Bessie's Fortune Part 58

"Where does this lead to?" she asked, laying her hand upon the door which was always closed.

"That was grandfather's room. No one goes in there," Grey said, hurriedly, as he put his arm around her, and told her she had seen enough, and must rest until after dinner.

He took her to the pleasant south room, where the early dinner was served, with the tiny silver teaspoons, marked with the initials of Hannah's mother, and the bits of old china, which modern fashion has made so choice and rare now. And Bessie enjoyed it with the keen relish of a returning appet.i.te. She had improved rapidly within the last week, and declared herself is well and strong as ever, when, after dinner was over and the dishes cleared away she nestled down among the cushions of the chintz-covered lounge.

"This is such a dear old place," she said, "that I should like to stay here always. People say there is a skeleton in every house, but I am sure there can be none here, everything seems so peaceful and quiet."

"Why did she make that remark, of all others?" Grey thought, as, with a face whiter even than that of his Aunt Hannah, he sat down beside her, and drawing her closely to him, laid her golden head upon his shoulder.

"Bessie," he said, and his voice shook a little, "I am going to tell you something which perhaps I ought to have told you before I asked you to be my wife, and which I should have told you had I thought the telling would make any difference in your love for me."

"Nothing could make any difference in that," Bessie said, lifting up her sweet face to be kissed, and then dropping her head again upon Grey's arm, just as Hannah came in and took a seat on the other side of her.

Hannah had been up stairs to her room, where she now kept the box in which lay the picture which was so like Bessie McPherson.

"More like her than I supposed," she whispered, as she gazed upon the face which seemed each moment to grow more and more like the young girl to whom Grey was to tell the story.

He was only waiting for her to come in before he commenced, she knew, and putting the picture back in its place, she went down to the south room, and taking her seat beside Bessie, as Grey motioned her to do, waited for him to begin.

"Bessie," he said, and his aim tightened its clasp around her waist, "there _is_ a skeleton here, and it has darkened all my Aunt Hannah's life, and thrown its shadow over me as well. Can you bear to have a little of it fall upon you, too?"

"Yes," she answered, fearlessly, "I have always lived with skeletons until I knew you loved me; they cannot frighten me."

"But, darling, would you love me as well, think you you knew that, in a way, there was a disgrace clinging my name?" he asked, and Bessie replied:

"A disgrace! What do you mean? I cannot imagine you to be in disgrace; but if you are, I am quite ready to share it with you."

"Even if it be murder?"

Grey spoke the last word in a whisper, as if afraid the walls had ears, but Bessie heard him distinctly, and with a great start, she drew herself away from him, and sat rigid as a stone, while she repeated:

"Murder! Oh, Grey, you surely do not mean that!"

"No, not exactly; it was manslaughter, done in self-defense," Grey answered her, and, with a sigh of relief, Bessie asked:

"Who was the killed, and who the killer?"

"My grandfather did the deed, in the heat of pa.s.sion, and the victim has lain under the floor of that room into which I would not let you enter, for more than forty years. Now you know the skeleton there is in this old house."

"Ye-es," Bessie said, while a look of terror and pain crept into her eyes; but she did not move nearer either to Grey or his aunt.

Indeed, it seemed to both that she drew herself into as small a compa.s.s as possible, so that she might not touch them, and her face was very white and still as Grey commenced the story, which he made as short as possible, though he dwelt at length upon the life-long remorse of his grandfather, and the heavy burden which his Aunt Hannah had carried for years.

At this part of the story, Bessie's face relaxed, and one of the hands, which had been clasped so tightly together at first, went over to Hannah's hand, which it took and held until Grey told of the lonely days and dreary nights pa.s.sed by the young girl in the old horror-haunted house, with no one but Rover for her companion. Then the hand went up with a soft, caressing motion to the face which Grey had once said looked as if Christ had laid his hands hard upon it, and left their impress there. It was pallid now, as the face of a corpse, and there were hard lines about the mouth, which quivered with pain. But, at the touch of Bessie's soft fingers, the hardness relaxed, and, covering her eyes, Hannah burst into a paroxysm of weeping.

"Dear auntie," Bessie said, "my auntie, because you are Grey's, how you must have suffered, and how I wish I could have come to you. There would have been no terror here for me, because, you see, it was not premeditated; it was an accident, not a crime, and G.o.d, I am sure, forgave it long ago. No, Grey;" and now she turned to him, and, winding her arms around his neck, went on: "It is not a disgrace you ask me to share it is a misfortune, a trouble; and do you think I would shrink from it a moment--I, who have borne so much that _was_ disgrace?"

He knew she was thinking of her mother, but he said nothing except to fold her in his arms and kiss her flushed, eager face, while she went on:

"But who was this man? Where did he live, and had he no friends to make inquiries for him?"

Grey remembered now that he had simply said, the _peddler_, without giving the name, and he hastened to say:

"He was Joel Rogers, a Welshman, from Carnarvon, and it was for his sister Elizabeth, or her heirs, that I was searching, when I first came to Stoneleigh."

