“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.
XVIII
That night I slept but little. I had much to grieve over; much to think about. I had lost my best friend. Of that I was sure. His place would never again be filled in my heart or in my imagination. Without him the house seemed a barren shell save for the dim unseen corner where my darling mourned in her own way the man we both loved.
Might we but have shared each other’s suffering!
But under the existing state of things, that could not be. Our relations, one to the other, were too unsettled. Which thought brought me at once face to face with the most hopeless of all my perplexities. How were Orpha and I to know—and when, if ever—what Uncle’s wishes were or what his final intentions? The will which would have made everything plain, as well as fixed the status of everybody in the house, had not been found; and among the disadvantages in which this placed me was the fact that he, as the present acknowledged head of the house, had rights which it would have been most unbecoming in me to infringe upon. If he wished a door to be closed against me, I could not, as a mere resident under his roof, ask to have it opened. For days—possibly for weeks,—at all events until he saw fit to pursue the search he had declared to be at present so hopeless, it was for me to remain quiescent—a man apart—anxious for my rights but unable as a gentleman and a guest to make a move towards obtaining them.
And unhappily for us, instantaneous action was what the conditions called for. An immediate and exhaustive inquiry, conducted by Edgar in the presence of every occupant of the house, offered the only hope of arriving speedily at the truth of what it was not to the interests of any of us to leave much longer in doubt.
For some one of the few persons admitted to Uncle’s presence after Edgar and I had left it, must have aided him in the disposal of this missing document. He was far too feeble to have taken it from the room himself, nor could he, without a helping hand, have made any extraordinary effort within it which would have necessitated the displacing of furniture or the opening of drawers or other receptacles not plainly in sight and within easy access.
If the will which his sudden death prevented him from definitely locating was not found within twenty-four hours, it would never be found. The one helping him will have suppressed it; and this is what I believed had already occurred. For every servant in the house from his man Clarke to a shy little sewing girl who from time to time scurried on timid feet through the halls, favored Edgar to the point of self-effacing devotion.