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

moment--in no case can you survive the week."

His serene face did not change. He turned to his aunt with a smile that was often on his lips now:

"At last," he said softly; "at last my darling may come to me--at last I may tell her all. Thank God for this hour of release. Aunt Helena, send for Edith at once."

By the night train, a few hours later, Inez Catheron went up to London. As Madame Mirebeau's young women assembled next morning, she was there before them, waiting to see Miss Stuart.

Edith came--a foreknowledge of the truth in her mind. The interview was brief. She left at once in company with Miss Catheron, and Madame Mirebeau's establishment was to know her no more.

As the short, autumnal day closed in, they were in Cheshire.

It was the evening of the second of October--the anniversary of the bridal eve. And thus at last the bride was coming home. She looked out with eyes that saw nothing of the familiar landscape as it flitted by--the places she had never thought to see more. She was going to Catheron Royals, to the man she had married a year ago. A year ago! what a strange, terrible year it had been--like a bad dream. She shuddered as she recalled it. All was to be told at last, and death was to set all things even. The bride was returning to the bridegroom like this.

All the way from the station to the great house she never spoke a word. Her heart beat with a dull, heavy pain--pity for him--dread of what she was to hear. It was quite dark when they rolled through the lofty gates, up the broad, tree-shaded drive, to the grand portico entrance of the house.

"He is very low this evening, miss," Jamison whispered as he admitted them; "feverish and longing for her ladyship's coming. He begs that as soon as my lady is rested and has had some refreshment she will come to him at once."

Lady Helena met them at the head of the stairs, and took the pale, tired girl in her arms for a moment. Then Edith was in a firelit, waxlit room, lying back for a minute's rest in the downy depths of a great chair. Then coffee and a dainty repast was brought her. She bathed her face and hands, and tried to eat and drink. But the food seemed to choke her. She drank the strong, black coffee eagerly, and was ready to go.

Lady Helena led her to the room where he lay--that purple and gold chamber, with all its dainty and luxurious appointments. She shrank a little as she entered--she remembered it was to have been _their_ room when they returned from their bridal tour. Lady Helena just opened the door to admit her, closed it again, and was gone.

She was alone with the dying man. By the dim light of two wax tapers she beheld him propped up with pillows, his white, eager face turned toward her, the love, that not death itself could for a moment vanquish, shining upon her from his eyes. She was over kneeling by the bedside, holding his hands in hers--how, she could never have told.

"I am sorry--I am sorry!" It was all she could say. In that hour, in the presence of death, she forgot everything, her wrongs, her humiliation. She only knew that he was dying, and that he loved her as she would never be loved again in this world.

"It is better as it is," she heard him saying, when she could hear at all, for the dull, rushing sound in her ears; "far better--far better. My life was torture--could never have been anything else, though I lived fifty years. I was so young--life looked so long, that there were times, yes, Edith, times when for hours I sat debating within myself a suicide's cowardly end. But Heaven has saved me from that. Death has mercifully come of itself to set all things straight, and oh, my darling! to bring _you_."

She laid her face upon his wasted hand, nearer loving him in his death than she had ever been in his life.

"You have suffered," he said tenderly, looking at her. "I thought to shield you from every care, to make your life one long dream of pleasure and happiness, and see how I have done it! You have hated me--scorned me, and with justice; how could it be otherwise? Even when you hear all, you may not be able to forgive me, and yet, Heaven knows, I did it all for the best. If it were all to come over again, I could not act otherwise than as I have acted. But, my darling, it was very hard on you."

In death as in life his thoughts were not of himself and his own sufferings, but of her. As she looked at him, as she recalled what he had been only a year ago, in the flush and vigor and prime of manhood--it seemed almost too much to bear.

"Oh, Victor! hush," she cried, hiding her face again, "you break my heart!"

His feeble fingers closed over hers with all their dying strength--that faint, happy smile came over his lips. "I don't want to distress you," he said very gently; "you have suffered enough without that. Edith, I feel wonderfully happy to-night--it seems to me I have no wish left--as though I were sure of your forgiveness beforehand. It is joy enough to see you here--to feel your hand in mine once more, to know I am at liberty to tell you the truth at last. I have longed for this hour with a longing I can never describe. Only to be forgiven and die--I wanted no more. For what would life have been without you? My dearest, I wonder if in the dark days that are gone, whatever you may have doubted, my honor, my sanity, if you ever doubted my love for you?"

