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

over twice. Then observing that his niece seemed calmer, he spoke to her once more.

“You are in trouble, Sarah,” he said, quietly. “You tell me that, and I see it is true in your face. Are you grieving for your husband?”

“I grieve that I ever met him,” she answered. “I grieve that I ever married him. Now that he is dead, I can not grieve⁠—I can only forgive him.”

“Forgive him? How you look, Sarah, when you say that! Tell me⁠—”

“Uncle Joseph! I have told you that my husband is dead, and that I have forgiven him.”

“You have forgiven him? He was hard and cruel with you, then? I see; I see. That is the end, Sarah⁠—but the beginning? Is the beginning that you loved him?”

Her pale cheeks flushed; and she turned her head aside. “It is hard and humbling to confess it,” she murmured, without raising her eyes; “but you force the truth from me, uncle. I had no love to give to my husband⁠—no love to give to any man.”

“And yet you married him! Wait! it is not for me to blame. It is for me to find out, not the bad, but the good. Yes, yes; I shall say to myself, she married him when she was poor and helpless; she married him when she should have come to Uncle Joseph instead. I shall say that to myself, and I shall pity, but I shall ask no more.”

Sarah half reached her hand out to the old man again⁠—then suddenly pushed her chair back, and changed the position in which she was sitting. “It is true that I was poor,” she said, looking about her in confusion, and speaking with difficulty. “But you are so kind and so good, I can not accept the excuse that your forbearance makes for me. I did not marry him because I was poor, but⁠—” She stopped, clasped her hands together, and pushed her chair back still farther from the table.

“So! so!” said the old man, noticing her confusion. “We will talk about it no more.”

“I had no excuse of love; I had no excuse of poverty,” she said, with a sudden burst of bitterness and despair. “Uncle Joseph, I married him because I was too weak to persist in saying No! The curse of weakness and fear has followed me all the days of my life! I said No to him once. I said No to him twice. Oh, uncle, if I could only have said it for the third time! But he followed me, he frightened me, he took away from me all the little will of my own that I had. He made me speak as he wished me to speak, and go where he wished me to go. No, no, no⁠—don’t come to me, uncle; don’t say anything. He is gone; he is dead⁠—I have got my release; I have given my pardon! Oh, if I could only go away and hide somewhere! All people’s eyes seem to look through me; all people’s words seem to threaten me. My heart has been weary ever since I was a young woman; and all these long, long years it has never got any rest. Hush! the man in the shop⁠—I forgot the man in the shop. He will hear us; let us talk in a whisper. What made me break out so? I’m always wrong. Oh me! I’m wrong when I speak; I’m wrong when I say nothing; wherever I go and whatever I do, I’m not like other people. I seem never to have grown up in my mind since I was a little child. Hark! the man in the shop is moving⁠—has he heard me? Oh, Uncle Joseph! do you think he has heard me?”

Looking hardly less startled than his niece, Uncle Joseph assured her that the door was solid, that the man’s place in the shop was at some distance from it, and that it was impossible, even if he heard voices in the parlor, that he could also distinguish any words that were spoken in it.

“You are sure of that?” she whispered, hurriedly. “Yes, yes, you are sure of that, or you would not have told me so, would you? We may go on talking now. Not about my married life: that is buried and past. Say that I had some years of sorrow and suffering, which I deserved⁠—say that I had other years of quiet, when I was living in service with masters and mistresses who were often kind to me when my fellow-servants were not⁠—say just that much about my life, and it is saying enough. The trouble that I am in now, the trouble that brings me to you, goes back further than the years we have been talking about⁠—goes back, back, back, Uncle Joseph, to the distant day when we last met.”

“Goes back all through the sixteen years!” exclaimed the old man, incredulously. “Goes back, Sarah, even to the Long Ago!”

“Even to that time. Uncle, you remember where I was living, and what had happened to me, when⁠—”

“When you came here in secret? When you asked me to hide you? That was the same week, Sarah, when your mistress died; your mistress who lived away west in the old house. You were frightened, then⁠—pale and frightened as I see you now.”

“As everyone sees me! People are always staring at me; always thinking that I am nervous, always pitying me for being ill.”

Saying these words with a sudden fretfulness, she lifted the teacup by her side to her lips, drained it of its contents at a draught, and pushed it across the table to be filled again. “I have come all over thirsty and hot,” she whispered. “More tea, Uncle Joseph⁠—more tea.”

“It is cold,” said the old man. “Wait till I ask for hot water.”

“No!” she exclaimed, stopping him as he was about to rise. “Give it me cold; I like it cold. Let nobody else come in⁠—I can’t speak if anybody else comes