PAGE 13
A Light Man
by
23d.–I am restless and nervous–and for good reasons. Scribbling here keeps me quiet. This morning Mr. Sloane is better; feeble and uncertain in mind, but unmistakably on the rise. I may confess now that I feel relieved of a horrid burden. Last night I hardly slept a wink. I lay awake listening to the pendulum of my clock. It seemed to say, “He lives–he dies.” I fully expected to hear it stop suddenly at dies. But it kept going all the morning, and to a decidedly more lively tune. In the afternoon the old man sent for me. I found him in his great muffled bed, with his face the color of damp chalk, and his eyes glowing faintly, like torches half stamped out. I was forcibly struck with the utter loneliness of his lot. For all human attendance, my villainous self grinning at his bedside and old Robert without, listening, doubtless, at the keyhole. The bonhomme stared at me stupidly; then seemed to know me, and greeted me with a sickly smile. It was some moments before he was able to speak. At last he faintly bade me to descend into the library, open the secret drawer of the secretary (which he contrived to direct me how to do), possess myself of his will, and burn it up. He appears to have forgotten his having taken it out night before last. I told him that I had an insurmountable aversion to any personal dealings with the document. He smiled, patted the back of my hand, and requested me, in that case, to get it, at least, and bring it to him. I couldn’t deny him that favor? No, I couldn’t, indeed. I went down to the library, therefore, and on entering the room found Theodore standing by the fireplace with a bundle of papers. The secretary was open. I stood still, looking from the violated cabinet to the documents in his hand. Among them I recognized, by its shape and size, the paper of which I had intended to possess myself. Without delay I walked straight up to him. He looked surprised, but not confused. “I am afraid I shall have to trouble you to surrender one of those papers,” I said.
“Surrender, Maximus? To anything of your own you are perfectly welcome. I didn’t know that you made use of Mr. Sloane’s secretary. I was looking for some pages of notes which I have made myself and in which I conceive I have a property.”
“This is what I want, Theodore,” I said; and I drew the will, unfolded, from between his hands. As I did so his eyes fell upon the superscription, “Last Will and Testament, March. F.S.” He flushed an extraordinary crimson. Our eyes met. Somehow–I don’t know how or why, or for that matter why not–I burst into a violent peal of laughter. Theodore stood staring, with two hot, bitter tears in his eyes.
“Of course you think I came to ferret out that thing,” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders–those of my body only. I confess, morally, I was on my knees with contrition, but there was a fascination in it–a fatality. I remembered that in the hurry of my movements the other evening I had slipped the will simply into one of the outer drawers of the cabinet, among Theodore’s own papers. “Mr. Sloane sent me for it,” I remarked.
“Very good; I am glad to hear he’s well enough to think of such things.”
“He means to destroy it.”
“I hope, then, he has another made.”
“Mentally, I suppose he has.”
“Unfortunately, his weakness isn’t mental–or exclusively so.”
“Oh, he will live to make a dozen more,” I said. “Do you know the purport of this one?”
Theodore’s color, by this time, had died away into plain white. He shook his head. The doggedness of the movement provoked me, and I wished to arouse his curiosity. “I have his commission to destroy it.”