 | CHAPTER XXXVI.
WILL SHE FLY? The Wetherel affair |  |
36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
WILL SHE FLY?
“I cannot repress the anxiety which fills me soul,” murmured Imogen
Eleonore, who was obviously elocutioneering at the soul of Edward Wetherel.
Lehming felt that this young lady was oppressive; it certainly would not
do to open the closet door in her presence; he was nervously anxious to get
rid of her.
“Is it not possible that your friend has taken a walk with Mr. Bowlder?”
he suggested.
Imogen had advanced into the room with the deep and dark intent of
getting herself introduced to the handsome and handsomely attired young visitor;
but as Lehming did not present her, she was obliged in decency to come
to a halt and to devise some “thrilling” speech, under cover of which she
might beat a retreat.
“Your weird supposition is worthy of hopeful consideration,” she said with
the even utterance of an automaton, and thereupon swept—as she would have
described it—out of the room, considerably irritated against Mr. Lehming.
“You have annoyed your friend, I am afraid, on my account,” gently remarked
Wetherel—a changed and bettered young man certainly, for time was
when he would have been hardheartedly amused at the discomfiture of this
intrusive young lady, and would have made satirical remarks on her obvious
craving after male company.
“She is a good-hearted, well-meaning girl,” replied Lehming. “I must
say in excuse for her that I have made her welcome to this room and what
there is in it. But she ought to have seen that we wished to be in private.”
He was a little less considerate than usual, because the mystery of the
closet perplexed and agitated him almost unendurably. What would be the
result if he should fling open that door and bring these two people face to face?
Was one of them the murderer, and did the other know it? If he should reveal
Nestoria to Wetherel, it might give her an unsupportable shock; it seemed
to him in his excitement that it might drive her mad, or kill her on the spot.
In vain did he argue with himself that the mystery ought to be solved, and
try to feel that it was his duty as a man and a Christian to hurry it to a solution.
He made such progress as travellers toward the polar sea have made
when the ice-fields under their feet slipped southward faster than they could
toil northward. At the end of a minute of tumultuous reflection his sentiments
had drifted him far back from the deed to which his conscience summoned
him and that closet door; as if he could not reach it though he should
journey toward it all night; as if it were in another planet.
At last this sensitive and compassionate soul gave up the struggle to take
hold upon a duty which a puissant imagination filled as full of perils and cruelties
as the embrace of the deadly “Virgin” of the Inquisition was full of knives.
He resolved that he would not precipitate a revelation; that he would suffer
the girl to escape from her doubtless agonizing concealment; that he would
see her alone the next day, and plead with her for an explanation; that he
must even run the risk of her flying during the night.
“If you don't mind a little chilliness, we will go into my bedroom,” he
said to Wetherel. “It will give my disappointed fellow-lodger a chance to
come back here and get a book, if she wants one.”
“Certainly,” replied Edward. “We can wear our overcoats. Besides, I
shall not stay long. I must take a look at my text-books before I go to bed.”
The two young men quitted the study, and were soon closeted in the bedroom.
“I wanted to speak to you about our cousin,” continued Lehming, reverting
to the subject which he had had in mind half an hour before. Then he told
of the foreigner whom he had met at Mrs. Dinneford's, and hinted his fears that
the man was wooing Alice with some chance of success. Wetherel had little
to communicate concerning Poloski except that he was a gambler and was
supposed to be a fortune-hunter, and that he might or might not be a count.
“I am astonished that Alice should seem to care for him,” he frowned in a
rather imperial way, very natural to male Wetherels. “She has always
known that I had no opinion of the fellow.”
“Our girls are so easily carried away by a title!” said Lehming. “It is
natural; a title is a general letter of introduction; it opens the way to good
society everywhere. And yet such a marriage as this would probably be a
sad affair. American women are hardly ever happy with foreign husbands;
they get too little consideration and have to concede too much obedience.
Moreover, this man may not be a noble; may be a vulgar and rascally impostor.”
“I must see to this!” observed Edward with the air of one who could not
help feeling himself to be the head of the family, however much he might
strive after the grace of meekness. “I am somewhat responsible for the acquaintance.”
“If we do nothing else all our lives, we shall have work enough in undoing
our mistakes and mischiefs,” said Lehming, a man whose almost stainless
purity of conduct did not save him from the inquisitions of conscience.
Next there was some talk about Wetherel's plans for the future. It appeared
that he intended to devote himself to the betterment of the industrial
classes.
“I shall practise gratuitously in the main,” he said. “I shall look up
such patients as other physicians cannot afford to have. But that is not all.
Do you know that our artisans and workingmen generally are running to
their ruin, through ignorance of the elements of political economy? Look at
these strikes. The strikers don't know that the raising of wages involves the
raising of expenses. What they need is not higher pay, but cheaper living.
Our present system of taxation is a plundering of the poor. Our tariff seems
to be specially designed to enhance the cost of the materials of labor and of
hundred capitalists and monopolists, who are rich enough to overawe and perhaps
to bribe our politicians. But you know all this; I won't tire you with it.
What I propose is a course of lectures to workingmen on political economy
and on household economy also. The laboring classes need all sorts of practical
instruction. They are absurdly and ruinously extravagant; their wives
have silk dresses, and their babies velvet jackets. I find young fellows who earn
twenty-five dollars a week and spend half of it in cigars, drinks, frolicking,
militia displays, and other follies. They growl at capital without seeing that
they are themselves to blame for the fact that they are not capitalists. But
the subject is too attractive; it is irritatingly inexhaustible. I become tiresome
when I commence on it.”
“Will democracy destroy us?” sighed Lehming. “In a democracy every
citizen is tempted to want to be as fine and as much at leisure as any other
citizen. And the women are madder than the men; their one demand is for
idle elegance.”
