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

prevent every penny that the captain has got from going to that rascal-monster, his brother, who slandered me; and, last and most, I mean to keep my husband from going away to sea again, by making him love me as he has never loved me yet. Must I say more, you poor, afflicted, frightened creature⁠—or is it enough so?’ And all that Sarah can answer, is to cry bitter tears, and to say faintly, ‘No.’ ‘Do you doubt,’ says the mistress, and grips her by the arm, and looks her close in the face with fierce eyes⁠—‘Do you doubt which is best, to cast yourself into the world forsaken and disgraced and ruined, or to save yourself from shame, and make a friend of me for the rest of your life? You weak, wavering, baby woman, if you can not decide for yourself, I shall for you. As I will, so it shall be! Tomorrow, and the day after that, we go on and on, up to the north, where my good fool of a doctor says the air is cheerful-keen⁠—up to the north, where nobody knows me or has heard my name. I, the maid, shall spread the report that you, the lady, are weak in your health. No strangers shall you see, but the doctor and the nurse, when the time to call them comes. Who they may be, I know not; but this I do know, that the one and the other will serve our purpose without the least suspicion of what it is; and that when we get back to Cornwall again, the secret between us two will to no third person have been trusted, and will remain a Dead Secret to the end of the world!’ With all the strength of the strong will that is in her, at the hush of night and in a house of strangers, she speaks those words to the woman of all women the most frightened, the most afflicted, the most helpless, the most ashamed. What need to say the end? On that night Sarah first stooped her shoulders to the burden that has weighed heavier and heavier on them with every year, for all her afterlife.”

“How many days did they travel toward the north?” asked Rosamond, eagerly. “Where did the journey end? In England or in Scotland?”

“In England,” answered Uncle Joseph. “But the name of the place escapes my foreign tongue. It was a little town by the side of the sea⁠—the great sea that washes between my country and yours. There they stopped, and there they waited till the time came to send for the doctor and the nurse. And as Mistress Treverton had said it should be, so, from the first to the last, it was. The doctor and the nurse, and the people of the house were all strangers; and to this day, if they still live, they believe that Sarah was the sea-captain’s wife, and that Mistress Treverton was the maid who waited on her. Not till they were far back on their way home with the child did the two change gowns again, and return each to her proper place. The first friend at Porthgenna that the mistress sends for to show the child to, when she gets back, is the doctor who lives there. ‘Did you think what was the matter with me, when you sent me away to change the air?’ she says, and laughs. And the doctor, he laughs too, and says, ‘Yes, surely! but I was too cunning to say what I thought in those early days, because, at such times, there is always fear of a mistake. And you found the fine dry air so good for you that you stopped?’ he says. ‘Well, that was right! right for yourself and right also for the child.’ And the doctor laughs again and the mistress with him, and Sarah, who stands by and hears them, feels as if her heart would burst within her, with the horror, and the misery, and the shame of that deceit. When the doctor’s back is turned, she goes down on her knees, and begs and prays with all her soul that the mistress will repent, and send her away with her child, to be heard of at Porthgenna no more. The mistress, with that tyrant-will of hers, has but four words of answer to give⁠—‘It is too late!’ Five weeks after, the sea-captain comes back, and the ‘Too late’ is a truth that no repentance can ever alter more. The mistress’s cunning hand that has guided the deceit from the first, guides it always to the last⁠—guides it so that the captain, for the love of her and of the child, goes back to the sea no more⁠—guides it till the time when she lays her down on the bed to die, and leaves all the burden of the secret, and all the guilt of the confession, to Sarah⁠—to Sarah, who, under the tyranny of that tyrant-will, has lived in the house, for five long years, a stranger to her own child!”

“Five years!” murmured Rosamond, raising the baby gently in her arms, till his face touched hers. “Oh me! five long years a stranger to the blood of her blood, to the heart of her heart!”

“And all the years after!” said the old man. “The lonesome years and years among strangers, with no sight of the child that was growing up, with no heart to pour the story of her sorrow into the ear of any living creature, not even into mine! ‘Better,’ I said to her, when she could speak to me no more, and when her face was turned away again on the pillow⁠—‘a thousand times better, my child, if you had told the Secret!’ ‘Could I tell it,’ she said, ‘to the master who trusted me? Could I tell it afterward to the child, whose birth was a reproach to me? Could she listen to the story of her mother’s