Mrs. Quintard looked frightened.
“But, I have no memory,” she objected. “I forget quickly, so quickly that in order to fulfill my engagements I have to keep a memorandum of every day’s events. Yesterday? yesterday? What did I do yesterday? I went downtown for one thing, but I hardly know where.”
“Perhaps your memorandum of yesterday’s doings will help you.”
“I will get it. But it won’t give you the least help. I keep it only for my own eye, and—”
“Never mind; let me see it.”
And she waited impatiently for it to be put in her hands.
But when she came to read the record of the last two days, this was all she found:
Saturday: Mauretania nearly due. I must let Mr. Delahunt know today that he’s wanted here to-morrow. Hetty will try on my dresses. Says she has to alter them. Mrs. Peabody came to lunch, and we in such trouble! Had to go down street. Errand for Clement. The will, the will! I think of nothing else. Is it safe where it is? No peace of mind till to-morrow. Clement better this afternoon. Says he must live till Carlos gets back; not to triumph over him, but to do what he can to lessen his disappointment. My good Clement!
So nervous, I went to pasting photographs, and was forgetting all my troubles when Hetty brought in another dress to try on.
Quiet in the great house, during which the clock on the staircase sent forth seven musical peals. To Violet waiting alone in the library, they acted as a summons. She was just leaving the room, when the sound of hubbub in the hall below held her motionless in the doorway. An automobile had stopped in front, and several persons were entering the house, in a gay and unseemly fashion. As she stood listening, uncertain of her duty, she perceived the frenzied figure of Mrs. Quintard approaching. As she passed by, she dropped one word: “Carlos!” Then she went staggering on, to disappear a moment later down the stairway.
This vision lost, another came. This time it was that of Clements’s wife leaning from the marble balustrade above, the shadow of approaching grief battling with the present terror in her perfect features. Then she too withdrew from view and Violet, left for the moment alone in the great hall, stepped back into the library and began to put on her hat.
The lights had been turned up in the grand salon and it was in this scene of gorgeous colour that Mrs. Quintard came face to face with Carlos Pelacios. Those who were witness to her entrance say that she presented a noble appearance, as with the resolution of extreme desperation she stood waiting for his first angry attack.
He, a short, thick-set, dark man, showing both in features and expression the Spanish blood of his paternal ancestors, started to address her in tones of violence, but changed his note, as he met her eye, to one simply sardonic.
“You here!” he began. “I assure you, madame, that it is a pleasure which is not without its inconveniences. Did you not receive my cablegram requesting this house to be made ready for my occupancy?”
“I did.”
“Then why do I find guests here? They do not usually precede the arrival of their host.”
“Clement is very ill—”
“So much the greater reason that he should have been removed—”
“You were not expected for two days yet. You cabled that you were coming on the Mauretania.”
“Yes, I cabled that. Elisabetta,”—this to his wife standing silently in the background—“we will go to the Plaza for tonight. At three o’clock tomorrow we shall expect to find this house in readiness for our return. Later, if Mrs. Quintard desires to visit us we shall be pleased to receive her. But”—this to Mrs. Quintard herself—“you must come without Clement and the kids.”
Mrs. Quintard’s rigid hand stole up to her throat.
“Clement is dying. He is failing hourly,” she murmured. “He may not live till morning.”
Even Carlos was taken aback by this. “Oh, well!” said he, “we will give you two days.”
Mrs. Quintard gasped, then she walked straight up to him.
“You will give us all the time his condition requires and more, much more. He is the real owner of this house, not you. My brother left a will bequeathing it to him. You are my nephew’s guests, and not he yours. As his representative I entreat you and your wife to remain here until you can find a home to your mind.”
The silence seethed. Carlos had a temper of fire and so had his wife. But neither spoke, till he had gained sufficient control over himself to remark without undue rancour:
“I did not think you had the wit to influence your brother to this extent; otherwise, I should have cut my travels short.” Then harshly: “Where is this will?”
“It will be produced.” But the words faltered.
Carlos glanced at the man standing behind his wife; then back at Mrs. Quintard.
“Wills are not scribbled off on deathbeds; or if they are, it needs something more than a signature to legalize them. I don’t believe in this trick of a later will. Mr. Cavanagh”—here he indicated the gentleman accompanying them—“has done my father’s business for years, and he assured me that the paper he holds in his pocket is the first, last, and only expression of your brother’s wishes. If you are in a position to deny this, show us the document you mention; show us it at once, or inform us where and in whose hands it can be found.”
“That, for—for reasons I cannot give, I must refuse to do at present. But I am ready to swear—”
A mocking laugh cut her short. Did it issue from his lips or from those of his highstrung and unfeeling wife? It might have come from either; there was cause enough.
“Oh!” she faltered, “may God have mercy!” and was sinking before their eyes, when she heard her name, called from the threshold, and, looking that way, saw Hetty beaming upon her, backed by a little figure with a face so radiant that instinctively her hand went out to grasp the folded sheet of paper Hetty was seeking to thrust upon her.
“Ah!” she cried, in a great voice, “you will not have to wait, nor Clement either. Here is the will! The children have come into their own.” And she fell at their feet in a dead faint.
“Where did you find it? Oh! where did you find it? I have waited a week to know. When, after Carlos’s sudden departure, I stood beside Clement’s death-bed and saw from the look he gave me that he could still feel and understand, I told him that you had succeeded in your task and that all was well with us. But I was not able to tell him how you had succeeded or in what place the will had been found; and he died, unknowing. But we may know, may we not, now that he is laid away and there is no more talk of our leaving this house?”
Violet smiled, but very tenderly, and in a way not to offend the mourner. They were sitting in the library—the great library which was to remain in Clement’s family after all—and it amused her to follow the dreaming lady’s glances as they ran in irrepressible curiosity over the walls. Had Violet wished, she could have kept her secret forever. These eyes would never have discovered it.
But she was of a sympathetic temperament, our Violet, so after a moment’s delay, during which she satisfied herself that little, if anything, had been touched in the room since her departure from it a week before, she quietly observed:
“You were right in persisting that you hid it in this room. It was here I found it. Do you notice that photograph on the mantel which does not stand exactly straight on its easel?”
“Yes.”
“Supposing you take it down. You can reach it, can you not?”