Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume Two: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries (Four thrilling novels in one volume!)

by Marion Bryce

  With a start Mr. Sylvester rose. “Paula,” said he, in a stern and different tone, “is this fear of which you speak, the offspring of your own instincts, or has it been engendered in your breast by the words of another?”

  “My Aunt Belinda is in my confidence, if it is she to whom you allude,” rejoined she, meeting his glance fully and bravely. “But from no lips but yours could any words proceed capable of affecting my estimate of you as the one best qualified to make me happy.”

  “Then it is my words alone that have awakened this doubt, this apprehension?”

  “I have not spoken of doubt,” said she, but her eyelids fell.

  “No, thank God!” he passionately exclaimed. “And yet you feel it,” he went on more composedly. “I have studied your face too long and closely not to understand it.”

  She put out her hands in appeal, but for once it passed unheeded.

  “Paula,” said he, “you must tell me just what that doubt is; I must know what is passing in your mind. You say you love me—” he paused, and a tremble shook him from head to foot, but he went inexorably on—“it is more than I had a right to expect, and God knows I am grateful for the precious and inestimable boon, far as it is above my deserts; but while loving me, you hesitate to give me your hand. Why? What is the name of the doubt that disturbs that pure breast and affects your choice? Tell me, I must know.”

  “You ask me to dissect my own heart!” she cried, quivering under the torture of his glance; “how can I? What do I know of its secret springs or the terrors that disturb its even beatings? I cannot name my fear; it has no name, or if it has—Oh, sir!” she cried in a burst of passionate longing, “your life has been one of sorrow and disappointment; grief has touched you close, and you might well be the melancholy and sombre man that all behold. I do not shrink from grief; say that the only shadow that lie across your dungeon-door is that cast by the great and heart-rending sorrows of your life, and without question and without fear I enter that dungeon with you—”

  The hand he raised stopped her. “Paula,” cried he, “do you believe in repentance?”

  The words struck her like a blow. Falling slowly back, she looked at him for an instant, then her head sank on her breast.

  “I know what your hatred of sin is,” continued he. “I have seen your whole form tremble at the thought of evil. Is your belief in the redeeming power of God as great as your recoil from the wrong that makes that redemption necessary?”

  Quickly her head raised, a light fell on her brow, and her lips moved in a vain effort to utter what her eyes unconsciously expressed.

  “Paula, I would be unworthy the name of a man, if with the consciousness of possessing a dark and evil nature, I strove by use of any hypocrisy or specious pretense at goodness, to lure to my side one so exceptionally pure, beautiful and high-minded. The ravening wolf and the innocent lamb would be nothing to it. Neither would I for an instant be esteemed worthy of your regard, if in this hour of my wooing there remained in my life the shadow of any latent wrong that might hereafter rise up and overwhelm you. Whatever of wrong has ever been committed by me—and it is my punishment that I must acknowledge before your pure eyes that my soul is not spotless—was done in the past, and is known only to my own heart and the God who I reverently trust has long ago pardoned me. The shadow is that of remorse, not of fear, and the evil, one against my own soul, rather than against the life or fortunes of other men. Paula, such sins can be forgiven if one has a mind to comprehend the temptations that beset men in their early struggles. I have never forgiven myself, but—” He paused, looked at her for an instant, his hand clenched over his heart, his whole noble form shaken by struggle, then said—“forgiveness implies no promise, Paula; you shall never link yourself to a man who has been obliged to bow his head in shame before you, but by the mercy that informs that dear glance and trembling lip, do you think you can ever grow to forgive me?”

  “Oh,” she cried, with a burst of sobs, violent as her grief and shame, “God be merciful to me, as I am merciful to those who repent of their sins and do good and not evil all the remaining days of their life.”

  “I thought you would forgive me,” murmured he, looking down upon her, as the miser eyes the gold that has slipped from his paralyzed hand. “Him whom the hardhearted sinner and the hypocrite despise, God’s dearest lambs regard with mercy. I learned to revere God before I knew you, Paula, but I learned to love Him in the light of your gentleness and your trust. Rise up now and let me wipe away your tears—my daughter.”

