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

or how shall I feel the blessing that the seeing her will bring to me, if my conscience is only clear?’ Then she stops a little, and lifts up her two hands, so, and cries out loud, ‘Oh, will God’s mercy show me no way of telling it that will spare me before my child!’ And I say, ‘Hush, then! there is a way. Tell it to Uncle Joseph, who is the same as father to you! Tell it to Uncle Joseph, whose little son died in your arms; whose tears your hand wiped away, in the grief time long ago. Tell it, my child, to me; and I shall take the risk, and the shame (if there is shame), of telling it again. I, with nothing to speak for me but my white hair; I, with nothing to help me but my heart that means no harm⁠—I shall go to that good and true woman, with the burden of her mother’s grief to lay before her; and, in my soul of souls I believe it, she will not turn away!’ ”

He paused, and looked at Rosamond. Her head was bent down over her child; her tears were dropping slowly, one by one, on the bosom of his little white dress. Waiting a moment to collect herself before she spoke, she held out her hand to the old man, and firmly and gratefully met the look he fixed on her. “Oh, go on, go on!” she said. “Let me prove to you that your generous confidence in me is not misplaced.”

“I knew it was not, from the first, as surely as I know it now!” said Uncle Joseph. “And Sarah, when I had spoken to her, she knew it too. She was silent for a little; she cried for a little; she leaned over from the pillow and kissed me here, on my cheek, as I sat by the bedside; and then she looked back, back, back, in her mind, to the Long Ago, and very quietly, very slowly, with her eyes looking into my eyes, and her hand resting so in mine, she spoke the words to me that I must now speak again to you, who sit here today as her judge, before you go to her tomorrow as her child.”

“Not as her judge!” said Rosamond. “I can not, I must not hear you say that.”

“I speak her words, not mine,” rejoined the old man, gravely. “Wait before you bid me change them for others⁠—wait till you know the end.”

He drew his chair a little nearer to Rosamond, paused for a minute or two to arrange his recollections, and to separate them one from the other; then resumed.

“As Sarah began with me,” he said, “so I, for my part, must begin also⁠—which means to say, that I go down now through the years that are past, to the time when my niece went out to her first service. You know that the sea-captain, the brave and good man Treverton, took for his wife an artist on the stage⁠—what they call play-actress here? A grand, big woman, and a handsome; with a life and a spirit and a will in her that is not often seen; a woman of the sort who can say, We will do this thing, or that thing⁠—and do it in the spite and face of all the scruples, all the obstacles, all the oppositions in the world. To this lady there comes for maid to wait upon her, Sarah, my niece⁠—a young girl then, pretty and kind and gentle, and very, very shy. Out of many others who want the place, and who are bolder and bigger and quicker girls, Mistress Treverton, nevertheless, picks Sarah. This is strange, but it is stranger yet that Sarah, on her part, when she comes out of her first fears and doubts, and pains of shyness about herself, gets to be fond with all her heart of that grand and handsome mistress, who has a life and a spirit and a will of the sort that is not often seen. This is strange to say, but it is also, as I know from Sarah’s own lips, every word of it true.”

“True beyond a doubt,” said Leonard. “Most strong attachments are formed between people who are unlike each other.”

“So the life they led in that ancient house of Porthgenna began happily for them all,” continued the old man. “The love that the mistress had for her husband was so full in her heart that it overflowed in kindness to everybody who was about her, and to Sarah, her maid, before all the rest. She would have nobody but Sarah to read to her, to work for her, to dress her in the morning and the evening, and to undress her at night. She was as familiar as a sister might have been with Sarah, when they two were alone, in the long days of rain. It was the game of her idle time⁠—the laugh that she liked most⁠—to astonish the poor country maid, who had never so much as seen what a theatre’s inside was like, by dressing in fine clothes, and painting her face, and speaking and doing all that she had done on the theatre-scene in the days that were before her marriage. The more she puzzled Sarah with these jokes and pranks of masquerade, the better she was always pleased. For a year this easy, happy life went on in the ancient house⁠—happy for all the servants⁠—happier still for the master and mistress, but for the want of one thing to make the whole complete, one little blessing that was always hoped for, and that never came⁠—the same, if you please, as the blessing in the long white frock, with the plump, delicate face and the tiny arms, that I see before me now.”

He paused, to point the allusion by nodding and smiling at the child in Rosamond’s lap; then resumed.

“As the new year gets on,” he