Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume Two: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries (Four thrilling novels in one volume!)

by Marion Bryce

  “‘Well, how much money have you to show?’

  “Now I had none. My salary as cashier of a small country bank was not large, and my brother’s prolonged sickness and subsequent death, together with my own somewhat luxurious habits, had utterly exhausted it. I told him so, but added that I had, somewhere up among the hills, an old maiden aunt who had promised me five thousand dollars at her death; and that as she was very ill at that time—hopelessly so, her neighbors thought—in a few weeks I should doubtless be able to satisfy him with the sight of a sum sufficient to start us in housekeeping, if no more.

  “He nodded at this, but gave me no distinct reply. ‘Let us wait,’ said he.

  “But youth is not inclined to wait. I considered my cause as good as won, and began to make all my preparations accordingly. With a feverish impatience which is no sign of true love, I watched the days go by, and waited for, if I did not anticipate, the death which I fondly imagined would make all clear. At last it came, and I went again into Mr. Delafield’s presence.

  “‘My aunt has just died,’ I announced, and stood waiting for the short, concise, ‘Go ahead, then, my boy!’ which I certainly expected.

  “Instead of that, he gave me a queer inexplicable smile, and merely said, ‘I want to see the greenbacks, my lad. No color so good as green, not even the black upon white of ‘I promise to pay.’

  “I went back to my desk in the bank, chagrined. Ona had told me a few days before that she was tired of waiting, that the young doctor from the next town was very assiduous in his attentions, and as there was no question as to his ability to support a wife, why—she did not finish her sentence, but the toss of her head and her careless tone at parting, were enough to inflame the jealousy of a less easily aroused nature than mine. I felt that I was in hourly danger of losing her, and all because I could not satisfy her father with a sight of the few thousands which were so soon to be mine.

  “The reading of my aunt’s will, which confirmed my hopes, did not greatly improve matters. ‘I want to see the money,’ the old gentleman repeated; and I was forced to wait the action of the law and the settlement of the estate. It took longer than even he foresaw. Weeks went by and my poor little five thousand seemed as far from my control as on the day the will was read. There was some trouble, I was not told what, that made it seem improbable that I should reap the benefit of my legacy for some time. Meanwhile Ona accepted the attentions of the young doctor, and my chances of winning her, dwindled rapidly day by day. I became morbidly eager and insanely jealous. Instead of pursuing my advantage—for I undoubtedly possessed one in her own secret inclination towards me—I stood off, and let my rival work his way into her affections unhindered. I was too sore to interrupt his play, as I called it, and too afraid of myself to actually confront him in her presence. But the sight of them riding together one day, was more than I could endure even in my spirit of unresistance. ‘he shall not have her,’ I cried, and cast about in my mind how to bring my own matters into such shape as to satisfy her father and so win her own consent to my suit. My first thought was to borrow the money, but that was impracticable in a town where each man’s affairs are known to his neighbor. My next was to hurry up the settlement of the estate by appeal to my lawyer. The result of the latter course was a letter of many promises in the midst of which a great temptation assailed me.

  “Colonel Japha, of whose history you have heard more or less true accounts, was at that time living in the old mansion you took such pains to point out to me in that walk we took together in Grotewell. he had suffered a great anguish in the flight and degradation of his only daughter, and though the real facts connected with her departure were not known in the village, he was so overcome with shame, and so shattered in health, he lived in the utmost seclusion, opening his doors to but few visitors, among whom I, for some unexplained reason, was one. He used to say he liked me and saw in me the makings of a considerable man; and I, because he was Colonel Japha and a strong spirit, returned his appreciation, and spent many of my bitter and unhappy hours in his presence. It was upon one of these occasions the temptation came to which I have just alluded.

  “I had been talking about his health and the advisability of his taking a journey, when he suddenly rose and said, ‘Come with me to my study.’

  “I of course went. The first thing I saw upon entering was a trunk locked and strapped. ‘I am going to Europe to-morrow,’ said he, ‘to be gone six months.’

