"'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 pa.s.sion 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 had 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.

{ "'The antidote!' he moaned, 'the antidote!' } { I burst the bonds which held me, and leaving open } { the drawer which I had half pulled out in my eagerness } { to relieve him, I rushed across the room to the } { cabinet he had pointed out. } { } { "'The long drawer,' he murmured, 'the one } { like the other. Pull it hard; it is not locked!' } { } { "I tried to do as he commanded, but my hand } { slid helplessly from drawer to drawer. I could } { hardly see. He moaned and shrieked again. } { } { "'The long one, I say, the long one!' } { } { "As he spoke my hand touched it. } { } { "'I have it,' I panted forth. }

"'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."

"G.o.d, what a difference!" cried Edgar. But Frank, trembling from head to foot, reached out and took the sheets, and laying them on the desk before him, buried his face in them. When he looked up again, Edgar, for all his own relief, was startled by the change in him.

"Her vindication comes late," said he, "but I will go at once and explain----"

"Wait; let us first understand how we both were led to make such a mistake. Could the leaves have stuck together?"

There were no signs of this having happened. Yet who could say that this was not the real explanation of the whole matter? The most curious feature of the occurrence was that just the missing of that one sheet should have so altered the sense of what they read. They did not know then or ever that this very fact had struck Huckins also in his stolen reading of the same, and that it had been his hand which had abstracted it and then again restored it when he thought the mutilated ma.n.u.script had done its work. They never knew this, as I say, but they thought the chance which had occurred to them a very strange one, and tried to lay it to their agitation at the time, or to any cause but the real one.

The riddle proving insolvable, they abandoned it, and Frank again rose.

But Edgar drawing his attention to the few additional sheets which he had never read, he sat down again in eagerness to peruse them. Let us read them with him, for in them we shall find the Hermione of to-day, not the angry and imperious woman upon whom her father revenged himself by a death calculated to blot the sun from her skies and happiness from her heart forever.

"When Emma came to the room she discovered me kneeling, rigid and horror-stricken, above my father's outstretched form. She says that I met her eyes with mine, but that there was no look of life within them. Indeed, I was hardly alive, and have no remembrance of how I was taken from that room or what happened in the house for hours. When I did rouse, Emma was beside me.

Her look was one of grief but not of horror, and I saw she had no idea of what had pa.s.sed between my father and myself during the last few days. Dr. Dudgeon had told her that our father had died of heart-disease, and she believed him, and thought my terror was due to the suddenness of his end and the fact that I was alone with him at the time.

"She therefore smiled with a certain faint encouragement when I opened my eyes upon her face, but pushed me back with gentle hand when I tried to rise, saying:

"'All is well with father, Hermione,--so think only of yourself just now; I do not think you are able to get up.'

"I was only too happy not to make the effort. If only my eyes had never opened! If only I had sunk from unconsciousness into the perfect peace of death! But even that idea made me quake.

_He_ was _there_, and I had such a horror of him, that it seemed for a moment that I would rather live forever than to encounter him again, even in a world where the secrets of all hearts lie open.

"'Did not father forgive you?' murmured Emma, marking perhaps the expression of my face.

"I smiled a bitter smile.

"'Do not ever let us talk about father,' I prayed. 'He has condemned me to this house, and that will make me remember him sufficiently without words.'

"She rose horror-stricken.

"'O Hermione!' she murmured; 'O Hermione!' and hid her face in her hands and wept.

"But I lay silent, tearless.

"When the funeral procession pa.s.sed out of the house without us, the people stared. But no thought of there being anything back of this seeming disrespect, save the caprice of two very whimsical girls, seemed to strike the mind of any one. The paper which had held the antidote I had long ago picked up from the laboratory floor; while the open drawer with the packet in it marked _Poison_ had doubtless been shut by Doris on her first entrance into the room after his death. For I not only found it closed, but I never heard any one speak of it, or of any peculiar symptoms attending my father's death.

"But the arrow was in my heart for all that, and for weeks my life was little more than a nightmare. All the pride which had upheld me was gone. I felt myself a crushed woman. The pall which my father had thrown over me in his self-inflicted death, hung heavy and stifling about me. I breathed, but it seemed to be in gasps, and when exhausted nature gave way and I slept, it was to live over again in dreams those last fearful moments of his life, and hear, with even more distinctness than in my waking hours, the words of the final curse with which he sank to the floor.