"Oh, Grey!" and Bessie sprang up almost as quickly as she had done when he spoke to her of murder; "oh, Grey! what if it should be my great-uncle, whose grave is under the floor? You once told me you were hunting for Elizabeth Rogers, and I said I would ask Anthony, who knew everybody for fifty miles around and for a hundred years back. But I forgot it until after father died, when it came to me one day, and I went to Anthony and asked if he knew any one in Carnarvon or vicinity by the name of Elizabeth Rogers.

"'No,' he said, 'I never knew Elizabeth Rogers; but I knew your grandmother, Elizabeth Baldwin, before she was married, and she had a half-brother, Joel Rogers, twenty years older than herself. A queer, roaming kind of chap, who went off to America, or Australia, or some such place, and never came back again. He was a good bit older than I am,' Anthony said, 'and would be over eighty if living now.'

"Then I remembered that when I was a child I once heard my grandmother Allen speak of a brother, who, she said, went to the States when she was a girl, and from whom she had not heard in many years. He must have been very fond of her, for she had several choice things he had given her, and among them a picture of herself, which, she said, was painted in London the only time she was ever there, and which was very beautiful."

"A picture, did you say? Would you know one like it if you were to see it?" Hannah asked, in a constrained voice and Bessie replied:

"Oh, yes; that portrait is still at Stoneleigh, for when grandma died, six or seven years ago, mother gave it to me, and I hung it in my room.

It was like mother, only prettier, I think."

While Bessie was speaking Hannah had risen, and going from the room soon returned, bearing in her hand the box, which for so many years she had secreted, and which Grey had not seen since he was a boy, and Hannah told him the sad story which had blighted her life. He saw it now in his aunt's hands, and shuddered as if it were a long closed grave she was opening.

"Here is the watch," she said, with a strange calmness, as she laid in Bessie's lap the silver time-piece, whose white face seemed to Grey to a.s.sume a human shape, and look knowingly up at him. "You see it stopped at half-past eight. It has never been wound up since," Hannah continued, pointing to the hour and minute hands.

Without the slightest hesitancy Bessie took the watch, and examining it carefully, said, as she fitted the key attached to the old-fashioned fob to the key-hole:

"Do you think it would go if I were to wind it up?" Then, giving the key a turn or two, she continued: "It does. It ticks. Look, Grey," and she held it to his ear.

But he started away from it, as if it had been the heart beat of the dead man himself, and rising quickly began to pace up and down the room, while Bessie next took the picture to which she bore so striking a likeness.

"It is grandmother! _It is!_" she exclaimed. "He must have had two taken, one for himself and one for her. Is she not lovely?"

"She is like you," Hannah replied, "and it was this resemblance which started me so when I first saw you this morning. Oh, Bessie, my child, your coming to me has cleared away all the clouds, and I can make rest.i.tution at last, for _you_ are the rightful heir of the money I have saved so carefully--heir of that and everything."

"I do not think I understand you," Bessie said, and then Hannah handed her the will, executed in Wales, about a year before Joel Rogers' death, and in which he gave all he had to his sister Elizabeth and her heirs forever.

"Still I do not quite see it. Explain it to me, Grey," Bessie said, with a perplexed look on her face.

Thus importuned, Grey sat down beside her, and, as well as he could, explained everything, and told her of the gold, to which his aunt had added interest every year, so that the heirs, when found, should have their own, and of the shares in the slate quarries in Wales, dividends on which must have amounted to quite a fortune by this time, and all of which was hers, when she was proven to be the lawful heir of Elizabeth Baldwin, sister of Joel Rogers.

"Yes, I understand now," she said, with a quivering lip, and the great tears rolling down her cheeks. "There is money for me somewhere, but, oh, I wish it had come in father's life-time. We were so poor then; but," she added, as a bright smile broke over her face, "I am glad for you, Grey, that I shall not be a penniless bride."

Did she not then appreciate the position, or see the gulf which her relationship to the dead man had built between them? If not, he must tell her, and rising again to his feet, and standing over her, Grey began with a choking voice:

"Bessie, you do not seem even to suspect that, in the eyes of the world, the fact that you are Joel Rogers' grand-niece ought to separate you from me. Don't you know that the blood of your kinsman is on my grandfather's hands, and does that make no difference with you?"

"Difference!" she repeated. "No, why should it? Oh, Grey, you are not going to give me up because of that? I was not to blame;" and in Bessie's voice there was such a pleading pathos, that when she stretched her hands toward him, Grey took her in his arms, feeling that all his doubts and fears were removed, and that Bessie might be his in spite of everything.

For a long time they talked together of the course to be pursued, deciding finally that the matter should be kept to themselves until Grey and Bessie were married, and with Hannah had been to Wales and proved the validity of Bessie's claim to the effects of Joel Rogers.

There was no longer any talk of waiting until Christmas Eve, for the marriage was to take place as soon as possible, and when Grey took Bessie home to Miss McPherson he startled that good woman with the announcement that he was to be married the last week in November and sail at once for Europe, taking his Aunt Hannah with him.