The Golden Slipper Part 24

"Four minutes past two! How came our old timepiece here to stop at that exact moment on a day when Duty was making its last demand upon me to remember Frank's unhappy child? There was no one to answer; but as I looked and looked, I felt the impulse of the moment strengthen into purpose to leave those hands undisturbed in their silent accusation. She might see, and, moved by the coincidence, tremble at her treatment of Helena.

"But if this happened--if she saw and trembled--she gave no sign. The works were started up by some other hand, and the incident pa.s.sed.

But it left me with an idea. That clock soon had a way of stopping and always at that one instant of time. She was forced at length to notice it, and I remember, an occasion when she stood stock-still with her eyes on those hands, and failed to find the banister with her hand, though she groped for it in her frantic need for support.

"But no command came from her to remove the worn-out piece, and soon its tricks, and every lesser thing, were forgotten in the crushing calamity which befell us in the sickness and death of little Richard.

"Oh, those days and nights! And oh, the face of the mother when the doctors told her that the case was hopeless! I asked myself then, and I have asked myself a hundred times since, which of all the emotions I saw pictured there bit the deepest, and made the most lasting impression on her guilty heart? Was it remorse? If so, she showed no change in her att.i.tude towards Helena, unless it was by an added bitterness. The sweet looks and gentle ways of Frank's young daughter could not win against a hate sharpened by disappointment. Useless for me to hope for it. Release from the remorse of years was not to come in that way. As I realized this, I grew desperate and resorted again to the old trick of stopping the clock at the fatal hour. This time her guilty heart responded. She acknowledged the stab and let all her miseries appear. But how? In a way to wring my heart almost to madness, and not benefit the child at all.

She had her first stroke that night. I had made her a helpless invalid.

"That was eight years ago, and since then what? Stagnation. She lived with her memories, and I with mine. Helena only had a right to hope, and hope perhaps she did, till--Is that the great clock talking? Listen!

They all talk, but I heed only the one. What does it say? Tell! tell!

tell! Does it think I will be silent now when I come to my own guilt?

That I will seek to hide my weakness when I could not hide her sin?"

"Explain!" It was Violet speaking, and her tone was stern in its command. "Of what guilt do you speak? Not of guilt towards Helena; you pitied her too much--"

"But I pitied my dear madam more. It was that which affected me and drew me into crime against my will. Besides, I did not know--not at first--what was in the little bowl of curds and cream I carried to the girl each day. She had eaten them in her step-mother's room, and under her step-mother's eye as long as she had strength to pa.s.s from room to room, and how was I to guess that it was not wholesome? Because she failed in health from day to day? Was not my dear madam failing in health also; and was there poison in her cup? Innocent at that time, why am I not innocent now? Because--Oh, I will tell it all; as though at the bar of G.o.d. I will tell all the secrets of that day.

"She was sitting with her hand trembling on the tray from which I had just lifted the bowl she had bid me carry to Helena. I had seen her so a hundred times before, but not with just that look in her eyes, or just that air of desolation in her stony figure. Something made me speak; something made me ask if she were not quite so well as usual, and something made her reply with the dreadful truth that the doctor had given her just two months more to live. My fright and mad anguish stupefied me; for I was not prepared for this, no, not at all;--and unconsciously I stared down at the bowl I held, unable to breathe or move or even to meet her look."

As usual she misinterpreted my emotion.

"'Why do you stand like that?' I heard her say in a tone of great irritation. 'And why do you stare into that bowl? Do you think I mean to leave that child to walk these halls after I am carried out of them forever? Do you measure my hate by such a petty yard-stick as that? I tell you that I would rot above ground rather than enter it before she did?'

"I had believed I knew this woman; but what soul ever knows another's?

What soul ever knows itself?

"'Bella!' I cried; the first time I had ever presumed to address her so intimately. 'Would you poison the girl?' And from sheer weakness my fingers lost their clutch, and the bowl fell to the floor, breaking into a dozen pieces.

"For a minute she stared down at these from over her tray, and then she remarked very low and very quietly:

"'Another bowl, Humphrey, and fresh curds from the kitchen. I will do the seasoning. The doses are too small to be skipped. You won't?'--I had shaken my head--'But you will! It will not be the first time you have gone down the hall with this mixture.'

"'But that was before I knew--' I began.

"'And now that you do, you will go just the same.' Then as I stood hesitating, a thousand memories overwhelming me in an instant, she added in a voice to tear the heart, 'Do not make me hate the only being left in this world who understands and loves me.'

