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

wishing to see⁠—to look at something⁠—” She stopped again, and turned her face wistfully toward the church. The tears, which had never wetted her eyes at the first view of Porthgenna, were beginning to rise in them now.

Uncle Joseph’s natural delicacy warned him that it would be best to abstain from asking her for any explanations.

“Go you where you like, to see what you like,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. “I shall stop here to make myself happy with my pipe; and Mozart shall come out of his cage, and sing a little in this fine fresh air.” He unslung the leather case from his shoulder while he spoke, took out the musical box, and set it ringing its tiny peal to the second of the two airs which it was constructed to play⁠—the minuet in Don Giovanni. Sarah left him looking about carefully, not for a seat for himself, but for a smooth bit of rock to place the box upon. When he had found this, he lit his pipe, and sat down to his music and his smoking, like an epicure to a good dinner. “Aha!” he exclaimed to himself, looking round as composedly at the wild prospect on all sides of him as if he was still in his own little parlor at Truro⁠—“Aha! Here is a fine big music-room, my friend Mozart, for you to sing in! Ouf! there is wind enough in this place to blow your pretty dance-tune out to sea, and give the sailor-people a taste of it as they roll about in their ships.”

Meanwhile Sarah walked on rapidly toward the church, and entered the inclosure of the little burial-ground. Toward that same part of it to which she had directed her steps on the morning of her mistress’s death, she now turned her face again, after a lapse of sixteen years. Here, at least, the march of time had left its palpable track⁠—its footprints whose marks were graves. How many a little spot of ground, empty when she last saw it, had its mound and its headstone now! The one grave that she had come to see⁠—the grave which had stood apart in the bygone days, had companion graves on the right hand and on the left. She could not have singled it out but for the weather stains on the headstone, which told of storm and rain over it, that had not passed over the rest. The mound was still kept in shape; but the grass grew long, and waved a dreary welcome to her as the wind swept through it. She knelt down by the stone, and tried to read the inscription. The black paint which had once made the carved words distinct was all flayed off from them now. To any other eyes but hers the very name of the dead man would have been hard to trace. She sighed heavily as she followed the letters of the inscription mechanically, one by one, with her finger:

Sacred to the Memory
of
Hugh Polwheal,
Aged 26 Years.
He Met With His Death
Through the Fall of a Rock
in
Porthgenna Mine,
December 17th, 1823.

Her hand lingered over the letters after it had followed them to the last line, and she bent forward and pressed her lips on the stone.

“Better so!” she said to herself, as she rose from her knees, and looked down at the inscription for the last time. “Better it should fade out so! Fewer strangers’ eyes will see it; fewer strangers’ feet will follow where mine have been⁠—he will lie all the quieter in the place of his rest!”

She brushed the tears from her eyes, and gathered a few blades of grass from the grave⁠—then left the churchyard. Outside the hedge that surrounded the inclosure she stopped for a moment, and drew from the bosom of her dress the little book of Wesley’s Hymns which she had taken with her from the desk in her bedroom on the morning of her flight from Porthgenna. The withered remains of the grass that she had plucked from the grave sixteen years ago lay between the pages still. She added to them the fresh fragments that she had just gathered, replaced the book in the bosom of her dress, and hastened back over the moor to the spot where the old man was waiting for her.

She found him packing up the musical box again in its leather case. “A good wind,” he said, holding up the palm of his hand to the fresh breeze that was sweeping over the moor⁠—“A very good wind, indeed, if you take him by himself⁠—but a bitter bad wind if you take him with Mozart. He blows off the tune as if it was the hat on my head. You come back, my child, just at the nick of time⁠—just when my pipe is done, and Mozart is ready to travel along the road once more. Ah, have you got the crying look in your eyes again, Sarah? What have you met with to make you cry? So! so! I see⁠—the fewer questions I ask just now, the better you will like me. Good. I have done. No! I have a last question yet. What are we standing here for? why do we not go on?”

“Yes, yes; you are right, Uncle Joseph; let us go on at once. I shall lose all the little courage I have if we stay here much longer looking at the house.”

They proceeded down the path without another moment of delay. When they had reached the end of it, they stood opposite the eastern boundary wall of Porthgenna Tower. The principal entrance to the house, which had been very rarely used of late years, was in the west front, and was approached by a terrace road that overlooked the sea. The smaller entrance, which was generally used, was situated on the south side of the building, and led through the servants’ offices to the great hall and the west staircase. Sarah’s old experience of