Part 42

“For a minute she stared down at these from over her tray, and then she remarked very low and very quietly:

“‘Another bowl, Humphrey, and fresh curds from the kitchen. I will do the seasoning. The doses are too small to be skipped. You won’t?’--I had shaken my head--‘But you will! It will not be the first time you have gone down the hall with this mixture.’

“‘But that was before I knew--’ I began.

“‘And now that you do, you will go just the same.’ Then as I stood hesitating, a thousand memories overwhelming me in an instant, she added in a voice to tear the heart, ‘Do not make me hate the only being left in this world who understands and loves me.’

“She was a helpless invalid, and I a broken man, but when that word ‘love’ fell from her lips, I felt the blood start burning in my veins, and all the crust of habit and years of self-control loosen about my heart, and make me young again. What if her thoughts were dark and her wishes murderous! She was born to rule and sway men to her will even to their own undoing.”

“‘I wish I might kiss your hand,’ was what I murmured, gazing at her white fingers groping over her tray.

“‘You may,’ she answered, and hell became heaven to me for a brief instant. Then I lifted myself and went obediently about my task.

“But puppet though I was, I was not utterly without sympathy. When I entered Helena’s room and saw how her startled eyes fell shrinkingly on the bowl I set down before her, my conscience leaped to life and I could not help saying:

“‘Don’t you like the curds, Helena? Your brother used to love them very much.’

“‘His were--’

“‘What, Helena?’

“‘What these are not,’ she murmured.

“I stared at her, terror-stricken. So she knew, and yet did not seize the bowl and empty it out of the window! Instead, her hand moved slowly towards it and drew it into place before her.

“‘Yet I must eat,’ she said, lifting her eyes to mine in a sort of patient despair, which yet was without accusation.

“But my hand had instinctively gone to hers and grasped it.

“‘Why must you eat it?’ I asked. ‘If--if you do not find it wholesome, why do you touch it?’

“‘Because my step-mother expects me to,’ she cried, ‘and I have no other will than hers. When I was a little, little child, my father made me promise that if I ever came to live with her I would obey her simplest wish. And I always have. I will not disappoint the trust he put in me.’

“‘Even if you die of it?’

“I do not know whether I whispered these words or only thought them. She answered as though I had spoken.

“‘I am not afraid to die. I am more afraid to live. She may ask me some day to do something I feel to be wrong.’

“When I fled down the hall that night, I heard one of the small clocks speak to me. Tell! it cried, tell! tell! tell! tell! I rushed away from it with beaded forehead and rising hair.

“Then another’s note piped up. No it droned. No! no! no! no! I stopped and took heart. Disgrace the woman I loved, on the brink of the grave? I--, who asked no other boon from heaven than to see her happy, gracious, and good? Impossible. I would obey the great clock’s voice; the others were mere chatterboxes.

“But it has at last changed its tune, for some reason, quite changed its tune. Now, it is Yes! Yes! instead of No! and in obeying it I save Helena. But what of Bella? and O God, what of myself?”

A sigh, a groan, then a long and heavy silence, into which there finally broke the pealing of the various clocks striking the hour. When all were still again and Violet had drawn aside the portiere, it was to see the old man on his knees, and between her and the thin streak of light entering from the hall, the figure of the doctor hastening to Helena’s bedside.

When with inducements needless to name, they finally persuaded the young girl to leave her unholy habitation, it was in the arms which had upheld her once before, and to a life which promised to compensate her for her twenty years of loneliness and unsatisfied longing.

But a black shadow yet remained which she must cross before reaching the sunshine!

It lay at her step-mother’s door.

In the plans made for Helena’s release, Mrs. Postlethwaite’s consent had not been obtained nor was she supposed to be acquainted with the doctor’s intentions towards the child whose death she was hourly awaiting.