I had hoped that in my passage downstairs I might run upon someone who would give me news of Miss Postlethwaite, but the woman who approached to conduct me downstairs was not of an appearance to invite confidence, and I felt forced to leave the house with my doubts unsatisfied.
Two memories, equally distinct, followed me. One was a picture of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s fingers groping among her belongings on the little tray perched upon her lap, and another of the intent and strangely bent figure of the old man who had acted as my usher, listening to the ticking of one of the great clocks. So absorbed was he in this occupation that he not only failed to notice me when I went by, but he did not even lift his head at my cheery greeting. Such mysteries were too much for me, and led me to postpone my departure from town till I had sought out Mrs. Postlethwaite’s doctor and propounded to him one or two leading questions. First, would Mrs. Postlethwaite’s present condition be likely to hold good till Monday; and secondly, was the young lady living with her as ill as her step-mother said.
He was a mild old man of the easy-going type, and the answers I got from him were far from satisfactory. Yet he showed some surprise when I mentioned the extent of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s anxiety about her step-daughter, and paused, in the dubious shaking of his head, to give me a short stare in which I read as much determination as perplexity.
“I will look into Miss Postlethwaite’s case more particularly,” were his parting words. And with this one gleam of comfort I had to be content.
Monday’s interview was a brief one and contained nothing worth repeating. Mrs. Postlethwaite listened with stoical satisfaction to the reading of the will I had drawn up, and upon its completion rang her bell for the two witnesses awaiting her summons, in an adjoining room. They were not of her household, but to all appearance honest villagers with but one noticeable characteristic, an overweening idea of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s importance. Perhaps the spell she had so liberally woven for others in other and happier days was felt by them at this hour. It would not be strange; I had almost fallen under it myself, so great was the fascination of her manner even in this wreck of her bodily powers, when triumph assured, she faced us all in a state of complete satisfaction.
But before I was again quit of the place, all my doubts returned and in fuller force than ever. I had lingered in my going as much as decency would permit, hoping to hear a step on the stair or see a face in some doorway which would contradict Mrs. Postlethwaite’s cold assurance that Miss Postlethwaite was no better. But no such step did I hear, and no face did I see save the old, old one of the ancient friend or relative, whose bent frame seemed continually to haunt the halls. As before, he stood listening to the monotonous ticking of one of the clocks, muttering to himself and quite oblivious of my presence.
However, this time I decided not to pass him without a more persistent attempt to gain his notice. Pausing at his side, I asked him in the friendly tone I thought best calculated to attract his attention, how Miss Postlethwaite was today. He was so intent upon his task, whatever that was, that while he turned my way, it was with a glance as blank as that of a stone image.
“Listen!” he admonished me. “It still says No! No! I don’t think it will ever say anything else.”
I stared at him in some consternation, then at the clock itself which was the tall one I had found run down at my first visit. There was nothing unusual in its quiet tick, so far as I could hear, and with a compassionate glance at the old man who had turned breathlessly again to listen, proceeded on my way without another word.
The old fellow was daft. A century old, and daft.
I had worked my way out through the vines which still encumbered the porch, and was taking my first steps down the walk, when some impulse made me turn and glance up at one of the windows.
Did I bless the impulse? I thought I had every reason for doing so, when through a network of interlacing branches I beheld the young girl with whom my mind was wholly occupied, standing with her head thrust forward, watching the descent of something small and white which she had just released from her hand.
A note! A note written by her and meant for me! With a grateful look in her direction (which was probably lost upon her as she had already drawn back out of sight), I sprang for it only to meet with disappointment. For it was no billet-doux I received from amid the clustering brush where it had fallen; but a small square of white cloth showing a line of fantastic embroidery. Annoyed beyond measure, I was about to fling it down again, when the thought that it had come from her hand deterred me, and I thrust it into my vest pocket. When I took it out again—which was soon after I had taken my seat in the car—I discovered what a mistake I should have made if I had followed my first impulse. For, upon examining the stitches more carefully, I perceived that what I had considered a mere decorative pattern was in fact a string of letters, and that these letters made words, and that these words were:
IDONOTWANTTODIEBUTISURELYWILLIF
Or, in plain writing:
“I do not want to die, but I surely will if—”
Finish the sentence for me. That is the problem I offer you. It is not a case for the police but one well worth your attention, if you succeed in reaching the heart of this mystery and saving this young girl.
Only, let no delay occur. The doom, if doom it is, is immanent. Remember that the will is signed.
II
“She is too small; I did not ask you to send me a midget.”
Thus spoke Mrs. Postlethwaite to her doctor, as he introduced into her presence a little figure in nurse’s cap and apron. “You said I needed care,—more care than I was receiving. I answered that my old nurse could give it, and you objected that she or someone else must look after Miss Postlethwaite. I did not see the necessity, but I never contradict a doctor. So I yielded to your wishes, but not without the proviso (you remember that I made a proviso) that whatever sort of young woman you chose to introduce into this room, she should not be fresh from the training schools, and that she should be strong, silent, and capable. And you bring me this mite of a woman—is she a woman? she looks more like a child, of pleasing countenance enough, but who can no more lift me—”
“Pardon me!” Little Miss Strange had advanced. “I think, if you will allow me the privilege, madam, that I can shift you into a much more comfortable position.” And with a deftness and ease certainly not to be expected from one of her slight physique, Violet raised the helpless invalid a trifle more upon her pillow.
The act, its manner, and the smile accompanying it, could not fail to please, and undoubtedly did, though no word rewarded her from lips not much given to speech save when the occasion was imperative. But Mrs. Postlethwaite made no further objection to her presence, and, seeing this, the doctor’s countenance relaxed and he left the room with a much lighter step than that with which he had entered it.
And thus it was that Violet Strange—an adept in more ways than one—became installed at the bedside of this mysterious woman, whose days, if numbered, still held possibilities of action which those interested in young Helena Postlethwaite’s fate would do well to recognize.
Miss Strange had been at her post for two days, and had gathered up the following:
That Mrs. Postlethwaite must be obeyed.
That her step-daughter (who did not wish to die) would die if she knew it to be the wish of this domineering but apparently idolized woman.
That the old man of the clocks, while senile in some regards, was very alert and quite youthful in others. If a century old—which she began greatly to doubt—he had the language and manner of one in his prime, when unaffected by the neighbourhood of the clocks, which seemed in some non-understandable way to exercise an occult influence over him. At table he was an entertaining host; but neither there nor elsewhere would he discuss the family, or dilate in any way upon the peculiarities of a household of which he manifestly regarded himself as the least important member. Yet no one knew them better, and when Violet b
ecame quite assured of this, as well as of the futility of looking for explanation of any kind from either of her two patients, she resolved upon an effort to surprise one from him.
She went about it in this way. Noting his custom of making a complete round of the clocks each night after dinner, she took advantage of Mrs. Postlethwaite’s inclination to sleep at this hour, to follow him from clock to clock in the hope of overhearing some portion of the monologue with which he bent his head to the swinging pendulum, or put his ear to the hidden works. Soft-footed and discreet, she tripped along at his back, and at each pause he made, paused herself and turned her ear his way. The extreme darkness of the halls, which were more sombre by night than by day, favoured this attempt, and she was able, after a failure or two, to catch the No! no! no! no! which fell from his lips in seeming repetition of what he heard the most of them say.
The satisfaction in his tone proved that the denial to which he listened, chimed in with his hopes and gave ease to his mind. But he looked his oldest when, after pausing at another of the many timepieces, he echoed in answer to its special refrain, Yes! yes! yes! yes! and fled the spot with shaking body and a distracted air.
The same fear and the same shrinking were observable in him as he returned from listening to the least conspicuous one, standing in a short corridor, where Violet could not follow him. But when, after a hesitation which enabled her to slip behind the curtain hiding the drawing-room door, he approached and laid his ear against the great one standing, as if on guard, at the foot of the stairs, she saw by the renewed vigour he displayed that there was comfort for him in its message, even before she caught the whisper with which he left it and proceeded to mount the stairs:
“It says No! It always says No! I will heed it as the voice of Heaven.”
But one conclusion could be the result of such an experiment to a mind like Violet’s. This partly touched old man not only held the key to the secret of this house, but was in a mood to divulge it if once he could be induced to hear command instead of dissuasion in the tick of this one large clock. But how could he be induced? Violet returned to Mrs. Postlethwaite’s bedside in a mood of extreme thoughtfulness.
Another day passed, and she had not yet seen Miss Postlethwaite. She was hoping each hour to be sent on some errand to that young lady’s room, but no such opportunity was granted her. Once she ventured to ask the doctor, whose visits were now very frequent, what he thought of the young lady’s condition. But as this question was necessarily put in Mrs. Postlethwaite’s presence, the answer was naturally guarded, and possibly not altogether frank.
“Our young lady is weaker,” he acknowledged. “Much weaker,” he added with marked emphasis and his most professional air, “or she would be here instead of in her own room. It grieves her not to be able to wait upon her generous benefactress.”
The word fell heavily. Had it been used as a test? Violet gave him a look, though she had much rather have turned her discriminating eye upon the face staring up at them from the pillow. Had the alarm expressed by others communicated itself at last to the physician? Was the charm which had held him subservient to the mother, dissolving under the pitiable state of the child, and was he trying to aid the little detective-nurse in her effort to sound the mystery of her condition?
His look expressed benevolence, but he took care not to meet the gaze of the woman he had just lauded, possibly because that gaze was fixed upon him in a way to tax his moral courage. The silence which ensued was broken by Mrs. Postlethwaite:
“She will live—this poor Helena—how long?” she asked, with no break in her voice’s wonted music.
The doctor hesitated, then with a candour hardly to be expected from him, answered:
“I do not understand Miss Postlethwaite’s case. I should like, with your permission, to consult some New York physician.”
“Indeed!”
