Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume Two: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries

by Marion Bryce

  “He looked at me as if I had told him the world had come to an end. ‘My Jacqueline!’ he murmured in a low, incredulous voice of the tenderest yearning. ‘My Jacqueline!’

  “‘Oh!’ I shrieked, torn by my anguish for him and the terror of her escaping while we were yet talking, ‘God knows I had rather have died than contaminate her by such words as I have uttered. She is dear to me as my soul; dearer to me than my life. I have a mother’s feeling for her, sir. If to fling myself headlong from that window, would delay her feet from going down the stairs to meet her guilty lover, I would gladly do it. It is her danger makes me speak. O sir, realize that danger and hasten before she has taken the irrevocable step.’

  “He started like a man pricked by a sudden dart. ‘She is going—you believe she is going to meet him?’

  “‘I do,’ said I.

  “He gave me a terrible look and started for the door I hurriedly picked up the scraps that had fallen to the floor, and rushed around by an inner passage-way to my own little room, hiding my head and waiting as for the crash of a falling avalanche. Suddenly a cry rose in the hall.

  “There are some sounds that lift you unconsciously to your feet. Dashing out of my room, I detected the face of the servant-girl whom I have before mentioned, looking out of her door some distance down the corridor. Hastening towards her, I uttered some words about her being a busybody, and thrusting her inside her room, locked the door upon her Then I hastened with what speed I might to the front of the house, and coming out upon the grand staircase, met a sight that shook me to the very soul. You have been up the stairs; you know how they branch off to left and right from the platform near the top. The left branch led in those days to Colonel Japha’s room, the right to the apartments occupied by Jacqueline and myself. Coming upon them, then, as I did from my side of the house, I found myself in full view of the opposite approach, and there on the topmost step I beheld Colonel Japha, standing in an attitude of awful denunciation, while half way down the staircase, I beheld the figure of Jacqueline, hindered in her gliding course towards the front door by the terrible, ‘Stop!’ whose echo had reached me in my room and caused me to rush quaking and horrified to this spot. I leaned back sick and horror-stricken against the wall. There was no mercy in his voice: he had awakened to a full realization of the situation and the pride of the Japhas had made him steel.

  “‘You are my child!” he was saying. ‘I have loved you and do still; but proceed one step farther towards the man that awaits you at the gate, and the door that opens upon you, shuts never to open again!’

  “‘Colonel!’ I exclaimed, starting forward; but he heard me no more than he would a fly buzzing or a bird singing.

  “‘I desire it to shut; I have no wish to come back!’ issued from the set white lips of the girl beneath us. ‘There s no such charm for me in this humdrum house, that I should wish to exchange life with the man I adore, for its droning, spiritless existence!’ And she lifted her foot to proceed.

  “‘Jacqueline!’ I shrieked, leaning forward in my turn, and holding her by my anguish, as I never believed she could he held by anything, ‘Think, child, think what you do! It is not life you are going to but death. A man who can take a young girl from her father’s house, from her lover’s arms, from her mother’s grave, from the shrine of all that is pure and holy, to dash her into a pit of all that is corrupt, loathsome and deadly, is not one with whom you can live. You say you adore him: can one adore falsehood, selfishness and depravity? Does hypocrisy win love? Can the embraces of a serpent bring peace? Jacqueline, Jacqueline, you are yet pure; come back to our love and our hearts, before we die here in our shame at the head of the stairs, where your mother was carried out to her grave!’

  “She trembled. I saw the hand that clutched the banister loosens its grip; she cast one quick look behind her, and her eyes flashed upon her father’s face; it was set like a flint.

  “‘If you come back,’ cried he, leaning towards her, but not advancing a step from where he stood, ‘you must come back of your own free will. I will hold no creature prisoner in my house. I must trust you implicitly, or not at all. Speak then, which shall it be?’ And he raised his hand above his head, with a supreme and awful gesture, ‘a father’s blessing or a father’s curse?’

