"Nobody, sir. Every servant in the house had gone to bed, except Jane" (my aunt's maid), "and she was going up the stairs over my head, sir, when I first went down into the cellar. I know she was, sir, for she called through the stairs to me, and she says, 'Master'll hear you, Robert.' You see, sir, Jane and me didn't know as it was so late, and we was frightened when we heard the clock strike half-past eleven."
"That will do, Robert," said Uncle Jo. "You can go," and Robert disappeared, relieved but puzzled. There seemed no possible explanation of the appearance of the letter there and then, except that hands had placed it there during the brief interval of Robert's being in the cellar. There were no human hands in the house which could have done it. Was a restless ghost wandering there, bent on betraying poor Esther's secrets to strangers? What did it, what could it mean?
"Will you read this one with me, Nell?" said my uncle, turning it over reverently and opening it.
"No," I said, "but I will watch you read it;" and I sat down on the floor at his feet.
The letter was very short; he read it twice without speaking; and then said, in an unsteady voice: "This is an earlier letter than the other, I think. This is a joyous one; poor Esther! I believe I know her whole story. But the mystery is inexplicable! I would take down these walls if I thought I could get at the secret."
Long past midnight we sat and talked it all over; and racked our brains in vain to invent any theory to account for the appearance of the letters on that cellar stairway. My uncle's tender interest in the poor dead Esther was fast being overshadowed by the perplexing mystery.
A few days after this, Mary the cook found another of the letters when she first went down-stairs in the morning, and Robert placed it by my uncle's plate, with the rest of his mail. It was the strangest one of all, for there was not a word of writing in it that could be read. It was a foreign letter; some lines of the faded old postmarks were still visible on the back. The first page looked as if it had been written over with some sort of sympathetic ink; but not a word could be deciphered. Folded in a small piece of the thinnest of paper was a mouldy and crumbling flower, of a dull-brown color; on the paper was written,--"Pomegranate blossom, from Jaffa," and a few lines of poetry, of which we could make out only here and there a word.
Even Aunt Sarah was thoroughly aroused and excited now. Robert had been in the cellar very late on the previous night, and was sure that at that time no papers were on the stairs.
"I never go down them stairs, sir," said Robert, "without looking--and listening too," he added under his breath, with a furtive look back at the cook, who was standing in the second doorway of the butler's pantry. The truth was, Robert had been afraid of the cellar ever since the finding of the second letter: and all the servants shared his uneasiness. Between eleven at night and seven the next morning, this mute ghostly waif from Palestine, with the half-century old dust of a pomegranate flower in its keeping, had come up that dark stairway. It appeared now that the letters were always found on the fourth stair from the top. This fact had not before been elicited, but there seemed little doubt about it. Even little Princess said,--
"Yes, papa, I am sure that the one I found was on that stair; for I now remember Fido came up with only just one or two bounds to the top, as soon as he saw me."