JOAN HASTE, H. RIDER HAGGARD [free ereaders TXT] 📗

course, did you take them, it would be an act of robbery, seeing that the man who bequeathed them certainly desired to endow his own descendants and no one else, the difficulty arising from the fact of my marriage with his daughter being an illegal one. I have taken the opinions of four leading lawyers upon the case, giving false names to the parties concerned. Of these, two have advised that you would be entitled to the property, since the law is always strained against illegitimate issue, and two that equity would intervene and declare that her grandfather's inheritance must come to Emma, as he doubtless intended, although there was an accidental irregularity in the marriage of the mother.

"I have told you all this, Joan, as I am telling you everything, because I wish to keep nothing back; but I trust that your generosity and sense of right will never allow you to raise the question, for this money belongs to Emma and to her alone. For you I have done my best out of my savings, and in some few days or weeks you will inherit about four thousand pounds, which will give you a competence independent of your husband."

"You need not be afraid, sir," answered Joan contemptuously; "I would rather cut my fingers off than touch a farthing of the money to which I have no right at all. I don't even know that I will accept your legacy."

"I hope that you will do so, Joan, for it will put you in a position of complete independence, will provide for your children, and will enable you to live apart from your husband, should you by any chance fail to get on with him. And now I have told you the whole truth, and it only remains for me to most humbly beg your forgiveness. I have done my best for you, Joan, according to my lights; for, as I could not acknowledge you, I thought it would be well that you should be brought up in your mother's class--though here I did not make sufficient allowance for the secret influences of race, seeing that, notwithstanding your education, you are in heart and appearance a lady. I might, indeed, have taken you to live with me, as I often longed to do; but I feared lest such an act should expose me to suspicion, suspicion should lead to inquiry, and inquiry to my ruin and to that of my daughter Emma. Doubtless it would have been better, as well as more honest, if I had faced the matter out; but at the time I could not find the courage, and the opportunity went by. My early life had not been altogether creditable, and I could not bear the thought of once more becoming the object of scandal and of disgrace, or of imperilling the fortune and position to which after so many struggles I had at length attained. That, Joan, is my true story; and now again I say that I hope to hear you forgive me before I die, and promise that you will not, unless it is absolutely necessary, reveal these facts to your half-sister, Lady Graves, for if you do I verily believe that it will break her heart. The dread lest she should learn this history has haunted me for years, and caused me to strain every nerve to secure her marriage with a man of position and honourable name, so that, even should it be discovered that she had none, she might find refuge in her disgrace. Thank Heaven that I, who have failed in so many things, have at least succeeded in this, so that, come what may when I am dead, she is provided for and safe."

"I suppose, sir, that Sir Henry Graves knows all this?"

"Knows it! Of course not. Had he known it I doubt if he would have married her."

"Possibly not. He might even have married somebody else," Joan answered. "It seems, then, that you palmed off Miss Emma upon him under a false description."

"I did," he said, with a groan. "It was wrong, like the rest; but one evil leads to another."

"Yes, sir, one evil leads to another, as I shall show you presently. You ask me to forgive you, and you talk about the breaking of Lady Graves's heart. Perhaps you do not know that mine is already broken through you, or to what a fate you have given me over. I will tell you. Your daughter's husband, Sir Henry Graves, and I loved each other, and I have borne his child. He wished to marry me, though, believing myself to be what you have taught me to believe, I was against it from the first. When he learned my state he insisted upon marrying me, like the honourable man that he is, and told his mother of his intention. She came to me in London and pleaded with me, almost on her knees, that I should ward off this disgrace from her family, and preserve her son from taking a step which would ruin him. I was moved by her entreaties, and I felt the truth of what she said; but I knew well that, should he come to marry me, as within a few days he was to do, for our child's and our love's sake, if not for my own, I could never find the strength to deny him.

