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

again, her eyes alight. A hansom has dashed up to the door, and it is her husband who leaps out. Half a minute and he is in the room, and she is clasped in his arms.

"My darling!" he exclaims, and you need only hear the two words to tell how rapturously he loves his wife. "Let me look at you. Oh! as pale as ever, I see. Never mind! Cheshire air, sunshine, green fields, and new milk shall bring back your roses. And your son and heir, my lady, how is he?"

He bends over the pretty bassinet, with that absurd paternal look all _very_ new fathers regard the first blessing, and his mustache tickles baby's innocent nose.

A flush comes into her face. She looks at him eagerly.

"At last! Oh, Victor, when do we go?"

"To-morrow, if you are able. The sooner the better." He says it with rather a forced laugh. Her face clouds a little.

"And your cousin? Was she _very_ angry!" she asked, wistfully; "_very_ much surprised?"

"Well--yes--naturally, I am afraid she was both. We must make the best of that, however. To tell the truth, I had only one interview with her, and that of so particularly unpleasant a nature, that I left next morning. So then we start to-morrow? I'll just drop a line to Erroll to apprise him."

He catches hold of his wife's writing-table to wheel it near. By some clumsiness his foot catches in one of its spidery claws, and with a crash it topples over. Away goes the writing case, flying open and scattering the contents far and wide. The crash shocks baby's nerves, baby begins to cry, and the new-made mamma flies to her angel's side.

"I say!" Sir Victor cries. "Look here! Awkward thing of me to do, eh, Ethel? Writing case broken too. Never mind, I'll pick 'em up."

He goes down on his knees boyishly, and begins gathering them up. Letters, envelopes, wax, seals, pens and pencils. He flings all in a heap in the broken case. Lady Catheron cooing to baby, looks smilingly on. Suddenly he comes to a full stop.

Comes to a full stop, and holds something before him as though it were a snake. A very harmless snake apparently--the photograph of a young and handsome man. For fully a minute he gazes at it utterly aghast. "Good Heaven!" his wife hears him say.

Holding baby in her arms she glances at him. The back of the picture is toward her, but she recognizes it. Her face turns ashen gray--she moves round and bends it over baby.

"Ethel!" Sir Victor says, his voice stern, "what does this mean?"

"What does what mean? Hush-h-h baby, darling. Not so loud, Victor, please. I want to get babe asleep."

"How comes Juan Catheron's picture here?"

She catches her breath--the tone, in which Sir Victor speaks, is a tone not pleasant to hear. She is a thoroughly good little thing, but the best of little things (being women) are _ergo_ dissemblers. For a second she dares not face him; then she comes bravely up to time and looks at him over her shoulder.

"Juan Catheron! Oh, to be sure. Is that picture here yet?" with a little laugh. "I thought I had lost it centuries ago." "Good Heaven!" she exclaims inwardly; "how _could_ I have been such a fool!"

Sir Victor rises to his feet--a curious passing likeness to his dark cousin, Inez, on his fair blonde face. "Then you know Juan Catheron. _You_! And you never told me."

"My dear Sir Victor," with a little pout, "don't be unreasonable. I should have something to do, if I put you _au courant_ of all my acquaintances. I knew Mr. Catheron--slightly," with a gasp. "Is there any crime in that?"

"Yes!" Sir Victor answers, in a voice that makes his wife jump and his son cry. "Yes--there is. I wouldn't own a dog--if Juan Catheron had owned him before me. To look at him, is pollution enough--to know him--disgrace!"

"Victor! Disgrace!"

"Disgrace, Ethel! He is one of the vilest, most profligate, most lost wretches that ever disgraced a good name. Ethel, I command you to tell me--was this man ever anything to you--friend--lover--what?"

"And if he has been--what then?" She rises and faces him proudly. "Am I to answer for his sins?"

"Yes--we all must answer more or less for those who are our friends. How come you to have his picture? What has he been to you? Not your lover--for Heaven's sake, Ethel, never _that_!"

"And why not? Mind!" she says, still facing him, her blue eyes aglitter, "I don't say that he was, but _if_ he was--what then?"

"What then?" He is white to the lips with jealous rage and fear. "This then--_you should never again be wife of mine_!"

"Victor!" she puts out her hands as if to ward off a blow, "don't say that--oh, don't say that! And--and it isn't true--he never was a lover of mine--never, never!"

She bursts out with the denial in passionate fear and trembling. In all her wedded life she has never seen him look, heard him speak like this, though she has seen him jealous--needlessly--often.

"He never was your lover? You are telling me the truth?"

"No, no--never! never, Victor--don't look like that! Oh, what brought that wretched picture here! I knew him slightly--only that--and he _did_ give me his photograph. How could I tell he was the wretch you say he is--how could I think there would be any harm in taking a picture? He seemed nice, Victor. What did he ever do?"

