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

she fancied some person had walked suddenly into the room. She looks and talks at perfect vacancy, as you or I might look or talk at someone who was really standing and listening to us. The old man, her uncle, tells me that he first observed this when she came to see him (in Cornwall, I think he said) a short time since. She was speaking to him then on private affairs of her own, when she suddenly stopped, just as the evening was closing in, startled him by a question on the old superstitious subject of the reappearance of the dead, and then, looking away at a shadowed corner of the room, began to talk at it⁠—exactly as I have seen her look and heard her talk upstairs. Whether she fancies that she is pursued by an apparition, or whether she imagines that some living person enters her room at certain times, is more than I can say; and the old man gives me no help in guessing at the truth. Can you throw any light on the matter?”

“I hear of it now for the first time,” answered Rosamond, looking at the doctor in amazement and alarm.

“Perhaps,” he rejoined, “she may be more communicative with you than she is with me. If you could manage to be by her bedside at dusk today or tomorrow, and if you think you are not likely to be frightened by it, I should very much wish you to see and hear her, when she is under the influence of her delusion. I have tried in vain to draw her attention away from it, at the time, or to get her to speak of it afterward. You have evidently considerable influence over her, and you might therefore succeed where I have failed. In her state of health, I attach great importance to clearing her mind of everything that clouds and oppresses it, and especially of such a serious hallucination as that which I have been describing. If you could succeed in combating it, you would be doing her the greatest service, and would be materially helping my efforts to improve her health. Do you mind trying the experiment?”

Rosamond promised to devote herself unreservedly to this service, or to any other which was for the patient’s good. The doctor thanked her, and led the way back into the hall again.⁠—Uncle Joseph was descending the stairs as they came out of the room. “She is ready and longing to see you,” he whispered in Rosamond’s ear.

“I am sure I need not impress on you again the very serious necessity of keeping her composed,” said the doctor, taking his leave. “It is, I assure you, no exaggeration to say that her life depends on it.”

Rosamond bowed to him in silence, and in silence followed the old man up the stairs.

At the door of a back room on the second floor Uncle Joseph stopped.

“She is there,” he whispered eagerly. “I leave you to go in by yourself, for it is best that you should be alone with her at first. I shall walk about the streets in the fine warm sunshine, and think of you both, and come back after a little. Go in; and the blessing and the mercy of God go with you!” He lifted her hand to his lips, and softly and quickly descended the stairs again.

Rosamond stood alone before the door. A momentary tremor shook her from head to foot as she stretched out her hand to knock at it. The same sweet voice that she had last heard in her bedroom at West Winston answered her now. As its tones fell on her ear, a thought of her child stole quietly into her heart, and stilled its quick throbbing. She opened the door at once and went in.

Neither the look of the room inside, nor the view from the window; neither its characteristic ornaments, nor its prominent pieces of furniture; none of the objects in it or about it, which would have caught her quick observation at other times, struck it now. From the moment when she opened the door, she saw nothing but the pillows of the bed, the head resting on them, and the face turned toward hers. As she stepped across the threshold, that face changed; the eyelids drooped a little, and the pale cheeks were tinged suddenly with burning red.

Was her mother ashamed to look at her?

The bare doubt freed Rosamond in an instant from all the self-distrust, all the embarrassment, all the hesitation about choosing her words and directing her actions which had fettered her generous impulses up to this time. She ran to the bed, raised the worn, shrinking figure in her arms, and laid the poor weary head gently on her warm, young bosom. “I have come at last, mother, to take my turn at nursing you,” she said. Her heart swelled as those simple words came from it⁠—her eyes overflowed⁠—she could say no more.

“Don’t cry!” murmured the faint, sweet voice timidly. “I have no right to bring you here and make you sorry. Don’t, don’t cry!”

“Oh, hush! hush! I shall do nothing but cry if you talk to me like that!” said Rosamond. “Let us forget that we have ever been parted⁠—call me by my name⁠—speak to me as I shall speak to my own child, if God spares me to see him grow up. Say ‘Rosamond,’ and⁠—oh, pray, pray⁠—tell me to do something for you!” She tore asunder passionately the strings of her bonnet, and threw it from her on the nearest chair. “Look! here is your glass of lemonade on the table. Say ‘Rosamond, bring me my lemonade!’ say it familiarly, mother! say it as if you knew that I was bound to obey you!”

She repeated the words after her daughter, but still not in steady tones⁠—repeated them with a sad, wondering smile, and with a lingering of the voice on the name of Rosamond, as if it was a luxury to