"What can Mr. Steele be doing? He does not seem to be very successful in his attempts to carry out the mayor's orders. See! your husband asks where he is. He can mean no other by the words 'Where is S--?' He knew that your mind would supply the name."

"Yes."

Her eyes had become fixed; her whole face betrayed a settled despair.

Quickly, violently, she rang the bell.

Nixon appeared.

She advanced hurriedly to meet him.

"Nixon, you have Mr. Steele's address?"

"Yes, Mrs. Packard."

"Then go to it at once. Find Mr. Steele if you can, but if that is not possible, learn where he has gone and come right back and tell me. Mr.

Packard telegraphs to know where he is. He has not joined the mayor in C---."

"Yes, Mrs. Packard; the house is not far. I shall be back in fifteen minutes."

The words were respectful, but the sly glint in his blinking eyes as he hastened out fixed my thoughts again on this man and the uncommon att.i.tude he maintained toward the mistress whose behests he nevertheless flew to obey.

CHAPTER XIX. THE CRY FROM THE STAIRS

I was alone in the library when Nixon returned. He must have seen Mrs.

Packard go up before he left, for he pa.s.sed by without stopping, and the next moment I heard his foot on the stairs.

Some impulse made me step into the hall and cast a glance at his ascending figure. I could see only his back, but there was something which I did not like in the curve of that back and the slide of his hand as it moved along the stair-rail.

His was not an open nature at the best. I almost forgot the importance of his errand in watching the man himself. Had he not been a servant--but he was, and an old and foolishly fussy one. I would not imagine follies, only I wished I could follow him into Mrs. Packard's presence.

His stay, however, was too short for much to have been gained thereby.

Almost immediately he reappeared, shaking his head and looking very much disturbed, and I was watching his pottering descent when he was startled, and I was startled, by two cries which rang out simultaneously from above, one of pain and distress from the room he had just left, and one expressive of the utmost glee from the lips of the baby whom the nursemaid was bringing down from the upper hall.

Appalled by the anguish expressed in the mother's cry, I was bounding up-stairs when my course was stopped by one of the most poignant sights it has ever been my lot to witness. Mrs. Packard had heard her child's laugh, and flying from her room had met the little one on the threshold of her door and now, crying and sobbing, was kneeling with the child in her arms in the open s.p.a.ce at the top of the stairs. Her paroxysm of grief, wild and unconstrained as it was, gave less hint of madness than of intolerable suffering.

Wondering at an abandonment which bespoke a grief too great for all further concealment, I glanced again at Nixon. He had paused in the middle of the staircase and was looking back in a dubious way denoting hesitation. But as the full force of the tragic scene above made itself felt in his slow mind, he showed a disposition to escape and tremblingly continued his descent. He was nearly upon me when he caught my eye.

A glare awoke in his, and seeing his right arm rise threateningly, I thought he would certainly strike me. But he slid by without doing so.

What did it mean? Oh, what did it all mean?

CHAPTER XX. EXPLANATION

Determined to know the cause of Mrs. Packard's anguish, if not of Nixon's unprovoked anger against myself, I caught him back as he was pa.s.sing me and peremptorily demanded:

"What message did you carry to Mrs. Packard to throw her into such a state as this? Answer! I am in this house to protect her against all such disturbances. What did you tell her?"

"Nothing."

Sullenness itself in the tone.

"Nothing? and you were sent on an errand? Didn't you fulfil it?"

"Yes."

"And didn't tell her what you learned?"

"No."

"Why?"

"She didn't give me the chance."

"Oh!"

"I know it sounds queer, Miss, but it's true. She didn't give me a chance to talk."

He muttered the final sentence. Indeed, all that we had said until now had been in a subdued tone, but now my voice unconsciously rose.

"You found Mr. Steele?"

"No, Miss, he was not at home."

"But they told you where to look for him?"

"No. His landlady thinks he is dead. He has queer spells, and some one had sent her word about a man, handsome like him, who was found dead at Hudson Three Corners last night. Mr. Steele told her he was going over to Hudson Three Corners. She has sent to see if the dead man is he."

"The dead man!"

Who spoke? Not Mrs. Packard! Surely that voice was another's. Yet we both looked up to see:

The sight which met our eyes was astonishing, appalling. She had let her baby slip to the floor and had advanced to the stairs, where she stood, clutching at the rail, looking down upon us, with a joy in her face matching the unholy elation we could still hear ringing in that word "dead."

Such a look might have leaped to life in the eyes of the Medusa when she turned her beauty upon her foredoomed victims.

"Dead!" came again in ringing repet.i.tion from Mrs. Packard's lips, every fiber in her tense form quivering and the gleam of hope shining brighter and brighter in her countenance. "No, not dead!" Then while Nixon trembled and succ.u.mbed inwardly to this spectacle of a gentle-hearted woman transformed by some secret and overwhelming emotion into an image of vindictive delight, her hands left the stair-rail and flew straight up over her head in the transcendent gesture which only the greatest crises in life call forth, and she exclaimed with awe-inspiring emphasis: "G.o.d could not have been so merciful!"

It is not often, perhaps it is only once in a lifetime, that it is given us to look straight into the innermost recesses of the human soul. Never before had such an opportunity come to me, and possibly never would it come again, yet my first conscious impulse was one of fright at the appalling self-revelation she had made, not only in my hearing, but in that of nearly her whole household. I could see, over her shoulders, Letty's eyes staring wide in ingenuous dismay, while from the hall below rose the sound of hurrying feet as the girls came running in from the kitchen. Something must be done, and immediately, to recall her to herself, and, if possible, to reinstate her in the eyes of her servants.

Bounding upward to where she still stood forgetful and self-absorbed, I laid my hands softly but firmly on hers, which had fallen back upon the rail, and quietly said: