The Sword of Damocles Part 24

"Too late!" The tone in which this simple phrase was uttered was indescribable. Bertram slowly nodded his head.

"He had already disposed of all the papers, and favorably," he said.

"But--"

"And not only that," pursued Bertram. "He had issued orders by telegraph, that it was impossible to countermand. It was at the Forty Second Street depot I found him at last. He was just on the point of starting for the west."

"And has he gone?"

"Yes sir."

Mr. Sylvester walked slowly to the window. It was raining drearily without, but he did not notice the falling drops or raise his eyes to the leaden skies.

"Did you meet any one?" he asked at length. "Any one that you know, I mean, or who knows you?"

"No one but Mr. Stuyvesant."

"Mr. Stuyvesant!"

"Yes sir," returned Bertram, dropping his eyes before his uncle's astonished glance. "I was coming out of a house in Broad Street when he pa.s.sed by and saw me, or at least I believed he saw me. There is no mistaking him, sir, for any one else; besides it is a custom of his I am told, to saunter through the down town streets after the warehouses are all closed for the night. He enjoys the quiet I suppose, finds food for reflection in the sleeping aspect of our great city." There was gloom in Bertram's tone; his uncle looked at him curiously.

"What house was it from which you were coming when he pa.s.sed you?"

"A building where Tueller and Co. do business, shady operators in paper, as you know."

"And you believed he recognized you?"

"I cannot be sure, sir. It was dark, but I thought I saw him look at me and give a slight start."

Ah, how desolate sounds the drip, drip of a ceaseless rain, when conversation languishes and the ear has time to listen!

"I will explain to Mr. Stuyvesant when I see him, that you were in search of a man with whom I had pressing business," observed Mr.

Sylvester at last.

"No," murmured Bertram with effort, "it might emphasize the occurrence in his mind; let the matter drop where it is."

There was another silence, during which the drip of the rain on the window-ledge struck on the young man's ears like the premonitory thud of falling earth upon a coffin-lid. At length his uncle turned and advanced rapidly towards him.

"Bertram," said he, "you have done me a favor for which I thank you.

What you have learned in the course of its accomplishment I cannot tell.

Enough perhaps to make you understand why I warned you from the dangerous path of speculation, and set your feet in a way that if adhered to with steadfast purpose, ought to lead you at last to a safe and honorable prosperity. Now--No, Bertram," he bitterly interrupted himself as the other opened his lips, "I am in need of no especial commiseration, my affairs seem bound to prosper whether I will or not--now I have one more commission to give you. Miss Fairchild--" his voice quavered and he leaned heavily on the chair near which he was standing. "Have you seen her, Bertram? Is the poor child quite prostrated? Has this frightful occurrence made her ill, or does she bear up with fort.i.tude under the shock of this sudden calamity?"

"She is not ill, but her suffering is undoubted. If you could see her and say a few words to relieve her anxiety in regard to yourself, I think it would greatly comfort her. Her main thought seems to be for you, sir."

Mr. Sylvester frowned, raised his hand with a repelling gesture, and hastily opened his lips. Bertram thought he was about to utter some pa.s.sionate phrase. But instead of that he merely remarked, "I am sorry I cannot see her, but it is quite impossible. You must stand between me and this poor child, Bertram. Tell her I send her my love; tell her that I am quite well; anything to solace her and make these dark days less dreary. If she wants a friend with her, let a messenger be sent for whomever she desires. I place no restrictions upon anything you choose to do for her comfort or happiness, but let me be spared the sight of any other face than yours until this is all over. After the funeral--it nay sound ungracious, but I am far from feeling so--I shall wish to be left alone for awhile. If she can be made to understand this--"

"I think her instincts, sir, have already led her to divine your wishes.

If I am not mistaken, she is even now making preparations to return to her relatives."

Mr. Sylvester gave a start. "What, so soon!" he murmured, and the sadness of his tone smote Bertram to the heart. But in another moment he recovered himself and shortly exclaimed, "Well! well! that is as it should be. You will watch over her Bertram, and see that she is kindly cared for. It would be a grief to me to have her go away with any more than the necessary regret at losing one who was always kind to _her_."

"I will look after her as after a sister," returned Bertram. "She shall miss no attention which I can supply."

With a look Mr. Sylvester expressed his thanks. Then while Bertram again attempted to speak, he gave him a cordial pressure of the hand, and withdrew once more to his favorite spot.

And the rain beat, beat, and it sounded more and more like the droppings of earth upon a nailed down coffin-lid.

The funeral was a large one. The largest some said that had ever been seen in that quarter of the city. If Mrs. Sylvester's position had not been what it was, the sudden and awful nature of her death, would have been sufficient to draw together a large crowd. Among those who thus endeavored to show their respect was Miss Stuyvesant.

"I could not join you here in your pleasures," she whispered to Paula in the short interview they had upstairs, preparatory to the services, "but I cannot keep away in the dark hours!" And from her look and the clasp of her hand, Paula gained fresh courage to endure the slow pressure of anxiety and grief with which she was secretly burdened.

Moreover she had the pleasure of introducing her beloved friend to Mr.

