A Terrible Secret, May Agnes Fleming [best book clubs .TXT] 📗

months, and--there is a son. Inez, don't look at me like that! I am a scoundrel, I know, but--"

He breaks down--the sight of her face unmans him. He turns away, his heart beating horribly thick. How long the ghastly pause that follows lasts he never knows--a century, counting by what he undergoes. Once, during that pause, he sees her fixed eyes turn slowly to his mother's picture--he hears low, strange-sounding words drop from her lips:

"He swore by your dying bed, and see how he keeps his oath!"

Then the life that seems to have died from her face flames back. Without speaking to him, without looking at him, she turns to leave the room. On the threshold she pauses and looks back.

"A wife and a son," she says, slowly and distinctly. "Sir Victor Catheron, fetch them home; I shall be glad to see them."


CHAPTER II.

WIFE AND HEIR.

In a very genteel lodging-house, in the very genteel neighborhood of Russell Square, early in the afternoon of a September day, a young girl stands impatiently awaiting the return of Sir Victor Catheron. This girl is his wife.

It is a bright, sunny day--as sunny, at least, as a London day ever can make up its mind to be--and as the yellow, slanting rays pour in through the muslin curtains full on face and figure, you may search and find no flaw in either. It is a very lovely face, a very graceful, though petite figure. She is a blonde of the blondest type: her hair is like spun gold, and, wonderful to relate, no Yellow Wash: no Golden Fluid, has ever touched its shining abundance. Her eyes are bluer than the September sky over the Russell Square chimney-pots; her nose is neither aquiline nor Grecian, but it is very nice; her forehead is low, her mouth and chin "morsels for the gods." The little figure is deliciously rounded and ripe; in twenty years from now she may be a heavy British matron, with a yard and a half wide waist--at eighteen years old she is, in one word, perfection.

Her dress is perfection also. She wears a white India muslin, a marvel of delicate embroidery and exquisite texture, and a great deal of Valenciennes trimming. She has a pearl and turquoise star fastening her lace collar, pearl and turquoise drops in her ears, and a half dozen diamond rings on her plump, boneless fingers. A blue ribbon knots up the loose yellow hair, and you may search the big city from end to end, and find nothing fairer, fresher, sweeter than Ethel, Lady Catheron.

If ever a gentleman and a baronet had a fair and sufficient excuse for the folly of a low marriage, surely Sir Victor Catheron has it in this fairy wife--for it is a "low marriage" of the most heinous type. Just seventeen months ago, sauntering idly along the summer sands, looking listlessly at the summer sea, thinking drearily that this time next year his freedom would be over, and his Cousin Inez his lawful owner and possessor, his eyes had fallen on that lovely blonde face--that wealth of shining hair, and for all time--aye, for eternity--his fate was fixed. The dark image of Inez as his wife faded out of his mind, never to return more.

The earthly name of this dazzling divinity in yellow ringlets and pink muslin was Ethel Margaretta--Dobb!

Dobb! It might have disenchanted a less rapturous adorer--it fell powerless on Sir Victor Catheron's infatuated ear.

It was at Margate this meeting took place--that most popular and most vulgar of all English watering-places; and the Cheshire baronet had looked just once at the peach-bloom face, the blue eyes of laughing light, the blushing, dimpling, seventeen-year-old face, and fallen in love at once and forever.

He was a very impetuous young man, a very selfish and unstable young man, with whom, all his life, to wish was to have. He had been spoiled by a doting mother from his cradle, spoiled by obsequious servants, spoiled by Inez Catheron's boundless worship. And he wished for this "rose of the rose-bud garden of girls" as he had never wished for anything in his two-and-twenty years of life. As a man in a dream he went through that magic ceremony, "Miss Dobb, allow me to present my friend, Sir Victor Catheron," and they were free to look at each other, talk to each other, fall in love with each other as much as they pleased. As in a dream he lingered by her side three golden hours, as in a dream he said, "Good afternoon," and walked back to his hotel smoking a cigar, the world glorified above and about him. As in a dream they told him she was the only daughter and heiress of a well-to-do London soap-boiler, and he did not wake.

She was the daughter of a soap-boiler. The paternal manufactory was in the grimiest part of the grimy metropolis; but, remarkable to say, she had as much innate pride, self-respect, and delicacy as though "all the blood of all the Howards" flowed in those blue veins.

He wasn't a bad sort of young fellow, as young fellows go, and frantically in love. There was but one question to ask, just eight days after this--"Will you be my wife?"--but one answer, of course--"Yes."

But one answer, of course! How would it be possible for a soap-boiler's daughter to refuse a baronet? And yet his heart had beaten with a fear that turned him dizzy and sick as he asked it; for she had shrunk away for one instant, frightened by his fiery wooing, and the sweet face had grown suddenly and startlingly pale. Is it not the rule that all maidens shall blush when their lovers ask _the_ question of questions?

