Chapter X: Book II: The Secret of the Laboratory (4)

"They thought so too, and in a few minutes Doris stole out after the doctor, but I knew whatever delirium he had sprang from his hate of me, and was awed into a shrinking inactivity which Emma excused while only partially understanding.

"The doctor came and this time I stood watching. My father, who had not expected this interference, showed anger at first, but soon settled back into a half-jocular, half-indifferent endurance of the interloper, which tended to impress the latter, and did succeed in doing so, with the folly of those who thought he was sick enough to rouse a doctor up at midnight. Few questions brought few replies, and the irritated physician left us with something like a rebuke. He however said he would come again in the morning, as there was a fitfulness in my father's pulse which he did not like.

"But before the doctor appeared that morning father had called me for the third and last time to his side.

"'I wish to see my eldest daughter alone,' he declared, as Emma lingered and Doris hovered about the open door. They at once went out. 'Now shut the door,' said he, as their footsteps were heard descending the stairs.

"I did as I was bid, though I felt as if I were shutting myself in with some horrid doom.

"'Now come in front of me,' he commanded, 'I want to look at you. I have just five minutes left in which to do it.'

"'Five minutes!' I repeated hoarsely, creeping round with tottering and yet more tottering steps to where he pointed.

"'Yes; the poison has done its work at last. At eight o'clock I shall be dead.'

"'Poison!' I shrieked, but in so choked a tone the word sounded like a smothered whisper.

"But he was alarmed by it for all that.

"'Do not tell the world,' he cried. 'It is enough that you know it. Are you pleased that you have driven your father to self-destruction? Will it make your life in this house, in which you have vowed to remain, any happier? I told you that your sin should be on your head; and it will be. For, listen to me: now in this last dreadful hour, I command you, heartless and disobedient one, to keep that vow. By this awful death, by the despair which has driven me to it, beware of leaving these doors. In your anger you swore to remain within these walls; in your remorse see that you keep that oath. Not for love, not for hatred, dare to cross the threshold, or I will denounce you in the grave where I shall be gone, and my curse shall be upon you.'

"He had risen in his passion as he uttered these words, but he sank back as he finished, and I thought he was dead. Terrified, crushed, I sank upon my knees, having no words with which to plead for the mercy for which I now longed. The next minute a horrible groan burst upon my ear.

"'It eats--it burns into my vitals. The suffering has come,--the suffering which I have often noted with unconcern in the animals upon which I tested it. I cannot bear it; I had rather live. Get me the antidote; there, there, in the long narrow drawer in the cabinet by the wall. Not there, not there!' he shrieked, as I stumbled over the floor, which seemed to rise in waves beneath my feet. 'The other cabinet, the other drawer; _you are where the poison is_.'

"I halted; weights seemed to be upon my feet; I could not move. He was writhing in agony on the floor; he no longer seemed to know where I stood.

"'Open it--the drawer,' he cried. 'Bring me what is in it.'

"I reached out my hand; heaven and earth seemed to stand still; red lights danced before my eyes; I drew out the drawer.

"'Quick, quick, the powder!' he moaned; 'fetch it!'

"I was staring at him, but my hand groped in the drawer. I felt a little packet of powder; I took it and crossed the room. As soon as I was near him he stretched out his hand and grasped it. I saw him empty it into his mouth; at the same instant his eyes fixed themselves in horror on the drawer I had left open behind me, the drawer in which the poison was kept.

"'Curse you for a----' He never said what. With this broken imprecation upon his lips, he sank back upon the floor, dead."

XXV.

EDGAR AND FRANK.

Frank, who had been reading these words as if swept along by a torrent, started to his feet with a hoarse cry, as he reached this point. He could not believe his eyes, he could not believe his understanding. He shrank from the paper that contained the deadly revelation, as though a snake had suddenly uncoiled itself from amid the sheets. With hair slowly rising on his forehead, he stared and stared, hoping wildly, hoping against hope, to see other words start from the sheet, and blot out of existence the ones that had in an instant made his love a horror, his life a desert.

But no, Heaven works no such miracle, even in sight of such an agony as his; and the words met his gaze relentlessly till his misery was more than he could endure, and he rushed from the room like a madman.

Edgar, who was busy over some medical treatise, rose rapidly as he heard the unsteady footsteps of his friend.

"What is the matter?" he cried, as Frank came stumbling into his presence. "You look----"

"Never mind how I look; comfort me, Edgar, comfort me!" and in his anguish he burst into irrepressible sobs "Hermione is----" He could not say what, but drew his friend after him to the room where the letter lay, and pointed to the few ghastly lines which had undone him. "Read those," he panted. "She had suffered; she was not herself, but, oh----" He broke down again, and did not try to speak further till Edgar had read the hideous confession contained in those closing lines, and some of the revelations which had led up to it. Then he said: "Do not speak to me yet; let me bear the horror alone. I loved her so; ah, I did love her!"

Edgar, who had turned very pale, was considerate enough to respect this grief, and silently wait for Frank to regain sufficient composure to talk with him. This was not soon, but when the moment came, Edgar showed that his heart beat truly under all his apparent indifference. He did not say, "I bade you beware"; he merely took his friend's hand and wrung it. Frank, who was almost overwhelmed with shame and sorrow, muttered some words of acknowledgment.