Bertram Sylvester, a pleasure which she had long promised herself whenever the opportunity should arrive, as Miss Stuyvesant was somewhat of an enthusiast as regards music. She did not notice particularly then, but she remembered afterwards, with what a blus.h.i.+ng cheek and beautiful glance the dainty young girl received his bow, and responded to his few respectful words of pleasure at meeting the daughter of a man whom he had learned to regard with so much respect.

Mr. Sylvester was in a room by himself. The few glimpses obtained of him by his friends, convinced them all, that this trouble touched him more deeply than those who knew his wife intimately could have supposed. Yet he was calm, and already wore that fixed look of rigidity which was henceforth to distinguish the expression of his fine and n.o.ble features.

In the ride to Greenwood he spoke little. Paula who sat in the carriage with him did not receive a word, though now and then his eye wandered towards her with an expression that drove the blood to her heart, and made the whole day one awful memory of incomprehensible agony and dim but terrible forebodings. The ways of the human soul, in its crises of grief or remorse were so new to her. She had pa.s.sed her life beside rippling streams and in peaceful meadows, and now all at once, with shadow on shadow, the dark pictures of life settled down before her, and she could not walk without stumbling upon jagged rocks, deep yawning chasms and caves of impenetrable gloom.

The sight of the grave appalled her. To lay in such a bed as that, the fair and delicate head that had often found the downy pillows of its azure couch too hard for its languid pressure. To hide in such a dismal, deep, dark gap, a form so white and but a little while before, so imposing in its splendor and so commanding in its requirements. The thought of heaven brought no comfort. The beauty they had known lay here; soulless, inert, rigid and responseless, but here. It was gifted with no wings with which to rise. It owned no attachment to higher spheres. Death had scattered the leaves of this white rose, but from all the boundless mirror of the outspread heavens, no recovered semblance of its perfected beauty, looked forth to solace Paula or a.s.suage the misery of her glance into this gloomy pit. Ah, Ona, the social ladder reaches high, but it does not scale the regions where your poor soul could find comfort now.

Bertram saw the white look on Paula's face and silently offered his arm.

But there are moments when no mortal help can aid us; instants when the soul stands as solitary in the universe, as the s.h.i.+p-wrecked mariner on a narrow strip of rock in a boundless sea. Life may touch, but eternity enfolds us; we are single before G.o.d and as such must stand or fall.

Upon their return to the house, Mr. Sylvester withdrew with a few intimate friends to his room, and Paula, lonely beyond expression, went to her own empty apartment to finish packing her trunks and answer such notes as had arrived during her absence. For attention from outsiders was only too obtrusive. Many whom she had never met save in the most formal intercourse, flooded her now with expressions of condolence, which if they had not been all upon one pattern and that the most conventional, might have afforded her some relief. Two or three of the notes were precious to her and these she stowed safely away, one contained a deliberate offer of marriage from a wealthy old stock-broker; this she as deliberately burned after she had written a proper refusal. "He thinks I have no home," she murmured.

And had she? As she paced through the silent halls and elaborately furnished rooms on her way to her solitary dinner, she asked herself if any place would ever seem like home after this. Not that she was infatuated by its elegance. The lofty walls might dwindle, the gorgeous furniture grow dim, the works of beauty disappear, the whole towering structure contract to the dimensions of a simple cottage or what was worse, a seedy down-town house, if only the something would remain, the something that made return to Grotewell seem like the bending back of a towering stalk to the ground from which it had taken its root. "If?" she cried--and stopped there, her heart swelling she knew not why. Then again, "I thought I had found a father!" Then after a longer pause, a wild uncontrollable; "Bless! bless! bless!" which seemed to re-echo in the room long after her lingering step had left it.

"Will he let me go without a word?"

It was early morning and the time had come for Paula's departure. She was standing on the threshold of her room, her hands clasped, her eyes roving up and down the empty halls. "Will he let me go without a word?"

"O Miss Paula, what do you think?" cried Sarah, creeping slowly towards her from the spectral recesses of a dim corner. "Jane says Mr. Sylvester was up all last night too. She heard him go down stairs about midnight and he went through all the rooms like a gliding spectre and into _her_ room too!" she fearfully whispered; "and what he did there no one knows, but when he came out he locked the door, and this morning the cook heard him give orders to Samuel to have the trunks that were ready in Mrs.

Sylvester's room taken away. O Miss, do you think he can be going to give all those beautiful things to you?"

Paula recoiled in horror. "Sarah!" said she, and could say no more. The vision of that tall form gliding through the desolate house at midnight, bending over the soulless finery of his dead wife, perhaps stowing it away in boxes, came with too powerful a suggestion to her mind.

"Shure, I thought you would be pleased," murmured the girl and disappeared again into one of the dim recesses.

"Will he let me go without a word?"

"Miss Paula, Mr. Bertram Sylvester is waiting at the door in a carriage," came in low respectful tones to her ears, and Samuel's face full of regret appeared at the top of the stairs.

"I am coming," murmured the sad-hearted girl, and with a sob which she could not control, she took her last look of the pretty pink chamber in which she had dreamed so many dreams of youthful delight, and perhaps of youthful sorrow also, and slowly descended the stairs. Suddenly as she was pa.s.sing a door on the second floor, she heard a low deep cry.

"Paula!"