XVII
No attempt was made during those first few grief-stricken hours to settle the question alluded to above. Of course it would be an easy matter to find the will which he from sheer physical weakness could not have put very far away. But Edgar showed no anxiety to find it and I studiously refrained from showing any; while Orpha seemed to have forgotten everything but her loss.
But at nightfall Edgar came to where I was pacing the verandah and, halting in the open French window, said without preamble and quite brusquely for him:
“The will of which Uncle spoke as having been taken from the other envelope and concealed in some drawer or other, cannot be found. It is not in the cubby-hole at the back of his bed or in any of the drawers or subdivisions of his desk. You were with him later than I last night. Did he intimate to you in any way where he intended to put it?”
“I left him while the two wills, or at least the two envelopes, still remained in his hands. But Clarke ought to be able to tell you. He is the one most likely to have gone in immediately upon my departure.”
“Clarke says that he no sooner entered Uncle’s presence than he was ordered out, with an injunction not to come back or to allow any one else to approach the room for a full half hour. My uncle wished to be alone.”
“And was he obeyed?”
“Clarke says that he was. Wealthy was sitting in her usual place in the hall as he went by to his room; and answered with a quiet nod when he told her what Uncle’s wishes were. She is the last person to disobey them. Yet Uncle had been so emphatic that more than once he stole about the corner to see if she were still sitting where he had left her. And she was. Neither he nor she disturbed him until the time was up. Then Clarke went in. Uncle was sitting in his great chair looking very tired. The envelopes were in his hand but he allowed Clarke to add them to a pile of other documents lying on the stand by his bed where they still were when Wealthy came in. She says she was astonished to see so many valuable papers lying there, for he usually kept everything of the kind in the little cubby-hole let into the head of his bed. But when she offered to put them there he said ‘No,’ and was very peremptory indeed in his demand that she should go down to Orpha’s room on an errand, which while of no especial moment, would keep her from the room for fifteen minutes if not longer. She went and when she came back the envelopes as well as all the other papers were still lying on the stand. Later, at his request, she put them all back in the drawer.”
“Looking at them as she did so?”
“No.”
“Who got them out this morning? The two envelopes, I mean.”
“She, and it was not till then that she noticed that one of them was empty. She says, and the plausibility of her surmise you must acknowledge, that it was during the time she was below with Orpha, that Uncle took out the will now missing from its envelope and hid it away. Where, we cannot conceive.”
“What do you know of this woman?”
“Nothing but what is good. She has had the confidence of many people for years.”
“It is an extraordinary situation in which we find ourselves,” I commented, approaching him where he still stood in the open window. “But there cannot be any real difficulty ahead of us. The hiding-places which in his feeble state he could reach, are few. To-morrow will see this necessary document in hand. Meanwhile, you are the master.”
I said it to try him. Though my tone was a matter-of-fact one he could not but feel the sting of such a declaration from me.
And he did, and fully as much as I expected.
“You seem to think,” he said, with a dilation of the nostril and a sudden straightening of his lips which while it lasted made him look years older than his age, “that there is such a thing as the possibility of some other person taking that place upon the finding and probating of the remaining will.”
“I have reason to, Edgar.”
“How much reason, Quenton?”
“Only my uncle’s word.”
“Ah!” He was very still, but the shot went home. “And what did he say?” he asked after a moment of silent communion with himself.
“That I was the man.”
I repeated these words with as little offense as possible. I felt that no advantage should be taken of his ignorance if indeed he were as ignorant as he seemed. Nor did I feel like wounding his feelings. I simply wanted no misunderstandings to arise.
“You the man! He said that?”
“Those were his exact words.”
“The man to administer his wealth? To take his place in this community? To—” his voice sank lower, there was even an air of apology in his manner—“to wed his daughter?”
“Yes. And to my mind,”—I said it fervently—“this last honor out-weighs all the rest. I love Orpha deeply and devotedly. I have never told her so, but few women are loved as I love her.”
“You dare?” The word escaped him almost without his volition. “Didn’t you know that there at least I have the precedence? That she and I are engaged—”
“Truly, Edgar?”