"What was I to do? I was too ill to run away, and he would have hunted me out. Therefore it came to this, that I must choose between suicide--which was both wicked and impossible, for I could not murder another as well as myself--and the still more dreadful step that at length I took. You know the man Samuel Rock, my husband, and perhaps you know also that for a long while he has persecuted me with his passion, although again and again I have told him that he was hateful to me. While I was ill he obtained my address in London--I believe that he bought it from my aunt, Mrs. Gillingwater, the woman in whose charge you were satisfied to leave me--and two days after I had seen Lady Graves, he came to visit me, gaining admission by passing himself off as Sir Henry to my landlady, Mrs. Bird.

"You can guess the rest. To put myself out of temptation, and to save the man I loved from being disgraced and contaminated by me, I married the man I hated--a man so base that, even when I had told him all, and bargained that I should live apart from him for many months, he was yet content to take me. I did more than this even: I wrote in such a fashion to Sir Henry as I knew must shock and revolt him; and then I married, leaving him to believe that I had thrown him over because the husband whom I had chosen was richer than himself. Perhaps you cannot guess why I should thus have dishonoured both of us, and subjected myself to the horrible shame of making myself vile in Sir Henry's eyes. This was the reason: had I not done so, had he once suspected the true motives of my sacrifice, the plot would have failed. I should have sold myself for nothing, for then he would never have married Emma Levinger. And now, that my cup may be full, my child is dead, and to-morrow I must give myself over to my husband according to the terms of my bond. This, sir, is the fruit of all your falsehoods; and I say, Ask God to forgive you, but not the poor girl--your own daughter--whom you have robbed of honour and happiness, and handed over to misery and shame."

Thus Joan spoke to him, in a quiet, almost mechanical voice indeed, but standing on her feet above the dying man, and with eyes and gestures that betrayed her absorbing indignation. When she had finished, her father, who was crouched in the chair before her, let fall his hands, wherewith he had hidden his face, and she saw that he was gasping for breath and that his lips were blue.

"'The way of transgressors is hard,' as we both have learned," he muttered, with a deathly smile, "and I deserve it all. I am sorry for you, Joan, but I cannot help you. If it consoles you, you may remember that, whereas your sorrows and shame are but temporal, mine, as I fear--will be eternal. And now, since you refuse to forgive me, farewell; for I can talk no more, and must make ready, as best I can, to take my evil doings hence before another, and, I trust, a more merciful Judge."

Joan turned to leave the room, but ere she reached the door the rage died out of her heart and pity entered it.

"I forgive you, father," she said, "for it is Heaven's will that these things should have happened, and by my own sin I have brought the worst of them upon me. I forgive you, as I hope to be forgiven. But oh! I pray that my time here may be short."

"God bless you for those words, Joan!" he murmured.

Then she was gone.

CHAPTER XXXVIII(A GHOST OF THE PAST)

 

Lady Graves sat at breakfast in the dining-room at Rosham, where she had arrived from London on the previous evening, to welcome home her son and her daughter-in-law. Just as she was rising from the table the butler brought her a telegram.

"Your master and mistress will be here by half-past eleven, Thomson," she said. "This message is from Harwich, and they seem to have had a very bad crossing."

"Indeed, my lady!" answered the old man, whose face, like the house of Graves, shone with a renewed prosperity; "then I had better give orders about the carriage meeting them. It's a pity we hadn't a little more notice, for there's many in the village as would have liked to give Sir Henry and her ladyship a bit of a welcome."

"Yes, Thomson; but perhaps they can manage something of that sort in a day or two. Everything is ready, I suppose? I have not had time to go round yet."

"Well, I can't say that, my lady. I think that some of them there workmen won't have done till their dying day; and the smell of paint upstairs is awful. But perhaps your ladyship would like to have a look?"

"Yes, I should, Thomson, if you will give the orders about the carriage and to have some breakfast ready."

Thomson bowed and went, and, reappearing presently, led Lady Graves from room to room, pointing out the repairs that had been done to each. Emma's money had fallen upon the nakedness of Rosham like spring rains upon a desert land, with results that were eminently satisfactory to Lady Graves, who for many years had been doomed to mourn over threadbare carpets and shabby walls. At last they had inspected everything, down to the new glass in the windows of the servants' bedrooms.

"I think, Thomson," said Lady Graves, with a sigh of relief, "that, taking everything into consideration, we have a great deal to be thankful for."

"That's just what I says upon my knees every night,