Читать книгу Marked "Personal" - Anna Katharine Green - Страница 13

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“Mr. Hollister, sir!”

Stanhope rose; he was glad to see his friend.

“Why, how different you look!” was Jack’s exclamation as he strode into the room. “Has anything happened? Have you satisfied yourself that your fears were unfounded?”

His own manner had shown a certain feverish anxiety when he entered, but it had suddenly changed when he noted Stanhope’s relieved expression. Stanhope’s reply tended to still further reassure him.

“Yes; I cannot confide in you, Jack, any more than I could yesterday, but the grief I now feel is simple and unclouded. I mourn a father lost, but not a father desperate.”

“Then I can give you this letter without dread,” declared Jack, reaching out a small note which he had just taken from his pocket. “One of the letters which your father mailed yesterday is accounted for: it was written to me.”

“To you!”

“Yes; for the purpose of enclosing these few lines to you. He seemed to have some premonition of his doom—though not in the way you feared,” Jack hastily added, catching Stanhope’s startled look. “A good many people feel so when they are about starting on a journey. I shouldn’t let that influence me. Good heaven! Stanhope, what is it now?” he impulsively asked, as he beheld his friend staring with rapidly changing face at the words his father had written him.

“I do not know—I do not understand,” exclaimed Stanhope, somewhat incoherently. He was dazed; there was no meaning for him at the moment in the words he was endeavoring to read.

Jack, with a sense of renewed trouble, took the paper from his friend and read:—.

“It is my first, foremost, and lasting desire, that you should marry (if you ever marry) a girl by the name of Natalie Yelverton. She is the daughter of Stephen Yelverton, of whom you will probably hear shortly after my death. Why I demand this, and why it is the only and best thing for you to do, do not seek to inquire. That I wish it, and forbid every other marriage on your part, is sufficient to prove that only in this union lies your happiness and the honor of our name.

“Your affectionate father,

“Samuel White.”

“The deuce!”

In that somewhat trivial exclamation spoke the Jack of former times, the Jack whom we have not yet met. “Natalie Yelverton! Who is she, Stanhope?”

“I do not know,” was his quiet but prompt reply. “I have never seen her, never ever heard of her before.”

“The deuce!” again broke from his companion’s lips. He seemed almost as confounded as his friend.

But Stanhope was more than confounded; he was stricken, and that by more than one fear, more than one disappointment.

“I am overcome by this,” he exclaimed at last. “I wish I had not seen it till after the funeral. I wish—God forgive me—it had never come to my hand. Why should I marry this stranger? But that is what he tells me I should not inquire. Jack, were not my troubles great enough before?”

Jack, to whom this arbitrary disposal of a man’s right to choose his own wife as his own heart dictated was at this period of his career especially odious, immediately broke out in a tirade which it was fortunate that Stanhope was too much engrossed in his own emotions to hear. The last words only struck the dulled ears of his companion. They were these:

“You are under no legal obligation to do it, and I should first make sure that Natalie Yelverton was the girl I wanted to marry.”

To this assertion, Stanhope evidently felt himself called upon to reply.

“I shall never marry, if I must marry a girl who goes by the name of Natalie.”

His look more than his words seemed to strike Jack.

“You don’t mean,” he began, “that there is some one—”

“Isn’t there always some one?” smiled Stanhope, bitterly. And he walked away from Jack in a vain effort to regain his self-command sufficiently to answer the questions which he felt that this indiscreet admission was likely to bring upon him.

But if Jack was light of manner, he was not indelicate, and one look at his friend’s face had convinced him that the best use he could make of his friendship just then was to curb his lawful curiosity. He therefore remained silent and dubious, looking very much as if he would like to curse somebody if he could only be quite sure who that especial somebody was.

Stanhope, who had not expected this reticence, showed himself particularly grateful for it. Coming back to Jack, he seized him by the hand.