  “‘A father’s curse, then! since you command me to choose,’ rang out from her lips in a burst of uncontrollable passion. ‘I want no blessing that separates me from him!’ And she pointed towards the door with a look that, defiant as it was, spoke of a terrible love before which all our warnings and entreaties were but as empty air.

  “‘Curses then upon your head, slayer of a family’s honor, a father’s love, and a mother’s memory! Curses upon you, at home and abroad! in the joy of your first passion and in the agony of your last despair! May you live to look upon that door as the gateway to heaven, and find it shut! May your children, if you are cursed with them, turn in your face, as you are turning now in mine! May the lightning of heaven be your candle, and the blackness of death your daily food and your nightly drink!’ And with a look in which all the terrors he invoked, seemed to crash downward from his reeling brain upon her shrinking terror-crouched head, he gave one mighty gasp and fell back stricken to the floor.

  “God!’ burst from her lips, and she rushed downwards to the door like a creature hunted to its quarry. I saw her white face gleam marble-like in the fading light that came in from the chinks about the door. I saw her trembling hand fumbling with the knob, and rousing from my stupor, called down to her with all the force of a breaking heart,

  “‘Jacqueline, beware!’

  “She turned once more. There was something in my voice she could not withstand. ‘I do not hope to keep you,’ cried I, ‘but before you go, hear this. In the days to come, when the face that now beams upon you with such longing, shall have learned to turn from you in weariness, if not distaste, when hunger, cold, contumely and disease shall have blasted that fair brow and seared those soft cheeks, know, that although a father can curse, a woman who loves like a mother can forgive. The father cries, ‘Once go out of that door and it shuts upon you never to open!’ ‘Once come to that door, say I,’ pointing in the direction of the house’s other entrance, ‘and if I live and if I move, it shall open to you, were you as defiled and wretched and forsaken as Magdalen. Remember! Each day at this hour will I watch for you, kneeling upon its threshold. In sickness or in health, in joy or in sorrow, in cold or in heat. The hour of six is sacred. Some one of them shall see you falling weeping on my breast!’

  “She gave me a quick stare out of her wide black eyes, then a mocking smile curled her lips, and murmuring a short, ‘You rave!’ opened the door, and rushed out into the falling dusk. With a resounding clang like the noise of a stone rolled upon an open grave, the great door swung to, and I was left alone in that desolated house with my stricken master.

  XXVII. THE LONE WATCHER.

  “Hark! to the hurried question of Despair,

  Where is my child?—and Echo answers—Where?”

  —BYRON.

  “Colonel Japha recovered from his shock, but was never the same man again. Aft that was genial, affectionate and confiding in his nature, had been turned as by a lightning’s stroke, to all that was hard, bitter and suspicious. He would not allow the name of Jacqueline to be spoken in his presence; he would listen to no allusion made to those days when she was the care and perplexity, but also the light and pleasure of the house. Men are not like women, my child; when they turn, it is at an angle, the whole direction of their nature changes.

  “Perhaps the news that presently came to us from Boston may have had something to do with this. It was surely dreadful enough; Jacqueline’s perfidy had slain her lover. Mr. Robert Holt, the cultured, noble, high-souled gentleman, had been found lying dead on the floor of his room, a few days after the events I have just related, with a lady’s diamond ring in his hand and the remnants of a hastily burned letter in the grate before him. He had burst a
blood-vessel, and had expired instantly.

  “This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of Jacqueline’s history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and the story of her lover’s death was not generally known, while the fact of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny.

