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

inscription to the end. “There is a blank space left on the stone. Shall we fill it, love, with the initials of my mother’s name, and the date of her death? I feel something in my heart which seems to tell me to do that, and to do no more.”

“So let it be, Rosamond,” said her husband. “That short and simple inscription is the fittest and the best.”

She looked away, as he gave that answer, to the foot of the grave, and left him for a moment to approach the old man. “Take my hand, Uncle Joseph,” she said, and touched him gently on the shoulder. “Take my hand, and let us go back together to the house.”

He rose as she spoke, and looked at her doubtfully. The musical box, enclosed in its well-worn leather case, lay on the grave near the place where he had been kneeling. Rosamond took it up from the grass, and slung it in the old place at his side, which it had always occupied when he was away from home. He sighed a little as he thanked her. “Mozart can sing no more,” he said. “He has sung to the last of them now!”

“Don’t say ‘to the last,’ yet,” said Rosamond⁠—“don’t say ‘to the last,’ Uncle Joseph, while I am alive. Surely Mozart will sing to me, for my mother’s sake?”

A smile⁠—the first she had seen since the time of their grief⁠—trembled faintly round his lips. “There is comfort in that,” he said; “there is comfort for Uncle Joseph still, in hearing that.”

“Take my hand,” she repeated softly. “Come home with us now.”

He looked down wistfully at the grave. “I will follow you,” he said, “if you will go on before me to the gate.”

Rosamond took her husband’s arm, and guided him to the path that led out of the churchyard. As they passed from sight, Uncle Joseph knelt down once more at the foot of the grave, and pressed his lips on the fresh turf.

“Goodbye, my child,” he whispered, and laid his cheek for a moment against the grass before he rose again.

At the gate, Rosamond was waiting for him. Her right hand was resting on her husband’s arm; her left hand was held out for Uncle Joseph to take.

“How cool the breeze is!” said Leonard. “How pleasantly the sea sounds! Surely this is a fine summer day?”

“The calmest and loveliest of the year,” said Rosamond. “The only clouds on the sky are clouds of shining white; the only shadows over the moor lie light as down on the heather. Oh, Lenny, it is such a different day from that day of dull oppression and misty heat when we found the letter in the Myrtle Room! Even the dark tower of our old house, yonder, looks its brightest and best, as if it waited to welcome us to the beginning of a new life. I will make it a happy life to you, and to Uncle Joseph, if I can⁠—happy as the sunshine we are walking in now. You shall never repent, love, if I can help it, that you have married a wife who has no claim of her own to the honors of a family name.”

“I can never repent my marriage, Rosamond, because I can never forget the lesson that my wife has taught me.”

“What lesson, Lenny?”

“An old one, my dear, which some of us can never learn too often. The highest honors, Rosamond, are those which no accident can take away⁠—the honors that are conferred by Love and Truth.”

Colophon

The Dead Secret
was published in 1856 by
Wilkie Collins.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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David Grigg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2013 by
Melissa McDaniel and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans available at the
Internet Archive.

The cover page is adapted from
The Silent Evening Hour,
a painting completed in 1900 by
Benjamin Williams Leader.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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