Chapter X
Vickers had heard Overton’s voice downstairs, and would have liked to explain his reasons for staying. And yet they would have been difficult to define. He had come home the evening before, fully determined to go. He had dressed and packed, and just as he was ready a knock had come at his door. Waiting only to hide his bags, and to shut up all the bureaus which the haste of his packing had left open, he heard Nellie call to him. For an instant he had thought that she had discovered his intention; the next he heard Nellie was asking him to go for a doctor.
Before dawn, however, a time had come when he might easily have slipped away, unobserved, if he had wanted to; and yet he hadnot again thought of going. No one, he had said to himself, would go away and leave in such trouble the household that had sheltered him. Nor was it only the sense of companionship with Nellie that kept him, but the unwonted knowledge that some one depended on and needed him.
Trained nurses were not to be obtained in Hilltop, and even if they had been, most of the work of nursing would have devolved on Vickers, for Mr. Lee would not let him go out of his sight. All that day and most of the next night Vickers sat beside his bed, wondering whether the old man’s death was to be the end of the story or the beginning. Should he stay, or should he go? He told himself that Overton was right, and that the only decent thing for a wanderer and a fugitive to do was to go quickly and quietly. But the remembrance of Emmons poisoned the vision of his own departure.
On the second day of his illness, Mr. Lee died. For all his devotion Vickers was not with him at the moment. The old man had fallen into a comfortable sleep about noon; and Nellie had made Vickers go and lie down. He was awakened a few hours afterward by the girl herself. She came and sat down beside his sofa, and told him gently that his father had died without waking.
“My poor child,” said Vickers, “were you all alone?”
“I have been thinking that I ought to tell you, Bob,” she went on, disregarding his interest in her welfare, “that you have so much more than made up to my uncle. He has been happier than I ever expected to see him. I think that must be a help to you, Bob;” and, under the impression that he was suffering a very intimate sorrow, she gave him her hand.
Vickers took it only for a moment, and then replaced it on her lap.
They sat in the twilight of the darkened room for some time, talking of plans and arrangements.
The funeral took place on Friday, and Hilltop, which had always honored the name of Lee, turned out in full force. And to increase Vickers’s embarrassment, every member of the family came to pay the old gentleman a last token of respect.
“You must stand near me, Nellie,” he said to her the morning of the funeral, “and tell me their names.”
“Oh, you can’t have forgotten them, Bob,” she answered. “In the first place, Uncle Joseph, who gave you the goat when you were a little boy. You remember the goat, don’t you?”
He merely smiled at her for answer, and taking his meaning, she returned quickly:
“Ah, not to-day, Bob. I could not bearto think you would repudiate your father to-day.” Then, after a moment, for he said nothing, she went on: “Of course you remember Bertha and Jane. You used to be so fond of Jane. They are coming by the early train. They must have left Philadelphia before eight o’clock. I think that is wholly on your account, Bob.”
Subsequently he discovered that they were daughters of a sister of Mrs. Lee’s, his supposed first cousins.
They came some minutes before any one else. Vickers was alone in the parlor decorously drawing on a pair of black gloves, when they were ushered in. Fortunately they were quite unmistakable—two neat, rustling, little black figures, followed by a solitary male, whose name proved to be Ferdinand. Looking up, Vickers greeted them without hesitation:
“Why, Jane and Bertha!” he cried.
They lifted their veils, displaying cheerful and pretty countenances, and to his intense amusement, each imprinted a kiss upon his ready cheek.
“Dear Bob,” said one of them, “we are so sorry for you. And yet how glad you must have been to be at home when it happened. Poor Uncle Robert! We haven’t seen him for years.”
“Sam was so dreadfully sorry he could not come,” said the other, with a manner so frankly disingenuous that Vickers could not resist answering:
“Aye, I suppose so!”
Not in the least abashed, the little lady smiled back.
“Well, it is strange,” she admitted, “that he always has a toothache when it is a question of a family funeral. He keeps one tooth especially, I believe.” And feeling that more friendly relations were now established, shecontinued: “How tall you are, Bob. Were you always as tall as that? You look sad, poor boy. Why don’t you come down after the ceremony, and stay a few weeks with us, and let us try to console you?”
“Thank you,” said Vickers, “but I shall have to be here until to-morrow.”
“Oh, I see. Nellie will need you. But you might ask her. Nellie,” she added, “we want Bob to come with us after the funeral. He seems to think you can’t spare him.”
