Читать книгу Marked "Personal" - Anna Katharine Green - Страница 9

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Jack did not like the duty which had been imposed upon him; but he was naturally loyal, and he had no thought of refusing to do anything which Stanhope might demand. There was hesitation, however, in his step as he descended the stairs, and he seemed to have the same difficulty in passing the door, at the foot, which he had shown in going up.

A posse of gentlemen were standing in the lower hall. As he reached the passageway leading to the rooms formerly occupied by Stanhope’s father, he heard them coming slowly up. At the same moment the butler appeared on the back stairs, and, seeing Jack, said imploringly:

“It’s the coroner and his jury, sir. They have been asking for Mr. Stanhope. Shall I fetch him?”

“I will do that,” answered Jack, and immediately returned to the room above.

“It’s too bad,” he exclaimed, as his friend opened the door, “but the coroner is here, and I am afraid you will have to go down.”

Stanhope, turning pale, glanced down at his clothes, which naturally were the same he had worn at the wedding. “What shall I have to say?” he asked, tearing away the faded rose which still clung to his buttonhole.

“Answer their questions, that is all. You are not called upon to utter any surmises, fears, or doubts. I do not think your suspicions are shared by any one in the house. Do not, then, be the one to awaken them.”

“I will not. The honor and happiness of his young widow must be considered, as well as my own. Go on, Jack.”

And they proceeded at once to the rooms below.

The body of Mr. White had been lifted from the floor, and now lay upon the bed. As they entered the room, the twelve men stood about it; but these soon drew back, leaving the fine figure and regular features of the deceased in full view. Stanhope could not control his feelings at the sight. Samuel White had been a good father, and the void made in his son’s breast by his unhappy death was deep and never to be filled. At the sudden moan of grief he uttered, all the men present bowed their heads; but in a few minutes the necessities of the hour brought restraint, and such questions were put as were suggested by the appearance of the room, and the position in which the dead man had been found by his son, and such others as had entered immediately after.

From these appearances, and the other facts connected with the case, the conclusion of accident was so evident, that the jury saw small reason for delaying their verdict. It was, therefore, given upon the spot, to the immense relief of Stanhope, and, I do not hesitate to say, of Jack Hollister also. As the various figures, large, small, tall, short, fleshy, and angular, shuffled from the room, the latter drew a deep breath and seized Stanhope by the hand.

“Now, all will be easy,” said he. “No suspicion will be raised by any questions I may ask. Go to your room. I want to chatter with Felix.”

With a grateful look Stanhope prepared to obey; but, as he stepped into the hall, the door in front (the door of which I have already more than once spoken) opened softly, and he drew as suddenly back.

“Go with me,” he said to Jack. “With these doubts in my mind I cannot risk an interview with Mrs. White. She might read my thoughts, and that would bring wretchedness.”

Jack, with a searching look at his friend, did as he was bid. As they passed down the hall they heard the sound of eager breathing before them, and Jack espied the tip of a little boot projecting beyond the threshold. Summoning up his courage, which seemed rapidly on the wane, he at once addressed himself to Stanhope in some commonplace phrase; at which utterance the little boot quickly disappeared, and the door which had been held partly open softly closed, till the snapping of the lock announced that all danger from interruption in that quarter was, for the moment, safely over.

Stanhope gladly passed on his way up-stairs, and Jack went back to the rooms he had left.

The facts he had gleaned from the inquest were very simple. Mr. White and his bride had gone immediately from the church to her father’s house, where a short reception had been held. Thence they had driven here, it being a notion of Mr. White to introduce her to her future home before proceeding on their journey south. Accordingly, upon reaching the house, he had taken her through the various apartments, till they reached the boudoir on the second floor, where he had left her to rest while he went to make the final preparations for their departure.

These took him to his bedroom, which was at the rear of the house on this same floor. To reach this room, one was obliged to go through a small study, where, in the days of his widowerhood, he had been accustomed to carry on his correspondence and receive such men as he did not wish to meet in the drawing-room. This latter room, or ante-chamber as it might be called, jutted out some few feet into the hall just beyond the main staircase, and, small as it was, contained two doors besides the one opening into the bedroom. One faced the front of the house, and formed the usual means of entrance for the members of the family; the other was at right angles to it, and led into a narrow, rear hall, connecting with a back staircase used chiefly by the servants. Adjoining this, and opposite to the door leading to the front, was the one opening into the bedroom, and in the middle of the floor, facing this latter, was the table at which his work was done, and where he was usually to be found seated when not in the library below. This fact of a rear entrance, noticed by Jack, seemed to have attracted no attention at the inquest; and the reason undoubtedly was that there had been no evidence connecting that back staircase with the shooting, which every circumstance, so far as known, showed to have been purely accidental.

