Gertrude Atherton - Ancestors

“Well?” he demanded, sharply. “What is it? What’s up? Why doesn’t Zeal open? I saw him in Piccadilly on Saturday and he stared at me as if he had never seen me before. I thought at the moment it was some of his damned impertinence, but concluded that he had something on his mind. He looked more dead than alive.”

Gwynne’s back was to the light, and he controlled his voice, although his heart was thumping. “Well, he has been, poor chap—awfully seedy—I am really worried. He may have anticipated a final hemorrhage, and crawled home to die.” He cherished the hope that Zeal had been at pains to procure an untraceable drug.

“Ah! Well—I hope that is it if the poor fellow is dead. He looked as if he had more than ill-health on his mind. I thought he had pulled up, but no doubt he went to pieces over some wretched woman again. Come, let us get in. I don’t want the servants to know anything of this at present.”

They threw themselves against the door. The old gentleman was heavy and Gwynne sound and wiry in spite of his delicate appearance. The door was stout but its hinges were old, and after several attempts they drove it in. Lord Strathland’s face was pale and he was panting, but he led the way rapidly through the sitting-room into the bedroom.

Zeal had undressed, extended himself on the bed, and covered his body with an eider-down quilt. Lord Strathland jerked it off, and both saw what they had expected to see, for a faint odor of burnt powder lingered in the rooms.

Lord Strathland’s face was ghastly, almost blue. He had anticipated death, not with the imagination of the young, but dully, through the atrophied faculties of his age, and the shock could hardly have been greater had he found his grandson without warning.

“What does this mean?” he demanded, thickly. “You know and I will know.”

Gwynne took him firmly by the arm and turned him about. “Not here,” he said. “Come to the library. I will tell you, but I am no more fit to talk just now than you are to listen.”

His grandfather submitted, and Gwynne dropped his arm and rearranged the quilt over his cousin’s body. At the same moment Lord Strathland’s eyes lit on a sealed letter addressed to himself. Before Gwynne could interfere he had broken the seal. It ran:

MY LORD,—I murdered Brathland. In cold blood—saving the fact that I was drunk. My entire private fortune has gone for purposes of blackmail. Even that might not have saved me eventually from the hangman, we have grown so damned democratic. All things considered, I am sure you will agree that it is quite proper I should make the exit of a gentleman while there is yet time. Jack will give you further particulars, should you care to listen to them. ZEAL.”

He too had known nothing of the condition of his grandfather’s heart, and it had amused him to plan a last shock to the perennial optimism and complacency of the person he disliked most on earth. The smile was still on his frozen lips that expressed the amused anticipation of his brain. Death, to do him justice, he had met with none of the cowardice he had vaunted, and consistently with his arid cynical soul.

“Don’t read it! Don’t!” Gwynne had exclaimed, in agony, and forgetting the awful figure on the bed in his alarm at the sight of his grandfather’s face. “If you must know the truth let me tell it in my own way.”

But Lord Strathland read, and fell at his feet like a bundle of old clothes.

Gwynne wondered if he should ever shake off the pall-like memories of the past week: the testimony before the coroner, in which every word had to be weighed as carefully as if life instead of the honor of the worthless dead were at stake, the reporters from the less dignified of the British newspapers, and the American correspondents, two of whom dodged the vigilance of the servants, entered the Abbey by a window, and took snap shots of the lower rooms and of the coffins in the death-chamber; the painful scenes with the women of the family, who had descended in a body; the wearisome interview with the family solicitor, in the course of which he had learned that he was heir to little more than the entailed properties; which must be let in order to insure an income for his three unmarried aunts, Zeal’s five girls, and himself; the hideous reiteration of “your lordship” by the obsequious servants, that reproduced in his mind the slow deep notes of the passing bell, tolled in the village for his grandfather and cousin.

A letter from Julia Kaye had fluttered in like a dove of promise, but he had never been able to recall anything in the six pages of graceful sympathy but her allusions to the dead as “the marquess” and “the earl.” He told himself angrily that his brain must have weakened to notice a solecism at such a time, but it is in moments of abnormal mental strain that trifles have their innings; and during the beautiful service in the chapel he caught himself wondering if any woman of his own class could have made such a slip. Always deaf to gossip, he had no suspicion that his Julia had been laughed at more than once for her inability to grasp all the unwritten laws of a world which she had entered too late. With an ear in which a title lingered like a full voluptuous note of music, she was blunt to certain of the democratic canons of modern society. Although it gave her the keenest pleasure to address the highest bulwarks of the peerage off-handedly as “duke” and “duchess,” there had been moments of confusion when she had lapsed naturally into “your grace.” And it would have seemed like a lost opportunity to have alluded to a titled foreigner without his “von” or “de,” even where there was a more positive title to use as often as she pleased. It was the one weak spot in a singularly acute and accomplished mind.

But of all this Gwynne knew nothing, and he was dully wondering if a great love could be affected by trifles, and if his brain and character were of less immutable material than he had believed, his mental vision still straying through the insupportable gloom of the past week, when he heard a light foot-fall beyond the door. He sprang to his feet, cursing his nerves, and was by no means reassured upon seeing the long figure of a woman, dressed entirely in white, a candle in her hand, approaching him down the dark corridor. He had never given a moment’s thought in his active life to psychic phenomena, but he was in a state of mind where nothing would have surprised him, and he had turned cold to his finger-tips when a familiar voice reassured him.

“I am not Lady Macbeth,” said Isabel, with a tremor in her own voice, as she entered and blew out the candle. “But I felt like her as I braved the terrors of all those dark corridors and that staircase in my wild desire to talk to a living person. I had arrived at that stage where all your ancestors gibbered at the foot of my bed. Flora has been sleeping with me, but your mother wanted her to-night, and I am deserted.”

“What a lot of babies you are!” Gwynne was delighted to wreak his self-contempt on some one else, but glad of the interruption, and unexpectedly mellowed by the sight of a pretty woman after the red noses and sable plumage of the past week. It was true that he had seen Isabel at dinner, but like Flora she had worn a black gown out of respect to the family woe, and he hated the sight of black.

Now she wore a gown of soft white wool fastened at the throat and waist with a blue ribbon; and even her profile, whose severity he had disapproved, having a masculine weakness for pugs, was softened by the absence of the coils or braids that commonly framed it: her hair hung in one tremendous plait to the heels of her slippers.