  She sprang up as if stung. “No, no,” she cried, “not that; I cannot bear that yet. I must think, I must know what all this means,” and she laid her hand upon her heart. “God surely does not give so much love for one’s undoing; if I were not destined to comfort a life so saddened, He would have bequeathed me more pity and less—” The lifted head fell, the word she would have uttered, stirred her bosom, but not her lips.

  It was a trial to his strength, but his firm man’s heart did not waver. “You do comfort me,” said he; “from early morning to late night your presence is my healing and my help, and will always be so, whatever may befal. A daughter can do much, my Paula.”

  She took a step back towards the door, her eyes, dark with unfathomable impulses, flashing on him through the tears that hung thickly on her lashes.

  “Is it for your own sake or for mine, that you make use of that word?” said she.

  He summoned up his courage, met that searching glance with all its wild, bewildering beauty, and responded, “Can you ask, Paula?”

  With a lift of her head that gave an almost queenly stateliness to her form, she advanced a step, and drawing a crumpled paper from her pocket, said, “When I went to my room last night, it was to read two letters, one from yourself, and one from Mr. Ensign. This is his, and a manly and noble letter it is too; but hearts have right to hearts, and I was obliged to refuse his petition.” And with a reverent but inexorable hand, she dropped the letter on the burning coals of the grate at their side, and softly turned to leave the room.

  “Paula!” With a bound the stern and hitherto forcibly repressed man, leaped to her side. “My darling my life!” and with a wild, uncontrollable impulse, he caught her for one breathless moment to his heart; then as suddenly released her, and laying his hand in reverence on her brow, said softly, “Now go and pray, little one; and when you are quite calm, an hour hence or a week hence whichever it may be, come and tell me my fate as God and the angels reveal it to you.” And he smiled, and she saw his smile, and went out of the room softly, as one who treadeth upon holy ground.

  Mr. Sylvester was considered by his friends and admirers as a proud man. If a vote had been cast among those who knew him best, as from what especial passion common to humanity he would soonest recoil, it would have been unanimously pronounced shame, and his own hand would have emphasized the judgment of his fellows. But shame which is open to the gaze of the whole world, differs from that which is sacred to the eyes of one human being, and that the one who lies nearest the heart.

  As Paula’s retreating footsteps died away on the stairs, and he awoke to the full consciousness that his secret was shared by her whose love was his life, and whose good opinion had been his incentive and his pride, his first sensation was one of unmitigated anguish, but his next, strange to say, that of a restful relief. He had cast aside the cloak he had hugged so closely to his breast these many years, and displayed to her shrinking gaze the fox that was gnawing at his vitals; and Spartan though he was, the dew that had filled her loving eyes was balm to him. And not only that; he had won claim to the title of true man. Her regard, if regard it remained, was no longer an airy fabric built upon a plausible seeming, but a firm structure with knowledge for its foundation. “I shall not live to whisper, ‘If she knew my whole life, would she love me so well?’”

  His first marriage had been so wholly uncongenial and devoid of sympathy, that his greatest longing in connection with a fresh contract, was
to enjoy the full happiness of perfect union and mutual trust; and though he could never have summoned up courage to take her into his confidence, unsolicited, now that it had been done he would not have it undone, no, not if by the doing he had lost her confidence and affection.

  But something told him he had not lost it. That out of the darkness and the shock of this very discovery, a new and deeper love would spring, which having its birth in human frailty and human repentance, would gain in the actual what lost in the ideal, bringing to his weary, suffering and yearning man’s nature, the honest help of a strong and loving sympathy, growing trust, and sweetest because wisest encouragement.

