"Pet," he said, "I will tell you something. One reason they move me so is, that they are strangely like words written by a woman whom I knew thirty years ago. I did not believe two such women had been on the earth."

I kissed his hand when he said this; yet a strange unwillingness to read Esther's letters withheld me. I felt that he had right, and I had not.

But the end of the mystery was near. It was revealed, as it ought to have been, to my uncle himself.

One night I was wakened out of my first sleep by a very cautious tap at my door, and my uncle's voice, saying,--

"Nell--Nell, are you awake?"

I sprang to the door instantly.

"O uncle, are you ill?" (My aunt had not yet returned.)

"No, pet. But I want you down-stairs. Dress yourself and come down into the library."

My hands trembled with excitement as I dressed. Yet I was not afraid: I knew it was in some way connected with "Esther," though my uncle had not mentioned her name.

I found him sitting before the library table, which was literally covered with old letters, such as we had before seen.

"O uncle!" I gasped as soon as I saw them.

"Yes, dear! I have got them all. There was no ghost!"

Then he told me in few words what had happened. It seemed that he had gone down himself into the cellar, partly to satisfy himself that all was right with the furnace, partly with a vague hope of finding another of the letters. He had found nothing, had examined the furnace, locked the door at the head of the cellar stairs, and gone up to his bed-room. While he was undressing, a strange impulse seized him to go back once more, and see whether it might not happen to him as it had to Robert, to find a letter on returning after a few moments' interval.

He threw on his wrapper, took a candle, and went down. The first thing he saw, on opening the door, which he had himself locked only five minutes before, was a letter lying on the same fourth stair!

"I confess, Nell," said he, "for a minute I felt as frightened as black Bob. But I sat down on the upper step, and resolved not to go away till I had discovered how that letter came there, if I stayed till day-light!"

Nearly an hour pa.s.sed, he said; the cold wind from the cellar blew up and swayed the candle-flame to and fro. All sorts of strange sounds seemed to grow louder and louder, and still he sat, gazing helplessly in a sort of despair at that motionless letter, which he had not lifted from the stair.

At last, purely by accident, he looked up to the staircase overhead--the front stairs, down which he had just come from his room. He jumped to his feet! There, up among the dark cobwebbed shadows, he thought he saw something white. He held up the candle. It was, yes, it was a tiny corner of white paper wedged into a crack; by standing on the beam at the side he could just reach it. He touched it,--pulled it;--it came out slowly,--another of Esther's letters. They were hid in the upper staircase! The boards had been worn and jarred a little away from each other, and the letters were gradually shaken through the opening; some heavier or quicker step than usual giving always the final impetus to a letter which had been for days slowly working down towards the fated outlet.

Stealthily as any burglar he had crept about his own house, had taken up the whole of the front staircase carpet, and had with trouble pried off one board of the stair in which the letters were hid. There had been a spring, he found, but it was rusted and would not yield. He had carefully replaced the carpet, carried the letters into the library, and come for me; it was now half-past one o'clock at night.

Dear, blessed Uncle Jo! I am an old woman now. Good men and strong men have given me love, and have shown me of their love for others; but never did I feel myself so in the living presence of incarnate love as I did that night, sitting with my white-haired uncle, face to face with the faded records of the love of Esther Wynn.

It was only from one note that we discovered her last name. This was written in the early days of her acquaintance with her lover, and while she was apparently little more than a child. It was evident that at first the relation was more like one of pupil and master. For some time the letters all commenced scrupulously "my dear friend," or "my most beloved friend." It was not until years had pa.s.sed that the master became the lover; we fancied, Uncle Jo and I, as we went reverently over the beautiful pages, that Esther had grown and developed more and more, until she was the teacher, the helper, the inspirer. We felt sure, though we could not tell how, that she was the stronger of the two; that she moved and lived habitually on a higher plane; that she yearned often to lift the man she loved to the freer heights on which her soul led its glorified existence.

It was strange how little we gathered which could give a clew to her actual history or to his. The letters almost never gave the name of the place, only the day and year, many of them only the day. There was dearth of allusions to persons; it was as if these two had lived in a separate world of their own. When persons were mentioned at all, it was only by initials. It was plain that some cruel, inexorable bar separated her from the man she loved; a bar never spoken of--whose nature we could only guess,--but one which her strong and pure nature felt itself free to triumph over in spirit, however submissive the external life might seem.

Their relation had lasted for many years; so many, that that fact alone seemed a holy seal and testimony to the purity and immortality of the bond which united them. Esther must have been a middle-aged woman when, as the saddened letters revealed, her health failed and she was ordered by the physicians to go to Europe. The first letter which my uncle had read, the one which Princess found, was the letter in which she bade farewell to her lover. There was no record after that; only two letters which had come from abroad; one was the one that I have mentioned, which contained the pomegranate blossom from Jaffa, and a little poem which, after long hours of labor, Uncle Jo and I succeeded in deciphering. The other had two flowers in it--an Edelweiss which looked as white and pure and immortal as if it had come from Alpine snows only the day before; and a little crimson flower of the amaranth species, which was wrapped by itself, and marked "From Bethlehem of Judea." The only other words in this letter were, "I am better, darling, but I cannot write yet."

It was evident that there had been the deepest intellectual sympathy between them. Closely and fervently and pa.s.sionately as their hearts must have loved, the letters were never, from first to last, simply lovers'

letters. Keen interchange of comment and a.n.a.lysis, full revelation of strongly marked individual life, constant mutual stimulus to mental growth there must have been between these two. We were inclined to think, from the exquisitely phrased sentences and rare fancies in the letters, and from the graceful movement of some of the little poems, that Esther must have had ambition as a writer. Then, again, she seemed so wholly, simply, pa.s.sionately, a woman, to love and be loved, that all thought of anything else in her nature or her life seemed incongruous.

