The step on the stair

by Anna Katharine Green

LXII

Night again in this house of many mysteries. Late night. Quiet had succeeded intense excitement; darkness, the flashing here and there of many lights. Orpha had retired; even Edgar was asleep. I alone kept watch.

To these others peace of a certain nature had come amid all the distraction; but not to me. For me the final and most desperate struggle of all was on,—that conflict with self which I had foreseen with something like fear when I opened the old document so lately found by Orpha, and beheld Edgar’s name once more in its place as chief beneficiary.

Till then, my course had seemed plain enough. But with this previous will still in existence, signed and attested to and openly recognized as it had been for many years as the exact expression of my uncle’s wishes, confusion had come again and with it the return of old doubts which I had thought exorcized forever.

Had the assault been a feeble one—had these doubts been mere shadows cast by a discarded past, I might not have quailed at their onslaught so readily. But their strength was of the present and bore down upon me with a malignancy which made all their former attacks seem puerile and inconsequent.

For the events of the day previous to Orpha’s production of the old will had shown to my satisfaction that I might yet look for happiness whether my claim would be allowed or disallowed by the surrogate. If allowed, it left me free to do my duty by Edgar, now relieved forever in my eyes of all complicity in our uncle’s tragic death. If disallowed, it left Orpha free, as heiress and mistress of her own fortunes, to follow her inclination and formulate her future as her heart and reason dictated.

But now, with this former will still in existence, the question was whether I could find the strength to carry out the plan which my better nature prompted, when the alternative would be the restoration of Edgar to his old position with all the obligations it involved.

This was a matter not to be settled without a struggle. I must fight it out, and as I have said, alone. No one could help me; no one could advise me. Only myself could know myself and what was demanded of me by my own nature. No other being knew what had passed between Uncle and myself in those hours when it was given me to learn his heart’s secrets and the strength of the wish which had dominated his later life. Had Wealthy not spoken—had she not cleared Edgar from all complicity in Uncle’s premature death,—had I possessed a doubt or even the shadow of one, that in this she had spoken the whole unvarnished truth, there would have been no question as to my duty in the present emergency and I should have been sleeping, at this midnight hour just as Edgar was, or at the most, keeping a nurse’s watch over him, but no vigil such as I was holding now.

He was guilty of deception—guilty of taking an unfair advantage of me at a critical point in my life. He did not rightly love Orpha, and was lacking in many qualities desirable in one destined to fill a large place in civic life. But these were peccadilloes in comparison to what we had feared; and remembering his good points and the graces which embellished him, and the absolute certainty which I could not but feel that in time, with Lucy married and irrevocably removed from him, he would come to appreciate Orpha, I felt bound to ask myself whether I was justified in taking from him every incentive towards the higher life which our uncle had foreseen for him when he planned his future—a future which, I must always remember, my coming and my coming only had disturbed.

I have not said it, but from the night when, lying on my bed I saw my uncle at my side and felt his trembling arms pressing on my breast and heard him in the belief that it was at Edgar’s bedside he knelt, sobbing in my ear, “I cannot do it. I have tried to and the struggle is killing me,” I had earnestly vowed and, with every intention of keeping my vow, that I would let no ambition of my own, no love of luxury or power, no craving for Orpha’s affection, nothing which savored entirely of self should stand in the way of Edgar’s fortunes so long as I believed him worthy of my consideration. This may explain my sense of duty towards Orpha and also the high-strung condition of my nerves from the day tragedy entered our home and with it the deep felt fear that he did not merit that consideration.

I was aware what Mr. Jackson would say to all this—what any lawyer would say who had me for a client. They would find reason enough for me to let things take their natural course.

But would that exonerate me from acting the part of a true man as I had come to conceive it?

Would my days and nights be happier and my sleep more healthful if with a great fortune in hand, and blessed with a wife I adored, I had to contemplate the lesser fortunes of him who was the darling of the man from whom I had received these favors?

I shuddered at the mere thought of such a future. Always would his image rise in shadowy perspective before me. It would sit with me at meals, brood at my desk, and haunt every room in this house which had been his home from childhood while it had been mine for the space only of a few months. Together, we had fathomed its secret. Together, we had trod its strangely concealed stairway. The sense of an unseen presence which had shaken the hearts of many in traversing its halls was no longer a mystery; but the by-ways in life which the harassed soul must tread have their own hidden glooms and their own unexpectedness; and the echoes of steps we hear but cannot see, linger long in the consciousness and do not always end with the years. Should I brave them? Dare I brave them when something deep within me protested with an insistent, inexorable disclaimer?

The conflict waxed so keen and seemed destined to be so prolonged—for self is a wily adversary and difficult to conquer—that I grew impatient and the air heavy with the oppression of the darkness in which I sat. I was in Edgar’s den and comfortable enough; but such subjects as occupied me in this midnight hour call for light, space and utmost freedom of movement if they would be viewed aright and settled sensibly. Edgar was sleeping quietly; why not visit Uncle’s old room and do what he once told me to do when under the stress of an overwhelming temptation—sit within view of Orpha’s portrait and test my wishes by its wordless message.

But when I had entered the great room and, still in solitude though not in darkness, pulled the curtain from before that breathing canvas, the sight of features so dear bursting thus suddenly upon me made me forget my errand—forget everything but love. But gradually as I gazed, the purity of those features and the searching power they possessed regained its influence over me and I knew that if I would be true to her and true to myself,—above all, if I would be true to my uncle and the purpose of his life, I should give Edgar his chance.

For, in these long hours of self-analysis, I had discovered that deep in the inmost recesses of my mind there existed a doubt, vitiating every hope as it rose, whether we were right in assuming that the will we had come upon at the bottom of the walled-in stairway was the one he meant us to find and abide by. The box in which it was thrust held a former testament of his manifestly discarded. What proof had we that in thus associating the two he had not meant to discard both. None whatever. We could not even tell whether he knew or did not know which will he was handling. The right will was in the right envelope when we found it, he must therefore have changed them back, but whether in full knowledge of what he was doing, or in the confusion of a mind greatly perturbed by the struggle Wealthy had witnessed in him at the fireside, who could now decide. The intention with which this mortally sick man, with no longer prospect of life before him than the two weeks promised him by the doctor, forced himself to fit a delicate key into an imperceptible lock and step by step, without assistance, descend a stairway but little wider than his tread, into depths damp with the chill of years for the purpose of secreting there a will contradictory to the one he had left in the room above, could never now be known. We could but guess at it, I in my way, and Edgar in his, and the determining power—by which I mean the surrogate’s court—in its.

And because intention is all and guessing would never satisfy me, I vowed again that night, with my eyes fixed on Orpha’s as they shone upon me from her portrait, that come weal, or come woe,

Edgar should have his chance.