  “My child, you have a brow like snow, and a cheek like roses; you know little of life’s sorrows and little of life’s sins. To you the skies are blue, the woods vernal, the air balmy; the sad looks upon men’s and women’s faces, tell but shallow tales of the ceaseless grinding of grief in their pent up souls. But you are gentle, and you have an imagination that goes beyond your experience; perhaps if you pause and think, you can understand what a tale could be told of the weeks and months and years that now followed, without hint or whisper of the fate of her who had gone out from amongst us with the brand of her father’s curse upon her brow. At first we hoped, yes, he hoped,—I could see it in his eyes when there came a sudden ring at the bell.—that some sign of her penitence, or some proof of her existence, would come to relieve the torture of our fears, if not the shame of our memories. But the door that closed upon her on that fatal eve, had shut without an echo. .While we vainly waited, time had ample leisure to carve the furrows of age as well as of suffering on the Colonel’s once smooth brow, and to change my daily vigil into a custom of despair, rather than of hope.

  Time had also leisure to rob us of much of our worldly goods and to make our continued living in this grand old house, an act that involved constant care and the closest economy. That we were enabled to preserve appearances to the day that beheld the Colonel laid low by the final stroke of his dread disease, was only due to the secret charity of a certain gentleman, who, declaring he was indebted to us, secretly supplied me with means of support.

  “But of all this you care little.

  “You had rather hear about the evening watch with its hopeful assurance. ‘Yet another day and she will be here,’ to be followed so soon by the despairing acknowledgement, ‘Yet another day and she has not come!’ or of those dark hours when the Colonel lay blank and white upon his pillow, with his eyes fixed on the door which would never open to the beating of a daughter’s heart, while the gray shadow of an awful resolution deepened upon his immovable face. What that resolution was I could not know, but I feared it, when I saw what a sternness it gave to his eye, what a fixedness to his set and implacable lip; and when in the waning light of a certain December afternoon, the circle of neighbors about his bed gave way to the stiff and forbidding form of Mr. Phelps, I felt a thrill of mortal apprehension and only waited to hear the short, ‘It shall be done,’ of the lawyer to some slowly whispered command of the colonel, to rise from my far off corner and stand ready to accost Mr. Phelps as he came from the bedside of the dying man.

  “‘What is it?’ I asked, rushing up to him as he issued forth into the hall, and seizing him by the arm, with a woman’s unreasoning impetuosity. ‘I have nursed his daughter on my knee; tell me, then, what it is he has ordered you to do in this final moment?’

  “Mr. Phelps for all his ungainly bearing, is not a hardhearted man, as you know, and he doubtless saw the depth of the misery that made me forget myself. Giving me a look that was not without its touch of sarcasm, he replied, ‘The colonel has made me promise, to see that a plank is nailed across the front door of this house, after his body has been carried out to burial.’

  “A board across the front door! His anger then was implacable. The withering curse that had rung in my ears for ten years, was to outlive his death! With a horrified groan, I pressed my hands over my eyes and rushed back. My first glimpse of the Colonel’s face showed me that the end was at hand, but that fact only made more imperative my consuming desire to see that curse removed, even though it were done with his final breath. Drawing near his bedside, I leaned down, and waiting till his eye wandered to my face, asked him if there was nothing he wished amended before his strength failed. He understood me. We had not sat for so long, face to face across the chasm of a hideous memory, without knowing something of the workings of each other’s mind. Glancing up at his wife’s portrait which ever faced him as he lay upon his pillow, his mouth grew severe and he essayed to shake his head. I at once pointed to the portrait.

  “‘What will you say to her when she meets you on the borders of heaven?’ I demanded with the courage of despair. ‘She will ask, ‘Where is my child?’ And what will you reply?’

  “The fingers that lay upon the coverlid moved spasmodically; he eyed me with a steady deepening stare, awful to meet, fearful to remember. I went on steadily; ‘She has gone out of this house with your curse; tell me that if she comes back, she may be greeted with your forgiveness.’ Still that awful stare which changed not. ‘I have watched and waited for her every day since her departure,’ I whispered, ‘and shall watch and wait for her, every day until I die. Shall a stranger’s love be greater than a father’s?’ This time his lips twitched and the grey shadow shifted, but it did not rise. ‘I had sworn to do it,’ I went on. ‘When you lay there at the top of the stairs, smitten down by your first shock, I told her, come sickness, come health, I should keep a daily vigil at that door of the house which your severity had not closed upon her; and I have kept my word till now and shall keep it to the end. What will you do for this miserable child of whose being you are the author?’