"Oh," groaned Uncle Jo, after reading one of the most glowing letters, "oh, was there really ever in any other man's arms but mine a woman who could say such things as these between kisses? O Nell, Nell, thank G.o.d that you haven't the dower of such a double fire in your veins as Esther had!"

All night we sat reading, and reading, and reading. When the great clock in the hall struck six, we started like guilty persons.

"Oh, my childie," said Uncle Jo, "how wrong this has been in me! Poor little pale face, go to bed now, and remember, I forbid you to go to school to-day; and I forbid your getting up until noon. I promise you I will not look at another letter. I will lock them all up till to-morrow evening, and then we will finish them."

I obeyed him silently. I was too exhausted to speak; but I was also too excited to sleep. Until noon I lay wide awake on the bed, in my darkened room, living over Esther Wynn's life, marvelling at the inexplicable revelation of it which had been put into our hands, and wondering, until the uncertainty seemed almost anguish, what was that end which we could never know. Did she die in the Holy Land? or did she come home well and strong? and did her lover die some day, leaving his secret treasure of letters behind him, and poor stricken Esther to go to her grave in fear lest unfriendly hands might have gained possession of her heart's records?

He was a married man we felt sure. Had the wife whom he did not love paced up and down and up and down for years over these dumb witnesses to that of which she had never dreamed? The man himself, when he came to die, did he writhe, thinking of those silent, eloquent, precious letters which he must leave to time and chance to destroy or protect? Did men carry him, dead, down the very stairs on which he had so often knelt unseen and wafted kisses towards the hidden Esther?

All these conjectures and questions, and thousands more, hurried in wild confusion through my brain. In vain I closed my eyes, in vain I pressed my hands on my eyelids; countless faces, dark, light, beautiful, plain, happy, sad, threatening, imploring, seemed dancing in the air around my bed, and saying, "Esther, Esther!"

We knew she was fair; for there was in one of the letters a tiny curl of pale brown hair; but we believed from many expressions of hers that she had no beauty. Oh, if I could but have known how she looked!

At last I fell asleep, and slept heavily until after dark. This refreshed my overwrought nerves, and when at nine o'clock in the evening I joined my uncle in the library, I was calmer than he.

We said very few words. I sat on his knee, with one arm around his neck, and hand in hand we reverently lifted the frail, trembling sheets.

We learned nothing new; in fact, almost any one of the letters was a rounded revelation of Esther's nature, and of the great love she bore--and there was little more to learn. There were more than a hundred of the letters, and they embraced a period of fifteen years. We arranged them in piles, each year by itself; for some years there were only two or three; we wondered whether during those years they had lived near each other, and so had not written, or whether the letters had been destroyed. When the last letter was laid where it belonged, we looked at each other in silence, and we both sighed.

Uncle Jo spoke first.

"Childie, what shall we do with them?"

"I do not know, uncle," I said. "I should feel very guilty if we did not make sure that no one else read them. I should feel very guilty myself, except that I have read them with you. They seem to me to belong to you, somehow."

Uncle Jo kissed me, and we were silent again. Then he said, "There is but one way to make sure that no human being will ever read them--that is, to burn them; but it is as hard for me to do it as if they had been written to me."

"Could you not put them back in the stair, and nail it up firmly?" said I.

It was a stormy night. The wind was blowing hard, and sleet and snow driving against the windows. At this instant a terrible gust rattled the icy branches of the syringa-bushes against the window, with a noise like the click of musketry, and above the howling of the wind there came a strange sound which sounded like a voice crying, "Burn, burn!"

Uncle Jo and I both heard it, and both sprang to our feet, white with a nervous terror. In a second he recovered himself, and said, laughing, "Pet we are both a good deal shaken by this business. But I do think it will be safer to burn the letters. Poor, poor Esther. I hope she is safe with her lover now."

"Oh, do you doubt it?" said I; "I do not."

"No," said he, "I do not, either. Thank G.o.d!"

"Uncle Jo," said I, "do you think Esther would mind if I copied a few of these letters, and two or three of the poems? I so want to have them that it seems to me I cannot give them up; I love her so, I think she would be willing."

The storm suddenly died away, and the peaceful silence around us was almost as startling as the fierce gust had been before. I took it as an omen that Esther did not refuse my wish, and I selected the four letters which I most desired to keep. I took also the pomegranate blossom, and the Edelweiss, and the crimson Amaranth from Bethlehem.

"I think Esther would rather that these should not be burned," I said.

"Yes; I think so too," replied Uncle Jo.

Then we laid the rest upon the fire. The generous hickory logs seemed to open their arms to them. In a few seconds great panting streams of fire leaped up and rushed out of our sight, bearing with them all that was perishable of Esther Wynn's letters. Just as the crackling shadowy shapes were falling apart and turning black, my uncle sprang to an Indian cabinet which stood near, and seizing a little box of incense-powder which had been brought from China by his brother, he shook a few grains of it into the fire. A pale, fragrant film rose slowly in coiling wreaths and clouds and hid the last moments of the burning of the letters. When the incense smoke cleared away, nothing could be seen on the hearth but the bright hickory coals in their bed of white ashes.

"I shall make every effort," said Uncle Jo, "to find out who lived in this house during those years. I presume I can, by old records somewhere."

"Oh, uncle," I said, "don't. I think they would rather we did not know any more."

"You sweet woman child!" he exclaimed. "You are right. Your instinct is truer than mine. I am only a man, after all! I will never try to learn who it was that Esther loved."