“What is it I fear?” she asked herself. “What is it I suspect? Let me put it into words, and see if it sounds so very dreadful. I suspect that Christine Bodine, in her girlhood—when, I dare say, she was rather pretty and piquant, after mother died made herself very necessary to my father and attracted him more than she ought to have done. Such people are very ambitious, and susceptible, too; and if my father was at all familiar in his manner toward her, she probably was flattered at once, and maybe cheated herself, into the belief that he would marry her, when such an idea never existed in his brain. She probably wrote to him, and he answered and at last made her see how mistaken she was in supposing he could ever think of her after having known my mother. And then, by way of amends, he settled that money upon her. Yes, that is probably the fact of the case,” she continued, and the tightness around her heart gave way. She could breathe more freely, and her hands ceased to beat the air, until like lightning there flashed into her mind:
“But where was Mr. La Rue, and where was Margery, when Christine wrote those letters to my father? Christine told me she was married soon after mother died, and that father was angry about it, as it took her from me. Oh, if I only knew the truth—and I can know it, in part, at least, by reading those letters which I hid away, swearing never to touch them, unless circumstances should seem to make it necessary; and it is necessary, I am sure. I must know the truth, or lose my mind. I am so unsettled since poor Phil died, and to brood over this will make me crazy in time. Yes, I must know who was the Tina who wrote those letters to father.”
Reinette had reached a decision; and, lighting her candle, she opened the door of the closet where she had hidden the letters months before. There was the box on the upper shelf just where she had left it, and where she could not reach it without a chair. This she brought from her room, and stepping into it, stood a moment looking at the box, while a feeling of terror began to take possession of her, and she felt as if the dead hand of her father were clutching her arm and holding her back.
“I do not believe I will do it,” she said, as she came down from the chair with a sense of that dead hand’s touch still upon her arm. “It seems just as if father were speaking to me and bidding me let the letters alone. I wish I had burned them when I found them, and then I should not be tempted. And why not burn them now, and so put it out of my reach to read them?” she continued, as she stood shivering before the hearth and listening to the storm which was beginning to beat against the windows.
February was coming in with gusts of snow and the shrieks of the wild north wind, which swept furiously past the house, and seemed to Reinette to have in it a sound of human sobbing. She thought of her father in the quiet grave-yard in Merrivale, with the tall pine overhanging his grave—of her mother, far off in Rome, where the violets and daisies blossom all the year round—and of Phil, asleep beneath the Eastern waters, with nothing to mark his grave, and her heart ached with a keener pain than she had ever felt before as she stood in her slippers and dressing-gown and shivered in the cold, gray, winter night. And always above everything else the name of Tina was in her mind, with a burning desire to solve the mystery and know who Tina was, and what she had been to Mr. Hetherton.
“I may as well burn them first as last,” she thought, and going again to the closet and mounting upon the chair she took the box from the shelf, and carrying it to the fire sat down upon the floor and began to open it.
There were four boxes in all, one within another, and Queenie opened each one till she came to the last and smallest, where lay the envelope containing the letters.
“There can be no harm in glancing at the handwriting, and then if I ever see Christine’s, as I sometime may, I shall know if they are the same,” she thought, and took out the yellow, time-worn package, which seemed to her so different from anything pertaining to herself or to her surroundings.
Looking at the outside begat an intense longing to know what was inside—to have her doubts confirmed or scattered to the winds, and at last she made a desperate resolve, and jerking her arm, which it seemed to her the dead hand still held firmly, she said, aloud:
“I shall read these letters now, though a thousand dead hands hold me.”