He looked down at my hand which I had laid in honest appeal on his arm and as he did so he flushed ever so slightly.
“I regard myself as engaged to her.”
“Yet you do not love her. Not as I do,” I hastened to add. “She is my past, my present and my future; she is my whole life. Otherwise my conduct would be inexcusable. There is no reason why I should take precedence of you in other ways than that.”
He was taken aback. He had not expected any such an avowal from me. I had kept my secret well. It had not escaped the father’s eye but it had that of the lukewarm lover.
“You have some excuse for your presumption,” he admitted at last. “There has been no public recognition of our intentions, nor have we made any display of our affection. But you know it now, and must eliminate from your program that hope which you say is your whole life. As for the rest, I might as well tell you, now as later, that nothing but the sight of the lost will, made out as you have the hardihood to declare, will ever convince me that Uncle, even in the throes of approaching dissolution, would so far forget the affection of years as to give into the hands of my betrothed wife for public destruction the will he had made while under the stress of that affection. The one we all saw reduced to ashes was the one in which your name figured the largest. That I shall always believe and act upon till you can show me in black and white the absolute proof that I have made a mistake.”
He spoke with an air of dignity and yet with an air of detachment also, not looking me in the eye. The sympathy I had felt for him in his unfortunate position left me and I became boldly critical of everything he said. In every matter in which we, creatures of an hour, are concerned, there are depths which are never fully sounded. The present one was not likely to prove an exception. But the time had not come for me to show any positive distrust, so I let him go, with what I tried to make a dispassionate parting.
“Neither of us wish to take advantage of the other. That is why we are both disposed to be frank. I shall stand on my rights, too, Edgar, if events prove that I am legally entitled to them. You cannot expect me to do otherwise. I am a man like yourself and I love Orpha.”
Like a flash he wheeled at that and came hastily back.
“Do you mean that according to your ideas she goes absolutely with the fortune, in these days of woman’s independence? You will have to change your ideas. Uncle would never bind her to his wishes like that.”
He spoke with a conviction not observable in anything he had said before. He was not surmising now but speaking from what looked very much like knowledge.
“Then you saw those two wills—read them—became acquainted with their contents before I knew of their existence?”
“Fortunately, yes,” he allowed.
“There you have the advantage of me. I have only a general knowledge of the same. They were not unfolded before my eyes.”
He did not respond to this suggestion as I had some hope that he would, but stood in silence, drumming nervously with his fingers on the framework of the window standing open at his side. My heart, always sensitive to changes of emotion, began pounding in my breast. He was meditating some action or formulating some disclosure, the character of which I could not even guess at. I saw resolution climaxing in the expression of his eye.
“Quenton, there is something you don’t know.” These words came with slow intensity; he was looking fairly at me now. “There is another will, a former one, drawn up and attested to previous to those which made a nightmare of our uncle’s final days. That one I have also seen, and what is more to the point, I believe it to be still in existence, either in some drawer of my uncle’s desk or in the hands of Mr. Dunn, our legal adviser, and consequently producible at any time. I will tell you on my honor that by the terms of this first will—the only one which will stand—I am given everything, over and above certain legacies, which were alike in all three wills.”
“No mention of Orpha?”
“Yes. He leaves her a stated sum and with such expressions of confidence and affection that no one can doubt he did what he did from a conception, mistaken perhaps but sincere, that he was taking the best course to secure her happiness.”
“Was this will made previous to my coming or after?”
“Before.”
“How long before, Edgar? You cannot question my right to know.”
“I question nothing but the good taste of this conversation on the part of both of us, while Uncle lies cold in the house!”
“You are right; we will defer it. Take my hand, Edgar. I have not from the beginning to the end played you false in this matter. Nor have I made any effort beyond being at all times responsive to Uncle’s goodness, to influence him in any unfair way against you. We are cousins and should be friends.”
He took a long breath, smiled faintly and reached out his hand to mine. “You have the more solid virtues,” he laughed, “and I ought to envy you. But I don’t. The lighter ones will win and when they do—not if mind you, but when—then we will talk of friendship.”
Not the sort of harangue calculated to calm my spirits or to make this day of mourning lose any of its gloom.