  It was therefore, with a growing sense of deep unfathomable comfort, and a reverent thankfulness for the mercies of God, that he sat by the fire idly watching the rise and fall of the golden flames above the fluttering ashes of his rival’s letter, and dreaming with a fallowing sense of his unworthiness, upon the possible bliss of coming days. Happiness in its truest and most serene sense was so new to him, it affected him like the presence of something strangely commanding. he was awe-struck before it, and unconsciously bowed his head at its contemplation. Only his eyes betrayed the peace that comes with all great joy, his eyes and perhaps the faint, almost unearthly smile that flitted across his mouth, disturbing its firm line and making his face for all its inevitable expression of melancholy, one that his mother would have loved to look upon. “Paula!” came now and then in a reverent, yearning accent from between his lips, and once a low, “Thank God!” which showed that he was praying.

  Suddenly he rose; a more human mood had set in, and he felt the necessity of assuring himself that it was really he upon whom the dreary past had closed, and a future of such possible brightness opened. He walked about the room, surveying the rich articles within it, as the possible belongings of the beautiful woman he adored; he stood and pictured her as coming into the door as his wife, and before he realized what he was doing, had planned certain changes he would make in his home to adapt it to the wants of her young and growing mind, when with a strange suddenness, the door upon which he was gazing flew back, and Bertram Sylvester entered just as he had come from the street. He looked so haggard, so wild, so little the picture of himself as he ventured forth a couple of hours before, that Mr. Sylvester started, and forgetting his happiness in his alarm, asked in a tone of dismay:

  “What has happened? Has Miss Stuyvesant—”

  Bertram’s hand went up as if his uncle had touched him upon a festering wound. “Don’t!” gasped he, and advancing to the table, sat down and buried his face for a moment in his arms, then rose, and summoning up a certain manly dignity that became him well, met Mr. Sylvester’s eye with forced calmness, and inquired:

  “Did you know there was a thief in our bank, Uncle Edward?”

  XXXV. THE FALLING OF THE SWORD.

  “Foul deeds will rise,

  Though all the world o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.”

  —HAMLET.

  Mr. Sylvester towered on his nephew with an expression such as few men had ever seen even on his powerful and commanding face.

  “What do you mean?” asked he, and his voice rang like a clarion through the room.

  Bertram trembled and for a moment stood aghast, the ready flush bathing his brow with burning crimson. “I mean,” stammered he, with difficulty recovering himself, “that when Mr. Stuyvesant came to open his private box in the bank to-day, that he not only found its lock had been tampered with, but that money and valuables to the amount of some twelve hundred dollars were missing from among its contents.”

  “What?”

  The expression which had made Mr. Sylvester’s brow so terrible had vanished, but his wonder remained.

  “It is impossible,” he declared. “Our vaults are too well watched for any such thing to occur, he has made some mistake; a robbery of that nature could not take place without detection.”

  “It would seem not, and yet the fact remains. Mr. Stuyvesant himself informed me of it, to-night. He is not a careless man, nor reckless in his statements. Some one has robbed the bank and it remains with us to find out who.”

  Mr. Sylvester, who had been standing all this while, sat down like a man crazed, the wild lost look on Bertram’s face daunting him with a fearful premonition. “There are but four men who have access to the vault where the boxes are kept,” said he: then quickly, “Why did Mr. Stuyvesant wait till to-night to speak to you? Why did he not notify us at once of a loss so important for us to know?”

  The flush on Bertram’s brow slowly subsided, giving way to a steady pallor. “He waited to be sure,” said he. “He had a memorandum at home which he desired to consult; he was not ready to make any rash statement: he is a thinking man and more considerate than many of his friends are apt to imagine. Had the lock had not been found open he would have thought with you that he had made some mistake; if he had not missed from the box some of its contents, he would have considered the condition of the lock the result of some oversight on his own part or of some mistake on the part of another, but the two facts together were damning and could force upon him but one conclusion. Uncle,” said he, with a straightforward look into Mr. Sylvester’s countenance, “Mr. Stuyvesant knows as well as we do who are the men who have access to the vaults. As you say, the opening of a box during business hours and the abstracting from it of papers or valuables by any one who has not such access, would be impossible. Only Hopgood, you and myself, and possibly Folger, could find either time or opportunity for such a piece of work; while after business hours, the same four, minus Folger who contents himself with knowing the combination of the inner safe, could open the vaults even in case of an emergency. Now of the four named, two are above suspicion. I might almost say three, for Hopgood is not a man it is easy to mistrust. One alone, then, of all the men whom Mr. Stuyvesant is in the habit of meeting at the Bank, is open to a doubt. A young man, uncle, whose rising has been rapid, whose hopes have been lofty, whose life may or may not be known to himself as pure, but which in the eyes of a matured man of the world might easily be questioned, just because its hopes are so lofty and its means for attaining them so limited.”

