The step on the stair

by Anna Katharine Green

And then I spoke of Edgar and won her glad consent to my intention of taking care of him as long as he would suffer it or need me. After which, she left me with the understanding that I would summon all the remaining members of the household and tell them from my personal knowledge what they would soon be learning, possibly with less accuracy, from the city newspapers.

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.