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

There was a slight trembling in the sweet voice of the new nurse, but not the faintest tone of sullenness or anger, as she simply and quietly answered the inquiries addressed to her. By dint of keeping the conversation still on the subject of the child, Mrs. Frankland succeeded, little by little, in luring her back to the bedside⁠—in tempting her to bend down admiringly over the infant⁠—in emboldening her, at last, to kiss him tenderly on the cheek. One kiss was all that she gave; and she turned away from the bed, after it, and sighed heavily.

The sound of that sigh fell very sadly on Rosamond’s heart. Up to this time the baby’s little span of life had always been associated with smiling faces and pleasant words. It made her uneasy to think that anyone could caress him and sigh after it.

“I am sure you must be fond of children,” she said, hesitating a little from natural delicacy of feeling. “But will you excuse me for noticing that it seems rather a mournful fondness? Pray⁠—pray don’t answer my question if it gives you any pain⁠—if you have any loss to deplore; but⁠—but I do so want to ask if you have ever had a child of your own?”

Mrs. Jazeph was standing near a chair when that question was put. She caught fast hold of the back of it, grasping it so firmly, or perhaps leaning on it so heavily, that the woodwork cracked. Her head dropped low on her bosom. She did not utter, or even attempt to utter, a single word.

Fearing that she must have lost a child of her own, and dreading to distress her unnecessarily by venturing to ask any more questions, Rosamond said nothing, as she stooped over the baby to kiss him in her turn. Her lips rested on his cheek a little above where Mrs. Jazeph’s lips had rested the moment before, and they touched a spot of wet on his smooth warm skin. Fearing that some of the water in which she had been bathing her face might have dropped on him, she passed her fingers lightly over his head, neck, and bosom, and felt no other spots of wet anywhere. The one drop that had fallen on him was the drop that wetted the cheek which the new nurse had kissed.

The twilight faded over the landscape, the room grew darker and darker; and still, though she was now sitting close to the table on which the candles and matches were placed, Mrs. Jazeph made no attempt to strike a light. Rosamond did not feel quite comfortable at the idea of lying awake in the darkness, with nobody in the room but a person who was as yet almost a total stranger; and she resolved to have the candles lighted immediately.

“Mrs. Jazeph,” she said, looking toward the gathering obscurity outside the window, “I shall be much obliged to you, if you will light the candles and pull down the blind. I can trace no more resemblances out there, now, to a Cornish prospect; the view has gone altogether.”

“Are you very fond of Cornwall, ma’am?” asked Mrs. Jazeph, rising, in rather a dilatory manner, to light the candles.

“Indeed I am,” said Rosamond. “I was born there; and my husband and I were on our way to Cornwall when we were obliged to stop, on my account, at this place. You are a long time getting the candles lit. Can’t you find the matchbox?”

Mrs. Jazeph, with an awkwardness which was rather surprising in a person who had shown so much neat-handedness in setting the room to rights, broke the first match in attempting to light it, and let the second go out the instant after the flame was kindled. At the third attempt she was more successful; but she only lit one candle, and that one she carried away from the table which Mrs. Frankland could see, to the dressing-table, which was hidden from her by the curtains at the foot of the bed.

“Why do you move the candle?” asked Rosamond.

“I thought it was best for your eyes, ma’am, not to have the light too near them,” replied Mrs. Jazeph; and then added hastily, as if she was unwilling to give Mrs. Frankland time to make any objections⁠—“And so you were going to Cornwall, ma’am, when you stopped at this place? To travel about there a little, I suppose?” After saying these words, she took up the second candle, and passed out of sight as she carried it to the dressing-table.

Rosamond thought that the nurse, in spite of her gentle looks and manners, was a remarkably obstinate woman. But she was too good-natured to care about asserting her right to have the candles placed where she pleased; and when she answered Mrs. Jazeph’s question, she still spoke to her as cheerfully and familiarly as ever.

“Oh, dear no! Not to travel about,” she said, “but to go straight to the old country-house where I was born. It belongs to my husband now, Mrs. Jazeph. I have not been near it since I was a little girl of five years of age. Such a ruinous, rambling old place! You, who talk of the dreariness and wildness of Cornwall, would be quite horrified at the very idea of living in Porthgenna Tower.”

The faintly rustling sound of Mrs. Jazeph’s silk dress, as she moved about the dressing-table, had been audible all the while Rosamond was speaking. It ceased instantaneously when she said the words “Porthgenna Tower”; and for one moment there was a dead silence in the room.

“You, who have been living all your life, I suppose, in nicely repaired houses, can not imagine what a place it is that we are going to, when I am well enough to travel again,” pursued Rosamond. “What do you think, Mrs. Jazeph, of a house with one whole side of it that has never been inhabited for sixty or seventy years past? You may get some notion of the size of Porthgenna Tower from that. There is a west side that we are to