  “I was astonished, for in that town no one presumed to do anything of importance without consulting his neighbors; but I merely bowed my congratulations, and waited for him to speak, for I saw he had something on his mind that he wished to say. At last it came out. He had a daughter, he said, a daughter who had disgraced him and whom he had forbidden his house. She was not worthy of his consideration, yet he could not help but remember her, and while he never desired to see her enter his doors, it was not his wish that she should suffer want. He had a little money which he had laid by and which he wished to put into my hands for her use, provided anything should happen to him during his absence. ‘She is a wanderer now,’ he cried, ‘but she may one day come back, and then if I am dead and gone, you may give it to her.’ I was not to enter it in the bank under his name, but regard it as a personal trust to be used only under such circumstances as he mentioned.

  “The joy with which I listened to this proposal amounted almost to ecstacy when he went to his desk and brought out five one thousand dollar bills and laid them in my hand. ‘It is not much,’ said he, ‘but it will save her from worse degradation if she chooses to avail herself of it.’

  “Not much; oh no, not much, but just the sum that would raise me out of the pit of despondency into which I had fallen, and give me my bride, a chance in the world, and last, but not least, revenge on the rival I had now learned to hate. I was obliged to give the colonel a paper acknowledging the trust, but that was no hindrance. I did not mean to use the money, only to show it, and long before the colonel could return, my own five thousand would be in my hands—and so, and so, and so, as the devil reasons and young infatuated ears listen.

  “Colonel Japha thought I was an honest man, nor did I consider myself otherwise at that time. It was a chance for clever action; a bit of opportune luck that it would be madness to discard. On the day the vessel sailed which carried Colonel Japha out of the country, I went to Mr. Delafield and showed him the five crisp bank notes that represented as it were by proxy, the fortune I so speedily expected to inherit. ‘You have wanted to see five thousand dollars in my hand,’ said I; ‘there they are.’

  “His look of amazement was peculiar and ought to have given me warning; but I was blinded by my infatuation and thought it no more than the natural surprise incident to the occasion. ‘I have been made to wait a long time for your consent to my suit,’ said I; ‘may I hope that you will now give me leave to press my claims upon your daughter?’

  “He did not answer at once, but smiled, eying meanwhile the notes in my hand with a fascinated gaze which instinctively warned me to return them to my pocket. But I no sooner made a move indicative of that resolve, than he thrust out his cold slim hand and prevented me. ‘Let me see them,’ cried he.

  “There was no reason for me to refuse so simple a request to one in Mr. Delafield’s position, and though I had rather he had not asked for the notes, I handed them over, he at once seemed to grow taller. ‘So this is your start off in life,’ exclaimed he.

  “I bowed, and he let his eyes roam for a moment to my face. ‘Many a man would be glad of worse,’ smiled he; then suavely, ‘you shall have my daughter, sir.’

  “I must have turned white in my relief, for he threw his head back and laughed in a low unmusical way that at any other time would have affected me unpleasantly. But my only thought then, was to get the money back and rush with my new hopes into the room from which came the low ceaseless hum of his daughter’s voice. But at the first movement of my hand towards him, he assumed a mysterious a
ir, and closing his fingers over the notes, said:

  “‘These are yours, to do what you wish with, I suppose?’

  “I may have blushed, but if I did, he took no notice. ‘What I wish to do with them,’ returned I, ‘is to shut them up in the bank for the present, at least till Ona is my wife.’

  “‘Oh no, no, no, you do not,’ came in easy, almost wheedling tones from the man before me. ‘You want to put them where they will double themselves in two months.’ And before I could realize to what he was tempting me, he had me down before his desk, showing use letters, documents, etc., of a certain scheme into which if a man should put a dollar to-day, it would come out three and no mistake, before the year was out. ‘It is a chance in a thousand,’ said he; ‘if I had half a million I would invest it in this enterprise to-day. If you will listen to me and put your money a there, you will be a rich man before ten years have passed over your head.’

  “I was dazzled. I knew enough of such matters to see that it was neither a hoax nor a chimera. He did have a good thing, and if the five thousand dollars had been my own—But I soon came to consider the question without that conditional. He was so specious his manner of putting the affair before me, so masterful in the way he held on to the money, he gave me no time to think. ‘Say the word,’ cried he, ‘and in two months I bring you back ten thousand for your five. Only two months,’ he repeated, and then slowly, ‘Ona was born for luxury.’

