Читать книгу The Step On The Stair - Anna Katharine Green - Страница 16

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The following one was less troublesome, and so was the next; then came the week of my sojourn elsewhere and of Edgar’s dominance in the house we all felt would soon be his own. Whether Orpha confided to him her latest trouble I never heard. When his week was up and I replaced him again in the daily care of our uncle, I sought to learn if help or disappointment had come to her in my absence. But beyond a graver bearing and a manifest determination not to be alone with me even for a few moments in any of the rooms on the ground floor, I received no answer to my question. Orpha could be very inscrutable when she liked.

It was during the seven happy days of this week that three rather important conversations took place between Uncle and myself, portions of which I now propose to relate. I will not try your patience by repeating the preamble to any one of them or the after remarks. Just the bits necessary to make this story of the three Edgars understandable.

* * * * * * * * *

Uncle is speaking.

“I have been criticised very severely by my lawyer and less openly but fully as earnestly by both men and women of my acquaintance, for my well-known determination to leave the main portion of my property to a man—the man who is to marry my daughter. My answer has always been that no woman should be trusted with the responsibilities and conduct of very large interests. She has not the nerve, the experience, nor the acquaintanceship with other large holders, requisite for conducting affairs of wide scope successfully. She would have to employ an agent which in this case would of course be her husband. Then why not give him full control from the start?”

I was silent, what could I say?

“Quenton?”

His tone was so strange, so different from any I had ever heard pass his lips, that I looked up at him in amazement. I was still more amazed when I noted his aspect. His expression which until now had impressed me as fundamentally stern however he might mask it with the smile of sympathy or indulgence, had lost every attribute suggestive of strength or domination. Gone the steady look of power which made his glance so remarkable. Even the set of his lips had given way to a tremulous line full of tenderness and indefinable sorrow.

“Quenton,” he repeated, “there are griefs and remembrances of which a man never speaks until the sands of life are running low; and not even then save for a purpose. I loved my wife.” My heart leaped. I knew from his tone why he had understood me that night of the ball and taken instantly and at its full value the love I had expressed for Orpha. “Orpha was only two years old when her mother died. A babe with no memories of what has made my life! For me, the wife of my youth lives yet. This house which has been constructed so as to incorporate within its walls the old inn where I first met her, is redolent of her presence. Her tread is on the stairs. Her beauty makes more beautiful every object I have bought of worth or value to adorn her dwelling-place. Yet were she really living and I had no other inheritor, I should not consider that I was doing right by her or right by the world to leave her in full possession of means so hardly accumulated and interests so complicated and burdensome. She was tested once with the temporary charge of my affairs and, poor darling, broke under it. Orpha is her child. She has the same temperament, the same gentleness, the same strictness of conscience, to offend which is an active and all-absorbing pain. If this burden fell upon her—”

When he had finished I wondered if he had ever spoken of his wife to Edgar as he spoke of her to me that hour.

* * * * * * * * *

“You have heard the gossip about this house. Some one must have told you of unaccountable sounds heard at odd moments on the stairs or elsewhere—steps other than your own keeping pace with you as you went up or down.”

“Yes, uncle, I have been told of this. I heard something of the kind once myself.”

“You did? When?” The glance he shot at me was quick and searching.

I told him and for a long time he sat very still gazing with retrospective eyes into the fire.

“More than that,” I whispered after a while, “I heard a cough. It came from no one in sight. It sounded smothered. It seemed to come from the wall at my left, but that was impossible of course.”

“Impossible, of course. The whole thing is foolishness —not to be thought of for a moment. The harmless result of some defect in carpentry. I smile when people speak of it. So do my servants. I keep them all, you see.”

“Uncle, if this house needed a finishing touch to make it the most romantic in the world, this suggestion of mystery supplies it.”

I shall never forget his quick bend forward or the long, long look he gave me.

It emboldened me to ask almost seriously:

“Uncle, have you ever felt this presence yourself?”

He laughed a long, hearty, amused laugh, then a strange expression crossed his face unlike any I had ever seen on it before. “There’s romance in these old fancies,— romance,” he murmured—“romance.”

No lover’s voice could have been more tender; no poet’s eye more dreamy.

I locked the remembrance away in my mind, for I doubted if I ever should see him in just such a mood again.

* * * * * * * *

“Your eyes are very often on Orpha’s picture. I do not wonder at it; so are mine. It has a peculiar power to draw and then hold the attention. I chose an artist of penetrating intelligence; one who believes in the soul of his sitter and impresses you more with that than with the beauty of a woman or the mind of a man. I wanted her painted thus. Shall I tell you why? I think I will. It may steady you as it has steadied me and so serve a double purpose. Wealth has its charms; it also has its temptations. To keep me clean in the getting, the saving, and the spending, I had this picture painted and hung where I could not fail to see it when sitting at my desk. If a business proposition was presented to me which I could not consider under that clear, direct gaze so like her mother’s, I knew what to do with it. You will have the same guardianship. The souls of two women will protect you from yourself; Orpha’s mother’s and Orpha’s own.”

I felt a thrill. Something more than wealth, more even than love, was to be my portion. The living of a clean life in sight of God and man.