“You are a good fellow,” said he, “and a true friend; we won’t say anything more about this, and do you try if you can to forget it. My father had his reasons, no doubt, and—” He stopped, and a flush, deep and red mounted up his forehead. Some new fear, new shame, had evidently struck his mind, and for a moment robbed him of the last remains of his self-possession; but he speedily conquered himself. “And we should respect them,” finished he. “I shall never hear any word against my father’s good judgment.”

“Of course not, of course not,” stammered Jack. “He was one of our great men. No one thinks of disputing it.”

“I have but one final question to ask. What did you mean when you said that my father seemed to have some premonition of his doom?”

“Why, only this. He said in the few lines he wrote me, that being on the point of a journey over a road not unused to accidents, he requested that in case any disaster terminated his life, I would be good enough to hand you the enclosed. He said nothing about what I should do with it if nothing occurred to him, which, now I come to think of it, seems strange.”

The pallor in Stanhope’s face deepened. “We will not speculate,” said he. “The cross of my life has been given me to bear, and I must bear it. Not a word more, Jack.”

But, when Jack was gone, many and perplexing were the surmises in which Stanhope indulged. That his father expected to be dead when Jack received this letter, he no longer doubted. That the cause of this dread expectation—an expectation which in this case could have had birth only in an intention—sprang from some sudden knowledge of the state of his young wife’s affections, seemed equally evident. For what else but jealousy—a hideous, even if a misplaced jealousy, of his own son—could have prompted the look which that son had surprised on his face at the ceremony, and next these words—this mandate from the tomb—by which he was to be withheld from any marriage save one so problematical as to be scarcely taken into account?

That his father had spared his young bride’s honor, first by marrying her and then by directing to her words of the most confiding affection, only pointed these conclusions in Stanhope’s mind. For he knew his fathers nature, and knew it to be too essentially chivalrous for him to think of casting a shadow over a woman’s reputation; and, even had he possessed real cause for jealousy, it would have been contrary to his instincts to have revenged himself upon her, save as he may have thought himself to have done so by the restrictions he had placed upon his son.

What thoughts! What horrors! It made Stanhope writhe in shame, grief, and repulsion, only to consider from what an abyss of desperation and outraged feeling the determination to make those restrictions must have sprung. For his father had loved him always and loved him well, and never would have blasted a life, from which he had always avowed himself to hope so much, by any such arbitrary commands if he had not been maddened by pain and resentment. That his father had hurt him deeper than he knew, and in other ways than he knew, did not take from the sting of Stanhope’s reflections. Nor did any curiosity as to who this Natalie Yelverton could be, come at this time to alleviate the intolerable emotions under which he labored. For with him then, as later, was present the conviction that this was but a name, and only a name, and that as he would never meet one bearing it, he would never be at liberty to marry any one. A cruel outlook for a young man, gifted as Stanhope was not only with domestic tastes, but with every grace and virtue calculated to please women and insure happiness in marriage.

To rouse himself from thoughts fast growing too desperate to be endured, Stanhope finally left his room and went below to his father’s study. A duty had presented itself to him there—the verification of a theory he had formed in reference to the package marked “Personal.”

Josephine had said it looked like a book, but he did not believe it to have been a book. On the contrary, he was convinced that it had held the pistol which had taken his father’s life.

Satisfied as he was now that his father had wished to throw a mystery about his death, or at least to avoid the suspicion of suicide, Stanhope refrained from looking for this box in any near or conspicuous place. It was in the recesses of cupboards that he sought it, and at the back of high shelves. And it was in one of these latter places that he finally found it, and with it the proof that his theory had been correct, for it exactly fitted the creases in the piece of brown paper which he had taken from the waste-paper basket the day before, as well as the piece of green cord with which that paper had been bound.

It was a new box, and on the bottom of it was pasted a label bearing the name of the firm from which it had been purchased.

The mystery of the brown-paper package had been solved, but not the mystery as to how his father had been able to send for and receive a pistol at such short notice.