  “Paula, you cannot realize what that temptation was. To amass wealth had never been my ambition before, but now everything seemed to urge it upon me. Dreams of unimagined luxury came to my mind as these words were uttered. A vision of Ona clad in garments worthy of her beauty floated before my eyes; the humble home I had hitherto pictured for myself, broadened and towered away into a palace; I beheld myself honored and accepted as the nabob of the town. I caught a glimpse of a new paradise, and hesitated to shut down the gate upon it. ‘I will think of it,’ said I, and went into the other room to speak to Ona.

  “Ah, if some angel had met me on the threshold! If my mother’s spirit or the thought of your dear face could have risen before me then and stopped me! Dizzy, intoxicated with love and ambition, I crossed the room to where she sat reeling off a skein of blue silk with hands that were whiter than alabaster. Kneeling down by her side, I caught those fair hands in mine.

  “‘Ona,’ I cried, ‘will you marry me? Your father has given his consent, and we shall be very happy.’

  “She bestowed upon me a little pout, and half mockingly, half earnestly inquired, ‘What kind of a house are you going to put me? I cannot live in a cottage.’

  “‘I will put you in a palace,’ I whispered, ‘if you will only say that you will be mine.’

  “‘A palace! Oh, I don’t expect palaces; a house like the Japhas’ would do. Not but what I should feel at home in a palace,’ she added, lifting her lordly head and looking beautiful enough to grace a sceptre. Then, archly for her, ‘And papa has given his consent?’

  “‘Yes,’ I ardently cried.

  “‘Then Dr. Burton might as well go,’ she answered. ‘I will trust my father’s judgment, and take the palace—when it comes.’

  “After that, it was impossible to disappoint her.

  “Paula, in stating all this, I have purposely confined myself to relating bare facts. You must see us as we were. The glamour which an unreasoning passion casts over even a dishonest act, if performed for the sake of winning a beautiful woman, is no excuse in my own soul for the evil to which I succumbed that day, nor shall it seem so to you. Bare, hard, stern, the fact confronts me from the past, that at the first call of temptation I fell; and with this blot on my character, you will have to consider me—unhappy being that I am!

  “I did not realize then, however, all that I had done. The operation entered into by Mr. Delafield prospered, and in two months I had, as he predicted, ten thousand dollars instead of five, in my possession. Besides, I had just married Ona, and for awhile life was a dream of delight and luxury. But there came a day when I awoke to an insight of the peril I had escaped by a mere chance of the die. The money which I had expected from my aunt’s will, turned out to be amongst certain funds that had been risked in speculation by some agent during her sickness, and irrecoverably lost. The expression of her good-will was all that ever came to me of the legacy upon which I had so confidently relied.

  “I was sitting with my young wife in the pretty parlor of our new home, when the letter came from my lawyer announcing this fact, and I never can make you understand what effect it had upon me. The very walls seemed to shrivel up into the dimensions of a prison’s cell; the face that only an hour before had possessed every conceivable charm for me, shone on my changed vision with the allurement, but also with the unreality of a will-o’-the-wisp. All that might have happened if the luck, instead of being in my favor, had turned against me, crushed like a thunderbolt upon my head, and I rose up and left the presence of my young wife, with the knowledge at my heart that I was no more nor less than a thief in the eyes of God, if not in that of my fellow-men; a base thief, who if he did not meet his fit punishment, was only saved from it by fortuitous circumstances and the ignorance of those he had been so near despoiling.

  “The bitterness of that hour never passed away. The streets in which I had been raised, the house which had been the scene of my temptation, Mr. Delafield’s face, and my own home, all became unendurable to me. I felt as if each man I met must know what I had done; and secret as the transaction had been, it was long before I could enter the bank without a tremor of apprehension lest I should hear from some quarter, that my services there would no longer be required. The only comfort I received was in the thought that Ona did not know at what a cost her hand had been obtained. I was still under the glamour of her languid smiles and countless graces, and was fain to believe that notwithstanding a certain unresponsiveness and coldness in her nature, her love would yet prove a compensation for the remorse that I secretly suffered.

