The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins [best historical biographies .TXT] 📗

to my taste. So far as I can tell, it seems to be intended to represent⁠—”

Leonard stopped her before she could say any more. “Let me try, for once, if I can’t make a discovery for myself,” he said, a little impatiently. “Let me try if my fingers won’t tell me what this sculpture is meant to represent.”

He passed his hands carefully over the bass-relief (Rosamond watching their slightest movement with silent interest, the while), considered a little, and said⁠—

“Is there not a figure of a man sitting down, in the right-hand corner? And are there not rocks and trees, very stiffly done, high up, at the left-hand side?”

Rosamond looked at him tenderly, and smiled. “My poor dear!” she said. “Your man sitting down is, in reality, a miniature copy of the famous ancient statue of Niobe and her child; your rocks are marble imitations of clouds, and your stiffly done trees are arrows darting out from some invisible Jupiter or Apollo, or other heathen god. Ah, Lenny, Lenny! you can’t trust your touch, love, as you can trust me!”

A momentary shade of vexation passed across his face; but it vanished the instant she took his hand again to lead him back to his seat. He drew her to him gently, and kissed her cheek. “You are right, Rosamond,” he said. “The one faithful friend to me in my blindness, who never fails, is my wife.”

Seeing him look a little saddened, and feeling, with the quick intuition of a woman’s affection, that he was thinking of the days when he had enjoyed the blessing of sight, Rosamond returned abruptly, as soon as she saw him seated once more on the ottoman, to the subject of the Myrtle Room.

“Where shall I look next, dear?” she said. “The bookcase we have examined. The writing-table we must wait to examine. What else is there that has a cupboard or a drawer in it?” She looked round her in perplexity; then walked away toward the part of the room to which her attention had been last drawn⁠—the part where the fireplace was situated.

“I thought I noticed something here, Lenny, when I passed just now with you,” she said, approaching the second recess behind the mantelpiece, corresponding with the recess in which the writing-table stood.

She looked into the place closely, and detected in a corner, darkened by the shadow of the heavy projecting mantelpiece, a narrow, rickety little table, made of the commonest mahogany⁠—the frailest, poorest, least conspicuous piece of furniture in the whole room. She pushed it out contemptuously into the light with her foot. It ran on clumsy old-fashioned casters, and creaked wearily as it moved.

“Lenny, I have found another table,” said Rosamond. “A miserable, forlorn-looking little thing, lost in a corner. I have just pushed it into the light, and I have discovered one drawer in it.” She paused, and tried to open the drawer; but it resisted her. “Another lock!” she exclaimed, impatiently. “Even this wretched thing is closed against us!”

She pushed the table sharply away with her hand. It swayed on its frail legs, tottered, and fell over on the floor⁠—fell as heavily as a table of twice its size⁠—fell with a shock that rang through the room, and repeated itself again and again in the echoes of the lonesome north hall.

Rosamond ran to her husband, seeing him start from his seat in alarm, and told him what had happened. “You call it a little table,” he replied, in astonishment. “It fell like one of the largest pieces of furniture in the room!”

“Surely there must have been something heavy in the drawer!” said Rosamond, approaching the table with her spirits still fluttered by the shock of its unnaturally heavy fall. After waiting for a few moments to give the dust which it had raised, and which still hung over it in thick lazy clouds, time to disperse, she stooped down and examined it. It was cracked across the top from end to end, and the lock had been broken away from its fastenings by the fall.

She set the table up again carefully, drew out the drawer, and, after a glance at its contents, turned to her husband. “I knew it,” she said, “I knew there must be something heavy in the drawer. It is full of pieces of copper-ore, like those specimens of my father’s, Lenny, from Porthgenna mine. Wait! I think I feel something else, as far away at the back here as my hand can reach.”

She extricated from the lumps of ore at the back of the drawer a small circular picture-frame of black wood, about the size of an ordinary hand-glass. It came out with the front part downward, and with the area which its circle enclosed filled up by a thin piece of wood, of the sort which is used at the backs of small frames to keep drawings and engravings steady in them. This piece of wood (only secured to the back of the frame by one nail) had been forced out of its place, probably by the overthrow of the table; and when Rosamond took the frame out of the drawer, she observed between it and the dislodged piece of wood the end of a morsel of paper, apparently folded many times over, so as to occupy the smallest possible space. She drew out the piece of paper, laid it aside on the table without unfolding it, replaced the piece of wood in its proper position, and then turned the frame round, to see if there was a picture in front.

There was a picture⁠—a picture painted in oils, darkened, but not much faded, by age. It represented the head of a woman, and the figure as far as the bosom.

The instant Rosamond’s eyes fell on it she shuddered, and hurriedly advanced toward her husband with the picture in her hand.

“Well, what have you found now?” he inquired, hearing her approach.

“A picture,” she answered, faintly, stopping to look at it again.

Leonard’s sensitive ear detected a