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

“How unnaturally cool it is here!” she said, as they entered the deserted place.

At the foot of the stairs she stopped, and took a firmer hold of her husband’s arm.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Leonard. “Is the change to the damp coolness of this place affecting you in any way?”

“No, no,” she answered hastily. “I am far too excited to feel either heat or damp, as I might feel them at other times. But, Lenny, supposing your guess about Mrs. Jazeph is right?⁠—”

“Yes?”

“And, supposing we discover the Secret of the Myrtle Room, might it not turn out to be something concerning my father or my mother which we ought not to know? I thought of that when Mrs. Pentreath offered to accompany us, and it determined me to come here alone with you.”

“It is just as likely that the Secret might be something we ought to know,” replied Mr. Frankland, after a moment’s thought. “In any case, my idea about Mrs. Jazeph is, after all, only a guess in the dark. However, Rosamond, if you feel any hesitation⁠—”

“No! come what may of it, Lenny, we can’t go back now. Give me your hand again. We have traced the mystery thus far together, and together we will find it out.”

She ascended the staircase, leading him after her, as she spoke. On the landing she looked again at the plan, and satisfied herself that the first impression she had derived from it, of the position of the Myrtle Room, was correct. She counted the doors on to the fourth, and looked out from the bunch the key numbered “IV,” and put it in the lock.

Before she turned it she paused, and looked round at her husband.

He was standing by her side, with his patient face turned expectantly toward the door. She put her right hand on the key, turned it slowly in the lock, drew him closer to her with her left hand, and paused again.

“I don’t know what has come to me,” she whispered faintly. “I feel as if I was afraid to push open the door.”

“Your hand is cold, Rosamond. Wait a little⁠—lock the door again⁠—put it off till another day.”

He felt his wife’s fingers close tighter and tighter on his hand while he said those words. Then there was an instant⁠—one memorable, breathless instant, never to be forgotten afterward⁠—of utter silence. Then he heard the sharp, cracking sound of the opening door, and felt himself drawn forward suddenly into a changed atmosphere, and knew that Rosamond and he were in the Myrtle Room.

A broad, square window, with small panes and dark sashes; dreary yellow light, glimmering through the dirt of half a century crusted on the glass; purer rays striking across the dimness through the fissures of three broken panes; dust floating upward, pouring downward, rolling smoothly round and round in the still atmosphere; lofty, bare, faded red walls; chairs in confusion, tables placed awry; a tall black bookcase, with an open door half dropping from its hinges; a pedestal, with a broken bust lying in fragments at its feet; a ceiling darkened by stains, a floor whitened by dust⁠—such was the aspect of the Myrtle Room when Rosamond first entered it, leading her husband by the hand.

After passing the doorway, she slowly advanced a few steps, and then stopped, waiting with every sense on the watch, with every faculty strung up to the highest pitch of expectation⁠—waiting in the ominous stillness, in the forlorn solitude, for the vague Something which the room might contain, which might rise visibly before her, which might sound audibly behind her, which might touch her on a sudden from above, from below, from either side. A minute or more she breathlessly waited; and nothing appeared, nothing sounded, nothing touched her. The silence and the solitude had their secret to keep, and kept it.

She looked round at her husband. His face, so quiet and composed at other times, expressed doubt and uneasiness now. His disengaged hand was outstretched, and moving backward and forward and up and down, in the vain attempt to touch something which might enable him to guess at the position in which he was placed. His look and action, as he stood in that new and strange sphere, the mute appeal which he made so sadly and so unconsciously to his wife’s loving help, restored Rosamond’s self-possession by recalling her heart to the dearest of all its interests, to the holiest of all its cares. Her eyes, fixed so distrustfully but the moment before on the dreary spectacle of neglect and ruin which spread around them, turned fondly to her husband’s face, radiant with the unfathomable brightness of pity and love. She bent quickly across him, caught his outstretched arm, and pressed it to his side.

“Don’t do that, darling,” she said, gently; “I don’t like to see it. It looks as if you had forgotten that I was with you⁠—as if you were left alone and helpless. What need have you of your sense of touch, when you have got me? Did you hear me open the door, Lenny? Do you know that we are in the Myrtle Room?”

“What did you see, Rosamond, when you opened the door? What do you see now?” He asked those questions rapidly and eagerly, in a whisper.

“Nothing but dust and dirt and desolation. The loneliest moor in Cornwall is not so lonely looking as this room; but there is nothing to alarm us, nothing (except one’s own fancy) that suggests an idea of danger of any kind.”

“What made you so long before you spoke to me, Rosamond?”

“I was frightened, love, on first entering the room⁠—not at what I saw, but at my own fanciful ideas of what I might see. I was child enough to be afraid of something starting out of the walls, or of something rising through the floor; in short, of I hardly know what. I have got over those fears, Lenny, but a