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

change in her voice. “Is there anything that alarms you in the picture?” he asked, half in jest, half in earnest.

“There is something that startles me⁠—something that seems to have turned me cold for the moment, hot as the day is,” said Rosamond. “Do you remember the description the servant-girl gave us, on the night we arrived here, of the ghost of the north rooms?”

“Yes, I remember it perfectly.”

“Lenny! that description and this picture are exactly alike! Here is the curling, light-brown hair. Here is the dimple on each cheek. Here are the bright regular teeth. Here is that leering, wicked, fatal beauty which the girl tried to describe, and did describe, when she said it was awful!”

Leonard smiled. “That vivid fancy of yours, my dear, takes strange flights sometimes,” he said, quietly.

“Fancy!” repeated Rosamond to herself. “How can it be fancy when I see the face? how can it be fancy when I feel⁠—” She stopped, shuddered again, and, returning hastily to the table, placed the picture on it, face downward. As she did so, the morsel of folded paper which she had removed from the back of the frame caught her eye.

“There may be some account of the picture in this,” she said, and stretched out her hand to it.

It was getting on toward noon. The heat weighed heavier on the air, and the stillness of all things was more intense than ever, as she took up the paper from the table.

Fold by fold she opened it, and saw that there were written characters inside, traced in ink that had faded to a light, yellow hue. She smoothed it out carefully on the table⁠—then took it up again and looked at the first line of the writing.

The first line contained only three words⁠—words which told her that the paper with the writing on it was not a description of the picture, but a letter⁠—words which made her start and change color the moment her eye fell upon them. Without attempting to read any further, she hastily turned over the leaf to find out the place where the writing ended.

It ended at the bottom of the third page; but there was a break in the lines, near the foot of the second page, and in that break there were two names signed. She looked at the uppermost of the two⁠—started again⁠—and turned back instantly to the first page.

Line by line, and word by word, she read through the writing; her natural complexion fading out gradually the while, and a dull, equal whiteness overspreading all her face in its stead. When she had come to the end of the third page, the hand in which she held the letter dropped to her side, and she turned her head slowly toward Leonard. In that position she stood⁠—no tears moistening her eyes, no change passing over her features, no word escaping her lips, no movement varying the position of her limbs⁠—in that position she stood, with the fatal letter crumpled up in her cold fingers, looking steadfastly, speechlessly, breathlessly at her blind husband.

He was still sitting as she had seen him a few minutes before, with his legs crossed, his hands clasped together in front of them, and his head turned expectantly in the direction in which he had last heard the sound of his wife’s voice. But in a few moments the intense stillness in the room forced itself upon his attention. He changed his position⁠—listened for a little, turning his head uneasily from side to side, and then called to his wife.

“Rosamond!”

At the sound of his voice her lips moved, and her fingers closed faster on the paper that they held; but she neither stepped forward nor spoke.

“Rosamond!”

Her lips moved again⁠—faint traces of expression began to pass shadow-like over the blank whiteness of her face⁠—she advanced one step, hesitated, looked at the letter, and stopped.

Hearing no answer, he rose surprised and uneasy. Moving his poor, helpless, wandering hands to and fro before him in the air, he walked forward a few paces, straight out from the wall against which he had been sitting. A chair, which his hands were not held low enough to touch, stood in his way; and, as he still advanced, he struck his knee sharply against it.

A cry burst from Rosamond’s lips, as if the pain of the blow had passed, at the instant of its infliction, from her husband to herself. She was by his side in a moment. “You are not hurt, Lenny,” she said, faintly.

“No, no.” He tried to press his hand on the place where he had struck himself, but she knelt down quickly, and put her own hand there instead, nestling her head against him, while she was on her knees, in a strangely hesitating timid way. He lightly laid the hand which she had intercepted on her shoulder. The moment it touched her, her eyes began to soften; the tears rose in them, and fell slowly one by one down her cheeks.

“I thought you had left me,” he said. “There was such a silence that I fancied you had gone out of the room.”

“Will you come out of it with me now?” Her strength seemed to fail her while she asked the question; her head drooped on her breast, and she let the letter fall on the floor at her side.

“Are you tired already, Rosamond? Your voice sounds as if you were.”

“I want to leave the room,” she said, still in the same low, faint, constrained tone. “Is your knee easier, dear? Can you walk now?”

“Certainly. There is nothing in the world the matter with my knee. If you are tired, Rosamond⁠—as I know you are, though you may not confess it⁠—the sooner we leave the room the better.”

She appeared not to hear the last words he said. Her fingers were working feverishly about her neck and bosom; two bright red spots were beginning to burn in her pale cheeks; her eyes were fixed vacantly on the letter at her