Nellie, who had just entered the room, looked for an instant somewhat confused by this sudden address, but almost at once she replied coldly that she had spared Bob for so many years that she could probably do it again.
Without very much encouragement the two new cousins continued to cling to Vickers throughout the remainder of the ceremonies. They looked upon him as a direct reward ofvirtue. They had risen at an impossibly early hour, given up engagements merely from a sense of obligation to an old gentleman they hardly knew. The discovery of a good-looking cousin was a return—no more than just, but utterly unexpected.
For his part, if he had not been very conscious that this was his last day with Nellie, he would have enjoyed the company of the others. He took them down to the station and put them on their train, though he continued to refuse to accompany them.
“But you’ll come some day, soon, won’t you, Bob?” Bertha exclaimed. “I hear you are very wicked, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Yes,” said Vickers, “I myself understand that I am an excellent subject for reform.”
“We won’t try and reform you,” they answered; “we like you as you are,” and they kissed him again, and departed.
On his return to the house he heard that Nellie had gone to lie down, leaving word that Mr. Overton was coming after lunch. Overton had been Mr. Lee’s man of business. He and Emmons arrived soon after two. They sat round the library stiffly. Only Overton seemed to be as usual, his calm Yankee face untouched by the constraint visible in the others.
“I don’t know whether you want me actually to read the will itself,” he said. “It is a very simple one. He leaves all the Hilltop property to his son, without restrictions of any kind. That is all he had to leave. The town house is nominally Nellie’s, but it is mortgaged to its full value.”
“Do you mean to say,” Emmons cried, “that Nellie gets nothing?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry to say—perhaps a hundred or so, but I doubt even that.”
“You mean that Mr. Lee did not evenleave her the equivalent of the sum which his son took from her?”
“That is exactly what I mean, Mr. Emmons.”
“It is an iniquitous will. The man who made that will was mad, and no lawyer should have drawn it for him.”
“I drew it,” said Overton gently.
“You should not have done so, sir,” replied Emmons; “knowing the facts as you do, you ought to have pointed out to the old man where his obligations lay.”
“It is the profession of a clergyman, not of a lawyer, to point out his client’s duty, Mr. Emmons.”
Emmons looked from one to the other, and then, remembering the sudden friendship that had sprung up between them, he asked, “And when was this will made?”
“Almost three years ago,” Overton answered, and there was silence until, seeingEmmons about to break out again, Nellie said mildly,
“Really, James, if I can bear it, I think you might.”
“The sacrifices you made—” Emmons began, but she stopped him.
“Blood is thicker than water. It would be a pretty poor sort of world if men did not love their own children better than other people’s.”
“Oh, if you are satisfied,” said Emmons bitterly; and then changed his sentence but not his tone. “All I can say is I am glad you all are pleased.”
“You have not given us much of a chance to say whether we were or not,” suggested Vickers mildly.
Emmons turned on him. “I don’t have to ask whether you are satisfied or not. I don’t imagine that you have any complaint to make.”
“None at all,” said Vickers.
“Do you mean to tell me that you would take that property?” Emmons demanded.
“What are you talking about, James?” said Nellie. “Of course Bob will take what his father leaves to him.”
“I shall have my opinion of him if he does.”
“Well,” said Vickers, “if anything could separate me from an inheritance, it would certainly be the fear of Mr. Emmons’s criticism.”
“I shall only call your attention to one thing,” said Emmons, flushing slightly. “Does it ever strike you, Mr. BobLee, to ask what it was saved you from criminal prosecution twelve years ago? No? Well, I’ll tell you. Respect for your father, and the fact that you did not have any money. Both of these conditions have changed to-day.”
Vickers turned to Overton as if he had not heard. “I wonder,” he said, “if we could not talk over family affairs more comfortably if there were no outsiders present.”
“James is not an outsider,” said Nellie.
“He is to me,” said Vickers.
“If he goes, I go too,” Nellie answered.
“In that case,” said Vickers, “of course he must be allowed to stay, but perhaps you will be so good as to ask him, if he must be here, not to interrupt——”
“Come, come,” said Overton hastily, “can’t we effect some compromise in this matter? As I understand it, Mr. Emmons believes that certain sums are owed Miss Nellie by you——”
“Compromise be damned, Overton,” said Vickers. “You know this money is not mine, and I won’t touch it.”
Nellie started up. “The money is yours, Bob. My uncle would never have pinchedand saved to pay me back. The money exists only because he loved you so much. It is yours.”