  “My distaste for Grotewell culminated. It was too small for me. The money I had acquired through the use of my neighbor’s funds burned in my pocket. I determined to move to New York, and with the few thousands I possessed, venture upon other speculations. But this time in all honesty. Yes, I swore it before God and my own soul, that never again would I run a risk similar to that from which I had just escaped. I would profit by the money I had acquired, oh yes, but henceforth all my operations should be legitimate and honorable. My wife, who was fast developing a taste for ease and splendor, seconded my plans with something like fervor, while Mr. Delafield actually went so far as to urge my departure. ‘You are bound to make a rich man,’ said he ‘and must go where great fortunes are to be secured.’ He never asked me what became of the five thousand dollars I returned to Colonel Japha upon his arrival from Europe.

  “So I came to New York.

  “Paula, the man who loses at the outset of a doubtful game, is fortunate. I did not lose, I won. As if in that first dishonest deed of mine I had summoned to my side the aid of evil influences, each and every operation into which I entered prospered. It seemed as if I could not make a mistake; money flowed towards me from all quarters; power followed, and I found myself one of the most successful and one of the most unhappy men in New York. There are some things of which a man cannot write even to the one dear heart he most cherishes and adores. You have lived in my home, and will acquit me from saying much about her who, with all her faults and her omissions, was ever kind to you. But some things I must repeat in order to make intelligible to you the change which gradually took place within me as the years advanced. Beauty, while it wins the lover, can never of itself hold the heart of a husband who possesses aspirations beyond that which passion supplies. Reckless, worldly and narrow-minded as I had been before the commission of that deed which embittered my life, I had become by the very shock that followed the realization of my wrongdoing, a hungry-hearted, eager-minded and melancholy-spirited man, asking b
ut one boon in recompense for my secret remorse, and that was domestic happiness and the sympathetic affection of wife and children. Woman, according to my belief, was born to be chiefly and above all, the consoler. What a man missed in the outside world, he was to find treasured at home. What a man lacked in his own nature, he was to discover in the delicate and sublimated one of his wife. Beautiful dream, which my life was not destined to see realized!

  “The birth of my only child was my first great consolation. With the opening of her blue eyes upon my face, a well-spring deep as my unfathomable longing, bubbled up within my breast. Alas, that very consolation brought a hideous grief; the mother did not love her child; and another strand of the regard with which I still endeavored to surround the wife of my youth, parted and floated away out of sight, lo take my little one in my arms, to feel her delicate cheek press yearningly to mine, to behold her sweet infantile soul develop itself before my eyes, and yet to realize that that soul would never know the guidance or sympathy of a mother, was to me at once rapture and anguish. I sometimes forgot to follow up a fortunate speculation, in my indulgence of these feelings. I was passionately the father as I might have been passionately the husband and the friend. Geraldine died; how and with what attendant circumstances of pain and regret, I will not dare not state. The blow struck to the core of my being. I stood shaken before God. The past, with its one grim remembrance—a remembrance that in the time of business successes and the engrossing affection which had of late absorbed me, had been well-nigh swamped from sight—rose before me like an accusing spirit. I had sinned, and I had been punished; I had sown, and I had reaped.

  “More than that, I was sinning still. My very enjoyment of the position I had so doubtfully acquired, was unworthy of me. My very wealth was a disgrace. Had it not all been built upon another man’s means? Could the very house I lived in be said to be my own, while a Japha existed in want? In the eyes of the world, perhaps, yes; in my own eyes, no. I became morbid on the subject. I asked myself what I could do to escape the sense of obligation that overwhelmed me. The few sums with which I had been secretly enabled to provide Colonel Japha during the final days of his ruined and impoverished life, were not sufficient. I desired to wipe out the past by some large and munificent return. Had the colonel been living, I should have gone to him, told him my tale and offered him the half of my fortune; but his death cut off all hopes of my righting myself m that way. Only his daughter remained, the poor, lost, reprobated being, whom he was willing to curse, but whom he could not bear to believe suffering. I determined that the debt due to my own peace of mind should be paid to her. But how? Where was I to find this wanderer? How was I to let her know that a comfortable living awaited her if she would only return to her friends and home? Consulting with a business associate, he advised me to advertise. I did so, but without success. I next resorted to the detectives, but all without avail. Jacqueline Japha was not to be found.