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

thoughtful, her eyes softened, as they turned, now on her husband, now on the bed in which the child was sleeping by his side. After a minute or two of silence, she took one of his hands, placed it on his knee, and laid her cheek gently down on it.

“Lenny,” she said, rather sadly, “I wonder whether we are any of us capable of feeling perfect happiness in this world?”

“What makes you ask that question, my dear?”

“I fancy that I could feel perfect happiness, and yet⁠—”

“And yet what?”

“And yet it seems as if, with all my blessings, that blessing was never likely to be granted to me. I should be perfectly happy now but for one little thing. I suppose you can’t guess what that thing is?”

“I would rather you told me, Rosamond.”

“Ever since our child was born, love, I have had a little aching at the heart⁠—especially when we are all three together, as we are now⁠—a little sorrow that I can’t quite put away from me on your account.”

“On my account! Lift up your head, Rosamond, and come nearer to me. I feel something on my hand which tells me that you are crying.”

She rose directly, and laid her face close to his. “My own love,” she said, clasping her arms fast round him. “My own heart’s darling, you have never seen our child.”

“Yes, Rosamond, I see him with your eyes.”

“Oh, Lenny! I tell you everything I can⁠—I do my best to lighten the cruel, cruel darkness which shuts you out from that lovely little face lying so close to you! But can I tell you how he looks when he first begins to take notice? can I tell you all the thousand pretty things he will do when he first tries to talk? God has been very merciful to us⁠—but, oh, how much more heavily the sense of your affliction weighs on me now when I am more to you than your wife⁠—now when I am the mother of your child!”

“And yet that affliction ought to weigh lightly on your spirits, Rosamond, for you have made it weigh lightly on mine.”

“Have I? Really and truly, have I? It is something noble to live for, Lenny, if I can live for that! It is some comfort to hear you say, as you said just now, that you see with my eyes. They shall always serve you⁠—oh, always! always!⁠—as faithfully as if they were your own. The veriest trifle of a visible thing that I look at with any interest, you shall as good as look at too. I might have had my own little harmless secrets, dear, with another husband; but with you to have even so much as a thought in secret seems like taking the basest, the cruelest advantage of your blindness. I do love you so, Lenny! I am so much fonder of you now than I was when we were first married⁠—I never thought I should be, but I am. You are so much handsomer to me, so much cleverer to me, so much more precious to me in every way. But I am always telling you that, am I not? Do you get tired of hearing me? No? Are you sure of that? Very, very, very sure?” She stopped, and looked at him earnestly, with a smile on her lips, and the tears still glistening in her eyes. Just then the child stirred a little in his cot, and drew her attention away. She arranged the bedclothes over him, watched him in silence for a little while, then sat down again on the stool at Leonard’s feet. “Baby has turned his face quite round toward you now,” she said. “Shall I tell you exactly how he looks, and what his bed is like, and how the room is furnished?”

Without waiting for an answer, she began to describe the child’s appearance and position with the marvelous minuteness of a woman’s observation. While she proceeded, her elastic spirits recovered themselves, and its naturally bright happy expression reappeared on her face. By the time the nurse returned to her post, Rosamond was talking with all her accustomed vivacity, and amusing her husband with all her accustomed success.

When they went back to the drawing-room, she opened the piano and sat down to play. “I must give you your usual evening concert, Lenny,” she said, “or I shall be talking again on the forbidden subject of the Myrtle Room.”

She played some of Mr. Frankland’s favorite airs, with a certain union of feeling and fancifulness in her execution of the music, which seemed to blend the charm of her own disposition with the charm of the melodies which sprang into life under her touch. After playing through the airs she could remember most easily, she ended with the Last Waltz of Weber. It was Leonard’s favorite, and it was always reserved on that account to grace the close of the evening’s performance.

She lingered longer than usual over the last plaintive notes of the waltz; then suddenly left the piano, and hastened across the room to the fireplace.

“Surely it has turned much colder within the last minute or two,” she said, kneeling down on the rug, and holding her face and hands over the fire.

“Has it?” returned Leonard. “I don’t feel any change.”

“Perhaps I have caught cold,” said Rosamond. “Or perhaps,” she added, laughing rather uneasily, “the wind that goes before the ghostly lady of the north rooms has been blowing over me. I certainly felt something like a sudden chill, Lenny, while I was playing the last notes of Weber.”

“Nonsense, Rosamond. You are overfatigued and overexcited. Tell your maid to make you some hot wine and water, and lose no time in getting to bed.”

Rosamond cowered closer over the fire. “It’s lucky I am not superstitious,” she said, “or I might fancy that I was predestined to see the ghost.”

IV Standing on the Brink

The first night at Porthgenna passed without the slightest noise or interruption of