Joan Haste, H. Rider Haggard [e book reader free .TXT] 📗

>threw him up and tried to get over it, for I was doing uncommonly well

out there, running a lodging-house of my own. But it wasn’t any use: I

just thought of you all day and dreamed of you all night, and the end

of it was that I sold up the concern and started home. And now if you

will marry me respectable so much the better, and if you won’t—well,

I must put up with it, and sha’n’t show you any more temper, for I’ve

tried to get along without you and I can’t, that’s the fact. You seem

to be pretty flourishing, anyway; somebody in the train told me that

you had come into a lot of money and bought Monk’s Lodge, so I walked

here straight, I was in such a hurry to see you. Why, what’s the

matter with you, George? You look like a ghost. Come, give me a kiss

and take me into the house. I’ll clear out by-and-by if you wish it.’

 

“These, Joan, were your mother’s exact words, as she stood there in

the moonlight near the roadway, holding you in her arms. I have not

forgotten a syllable of them.

 

“When she finished I was forced to speak. ‘I can’t take you in there,’

I said, ‘because I am married and it is my wife’s house.’ She turned

ghastly white, and had I not caught her I think that she would have

fallen.

 

“‘O my God!” she said, ‘I never thought of this. Well, George, you

won’t cast me off for all that, will you? I was your wife before she

was, and this is your daughter.’

 

“Then, Joan, though it nearly choked me, I lied to her again, for what

else was I to do? ‘You never were my wife,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got

another daughter now. Also all this is your own fault, for had I known

that you were alive, I would not have married. You have yourself to

thank, Jane, and no one else. Why did you send me that false

certificate?’

 

“‘I suppose so,’ she answered heavily. ‘Well, I’d best be off; but you

needn’t have been so ready to believe things. Will you look after the

child if anything happens to me, George? She’s a pretty babe, and I’ve

taught her to say Daddy to nothing.’

 

“I told your mother not to talk in that strain, and asked her where

she was going to spend the night, saying that I would see her again on

the morrow. She answered, at her sister’s, Mrs. Gillingwater, and held

you up for me to kiss. Then she walked away, and that was the last

time that I saw her alive.

 

“It seems that she went to the Crown and Mitre, and made herself known

to your aunt, telling her that she had been abroad to America, where

she had come to trouble, but that she had money, in proof of which she

gave her notes for fifty pounds to put into a safe place. Also she

said that I was the agent for people who knew about her in the States,

and was paid to look after her child. Then she ate some supper, and

saying that she would like to take a walk and look at the old place,

as she might have to go up to London on the morrow, she went out. Next

morning she was found dead beneath the cliff, though how she came

there, there was nothing to show.

 

“That, Joan, is the story of your mother’s life and death.”

 

“You mean the story of my mother’s life and murder,” she answered.

“Had you not told her that lie she would never have committed

suicide.”

 

“You are hard upon me, Joan. She was more to blame than I was.

Moreover, I do not believe that she killed herself. It was not like

her to have done so. At the place where she fell over the cliff there

stood a paling, of which the top rail, that was quite rotten, was

found to have been broken. I think that my poor wife, being very

unhappy, walked along the cliff and leaned upon this rail wondering

what she should do, when suddenly it broke and she was killed, for I

am sure that she had no idea of making away with herself.

 

“After her death Mrs. Gillingwater came to me and repeated the tale

which her sister had told her, as to my having been appointed agent to

some person unknown in America. Here was a way out of my trouble, and

I took it, saying that what she had heard was true. This was the

greatest of my sins; but the temptation was too strong for me, for had

the truth come out I should have been utterly destroyed, my wife would

have been no wife, her child would have been a bastard, I should have

been liable to a prosecution for bigamy, and, worse of all, my

daughter’s heritage might possibly have passed from her to you.”

 

“To me?” said Joan.

 

“Yes, to you; for under my father-in-law’s will all his property is

strictly settled first upon his daughter, my late wife, with a life

interest to myself, and then upon my lawful issue. You are my only

lawful issue, Joan; and it would seem, therefore, that you are legally

entitled to your half-sister’s possessions, though of 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