  “With indescribable anxiety I paused and watched him, for his lips were moving. ‘Do for her?’ he repeated.

  “How awful is the voice of the dying! I shivered as I listened, but drew near and nearer, that I might lose no word that came from his stony lips.

  “‘She will not come,’ gasped he, with an effort that raised him up in bed, and deepened that horrible stare, ‘but—’

  “Who shall say what he might have uttered if Death’s hand had delayed a single instant, but the inexorable shadow fell, and he never finished the sentence.

  “My child, these are frightful things for you to hear. God knows I would not assail your pure ears with a tale like this, if it were not for the help and sympathy I hope to gain from you. Sin is a hideous thing; the gulf it opens is wide and deep; well may it be said to swallow those who trust themselves above its flower-hung brink. But we who are human, owe something to humanity. Love stops not because of the gulf; love follows the sinner with wilder and more heart-breaking longing, the deeper and deeper he sinks into the illimitable darkness. Ten years have passed since we laid the Colonel away in the burying-place of all the Japhas, and dutiful to his last request, nailed up the front door of his speedily to be forsaken mansion. In all that time my watch has remained unbroken in this house, which by will he had left to me, but which I secretly hold in trust for her. The hour of six has found me at my post, sometimes elate with hope, sometimes depressed with repeated disappointments, but whether hopeful or sad, always trustful that the great God who Himself so loved all sinners, that He gave the life of His Son to rescue them, would ultimately grant me the desire of my heart. But the decrepitude of age is coming upon me, and each morning I leave my bed, with growing fear lest my infirmities will increase until they finally overcome my resolution. Child, if this should happen, if lying in my bed I should some day hear that she had come back, and failing to find the lamp burning and the welcome ready, had gone away again—But the thought is madness. I cannot bear it. A sinner, lost, degraded, suffering, starving, perhaps, is wandering this way. She is hardened and old in guilt; she has drunk the cup of life’s passions and found them corrupting poison; all that was lovely and pure and good has withdrawn from her; she stands alone, shut off by her sin, like a wild thing in a circle of flame. What shall touch it in soul? The preacher’s voice has no charm for her; good men’s advice is but empty air. God’s love must be mirrored in human love, to strik
e an eye so unused to looking up. Where shall she find such love? It is all that can rescue her; love as great as her sin, as boundless as her degradation, as persistent as her suffering. Child—”

  “I know what you are going to say,” suddenly exclaimed Paula, rising up and confronting Mrs. Hamlin with a steady high look of determination. “In the day of your weakness or illness you want some one to unlock the door and light the lamp. You have found her!”

  XXVIII. SUNSHINE ON THE HILLS.

  If I speak to thee in Friendship’s name,

  Thou think’st I speak too coldly;

  If I mention Love’s devoted flame,

  Thou say’st I speak too boldly.”

  —MOORE.

  The story told by Mrs. Hamlin had a great effect upon Paula, not only on account of its own interest and the promise it had elicited from her, but because of the remembrances it revived of Mr. Sylvester and her life in New York. Any vision of evil or suffering, any experience that roused the affections or awakened the sensibilities, could not fail to recall to her mind the forcible figure of Mr. Sylvester as he stood that day by his own hearthstone, talking of the temptations that assail humanity; and any reminiscence of him must necessarily bring with it much that charmed and aroused. For a week, then, she felt the effect of a great unsettlement. Her village home appeared a prison; she longed to run, soar—anything to escape; the horizon was full of beckoning hands. A brooding melancholy settled upon her reveries; the prospect of a life spent in the narrow circle to which she had endeavored to re-accustom herself, became unendurable.