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

do not weigh with me, and I know the happiness of my life to be very near your heart. I have only to say again that that happiness lies entirely with her--that without her I should be the most miserable fellow alive--to hear you withdraw every objection and take my darling to your arms as your daughter."

She sighed heavily as she listened.

"A wilful man must have his way. You are, as you told me yesterday, your own master, free to do as you please. To Miss Darrell personally I have no objection; she is beautiful, well-bred, and, I believe, a noble girl. Her poverty and obscure birth _are_ drawbacks in my eyes, but, since they are not so in yours, I will allude to them no more. The objections I made yesterday to your marriage I would have made had your bride been a duke's daughter. I had hoped--it was an absurd hope--that you would not think of marriage for many years to come, perhaps not at all."

"But, Aunt Helena--"

"Do I not say it was an absurd hope? The fact is, Victor, I have been a coward--a nervous, wretched coward from first to last. I shut my eyes to the truth. I feared you might fall in love with this girl, but I put the fear away from me. The time has come when the truth must be spoken, when my love for you can shield you no longer. Before you marry you must know all. Do you remember, in the heat of my excitement yesterday, telling you you had no right to the title you bear? In one sense I spoke the truth. Your father--" she gasped and paused.

"My father?" he breathlessly repeated.

"Your father is alive."

He sat and looked at her--stunned. What was she saying? His father alive, after all those years! and he not Sir Victor Catheron! He half rose--ashen pale.

"Lady Helena, what is this? My father alive--my father, whom for twenty years--since I could think at all--I have thought dead! What vile deception is here?"

"Sit down, Victor; you shall hear all. There is no vile deception--the deception, such as it is, has been by his own desire. Your father lives, but he is hopelessly insane."

He sat looking at her, pale, stern, almost confounded.

"He--he never recovered from the, shock of his wife's dreadful death," went on her ladyship, her voice trembling. "Health returned after that terrible brain fever, but not reason. We took him away--the best medical aid everywhere was tried--all in vain. For years he was hopelessly, utterly insane, never violent, but mind and memory a total blank. He was incurable--he would never reclaim his title, but his bodily health was good, and he might live for many years. Why then deprive you of your rights, since in no way you defrauded him? The world was given to understand he was dead, and you, as you grew up, took his place as though the grave had indeed closed over him. But legally, as you see for yourself, you have no claim to it."

Still he sat gazing at her--still he sat silent, his lips compressed, waiting for the end.

"Of late years, gleams of reason have returned, fitfully and at uncertain times. On these rare occasions he has spoken of you, has expressed the desire that you should still be kept in ignorance, that he shall ever be to the world dead. You perceive, therefore, though it is my duty to tell you this, it need in no way alarm you, as he will never interfere with your claims."

Still he sat silent--a strange, intent listening expression on his face.

"You recollect the lady who came here yesterday," she continued. "Victor, looking far back into the past, have you no recollection of some one, fair and young, who used to bend over you at night, hear you say your baby prayers, and sing you to sleep? Try and think."

He bent his head in assent.

"I remember," he answered.

"Do you recall how she looked--has her face remained in your memory?"

"She had dark eyes and hair, and was handsome. I remember no more."

She looked at him wistfully.

"Victor, have you no idea who that woman was--none?"

"None," he replied coldly. "How could I, since she was not my mother. I never heard her name. Who was she?"

"She was the lady you saw yesterday."

"Who was the lady I saw yesterday?"

She paused a moment, then replied, still with that wistful glance on his face:

"Inez Catheron."

"What?" Again he half-started to his feet. "The woman who was my mother's rival and enemy, who made her life wretched, who was concerned in her murder! Whom _you_ aided to escape from Chesholm jail! The woman who, directly or indirectly, is guilty of her death!"

"Sir Victor Catheron, how dare you!" Lady Helen also started to her feet, her face flushing with haughty anger. "I tell you Inez Catheron has been a martyr--not a murderess. She was your mother's rival, as she had a right to be--was she not your father's plighted wife, long before he ever saw Ethel Dobb? She was your mother's rival. It was her only fault, and her whole life has been spent in expiating it. Was it not atonement sufficient, that for the crime of another, she should be branded with life-long infamy, and banished forever from home and friends?"

"If the guilt was not hers it was her brother's, and she was privy to it," the young man retorted, with sullen coldness.