"She was a helpless invalid, and I a broken man, but when that word 'love' fell from her lips, I felt the blood start burning in my veins, and all the crust of habit and years of self-control loosen about my heart, and make me young again. What if her thoughts were dark and her wishes murderous! She was born to rule and sway men to her will even to their own undoing."

"'I wish I might kiss your hand,' was what I murmured, gazing at her white fingers groping over her tray.

"'You may,' she answered, and h.e.l.l became heaven to me for a brief instant. Then I lifted myself and went obediently about my task.

"But puppet though I was, I was not utterly without sympathy. When I entered Helena's room and saw how her startled eyes fell shrinkingly on the bowl I set down before her, my conscience leaped to life and I could not help saying:

"'Don't you like the curds, Helena? Your brother used to love them very much.'

"'His were--'

"'What, Helena?'

"'What these are not,' she murmured.

"I stared at her, terror-stricken. So she knew, and yet did not seize the bowl and empty it out of the window! Instead, her hand moved slowly towards it and drew it into place before her.

"'Yet I must eat,' she said, lifting her eyes to mine in a sort of patient despair, which yet was without accusation.

"But my hand had instinctively gone to hers and grasped it.

"'Why must you eat it?' I asked. 'If--if you do not find it wholesome, why do you touch it?'

"'Because my step-mother expects me to,' she cried, 'and I have no other will than hers. When I was a little, little child, my father made me promise that if I ever came to live with her I would obey her simplest wish. And I always have. I will not disappoint the trust he put in me.'

"'Even if you die of it?'

"I do not know whether I whispered these words or only thought them. She answered as though I had spoken.

"'I am not afraid to die. I am more afraid to live. She may ask me some day to do something I feel to be wrong.'

"When I fled down the hall that night, I heard one of the small clocks speak to me. Tell! it cried, tell! tell! tell! tell! I rushed away from it with beaded forehead and rising hair.

"Then another's note piped up. No it droned. No! no! no! no! I stopped and took heart. Disgrace the woman I loved, on the brink of the grave? I--, who asked no other boon from heaven than to see her happy, gracious, and good? Impossible. I would obey the great clock's voice; the others were mere chatterboxes.

"But it has at last changed its tune, for some reason, quite changed its tune. Now, it is Yes! Yes! instead of No! and in obeying it I save Helena. But what of Bella? and O G.o.d, what of myself?"

A sigh, a groan, then a long and heavy silence, into which there finally broke the pealing of the various clocks striking the hour. When all were still again and Violet had drawn aside the portiere, it was to see the old man on his knees, and between her and the thin streak of light entering from the hall, the figure of the doctor hastening to Helena's bedside.

When with inducements needless to name, they finally persuaded the young girl to leave her unholy habitation, it was in the arms which had upheld her once before, and to a life which promised to compensate her for her twenty years of loneliness and unsatisfied longing.

But a black shadow yet remained which she must cross before reaching the sunshine!

It lay at her step-mother's door.

In the plans made for Helena's release, Mrs. Postlethwaite's consent had not been obtained nor was she supposed to be acquainted with the doctor's intentions towards the child whose death she was hourly awaiting.

It was therefore with an astonishment, bordering on awe, that on their way downstairs, they saw the door of her room open and herself standing alone and upright on the threshold--she who had not been seen to take a step in years. In the wonder of this miracle of suddenly restored power, the little procession stopped,--the doctor with his hand upon the rail, the lover with his burden clasped yet more protectingly to his breast.

That a little speech awaited them could be seen from the force and fury of the gaze which the indomitable woman bent upon the lax and half-unconscious figure she beheld thus sheltered and conveyed. Having but one arrow left in her exhausted quiver, she launched it straight at the innocent breast which had never harboured against her a defiant thought.

"Ingrate!" was the word she hurled in a voice from which all its seductive music had gone forever. "Where are you going? Are they carrying you alive to your grave?"

A moan from Helena's pale lips, then silence. She had fainted at that barbed attack. But there was one there who dared to answer for her and he spoke relentlessly. It was the man who loved her.

"No, madam. We are carrying her to safety. You must know what I mean by that. Let her go quietly and you may die in peace. Otherwise--"

She interrupted him with a loud call, startling into life the echoes of that haunted hall:

"Humphrey! Come to me, Humphrey!"

But no Humphrey appeared.