The Sword of Damocles Part 25

She stopped and her hand went to her heart, the reaction was so sudden.

"Yes," she murmured, standing still with great heart-beats of joy, or was it pain?

The door slowly opened. "Did you think I could let you go without a blessing, my Paula, my little one!" came in those deep heart-tones which always made her tears start. And Mr. Sylvester stepped out of the shadows beyond and stood in the shadows at her side.

"I did not know," she murmured. "I am so young, so feeble, such a mote in this great atmosphere of anguish. I longed to see you, to say good-bye, to thank you, but--" tears stopped her words; this was a parting that rent her leader heart.

Mr. Sylvester watched her and his deep chest rose spasmodically.

"Paula," said he, and there was a depth in his tone even she had never heard before, "are these tears for me?"

With a strong effort she controlled herself, looked up and faintly smiled. "I am an orphan," she gently murmured; "you have been kind and tender to me beyond words; I have let myself love you as a father."

A spasm crossed his features, the hand he had lifted to lay upon her head fell at his side, he surveyed her with eyes whose despairing fondness told her that her love had been more than met by this desolate childless man. But he did not reply as seemed natural, "Be to me then as a child. I can offer you no mother to guide or watch over you, but one parent is better than none. Henceforth you shall be known as my daughter." Instead of that he shook his head mournfully, yearningly but irrevocably, and said, "To be your father would have been a dear position to occupy. I have sometimes hoped that I might be so blessed as to call it mine, but that is all past now. Your father I can never be.

But I can bless you," he murmured brokenly, "not as I did that day in your aunt's little cottage, but silently and from afar as G.o.d always meant you should be blessed by me. Good-bye, Paula."

Then all the deeps in her great nature broke up. She did not weep, but she looked at him with her large dark eyes and the cry in them smote his heart. With a struggle that blanched his face, he kept his arms at his side, but his lips worked in agony, and he slowly murmured, "If after a time your heart loves me like this, and you are willing to bear shadow as well as sunshine with me, come back with your aunt and sit at my hearthstone, not as my child but as a dear and honored guest. I will try and be worthy--" He paused, "Will you come, Paula?"

"Yes, yes."

"Not soon, not now," he murmured, "G.o.d will show you when."

And with nothing but a look, without having touched her or so much as brushed her garments with his, he retired again into his room.

XXII.

HOPGOOD.

"Give it an understanding but no tongue."

--HAMLET.

Hopgood was a man who could keep a secret, but who made so much ado in the process that he reminded one of the placard found posted up somewhere out west which reads, "A treasure of gold concealed here; don't dig!" Or so his wife used to say, and she ought to know, for she had lived with him five years, three of which he had spent in the detective service.

"If he would only trust the wife of his bosom with whatever he's got on his mind, instead of ambling around the building with his eyes rolling about like peas in a caldron of boiling water, one might manage to take some comfort in life, and not hurt anybody either. For two days now, ever since the wife of Mr. Sylvester died and Mr. Sylvester has been away from the bank, he's acted just like a lunatic. Not that that has anything to do with his gettin up of nights and roamin down five pair of stairs to see if the watchman is up to his duty, or with his askin a dozen times a day if I remembers how Mr. Sylvester found him and me, well nigh starvin in Broad Street, and gave him the good word which got him into this place? O no! O no, of course not! But _something_ has, and while he persists in shutting out from his breast the woman he swore to love, honor, and cherish, that woman is not bound to bear the trials of life with patience. Every time he jumps out of his chair at the sound of Mr. Sylvester's name, and some one is always mentionin' it, I plumps me down on mine with an expression of my views regarding a kitchen stove that does all its drawin' when the oven's empty."

So spake Mrs. Hopgood to her special crony and constant visitor, Mrs.

Kirkshaw of Water Street, pursing up a mouth that might have been good-natured if she had ever given it an opportunity. But Mrs. Kirkshaw who pa.s.sed for a gossip with her neighbors, was a philosopher in the retirement of the domestic circle and did not believe in the blow for blow system.

"La!" quoth she, with a smoothing out of her ap.r.o.n suggestive of her employment as laundress, "show a dog that you want his bone and you'll never get it. Husbands is like that very stove you've been a slanderin of. Rattle on coal when the fire's low and you put it out entirely; but be a bit patient and drop it on piece by piece, coaxing-like, and you'll have a hot stove afore you know it."

Which suggestion struck Mrs. Hopgood like a revelation, and for a day and night she resorted to the coaxing system; the result of which was to send Mr. Hopgood out of the room to sit on the stairs in mortal terror, lest his good nature should get the better of his discretion. His little daughter, Constantia Maria--so named and so called from two grandmothers, equally exacting in their claims and equally impecunious as regards their resources--was his sole solace in this long vigil. Her pretty innocent prattle scarcely disturbed his meditation, while it soothed his nerves, and with no one by but this unsuspecting child, he could roll his great eyes to his heart's content without fear of her descrying anything in them, but the love with which her own little heart abounded.

On the morning after the funeral, however, Constantia Maria was restored to his wife's arms on the plea that she did not seem quite well, and Hopgood went out and sat alone. In a few minutes, however, he returned, and ambling restlessly up and down the room, stopped before his persistently smiling wife and said somewhat tremulously:

"If Mr. Sylvester takes a notion to come up and see Constantia Maria to-day, I hope you'll take the opportunity to finish your ironing or whatever else it is you may have to do. I've noticed he seems a little shy with the child when you are around."