“Our cultivated classes must put their shoulders to this load,” declared
Wetherel, with the enthusiasm of youth. “Can't you give a lift? You know
that abundant pecuniary means are at your command. By the way, when
will you take your share of that estate?”
“How long can the settlement be put off?” inquired Lehming.
“A year from the decease.”
“Give me that time,” smiled Walter, a pygmy who was fit to have the
power of a giant, so little was he likely to abuse it. “I know perfectly well
that I am not an heir, and I don't want to be hustled into heirship. Of course
you give the Dinnefords whatever you like, and they will probably submit,
and ought to. They are women, and are used to being supported by others,
and to have others decide for them. But a man is responsible for his own
moral code in matters of property. I must have time to consider this business
of taking your money. Let us talk of it toward the end of the year.”
“Very well,” nodded Edward with a fine tranquillity, and took his departure.
Lehming now returned to his study, looked with a beating heart into the
closet, and found it empty. On the floor of it, however, he discovered a little
silk neckerchief which he recognized as belonging to Nettie Fulton. There
was of course no longer much doubt in his mind that the girl had been hiding
there, and almost as little doubt that she was the refugee from the horror and
mystery of Sea Lodge. After gazing at the neckerchief for a moment, he
wrapped it carefully and one might say reverentially in a piece of white paper,
and put it in the breast pocket of his coat, very near his beating heart. Then
he went softly to the door of Miss Jones's room, tapped gently, and, when the
schoolma'am made her appearance, asked if Miss Fulton had returned.
“Yes,” answered Imogen Eleonore. “I went to inquire for her in the
apartment below, and came back as quick as ever I could, and here she was.
I should like you to tell me, sir, what I am to think of it,” she added, with an
air of laying all the responsibility on Lehming.
But the young man had no desire to talk over the matter, and so he said he
was glad that Miss Fulton had been found, and began to smile himself away.
“I can't stand this much longer,” continued Miss Jones in a hissing whisper,
much like the voice of a blown football suffering from a puncture. “I think
you ought to speak with her about her mysterious ways,” urged this young
woman who was bursting with a long-endured colic of curiosity. “She's as
been.”
Lehming halted. “Call me, if she seems to be ill,” he said energetically.
Then, without further hearkening, he glided hastily away, whereupon Imogen
slammed her door in a pet.
The burdened Lehming returned to his study, and seated himself before his
smouldering fire. He was sorry that Miss Jones should be offended; but in a
minute or so he had entirely forgotten her. He could think only of Nestoria—
how to prevent her from taking flight, perhaps before morning, and how to
draw her out of her doubtless wretched and possibly wrongful seclusion. He
felt sure that never during her whole life could she have any real happiness,
unless she revealed all that she knew (and she must know something) of the
murder of Judge Wetherel. He was persuaded that it was her duty to make
such a revelation, even though it should fill her heart and other hearts with
incurable sorrow. The supposition that she might herself he the assassin he
rejected absolutely, notwithstanding that it was held by many people, and a
reward had been offered for her apprehension. Then he had to grapple with
the terrible hypothesis that, if she accused any person of blood-guiltiness, that
person would probably be Edward Wetherel.
“Well, so be it,” he whispered, drooping his head to his knees and burying
his face in his hand. “It is her duty to bring the wrong-doer to punishment,
though she and all of us suffer grief and shame beyond estimate. If blood be
upon his soul, she must give him up, and we must all give him up. O,
Heaven! with this thought upon my mind, how could I face him as calmly as I
did! O, almighty and pitying Father, let it not be as we think! Let that cup
pass from us! But if it must come to our lips, give us strength to drink it!
No, there must be no putting away of justice; there must be no evasion of righteousness.
She must speak, and I must make her.”
So he went on, fighting with suspicions and horrors, for hour after hour.
We often hear of passing a night without sleep; it is an almost superhuman
feat and seldom accomplished; but Lehming did it. His mental trouble alone
might not have kept him waking, but he felt it his duty to watch against the
flight of Nestoria.
Wrapping himself in his overcoat, he moved his chair close to his partially
open door, and listened for the sound of stealthy feet in the passage. If he found
himself inclined to doze, he paced the room for a minute or two in his stockings,
and then resumed his ward. The dull hum and murmur of the great city around
him sank little by little into a perfect, solemn, and awful silence. From time
to time a bell, which he remembered that he had never heard before, gave him
notice of the death of the hours. This solitary sound, recurring after such
weary intervals, and striking into the midst of tragic reflections and anxieties,
seemed to him funereal. His powerful and sombre imagination awoke at the
summons, spread its raven wings, and flew abroad through the night, seeking
out spectacles of sorrow. He heard in fancy all the bells that ring for the
burial of men, extorting the fierce or despairing grief of mourners all over
the world. He saw the black, slow corteges of those who cannot be comforted.
The vast ocean of universal human misery rolled in upon and swelled his own
wretchedness. It was such a night of sadness and boding as only a most sensitive
imagination can know.
A little after two in the morning he started up from his seat with an impression
that footsteps were gliding through the hall toward the stairway
venture in the darkness, and caught a figure wrapped in a shawl or some
other womanly vestment. There was a low cry, and an attempt at retreat;
but Lehming held firm with one trembling hand, while with the other he drew
a match against the wall. As he expected he beheld the slight form and childlike
face, now pale and terrified enough, of Nettie.
“What do you stop me for?” she burst out in a harsh, eager, passionate
whisper.
“Come into my study and let me speak to you before you go,” he replied.
“My poor child, only one moment!”
| CHAPTER XXXVI.
WILL SHE FLY? The Wetherel affair | |