"I had not deserved it--that I felt; but I suffered all the same, and suffered all the more that I could take no confidant into my troubles. Emma, with her broken life, had had disappointments enough without this revelation of a father's vindictiveness, and though it might have eased me for the moment to hear her words of sympathy, I knew that I should find it harder to face her day by day, if this ghost of horror once rose between us. No; the anguish was mine, and must be borne by me alone. So I crushed it down into my heart and was silent.

"Meantime the command which had been laid upon me by my father, never to leave the house, was weaving a chain about me I soon found it impossible to break. Had I immediately upon his death defied his will and rushed frenziedly out of the gate, I might have grown to feel it easy to walk the streets again in the face of a curse which should never have been laid upon me. But the custom of obeying his dying mandate soon got its hold upon me, and I could not overcome it. At the very thought of crossing the threshold I would tremble; and though when I looked at Emma heroically sharing my fate without knowing the reasons for my persistency, I would dream for a moment of breaking the spell those dying lips had laid upon me, I always found myself drawing back in terror, almost as if I had been caught by fleshless fingers.

"And so the weeks pa.s.sed and we settled into the monotonous existence of an uninterrupted seclusion. What had been the expression of my self-will, became now a species of expiation.

For though I had not deserved the awful burden which had been imposed upon me of a father's death and curse, I had deserved punishment, and this I now saw, and this I now endeavored to meet, with something like the meekness of repentance. I accepted my doom, and tried not to dwell so much upon my provocations as upon the temper with which I met them, and the hardness with which I strove to triumph over my disappointments. And in doing this I became less hard, preparing my heart, though I did not know it, for that new seed of love which fate was about to drop into it.

"Mr. Etheridge, I have told you all my story. If it strikes you with dismay and you shrink in your n.o.ble manhood from a woman whom, rightfully or wrongfully, is burdened with the weight of a father's death, do not try to overcome that shrinking or defy that dismay. We could never be happy if you did. Nothing but whole-souled love will satisfy me or help me to forget the shadows that bear so heavily upon my head. You say you love me, but your emotions upon reading this letter will prove to yourself what is the true strength and nature of your feelings.

Let them, then, have their honest way. If they are in my favor I shall be the happiest girl alive, but if they lead you to go by on the other side of the street, then will I strive to bear this sorrow also, as one who has been much to blame for the evils which have befallen her."

That was all. As Frank folded the last sheet and put it and the rest quietly away in his pocket, Edgar saw, or thought he saw, that happier hours were about to dawn for Hermione Cavanagh. It made him think of his own love and of the claims of the gentle Emma.

"Frank," said he, with the effort of a reticent man compelled at last to make an admission, "if you are going to the Cavanaghs, I think--I--will--go--with you."

Frank started and leaped forward warmly with outstretched hand. But before their two palms could meet, the door was violently opened and a messenger came panting in with the announcement:

"Dr. Sellick's wanted. Hermione Cavanagh is at the point of death."

XXVIII.

IN EXTREMITY.

Frank and Edgar were equally pale as they reached the Cavanagh house. No time had been lost on the way, and yet the moments had been long enough for them both to be the prey of the wildest conjectures. The messenger who had brought the startling news of Hermione's illness knew nothing concerning the matter beyond the fact that Doris, their servant, had called to him, as he was pa.s.sing their house, to run for Dr. Sellick, as Miss Hermione was dying. They were therefore entirely in the dark as to what had happened, and entered the house, upon their arrival, like men for whom some terrible doom might be preparing.

The first person they encountered was Huckins. He was standing in the parlor window, rubbing his hands slowly together and smiling very softly to himself. But when he saw the two young men, he came forward with a cringing bow and an expression of hypocritical grief, which revived all Frank's distrust and antipathy.

"Oh, sir," he exclaimed to Frank, "you here? You should not have come; indeed you should not. Sad case," he added, turning to the Doctor; "very sad case, this which we have upstairs. I fear we are going to lose the dear young lady." And he wiped his half-shut eyes with his fine white handkerchief.

"Let me see her; where is she?" cried the Doctor, not stopping to look around him, though the place must have been full of the most suggestive a.s.sociations.