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

to the little oblong box on the table, and trying to lead the conversation to a harmless, everyday topic, by asking questions about it. “What work do you do? May I look at it?”

Her face lost its weary, suffering look, and brightened once more into a smile. “There is no work there,” she said. “All the treasures I had in the world, till you came to see me, are shut up in that one little box. Open it, my love, and look inside.”

Rosamond obeyed, placing the box on the bed where her mother could see it easily. The first object that she discovered inside was a little book, in dark, worn binding. It was an old copy of Wesley’s Hymns. Some withered blades of grass lay between its pages; and on one of its blank leaves was this inscription⁠—“Sarah Leeson, her book. The gift of Hugh Polwheal.”

“Look at it, my dear,” said her mother. “I want you to know it again. When my time comes to leave you, Rosamond, lay it on my bosom with your own dear hands, and put a little morsel of your hair with it, and bury me in the grave in Porthgenna churchyard, where he has been waiting for me to come to him so many weary years. The other things in the box, Rosamond, belong to you; they are little stolen keepsakes that used to remind me of my child, when I was alone in the world. Perhaps, years and years hence, when your brown hair begins to grow gray like mine, you may like to show these poor trifles to your children when you talk about me. Don’t mind telling them, Rosamond, how your mother sinned and how she suffered⁠—you can always let these little trifles speak for her at the end. The least of them will show that she always loved you.”

She took out of the box a morsel of neatly folded white paper, which had been placed under the book of Wesley’s Hymns, opened it, and showed her daughter a few faded laburnum leaves that lay inside. “I took these from your bed, Rosamond, when I came, as a stranger, to nurse you at West Winston. I tried to take a ribbon out of your trunk, love, after I had taken the flowers⁠—a ribbon that I knew had been round your neck. But the doctor came near at the time, and frightened me.”

She folded the paper up again, laid it aside on the table, and drew from the box next a small print which had been taken from the illustrations to a pocketbook. It represented a little girl, in gypsy-hat, sitting by the waterside, and weaving a daisy chain. As a design, it was worthless; as a print, it had not even the mechanical merit of being a good impression. Underneath it a line was written in faintly pencilled letters⁠—“Rosamond when I last saw her.”

“It was never pretty enough for you,” she said. “But still there was something in it that helped me to remember what my own love was like when she was a little girl.”

She put the engraving aside with the laburnum leaves, and took from the box a leaf of a copybook, folded in two, out of which there dropped a tiny strip of paper, covered with small printed letters. She looked at the strip of paper first. “The advertisement of your marriage, Rosamond,” she said. “I used to be fond of reading it over and over again to myself when I was alone, and trying to fancy how you looked and what dress you wore. If I had only known when you were going to be married, I would have ventured into the church, my love, to look at you and at your husband. But that was not to be⁠—and perhaps it was best so, for the seeing you in that stolen way might only have made my trials harder to bear afterward. I have had no other keepsake to remind me of you, Rosamond, except this leaf out of your first copybook. The nursemaid at Porthgenna tore up the rest one day to light the fire, and I took this leaf when she was not looking. See! you had not got as far as words then⁠—you could only do upstrokes and downstrokes. Oh me! how many times I have sat looking at this one leaf of paper, and trying to fancy that I saw your small child’s hand traveling over it, with the pen held tight in the rosy little fingers. I think I have cried oftener, my darling, over that first copy of yours than over all my other keepsakes put together.”

Rosamond turned aside her face toward the window to hide the tears which she could restrain no longer.

As she wiped them away, the first sight of the darkening sky warned her that the twilight dimness was coming soon. How dull and faint the glow in the west looked now! how near it was to the close of day!

When she turned toward the bed again, her mother was still looking at the leaf of the copybook.

“That nursemaid who tore up all the rest of it to light the fire,” she said, “was a kind friend to me in those early days at Porthgenna. She used sometimes to let me put you to bed, Rosamond; and never asked questions, or teased me, as the rest of them did. She risked the loss of her place by being so good to me. My mistress was afraid of my betraying myself and betraying her if I was much in the nursery, and she gave orders that I was not to go there, because it was not my place. None of the other women-servants were so often stopped from playing with you and kissing you, Rosamond, as I was. But the nursemaid⁠—God bless and prosper her for it!⁠—stood my friend. I often lifted you into your little cot, my love, and wished you good night, when my mistress thought