As I have previously stated, this had taken place in the bedroom, whither Mr. White had gone almost immediately after leaving his bride. His trunk, which he had packed before the ceremony, stood ready strapped, on one side, and only the open bag resting on it proclaimed that his preparations for departure had not been quite complete. His form, outstretched on the floor at the foot of the trunk, was clad in the same garments he had worn to church; and from the fact given by Felix, who had entered the room behind Mrs. White and Stanhope, that the keys dangling from the bag were swinging slowly to and fro, it was evident that Mr. White’s hand had been in contact with the bag when he fell. The jury, after surveying the situation, had drawn the conclusion that Mr. White had been putting the pistol into the bag, when it went off; but Jack asked himself, as he looked the same scene over in the company of the respectful Felix, if Mr. White could not have been taking it from the bag at that fatal moment, though the latter would look like intention, while the former pointed solely to inadvertence. That there should be a pistol at all in the case, and that it should be one which had never been seen before by any member of the family, might mean much and might mean little. What did mean much to Jack, though it had seemed to have had little weight with the hastily formed jury, was the fact that a man of so much experience as Mr. White should have endeavored to pack a weapon at full cock. Yet there might have been some obscure reason for even such a piece of carelessness as this, and till he knew that Stanhope had been right in his fears that his father had not been as happy on this day as the occasion seemed to warrant, he would believe that it was in his attempt to rectify this dangerous oversight that Mr. White had taken the pistol into his hand.

For it was dreadful, horrible to Jack Hollister to entertain the least suspicion of suicide on the part of Mr. White. It caused his cheeks to whiten, and the hair to rise on his forehead, merely to contemplate such a possibility; and had he not given his promise to Stanhope, he would have been ready to take the conclusions of the jury as his own, and have accepted without query the verdict which they had given of accidental death.

For Jack’s instincts, if not his practices, were invariably noble and unselfish, and there were reasons—reasons which he shrank from remembering—why it would rouse nothing but wretchedness in him to find that his friend’s suspicions were true. Yet there was no faltering in Jack, and after seeing for himself all that there was to see, he beckoned Felix from the room, and with a show of shallow curiosity, which hid the deep and real interest which he felt, ventured to ask where were the letters which Mr. White was said to have written before his marriage.

“Oh, sir, mailed long ago. The footman took them; I saw him go out of the basement door with them before the gentlemen went to church.”

Jack wondered if the footman had read the addresses on those letters before he put them into the box.

“The poor young bride!” Jack now exclaimed with an effort known only to himself. “It is a sad ending to her hopes.”

“It is, sir,” acquiesced Felix, heartily. “I never saw a lady so overcome. When she came into the room and saw what had occurred” (this was what Jack wished to hear), “she gave one shriek and then cowered down as if some heavy weight had fallen on her head. But she has grit, sir, and the true spirit; for, when she saw that her husband was really dead, she grew quieter and put a constraint upon herself, so that we have been let do what we thought best, without any hindrance from her. Oh, she’s a fine and beautiful lady, sir, and would have done Mr. White great credit! I hope she will stay as the missus here.”

Jack with an easier feeling left the old servant to the duties that were pressing upon him, and went to the drawing-room to think. Open evidence there could never be that Mr. White had meditated the death that had overtaken him; but what could not the young wife tell if she chose to speak? That she suspected a deeper tragedy in this matter than was apparent to the outside world, seemed evident to him; and yet, as he remembered her at the altar, she had shown nothing but what he had then considered to be a chill self-possession, not unmixed with complacency.

“The face and figure of a proud woman,” thought he, “conscious of wearing a fortune on her head in lace and diamonds. How I hated the sight! How much more I admired her at the reception, when there seemed to be some feeling in her heart, some tremor in the daintily gloved hand she stretched out to the friends who crowded about her.” He had not been quite himself at that reception (he blushed as he thought of it), but his wits had not been so clouded that he could not recall the looks of the bridal couple as they stood at the end of the long room. There was a sweetness in her face which had both pleased and angered him at the time, and, now that he thought of it, he had detected her more than once steal short glances at her husband which had something deeper than curiosity in them. And that husband? Had he been quite natural? It was hard to tell. A man under such circumstances, even when going through them for the second time, is apt to show some loss of self-possession; and Mr. White, if he betrayed any feeling at all, did so by the extreme quietness of his manner rather than by any undue excitement. Yet the Mr. White of the bridal ceremony was not the Mr. White even of the evening before. Some change, subtle but deep, had passed over him; and it was on account of this change, perhaps, that Stanhope had drawn the conclusions he had confided to Jack.

But had it been a change great enough to warrant a belief of premeditated suicide on the part of this successful and highly honored man? No; not in Jack’s judgment, at least. Such an intention in the heart of a man, at a moment acknowledged to be the happiest in life, would have plowed deep traces even in so composed and courageous a countenance as that of this great public leader. No man could have stood thus with a young and lovely bride at his side, and thought of death, without a shudder which would have affected his whole bearing and drawn the attention even of the gay throng which surrounded them. No: Stanhope had been mistaken; some petty anxiety, some secret hitch in his business interests or in his political aspirations, may have drawn a shadow over his spirits, but nothing serious, nothing breathing with life or death.

And yet something in the temper of his own mind, some latent instinct of heroism perhaps, told him that a great despair often brought great calmness; and that if Mr. White had received some heavy shock, affecting his whole present and future happiness, there might have come with it sufficient strength to steady his outer man, however much it may have broken his inner spirit.

Moved by doubts to which meditation gave no answer, Jack left the drawing-room to return to Stanhope. As he passed into the hall, a man who was standing at the front door made him a short bow. It was the footman of the establishment. Jack, with a sudden recollection of the letters which this man had mailed during the morning, paused and in his own good-humored, somewhat careless way addressed him. Peter, sensible of the honor, replied with great freedom, and in five minutes, after some very delicate manipulation, Jack was so happy as to learn that Peter had not read the names of the persons to whom Mr. White had written, for the very good reason that he could not read writing.

Had this been in Mr. White’s mind when he summoned him, instead of Felix, to execute this little commission for him?