  “Bertram!” sprang from Mr. Sylvester’s white lips.

  But the young man raised his hand with almost a commanding gesture. “Hush,” said he, “no sympathy or surprise. Facts like these have to be met with silent endurance, as we walk up to the mouth of the cannon we cannot evade, or bare our breast to the thrust of the bayonet gleaming before our eyes.—I would not have you think,” he somewhat hurriedly pursued, “that Mr. Stuyvesant insinuated anything of the kind, but his daughter was not present in the parlor, and—” A sigh, almost a gasp finished the sentence.

  “Bertram!” again exclaimed his uncle, this time with some authority in his voice. “The shock of this discovery has unnerved you. You act like a man capable of being suspected. That is simply preposterous. One half hour’s conversation with Mr. Stuyvesant on my part will convince him, if he needs convincing, which I do nut believe, that whoever is unworthy of trust in our bank, you are not the man.”

  Bertram raised his head with a gleam of hope, but instantly dropped it again with a despairing gesture that made his uncle frown.

  “I did not know that you were inclined to be so pusillanimous,” cried Mr. Sylvester; “and in presence of a foe so unsubstantial as this you have conjured up almost out of nothing. If the bank has been robbed, it cannot be difficult to find the thief. I will order in detectives to-morrow. We will hold a board of inquiry, and the culprit shall be unmasked; that is, he is one of the employees of the bank, which it is very hard to believe.”

  “Very, and which, if true, would make it unadvisable in us to give the alarm that any public measures taken could not fail to do “

  “The inquiry shall be private, and the detectives, men who can be trusted to keep their business secret.”

  “How can any inquiry be private? Uncle, we are treading on delicate gr
ound, and have a task before us requiring great tact and discretion. If the safe had only been assaulted, or there were any evidences of burglary to be seen! But we surely should have heard of it from some one of the men, if anything unusual had been observed. Hopgood would have spoken at least.”

  “Yes, Hopgood would have spoken.”

  The tone in which this was uttered made Bertram look up. “You agree with me, then, that Hopgood is absolutely to be relied upon?”

  “Absolutely.” A faint flush on Mr. Sylvester’s face lent force to this statement.

  “He could not be beguiled or forced by another man to reveal the combination, or to relax his watch over the vaults entrusted to his keeping?”

  “No.”

  “He is alone with the vaults where the boxes are kept for an hour or two in the early morning!”

  “Yes, and has been for three years. Hopgood is honesty itself.”

  “And so are Folger and Jessup and Watson,” exclaimed Bertram emphatically.

  “Yes,” his uncle admitted, with equal emphasis.

  “It is a mystery,” Bertram declared; “and one I fear that will undo me.”

  “Nonsense!” broke forth somewhat impatiently from Mr. Sylvester’s lips; “there is no reason at this time for any such conclusion. If there is a thief in the bank he can be found; if the robbery was committed by an outsider, he may still be discovered. If he is not, if the mystery rests forever unexplained, you have your character, Bertram, a character as spotless as that of any of your fellows, whom we regard as above suspicion. A man is not going to be condemned by such a judge of human nature as Mr. Stuyvesant, just because a mysterious crime has been committed, to which the circumstances of his position alone render it possible for him to be party. You might as well say that Jessup and Folger and Watson—yes, or myself, would in that case lose his confidence. They are in the bank, and are constantly in the habit of going to the vaults.”