"Who are you, that you should say whether it was or not? The assassin is known to Heaven, and Heaven has dealt with him. Accuse no one--neither Juan Catheron nor his sister--all human judgment is liable to err. Of your mother's death Inez Catheron is innocent--by it her whole life has been blighted. To your father, that life has been consecrated. She has been his nurse, his companion, his more than sister or mother all those years. _I_ loved him, and I could not have done what she has done. He used her brutally--brutally I say--and her revenge has been life-long devotion and sacrifice. All those years she has never left him. She will never leave him until he dies."

She sank back in her seat, trembling, exhausted. He listened in growing wonder.

"You believe me?" she demanded imperiously.

"I believe you," he replied sadly. "My dear aunt, forgive me. I believe all you have said. Can I not see her and thank her too?"

"You shall see her. It is for that she has remained. Stay here; I will send her to you. She deserves your thanks, though all thanks are but empty and vain for such a life-long martyrdom as hers."

She left him hastily. Profound silence fell. He turned and looked out at the fast-falling rain, at the trees swaying in the fitful wind, at the dull, leaden sky. Was he asleep and dreaming? His father alive! He sat half dazed, unable to realize it.

"Victor!"

He had not heard the door open, he had not heard her approach, but she stood beside him. All in black, soft, noiseless black, a face devoid of all color; large, sad, soft eyes, and hair white as winter snow--that was the woman Sir Victor Catheron saw as he turned round. The face, with all its settled sadness and pallor, was still the face of a beautiful woman, and in weird contradiction to its youth and beauty, were the smooth bands of abundant hair--white as the hair of eighty. The deep, dusk eyes, once so full of pride and fire, looked at him with the tender, saddened light, long, patient suffering had wrought; the lips, once curved in haughtiest disdain, had taken the sweetness of years of hopeless pain. And so, after three-and-twenty years, Victor Catheron saw the woman, whose life his father's falsity and fickleness had wrecked.

"Victor!"

She held out her hand to him shyly, wistfully. The ban of murder had been upon her all these years. Who was to tell that in his inmost heart he too might not brand her as a murderess? But she need not have doubted. If any suspicion yet lingered in his mind, it vanished as he looked at her.

"Miss Catheron!" He grasped her hand, and held it between both his own. "I have but just heard all, for the first time, as you know. That my father lives--that to him you have nobly consecrated your life. He has not deserved it at your hands; let my father's son thank you with all his soul!"

"Ah, hush," she said softly. "I want no thanks. Your poor father! Aunt Helena has told you how miserably all _his_ life has been wrecked--a life once so full of promise."

"She has told me all, Miss Catheron."

"Not Miss Catheron," she interposed, with a smile that lit her worn face into youth and beauty; "not Miss Catheron, surely--Inez, Cousin Inez, if you will. It is twenty-three years--do you know it?--since any one has called me Miss Catheron before. You can't fancy how oddly it sounds."

He looked at her in surprise.

"You do not bear your own name? And yet I might have known it, lying as you still do--"

"Under the ban of murder." She shuddered slightly as she said it. "Yes, when I fled that dreadful night from Chesholm prison, and made my way to London, I left my name behind me. I took at first the name of Miss Black. I lived in dingy lodgings in that crowded part of London, Lambeth; and for the look of the thing, took in sewing. It was of all those years the most dreary, the most miserable and lonely time of my probation. I lived there four months; then came the time of your father's complete restoration to bodily health, and confirmation of the fear that his mind was entirely gone. What was to be done with him? Lady Helena was at a loss to know. There were private asylums, but she disliked the idea of shutting him up in one. He was perfectly gentle, perfectly harmless, perfectly insane. Lady Helena came to see me, and I, pining for the sight of a familiar face, sick and weary to death of the wretched neighborhood in which I lived, proposed the plan that has ever since been the plan of my life. Let Lady Helena take a house, retired enough to be safe, sufficiently suburban to be healthy; let her place Victor there with me; let Mrs. Marsh, my old friend and housekeeper at Catheron Royals, become my housekeeper once more; let Hooper the butler take charge of us, and let us all live together. I thought then, and I think still, it was the best thing for him and for me that could have been suggested. Aunt Helena acted upon it at once; she found a house, on the outskirts of St. John's Wood--a large house, set in spacious grounds, and inclosed by a high wall, called 'Poplar Lodge.' It suited us in every way; it combined all the advantages of town and country. She leased it from the agent for a long term of years, for a 'Mr. and Mrs. Victor,' Mr. Victor being in very poor health. Secretly and by night we removed your father there, and since the night of his entrance he has never passed the gates. From the first--in the days of my youth and my happiness--my life belonged to him; it will belong to him to the end. Hooper and Marsh are with me still, old and feeble now; and of late