words Nestoria scarcely restrained herself from coming
out of her hiding-place and laying her hand on his shoulder.

“I deserve it all,” continued Edward. “My life has been such that men
might well suspect me of crime.”'

To Nestoria this sounded like a confession of blood-guiltiness, and of course
like a very incomplete and inadequate confession, showing no profound and
salvatory repentance. To Lehming, on the contrary, it seemed the exaggeration
of a scrupulous soul, looking upon the ordinary excesses of youth as
enormous misdeeds. Thus variously do we judge our fellow creatures, according
to our differing lights and points of view.

“We must not deal over-harshly with ourselves,” said Lehming. “Do
you remember how John Bunyan looked back upon his Christmas bell-ringings
as deadly sins, and marvelled that Heaven had not visited him with instant
judgment in the midst of them? It was undoubtedly an extravagance
of self-condemnation. You should be careful to avoid such excesses of austerity.
The Divine Reason is perfectly reasonable.”

“I shall keep watch of myself,” observed Wetherel, after a pause.
“Thanks to my good health, my mind is mainly even in its pulse. I believe
that I do not habitually overestimate my responsibilities and culpabilities.
Repentance is just, but remorse is folly. I trust that I perceive the distinction
between the two.”

Notwithstanding the gravity of Leming's own spirit, he could not help marvelling
at the gravity of his comrade. Here was a young man, who two
months before had seemed destined to be a worldling for life, but whose character
had now become solemnized, and, if we may use the timeworn phrase,
spiritualized. He was still the same in person and face, tall and strong and
upright, with fresh blonde cheeks and brave blue eyes and an air of hardy
virility. But in soul he was another; he was the historical Wetherel; he was
the Puritan.

“You had to break off your medical studies,” resumed Lehming, anxious
to render the conversation more lightsome and to brighten his young friend's
mood.

“I shall go on with the course,” replied Edward. “I am resolved to be a
physician. It seems to me the profession in which I can make myself most
useful to my kind. A doctor can be a philanthropist without impertinence
and as a natural part of his vocation. If he can do nothing better, he can
gripe and nauseate poor people gratis,” he added, with a faint flash of that humor
which belonged to him as a Wetherel, though in him it had of late been
much in abeyance.

Once more Nestoria was almost uplifted and borne into his presence by a
throb of sympathy, of forgiveness, and of love. The mere word doctor was a
claim upon her affection because it had been the title of her father.

At this moment there were steps in the passage, and Miss Jones appeared
at the door of the study.

“I quite beg your pardon, Mr. Lehming,” she said in that stilted tone
which she was apt to use before strangers. “But I intrude upon you to ask
if you have seen anything of my little friend.”

“Is she out?” asked Lehming with a start of alarm. “How could she go
out alone at this hour?”

“It is even so,” mouthed Imogen Eleonore. “I have searched for her in
vain. She must have fled into the dark, dark night.”

All at once it occurred to Lehming that Nettie Fulton might have taken
refuge in his closet; and with equal rapidity it flashed across him that in such
case she must be Nestoria Bernard. No other supposition could account for
the confusion and fright which must have been necessary to precipitate her
into such a hiding-place.

What should he do? Should he open the door, drag the girl into the presence
of Wetherel, and force a solution of this fearful riddle?