Vickers smiled at her. “I am glad,” he said, “that I do not have to argue that extremely sophistical point with you. The reason that the money is not mine is—I hate to repeat a statement that you asked me not to make again—but I am not Bob Lee.”
He had the satisfaction of seeing that, for the first time, she weighed the possibility of the assertion’s being true.
“What does he mean, Mr. Overton?” she asked.
“He means he is not the person he represented himself as being.”
“What is this?” cried Emmons, who had remained silent hitherto only from a species of stupefaction. “Is he trying to make us believe that his own father did not know him? What folly! How frivolous!”
Nellie’s face clouded again; evidently to her, too, it seemed folly, but she said temperately:
“At least, James, it will cost him his inheritance, if he can make us believe him. He certainly does not gain by the assertion.”
“What?” cried Emmons. “How can you be so blind! He was willing enough to be Bob Lee—he kept mighty quiet, until I threatened suit. He was willing enough to take the money, until it looked dangerous; and then we began to hear that he was not the fellow at all.”
Nellie turned desperately to Overton.
“Mr. Overton,” she said, “do you believe this story?”
Overton nodded. “Yes,” he said, “I do; but I must tell you that I have no proofs of any kind, no facts, no evidence.”
“Then why do you believe it?”
“Why, indeed?” murmured Emmonswith a carefully suppressed laugh; “a very good question.”
“I have asked myself why,” Overton answered, “and I can find only two reasons, if they may be called so. First, I do feel a difference between this man and the Bob Lee I used to know—a difference of personality. And, second, I have never had any reason to doubt this man’s word.”
“Ah, but I have,” said Nellie. “As a boy Bob was not truthful.”
“I was not speaking of Lee,” said Overton.
Nellie put her hand to her head. “Oh, I don’t know what to think,” she said, and jumped up and walked to the window, as if to get away from Emmons, who was ready to tell her exactly what to think.
She stood there, and there was silence in the room. Overton sat feeling his chin, as if interested in nothing but the closeness of hismorning’s shave. Vickers, though his head was bent, had fixed his eyes on Nellie; and Emmons leant back with the manner of the one sane man in a party of lunatics.
Nellie was the first to speak. Turning from the window she asked,
“If you are not my cousin, who are you?”
“My name is Lewis Vickers.”
She thought it over a minute, and threw out her hands despairingly.
“Oh, it is impossible!” she cried. “Why, if you were not my cousin, should you have stayed and worked for us, and borne all the hideous things I said to you? Only a saint would do such a thing.”
“He’ll not ask you to believe him a saint,” put in Overton.
“No, I don’t even claim to be much of an improvement on Lee.”
“Oh, any one would be an improvement on poor Bob.”
In answer, Vickers got up, and going over to where she stood beside the window, he told her his story. He told it ostensibly to her alone, but Emmons on the sofa was plainly an interested listener. Vickers spoke with that simplicity, that directness and absence of any attempt at self-justification, which the wise use when they are most desirous of being leniently judged.
From the first, he began to hope that he was succeeding. Nellie regarded him with a clear and steady glance from the start, and when he had finished, she remained gazing at him—no longer doubtful, but with something almost terror-stricken in her expression.
In the pause that followed, Emmons turned to the lawyer.
“Now, you are a clever man, Mr. Overton,” he said easily. “Perhaps you can explain to me, why it is that a fellow who isknown to be a thief and a liar should be in such a hurry to write himself down a murderer as well?”
The tone and manner of the interruption, coming at a moment of high emotion, were too much for Vickers’s temper. He turned on Emmons white with rage.
“I’ve stood about as much as I mean to stand from you,” he said. “Overton and Nellie are welcome to believe me or not as they like, but you will either believe me or leave this house.”
His tone was so menacing that Overton stood up, expecting trouble, but it was Nellie who spoke.
“James will do nothing of the kind,” she said. “If you are not Bob Lee you have no right to say who shall stay in this house and who shall not. The house is mine, and I won’t have any one in it who can’t be civil to James.”
“Then you certainly can’t have me,” said Vickers.
“It seems not,” answered Nellie.
They exchanged such a steel-like glance as only those who love each other can inflict, and then Vickers flung out of the house.
When, a few minutes later, Overton caught up with him, his anger had not cooled.
“Hush, hush, my dear fellow,” said the lawyer. “Hilltop is not accustomed to such language. Let a spirited lady have her heroics if she wants.”