"I don't know," she answered, in a stifled voice. "My thoughts have been very dark--very desperate. There were times when there seemed no light on earth, no hope in Heaven. I dare not tell you--I dare not think--how wicked and reckless my heart has been."

"Poor child!" he said, with a touch of infinite compassion. "You were so young--it was all so sudden, so terrible, so incomprehensible. Draw up that hassock, Edith, and sit here by my side, and listen. No, you must let go my hand. How can I tell whether you will not shrink from it and me with horror when you know all."

Without a word, she drew the low seat close to the bed, and shading her face with her hand, listened, motionless as a statue, to the brief story of the secret that had held them apart so long.

"It all begins," Sir Victor's faint, low voice said, "with the night of my father's death, three weeks before our wedding-day. That night I learned the secret of my mother's murder, and learned to pity my unhappy father as I had never pitied him before. Do you remember, Edith, the words you spoke to Lady Helena the day before you ran away from Powyss Place? You said Inez Catheron was not the murderer, though she had been accused of it, nor Juan Catheron, though he had been suspected of it--that you believed Sir Victor Catheron had killed his own wife. Edith, you were right. Sir Victor Catheron murdered his own wife!

"I learned it that fatal night. Lady Helena and Inez had known it all along. Juan Catheron more than suspected it. Bad as he was, he kept that secret. My mother was stabbed by my father's hand.

"Why did he do it? you ask. I answer, because he was mad--mad for weeks before. And he knew it, though no one else did. With the cunning of insanity he kept his secret, not even his wife suspected that his reason was unsound. He was a monomaniac. Insanity, as you have heard, is hereditary in our family, in different phases; the phase it took with him was homicidal mania. On all other points he was sane--on this, almost from the first, he had been insane--_the desire to take his wife's life_.

"It is horrible, is it not--almost incredibly horrible? It is true, nevertheless. Before the honeymoon was ended, his homicidal mania developed itself--an almost insurmountable desire, whenever he was alone in her presence, to take her life. Out of the very depth and intensity of his passion for her his madness arose. He loved her with the whole strength of his heart and being, and--the mad longing was with him always, to end her life while she was all his own--in short, to kill her.

"He could not help it; he knew his madness--he shrank in horror from it--he battled with it--he prayed for help--and for over a year he controlled himself. But it was always there--always. How long it might have lain dormant--how long he would have been able to withstand his mad desire, no one can tell. But Juan Catheron came and claimed her as his wife, and jealousy finished what a dreadful hereditary insanity had begun.

"On that fatal evening he had seen them together somewhere in the grounds, and though he hid what he felt, the sight had goaded him almost to frenzy. Then came the summons from Lady Helena to go to Powyss Place. He set out, but before he had gone half-way, the demon of jealously whispered in his ear, 'Your wife is with Juan Catheron now--go back and surprise them.' He turned and went back--a madman--the last glimpse of reason and self-control gone. He saw his wife, not with Juan Catheron, but peacefully and innocently asleep by the open window of the room where he had left her. The dagger, used as a paper knife, lay on the table near. I say he was utterly mad for the time. In a moment the knife was up to the hilt in her heart, dealing death with that one strong blow! He drew it out and--she lay dead before him.

"Then a great, an awful horror, fell upon him. Not of the consequence of his crime; only of that which lay so still and white before him. He turned like the madman he was and fled. By some strange chance he met no one. In passing through the gates he flung the dagger among the fern, leaped on his horse, and was gone.

"He rode straight to Powyss Place. Before he reached it some of insanity's cunning returned to him. He must not let people know _he_ had done it; they would find out he was mad; they would shut him up in a madhouse; they would shrink from him in loathing and horror. How he managed it, he told me with his dying breath, he never knew--he did somehow. No one suspected him, only Inez Catheron, returning to the nursery, had seen all--had seen the deadly blow struck, had seen his instant flight, and stood spell-bound, speechless and motionless as a stone. He remembered no more--the dark night of oblivion and total insanity closed about him only to open at briefest intervals from that to the hour of his death.

"That, Edith, was the awful story I was told that night--the story that has ruined and wrecked my whole life and yours. I listened to it all as you sit and listen now, still as a stone, frozen with a horror too intense for words. I can recall as clearly now as the moment I heard them the last words he ever spoke to me:

"'I tell you this