Myra

by Ann S. Stephens

The next day, Daniel Clark rode into the city, and was closeted with several of his old and intimate friends. In the house of one of these friends the others met by appointment, and there Daniel Clark read his last will and testament, making his child, Myra Clark, the heiress to his vast possessions, and there he solemnly declared his marriage with Zulima, that child’s mother. After this he sat down in the presence of his friends and chosen executors, and placed his signature to the will that his own hands had written.

When Mr. Clark left them that day, his friends observed that the hand with which he clasped theirs was burning, and that his eyes looked heavy and swollen. They remarked, too, that he had never once smiled during the whole interview; but the occasion was a solemn one, and so they merely gave these things a passing thought, deeming them but the result of some undue excitement.

At nightfall Mr. Clark reached the dwelling of Ross. It had been Zulima’s residence, and he yearned to lie down in the room that she had occupied, and to press the same pillow that she had wept upon. All the deep tenderness of his early love for that wronged woman came back to him with a knowledge of her blamelessness. Pride, the great sin of his nature, had been prostrated with the knowledge that he, with all his haughty self-reliance, all his splendor of intellect, had been influenced by base and ungrateful men to wrong the being dearest to him in life. All the manifestation of displeasure that he displayed toward Ross was a desire to avoid his presence, but even that awoke the ever-vigilant suspicion of the man. He had placed menial spies on the steps of Zulima, but in hunting down the sterner game Ross played the spy himself. The plantation which Ross occupied was the property of his patron, and in the dwelling Mr. Clark had always kept his own separate apartments. On returning home that night he entered a little library belonging to these apartments, and opening an escritoir had taken from thence an ebony box, in which were his most valuable papers. After placing the will therein he had carefully locked the escritoir and the room before retiring to his chamber for the night.

At two o’clock the next morning there shone in this library a faint light. By the escritoir stood Ross softly trying a key in the lock, and behind him upon a table rested a dark lantern, so placed that all its rays fell in one direction, leaving most of the room in darkness. Noiselessly the key was turned, and without a sound was the escritoir opened, and the ebony box dragged forth.

The will was the first paper that presented itself on opening the box. Ross took it up, seated himself in Mr. Clark’s easy chair, and began to read; nervously glancing over the pages, and starting from time to time if the slightest sound reached his ear.

“As I thought!” he said, in a stern, low voice, dashing his hand against the paper till the sheets rustled loud enough to make him start. “Thus has one day undone the work of years. I knew that something had warped his heart against me!”

Thoughtfully, and with a frowning brow, Ross folded up the will, laid it in its depository, and secured it as before. At first he was tempted to take the light from his lantern, and consume it at once, but the rash thought was abandoned after a moment’s reflection, for there was danger at any hour that Mr. Clark might detect the fraud and place another will beyond his reach. With his duplicate key and ready access to all the apartments, there was little to dread while the will remained under that roof.

The moment every thing was safe, Ross closed his lantern, and sat for more than an hour musing in the darkness. When he came forth, there was a deep and gloomy cloud upon his brow; the pale moonbeams fell upon it through the windows, as he passed to his own room, but the moonbeams failed to reveal the black thought that lay hidden beneath that frown. There was more than fraud in that hideous thought.

Mr. Clark slept in Zulima’s chamber, upon the couch her delicate limbs had pressed, and upon the pillow where her head had found its sweetest slumbers. Perhaps the fever-spirit grew riotous and strong on the memory which these objects aroused, or it might have been that, without all these reminiscences, the illness that came upon him that night would have proved more painful still. The morning found the heart-stricken man faint and strengthless as a child. A vague dreaminess hung about him, which did not quite amount to delirium, and yet it could not have been said that he was quite conscious of passing events. He talked in a low voice of his wife and child: there was something sad and broken-hearted in every word that he uttered, totally at variance with his usual proud and lofty reserve. He seemed to take little interest in those about him, but murmured gently to himself, and always of them. If this was delirium—and it must have been, so totally was it at variance with his previous manner—there was something exceedingly touching and mournful in it, for the death-bed of that noble and strong man seemed marked by a degree of solemn tenderness that might have befitted the death-pillow of a loving woman.

At first the disease seemed scarcely more than an attack of nervous fever, such as often follows violent excitement. The spirits of heaven who guarded that death-bed alone can tell if neglect or irritation, or deeper and darker causes combined to terminate that slight illness in death. Ross was his attendant; constant and unceasing was the assiduity of his watch. No physician, no friend entered the sick-room, and for three days that noble man lay struggling with death, in the presence of his bitterest enemy, and one faithful old body-servant, who could only watch and weep over the master who was to him almost more than mortal.