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

his hand. The sun had just set, but there was a fine light still over the wide, open surface of the moor; and Jacob paused to let the old man and his niece get farther away from the building before he followed them. The housekeeper’s instructions had directed him just to keep them in sight, and no more; and, if he happened to observe that they stopped and turned round to look behind them, he was to stop, too, and pretend to be digging with his hoe, as if he was at work on the moorland. Stimulated by the promise of a sixpence, if he was careful to do exactly as he had been told, Jacob kept his instructions in his memory, and kept his eye on the two strangers, and promised as fairly to earn the reward in prospect for him as a boy could.

“And now, my child, I shall tell you what it is I am sorry for,” resumed Uncle Joseph, as they proceeded along the path. “I am sorry that we have come out upon this journey, and run our little risk, and had our little scolding, and gained nothing. The word you said in my ear, Sarah, when I was getting you out of the faint (and you should have come out of it sooner, if the muddleheaded people of the dungeon-house had been quicker with the water)⁠—the word you said in my ear was not much, but it was enough to tell me that we have taken this journey in vain. I may hold my tongue, I may make my best face at it, I may be content to walk blindfolded with a mystery that lets no peep of daylight into my eyes⁠—but it is not the less true that the one thing your heart was most set on doing, when we started on this journey, is the one thing also that you have not done. I know that, if I know nothing else; and I say again, it is a bad job⁠—yes, yes, upon my life and faith, there is no disguise to put upon it; it is, in your plainest English, a very bad job.”

As he concluded the expression of his sympathy in these quaint terms, the dread and distrust, the watchful terror, that marred the natural softness of Sarah’s eyes, disappeared in an expression of sorrowful tenderness, which seemed to give back to them all their beauty.

“Don’t be sorry for me, uncle,” she said, stopping, and gently brushing away with her hand some specks of dust that lay on the collar of his coat. “I have suffered so much and suffered so long, that the heaviest disappointments pass lightly over me now.”

“I won’t hear you say it!” cried Uncle Joseph. “You give me shocks I can’t bear when you talk to me in this way. You shall have no more disappointments⁠—no, you shall not! I, Joseph Buschmann, the Obstinate, the Pigheaded, I say it!”

“The day when I shall have no more disappointments, uncle, is not far off now. Let me wait a little longer, and endure a little longer: I have learned to be patient, and to hope for nothing. Fearing and failing, fearing and failing⁠—that has been my life ever since I was a young woman⁠—the life I have become used to by this time. If you are surprised, as I know you must be, at my not possessing myself of the letter, when I had the keys of the Myrtle Room in my hand, and when no one was near to stop me, remember the history of my life, and take that as an explanation. Fearing and failing, fearing and failing⁠—if I told you all the truth, I could tell no more than that. Let us walk on, uncle.”

The resignation in her voice and manner while she spoke was the resignation of despair. It gave her an unnatural self-possession, which altered her, in the eyes of Uncle Joseph, almost past recognition. He looked at her in undisguised alarm.

“No!” he said, “we will not walk on; we will walk back to the dungeon-house; we will make another plan; we will try to get at this devil’s imp of a letter in some other way. I care for no Munders, no housekeepers, no Betzees⁠—I! I care for nothing but the getting you the one thing you want, and the taking you home again as easy in your mind as I am myself. Come! let us go back.”

“It is too late to go back.”

“How too late? Ah, dismal, dingy, dungeon-house of the devil, how I hate you!” cried Uncle Joseph, looking back over the prospect, and shaking both his fists at Porthgenna Tower.

“It is too late, uncle,” she repeated. “Too late, because the opportunity is lost; too late, because if I could bring it back, I dare not go near the Myrtle Room again. My last hope was to change the hiding-place of the letter⁠—and that last hope I have given up. I have only one object in life left now; you may help me in it; but I can not tell you how unless you come on with me at once⁠—unless you say nothing more about going back to Porthgenna Tower.”

Uncle Joseph began to expostulate. His niece stopped him in the middle of a sentence, by touching him on the shoulder and pointing to a particular spot on the darkening slope of the moor below them.

“Look!” she said, “there is somebody on the path behind us. Is it a boy or a man?”

Uncle Joseph looked through the fading light, and saw a figure at some little distance. It seemed like the figure of a boy, and he was apparently engaged in digging on the moor.

“Let us turn round, and go on at once,” pleaded Sarah, before the old man could answer her. “I can’t say what I want to say to you, uncle, until we are safe under shelter at the inn.”

They went on until they reached the highest ground on the