"He seemed nice!" Sir Victor repeated, bitterly; "and what did he ever do? What has he left undone you had better ask. He has broken every command of the decalogue--every law human and divine. He is dead to us all--his sister included, and has been these many years. Ethel, can I believe--"

"I have told you, Sir Victor. You will believe as you please," his wife answers, a little sullenly, turning away from him.

She understands him. His very jealousy and anger are born of his passionate love for her. To grieve her is torture to him, yet he grieves her often.

For a tradesman's daughter to marry a baronet may be but one remove from paradise; still it is a remove. And the serpent in Lady Catheron's Eden is the ugliest and most vicious of all serpents--jealousy. He has never shown his green eyes and obnoxious claws so palpably before, and as Sir Victor looks at her bending over her baby, his fierce paroxysm of jealousy gives way to a fierce paroxysm of love.

"Oh, Ethel, forgive me!" he says; "I did not mean to wound you, but the thought of that man--faugh! But I am a fool to be jealous of you, my white lily. Kiss me--forgive me--we'll throw this snake in the grass out of the window and forget it. Only--I had rather you had told me."

He tears up the wretched little mischief-making picture, and flings it out of the window with a look of disgust. Then they "kiss and make up," but the stab has been given, and will rankle. The folly of her past is doing its work, as all our follies past and present are pretty sure to do.


CHAPTER III.

HOW LADY CATHERON CAME HOME.

Late in the afternoon of a September day Sir Victor Catheron, of Catheron Royals, brought home his wife and son.

His wife and son! The county stood astounded. And it had been a dead secret. Dreadful! And Inez Catheron was jilted? Shocking! And _she_ was a soap-boiler's daughter? Horrible! And now when this wretched, misguided young man could keep his folly a secret no longer, he was bringing his wife and child home.

The resident gentry sat thunderstruck. Did he expect they could call? (This was the gentler sex.) Plutocracy might jostle aristocracy into the background, but the line must be drawn somewhere, and the daughter of a London soap-boiler they would not receive. Who was to be positive there had been a marriage at all. And poor Inez Catheron! Ah it was very sad--very sad. There was a well-known, well-hidden taint of insanity in the Catheron family. It must be that latent insanity cropping up. The young man must simply be mad.

Nevertheless bells rung and bonfires blazed, tenantry cheered, and all the old servants (with Mrs. Marsh, the housekeeper, and Mr. Hooper, the butler, at their head) were drawn up in formidable array to receive them. And if both husband and wife were very pale, very silent, and very nervous, who is to blame them? Sir Victor had set society at defiance; it was society's turn now, and then--there was Inez!

For Lady Catheron, the dark, menacing figure of her husband's cousin haunted her, too. As the big, turreted, towered, ivied pile of stone and mortar called Catheron Royals, with its great bell booming, its Union Jack waving, reared up before the soap-boiler's daughter--she absolutely cowered with a dread that had no name.

"I am afraid!" she said. "Oh, Victor, I am afraid!"

He laughed--not quite naturally, though. If the painful truth must be told of a baronet and a Catheron, Sir Victor was afraid, too.

"Afraid?" he laughed; "of what, Ethel? The ghost of the Gray Lady, who walks twice in every year in Rupert's Tower? Like all fine old families, we have our fine old family ghost, and would not part with it for the world. I'll tell you the legend some day; at present 'screw your courage to the sticking place,' for here we are."

He descended from the carriage, and walked into the grand manorial hall, vast enough to have lodged a hundred men, his wife on his arm, his head very high, his face very pale. She clung to him, poor child! and yet she battled hard for her dignity, too. Hat in hand, smiling right and left in the old pleasant way, he shook hands with Mrs. Marsh and Mr. Hooper, presented them to my lady, and bravely inquired for Miss Inez. Miss Inez was well, and awaiting him in the Cedar drawing-room.

They ascended to the Cedar drawing-room, one of the grandest rooms in the house, all gilding and ormolu, and magnificent upholstery--Master Baby following in the arms of his nurse. The sweet face and soft eyes of Lady Catheron had done their work already in the ranks of the servants--she would be an easier mistress to serve than Miss Inez.

"If she ever _is_ mistress in her own house," thought Mrs. Marsh, who was "companion" to Miss Catheron as well as housekeeper; "and mistress she never will be while Miss Catheron is at the Royals."

The drawing-room was brilliantly lit, and standing in the full glare of the lamps--Inez. She was gorgeous this evening in maize silk, that was like woven sunshine; she had a white camelia in her hair, a diamond cross on her breast, scented laces about her, diamonds on her arms and in her ears. So she stood--a resplendent vision--so Sir Victor beheld her again.

He put up his hand for an instant like one who is dazzled--then he led forward his wife, as men have led on a forlorn hope.

"My cousin," he said, "my wife; Inez, this is Ethel."

There was a certain pathos in the simplicity of the words, in the tone of his voice, in the look of his eyes. And as some _very_ uplifted young empress might bow to the lowliest of her handmaidens, Miss Catheron bowed to Lady Catheron.

"Ethel," she repeated,