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

on one kind word from your lips? Oh, Lenny, you would not let her drop brokenhearted at your feet? You would know, let her birth be what it might, that she was still the same faithful creature who had cherished and served and trusted and worshipped you since her marriage-day, and who asked nothing in return but to lay her head on your bosom, and to hear you say that you loved her? You would know that she had nerved herself to tell the fatal secret, because, in her loyalty and love to her husband, she would rather die forsaken and despised, than live, deceiving him? You would know all this, and you would open your arms to the mother of your child, to the wife of your first love, though she was the lowliest of all lowly born women in the estimation of the world? Oh, you would, Lenny, I know you would!”

“Rosamond! how your hands tremble; how your voice alters! You are agitating yourself about this supposed story of yours, as if you were talking of real events.”

“You would take her to your heart, Lenny? You would open your arms to her without an instant of unworthy doubt?”

“Hush! hush! I hope I should.”

“Hope? only hope? Oh, think again, love, think again; and say you know you should!”

“Must I, Rosamond? Then I do say it.”

She drew back as the words passed his lips, and took the letter from the table.

“You have not yet asked me, Lenny, to read the letter that I found in the Myrtle Room. I offer to read it now of my own accord.”

She trembled a little as she spoke those few decisive words, but her utterance of them was clear and steady, as if her consciousness of being now irrevocably pledged to make the disclosure had strengthened her at last to dare all hazards and end all suspense.

Her husband turned toward the place from which the sound of her voice had reached him, with a mixed expression of perplexity and surprise in his face. “You pass so suddenly from one subject to another,” he said, “that I hardly know how to follow you. What in the world, Rosamond, takes you, at one jump, from a romantic argument about a situation in a novel, to the plain, practical business of reading an old letter?”

“Perhaps there is a closer connection between the two than you suspect,” she answered.

“A closer connection? What connection? I don’t understand.”

“The letter will explain.”

“Why the letter? Why should you not explain?”

She stole one anxious look at his face, and saw that a sense of something serious to come was now overshadowing his mind for the first time.

“Rosamond!” he exclaimed, “there is some mystery⁠—”

“There are no mysteries between us two,” she interposed quickly. “There never have been any, love; there never shall be.” She moved a little nearer to him to take her old favorite place on his knee, then checked herself, and drew back again to the table. Warning tears in her eyes bade her distrust her own firmness, and read the letter where she could not feel the beating of his heart.

“Did I tell you,” she resumed, after waiting an instant to compose herself, “where I found the folded piece of paper which I put into your hand in the Myrtle Room?”

“No,” he replied, “I think not.”

“I found it at the back of the frame of that picture⁠—the picture of the ghostly woman with the wicked face. I opened it immediately, and saw that it was a letter. The address inside, the first line under it, and one of the two signatures which it contained, were in a handwriting that I knew.”

“Whose!”

“The handwriting of the late Mrs. Treverton.”

“Of your mother?”

“Of the late Mrs. Treverton.”

“Gracious God, Rosamond! why do you speak of her in that way?”

“Let me read, and you will know. You have seen, with my eyes, what the Myrtle Room is like; you have seen, with my eyes, every object which the search through it brought to light; you must now see, with my eyes, what this letter contains. It is the Secret of the Myrtle Room.”

She bent close over the faint, faded writing, and read these words:

“To my Husband⁠—

“We have parted, Arthur, forever, and I have not had the courage to embitter our farewell by confessing that I have deceived you⁠—cruelly and basely deceived you. But a few minutes since, you were weeping by my bedside and speaking of our child. My wronged, my beloved husband, the little daughter of your heart is not yours, is not mine. She is a love-child, whom I have imposed on you for mine. Her father was a miner at Porthgenna; her mother is my maid, Sarah Leeson.”

Rosamond paused, but never raised her head from the letter. She heard her husband lay his hand suddenly on the table; she heard him start to his feet; she heard him draw his breath heavily in one quick gasp; she heard him whisper to himself the instant after⁠—“A love-child!” With a fearful, painful distinctness she heard those three words. The tone in which he whispered them turned her cold. But she never moved, for there was more to read; and while more remained, if her life had depended on it, she could not have looked up.

In a moment more she went on, and read these lines next:

“I have many heavy sins to answer for, but this one sin you must pardon, Arthur, for I committed it through fondness for you. That fondness told me a secret which you sought to hide from me. That fondness told me that your barren wife would never make your heart all her own until she had borne you a child; and your lips proved it true. Your first words, when you came back from sea, and when the infant was placed in your arms, were⁠—‘I have never loved you, Rosamond, as I love you now.’ If you had not said that, I should never have kept my guilty secret.

“I can add