The rosy brightness, the smiles, the dimples, all faded out of this face, and a white look of sudden fear crossed it. The startled eyes had shrank from his eager, flushed face and looked over the wide sea. For fully five minutes she never spoke or stirred. To his dying day that hour was with him--his passionate love, his sick, horrible fear, his dizzy rapture, when she spoke at last, only one word--"yes." To his dying day he saw her as he saw her then, in her summery muslin dress, her gipsy hat, the pale, troubled look chasing the color from the drooping face.

But the answer was "yes." Was he not a baronet? Was she not a well-trained English girl? And the ecstasy of pride, of joy, of that city soap-boiler's family, who shall paint? "Awake my muse" and--but, no! it passeth all telling. They bowed down before him (figuratively), this good British tradesman and his fat wife, and worshipped him. They burned incense at his shrine; they adored the ground he walked on; they snubbed their neighbors, and held their chins at an altitude never attained by the family of Dobb before. And in six weeks Miss Ethel Dobb became Lady Catheron.

It was the quietest, the dullest, the most secret of weddings--not a soul present except Papa and Mamma Dobb, a military swell in the grenadier guards--Pythias, at present, to Sir Victor's Damon--the parson, and the pew-opener. He was madly in love, but he was ashamed of the family soap-boiling, and he was afraid of his cousin Inez.

He told them a vague story enough of family matters, etc., that rendered secrecy for the present necessary, and nobody cross-questioned the baronet. That the parson was a parson, the marriage _bona fide_, his daughter "my lady," and himself the prospective grandfather of many baronets, was enough for the honest soap-boiler.

For the bride herself, she said little, in a shy, faltering little way. She was very fond of her dashing, high-born, impulsive lover, and very well content not to come into the full blaze and dazzle of high life just yet. If any other romance had ever figured in her simple life, _the_ story was finished and done with, the book read and put away.

He took her to Switzerland, to Germany, to Southern France, keeping well out of the way of other tourists, and ten months followed--ten months of such exquisite, unalloyed bliss, as rarely falls to mortal man. Unalloyed, did I say? Well, not quite, since earth and heaven are two different places. In the dead of pale Southern nights, with the shine of the moon on his wife's lovely sleeping face; in the hot, brilliant noontide; in the sweet, green gloaming--Inez Catheron's black eyes came menacingly before him--the one bitter drop in his cup. All his life he had been a little afraid of her. He was something more than a little afraid of her now.

They returned. The commodious lodgings in Russell Square awaited him, and Sir Victor "went in" for domestic felicity in the parish of Bloomsbury, "on the quiet." Very much "on the quiet" no theatre going, no opera, no visitors, and big Captain Jack Erroll, of the Second Grenadiers, his only guest. Four months of this sort of thing, and then--and then there was a son.

Lying in her lace-draped, satin-covered bed, looking at baby's fat little, funny little face, Ethel, Lady Catheron, began to think. She had time to think in her quiet and solitude. Monthly nurses and husbands being in the very nature of things antagonistic, and nurse being reigning potentate at present, the husband was banished. And Lady Catheron grew hot and indignant that the heir of Catheron Royals should have to be born in London lodgings, and the mistress of Catheron Royals live shut up like a nun, or a fair Rosamond in a bower.

"You have no relations living but your cousin, Victor," she said to him, more coldly than she had ever spoken in her life. "Are you master in your own house, or is she? Are you afraid of this Miss Catheron, who writes you such long letters (which I never see), that you dare not take your wife home?"

He had told her something of that other story necessarily--his former engagement to his cousin, Inez. Only something--not the bare ugly truth of his own treachery. The soap-boiler's daughter was more noble of soul than the baronet. Gentle as she was, she would have despised him thoroughly had she known the truth.

"This secrecy has lasted long enough," Lady Catheron said, a resolute-looking expression crossing her pretty, soft-cut mouth. "The time has come when you must speak. Don't make me think you are ashamed of me, or afraid of her. Take me home--it is my right; acknowledge your son--it is _his_. When there was only I, it did not so much matter--it is different now."

She lifted one of baby's dots of hands, and kissed it. And Sir Victor, his face hidden in the shadow of the curtains, his voice husky, made answer:

"You are right, Ethel--you always are. As soon as you both can travel, my wife and child shall come home with me to Catheron Royals."

Just three weeks later, as the August days were ending, came that last letter from Inez, commanding his return. His hour had come. He took the next morning train, and went forth to meet the woman he feared and had wronged.

* * * * *

The afternoon sun drops lower. If Sir Victor returns from Cheshire to-day, Lady Catheron knows he will be here in a few minutes. She looked at her watch a little wearily. The days are very long and lonely without him. Looks up