"I must get out of the town," said he. "I feel as if the very atmosphere here would choke me."

Here came again the long, doleful drone of the foghorn. "How like a groan that is," said he. "An evil day it was for me when I first came within its foreboding sound."

"We will say that when all is over," ventured Edgar, but in no very hopeful tones. "You should not have shown me these words, Frank; the wonder is that she was willing to show them to you."

"She could not otherwise get rid of my importunities. I would take no hint, and so she tells me the truth."

"That shows nobleness," remarked Edgar. "She has some virtues which may excuse you to yourself for the weakness you have shown in her regard."

"I dare not think of it," said Frank. "I dare not think of her again. Yet to leave her when she is suffering so! Is not that almost as cruel a fate as to learn that she is so unworthy?"

"I would you had never come here!" exclaimed Edgar, with unwonted fervency.

"There are more words," observed Frank, "but I cannot read them. "Words of sorrow and remorse, no doubt, but what do they avail? The fact remains that she gave her father in his agony another dose of the poison that was killing him, instead of the antidote for which he prayed."

"Yes," said Edgar, "only I feel bound to say that no antidote would have saved him then. I know the poison and I know the antidote; we have tested them together often."

Frank shuddered.

"He had the heart of a demon," declared Edgar, "to plan and carry out such a revenge, even upon a daughter who had so grievously disappointed him. I can hardly believe the tale, only that I have learned that one may believe anything of human nature."

"She--she did not kill him, then?"

"No, but her guilt is as great as if she had, for she must have had the momentary instinct of murder."

"O Hermione, Hermione! so beautiful and so unhappy!"

"A momentary instinct, which she is expiating fearfully. No wonder she does not leave the house. No wonder that her face looks like a tragic mask."

"No one seems to have suspected her guilt, or even his. We have never heard any whispers about poison."

"Dudgeon is a conceited fool. Having once said overwork, he would stick to overwork. Besides that poison is very subtle; I would have difficulty in detecting its workings myself."

"And this is the tragedy of that home! Oh, how much worse, how much more fearful than any I have attributed to it!"

The Doctor sighed.

"What has not Emma had to bear," he said.

"Emma!" Frank unconsciously roused himself. "If I remember rightly, Hermione has said that Emma did not know all her trouble."

"Thank God! May she never be enlightened."

"Edgar," whispered Frank, "I do not think I can let you read all that letter, though it tells much you ought to know. I have yet some consideration--for--for Hermione--" (How hard the word came from lips which once uttered it with so much pride!)--"and she never expected any other eyes than mine to rest upon these revelations of her heart of hearts. But one thing I must tell you in justice to yourself and the girl upon whom no shadow rests but that of a most loyal devotion to a most wretched sister. Not from her heart did the refusal come which blighted your hopes and made you cynical towards women. There were reasons she could not communicate, reasons she could not even dwell upon herself, why she felt forced to dismiss you, and in the seemingly heartless way she did."

"I am willing to believe it," said Edgar.

"Emma is a pure and beautiful spirit," observed Frank, and gave himself up to grief for her who was not, and yet who commanded his pity for her sufferings and possibly for her provocations.

Edgar now had enough of his own to think of, and if Frank had been less absorbed in his own trouble he might have observed with what longing eyes his friend turned every now and then towards the sheets which contained so much of Emma's history as well as her sister's. Finally he spoke:

"Why does Emma remain in the house to which the father only condemned her sister?"

"Because she once vowed to share that sister's fate, whatever it might be."

"Her love for her sister is then greater than any other passion she may have had."

"I don't know; there were other motives beside love to influence her," explained Frank, and said no more.

Edgar sank again into silence. It was Frank who spoke next.

"Do you think"--He paused and moistened his lips--"Have you doubted what our duty is about this matter?"

"To leave the girl--you said it yourself. Have you any other idea, Frank?"

"No, no; that is not what I mean," stammered Etheridge. "I mean about--about--the father's death. Should the world know? Is it a matter for the--for the police?"

"No," cried Edgar, aghast. "Mr. Cavanagh evidently killed himself. It is a dreadful thing to know, but I do not see why we need make it public."

Frank drew a long breath.

"I feared," he said,--"I did not know but you would think my duty would lie in--in----"

"Don't speak of it," exclaimed Edgar. "If you do not wish to finish reading her confession, put it up. Here is a drawer, in which you can safely lock it."

Frank, recoiling from the touch of those papers which had made such a havoc with his life, motioned to Edgar to do what he would with them.

"Are you not going to write--to answer this in some way?" asked Edgar.

"Thank God she has not made that necessary. She wrote somewhere, in the beginning, I think, that, if I felt the terror of her words too deeply, I was to pass by her house on the other side of the street at an early hour in the morning. Did she dream that I could do anything else?"

Edgar closed the drawer in which he had hidden her letter, locked it, and laid the key down on the table beside Frank.

Frank did not observe the action; he had risen to his feet, and in another moment had left the room. He had reached the point of feeling the need of air and a wider space in which to breathe. As he stepped into the street, he turned in a contrary direction to that in which he had been wont to walk. Had he not done this; had he gone southward, as usual, he might have seen the sly and crouching figure which was drawn up on that side of the house, peering into the room he had just left through the narrow opening made by an imperfectly lowered shade.