A single word, but as it left this woman’s thin lips Violet recoiled, and, perhaps, the doctor did. Rage can speak in one word as well as in a dozen, and the rage which spoke in this one was of no common order, though it was quickly suppressed, as was all other show of feeling when she added, with a touch of her old charm:
“Of course you will do what you think best, as you know I never interfere with a doctor’s decisions. But” and here her natural ascendancy of tone and manner returned in all its potency, “it would kill me to know that a stranger was approaching Helena’s bedside. It would kill her. She’s too sensitive to survive such a shock.”
Violet recalled the words worked with so much care by this young girl on a minute piece of linen, I do not want to die, and watched the doctor’s face for some sign of resolution. But embarrassment was all she saw there, and all she heard him say was the conventional reply:
“I am doing all I can for her. We will wait another day and note the effect of my latest prescription.”
Another day!
The deathly calm which overspread Mrs. Postlethwaite’s features as this word left the physician’s lips warned Violet not to let another day go by without some action. But she made no remark, and, indeed, betrayed but little interest in anything beyond her own patient’s condition. That seemed to occupy her wholly. With consummate art she gave the appearance of being under Mrs. Postlethwaite’s complete thrall, and watched with fascinated eyes every movement of the one unstricken finger which could do so much.
This little detective of ours could be an excellent actor when she chose.
III
To make the old man speak! To force this conscience-stricken but rebellious soul to reveal what the clock forbade! How could it be done?
This continued to be Violet’s great problem. She pondered it so deeply during all the remainder of the day that a little pucker settled on her brow, which someone (I will not mention who) would have been pained to see. Mrs. Postlethwaite, if she noticed it at all, probably ascribed it to her anxieties as nurse, for never had Violet been more assiduous in her attentions. But Mrs. Postlethwaite was no longer the woman she had been, and possibly never noted it at all.
At five o’clock Violet suddenly left the room. Slipping down into the lower hall, she went the round of the clocks herself, listening to every one. There was no perceptible difference in their tick. Satisfied of this and that it was simply the old man’s imagination which had supplied them each with separate speech, she paused before the huge one at the foot of the stairs,—the one whose dictate he had promised himself to follow,—and with an eye upon its broad, staring dial, muttered wistfully:
“Oh! for an idea! For an idea!”
Did this cumbrous relic of old-time precision turn traitor at this ingenuous plea? The dial continued to stare, the works to sing, but Violet’s face suddenly lost its perplexity. With a wary look about her and a listening ear turned towards the stair top, she stretched out her hand and pulled open the door guarding the pendulum, and peered in at the works, smiling slyly to herself as she pushed it back into place and retreated upstairs to the sick room.
When the doctor came that night she had a quiet word with him outside Mrs. Postlethwaite’s door. Was that why he was on hand when old Mr. Dunbar stole from his room to make his nightly circuit of the halls below? Something quite beyond the ordinary was in the good physician’s mind, for the look he cast at the old man was quite unlike any he had ever bestowed upon him before, and when he spoke it was to say with marked urgency:
“Our beautiful young lady will not live a week unless I get at the seat of her malady. Pray that I may be enabled to do so, Mr. Dunbar.”
A blow to the aged man’s heart which called forth a feeble “Yes, yes,” followed by a wild stare which imprinted itself upon the doctor’s memory as the look of one hopelessly old, who hears for the first time a distinct call from the grave which has long been awaiting him!
A solitary lamp stood in the lower hall. As the old man picked his slow way down, its small, hesitating flame flared up as in a sudden gust, then sank dow
n flickering and faint as if it, too, had heard a call which summoned it to extinction.
No other sign of life was visible anywhere. Sunk in twilight shadows, the corridors branched away on either side to no place in particular and serving, to all appearance (as many must have thought in days gone by), as a mere hiding-place for clocks.
To listen to their united hum, the old man paused, looking at first a little distraught, but settling at last into his usual self as he started forward upon his course. Did some whisper, hitherto unheard, warn him that it was the last time he would tread that weary round? Who can tell? He was trembling very much when with his task nearly completed, he stepped out again into the main hall and crept rather than walked back to the one great clock to whose dictum he made it a practice to listen last.
Chattering the accustomed words, “They say Yes! They are all saying Yes! now; but this one will say No!” he bent his stiff old back and laid his ear to the unresponsive wood. But the time for no had passed. It was Yes! yes! yes! yes! now, and as his straining ears took in the word, he appeared to shrink where he stood and after a moment of anguished silence, broke forth into a low wail, amid whose lamentations one could hear:
“The time has come! Even the clock she loves best bids me speak. Oh! Arabella, Arabella!”
In his despair he had not noticed that the pendulum hung motionless, or that the hands stood at rest on the dial. If he had, he might have waited long enough to have seen the careful opening of the great clock’s tall door and the stepping forth of the little lady who had played so deftly upon his superstition.
He was wandering the corridors like a helpless child, when a gentle hand fell on his arm and a soft voice whispered in his ear:
“You have a story to tell. Will you tell it to me? It may save Miss Postlethwaite’s life.”
Did he understand? Would he respond if he did; or would the shock of her appeal restore him to a sense of the danger attending disloyalty? For a moment she doubted the wisdom of this startling measure, then she saw that he had passed the point of surprise and that, stranger as she was, she had but to lead the way for him to follow, tell his story, and die.
The Golden Slipper Page 14