"Shy with the child when I am around! well I do declare!" exclaimed she, forgetting her late role in her somewhat natural indignation. "And what have I ever done to frighten Mr. Sylvester? Nothing but putting on of a clean ap.r.o.n, when he comes in and a dustin' of the best chair for his use. It's a trick of yours to get a chance of speakin' to him alone, and I'll not put up with it. As if it wasn't bad enough to have a kettle with the nozzle dangling, without living with a man who has a secret he won't share with his own wife and the mother of his innocent babe."

With a start the worthy man stared at her till he grew red in the face, probably with the effort of keeping his eyes steady for so long a time.

"Who told you I had a secret?" said he.

"Who told me?" and then she laughed, though in a somewhat hysterical way, and sat down in the middle of the floor and shook and shook again.

"Hear the man!" she cried. And she told him the story of the placard out west and then asked him, "if he thought she didn't remember how he used to act when he was a chasin' up of a thief in the days when he was on the police force."

"But," he cried, quite as pale now as he had been florid the moment before, "I'm not in the police force now and you are acting quite silly and I've no patience with you." And he was making for the door, presumably to sit upon the stairs, when with a late repentance she seized him by the arm and said:

"La now," an expression she had caught from Mrs. Kirkshaw, "I didn't mean nothin' by my talk. Come back, John; Constantia Maria is not well, and if Mr. Sylvester comes up to see her, I'll just slip out and leave you alone."

And upon that he told her she was a good wife and that if he had any secret from her it was only because he was a poor man. "Honesty and prudence are all the treasures I possess to keep us three from starving.

Shall I part with either of them just to satisfy your curiosity?" and being a good woman at heart, she said "no," though she secretly concluded that prudence in his case involved trust in one's wife first, and disbelief in the rest of the world afterward; and took her future resolutions accordingly.

"Well, Hopgood, you look anxious; do you want to speak to me?"

The janitor eyed the changed and melancholy face of his patron, with an expression in which real sympathy for his trouble, struggled with the respectful awe which Mr. Sylvester's presence was calculated to inspire.

"If you please," said he, speaking very low, for more or less of the bank employees were moving busily to and fro, "Constantia Maria is not well and she has been asking all day for the _dear man_, as she insists upon calling you, sir, with many apologies for the freedom."

Mr. Sylvester smiled with a faint far-away look in his dark eye that made Hopgood stare uneasily out of the window. "Sick! why then I must go up and see her," he returned in a matter-of-fact way that proved his visits in that direction were of no uncommon occurrence. "A moment more and I shall be at liberty."

Hopgood bowed and renewed his stare out of the window, with an intensity happily spared from serious consequences to the pa.s.sers-by, by the merciful celerity with which Mr. Sylvester procured his overcoat, put such papers in his pocket as he required, and joined him.

"Constantia Maria, here is Mr. Sylvester come to see you."

It was a pleasure to observe how the little thing brightened in her mother's arms, where but a moment before she had lain quite pale and still, and slipping to the ground rushed up to meet the embrace of this stern and melancholy-faced man. "I am so glad you have come," she cried over and over again; and her little arms went round his neck, and her soft cheek nestled against his, with a content that made the mother's eyes sparkle with pleasure, as obedient to her promise, she quietly left the room.

And Mr. Sylvester? If any one had seen the abandon with which he yielded to her caresses and returned them, he would have understood why this child should have loved him with such extraordinary affection. He kissed her forehead, he kissed her cheek, and seemed never weary of smoothing down her bright and silky curls. She reminded him of Geraldine. She had the same blue eyes and caressing ways. From the day he had come upon his old friend Hopgood in a condition of necessity almost of want, this blue-eyed baby had held its small sceptre over his lonely heart, and unbeknown to the rest of the world, had solaced many a spare five minutes with her innocent prattle. The Hopgoods understood the cause of his predilection and were silent. It was the one thing Mrs. Hopgood never alluded to in her gossips with Mrs. Kirkshaw. But to-day the attentions of Mr. Sylvester to the little one seemed to make the janitor restless. He walked up and down the narrow room uneasily surveying the pair out of the corner of his great gla.s.sy eyes, till even Mr. Sylvester noticed his unusual manner and put the child down, observing with a sigh, "You think she is not well enough for any excitement?"

"No sir, it is not that," returned the other uneasily, with a hasty look around him. "The fact is, I have something to say to you, sir, about--a discovery--I made the other day." His words came very slowly, and he looked down with great embarra.s.sment.

Mr. Sylvester frowned slightly, and drew himself up to the full height of his very imposing figure. "A discovery," repeated he, "when?"

"The day you paid that early visit to the bank, sir, the day Mrs.

Sylvester died."

The frown on Mr. Sylvester's brow grew deeper. "The day--" he began, and stopped.

"Excuse me, sir," exclaimed Hopgood with a burst. "I ought not to have mentioned it, but you asked me _when_, and I--"

"What was this discovery?" inquired his superior, imperatively.

"Nothing much," murmured the other now all in a cold sweat. "But I felt as if I ought to tell you. You have been my benefactor, sir, I can never forget what you have done for me and mine. If I saw death or bereavement between me and any favor I could do for you, sir, I would not hesitate to risk them. I am no talker, sir, but I am true and I am grateful." He stopped, choked, and his eyes rolled frightfully. Mr. Sylvester looked at him, grew a trifle pale, and put the little child away that was nestling up against his knee.

"You have not told me what you have discovered," said he.

"Well, sir, only this." And he took from his pocket a small roll of paper which he unfolded and held out in his hand. It contained a gold tooth-pick somewhat bent and distorted.