Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (232 page)

“As your name?” suggested Leonard.

“As the name of the Treverton family,” she continued, after a pause, during which her hand had been restlessly moving the letter to and fro on the table. “The husband shall be well-born — as well-born as you, Lenny — and the terrible discovery shall be, that his wife has no right to the ancient name that she bore when he married her.”

“I can’t say, my love, that I approve of your idea. Your story will decoy the reader into feeling an interest in a woman who turns out to be an impostor.”

“No!” cried Rosamond, warmly. “A true woman — a woman who never stooped to a deception — a woman full of faults and failings, but a teller of the truth at all hazards and sacrifices. Hear me out, Lenny, before you judge.” Hot tears rushed into her eyes; but she dashed them away passionately, and went on. “The wife shall grow up to womanhood, and shall marry, in total ignorance — mind that! — in total ignorance of her real history. The sudden disclosure of the truth shall overwhelm her — she shall find herself struck by a calamity which she had no hand in bringing about. She shall be staggered in her very reason by the discovery; it shall burst upon her when she has no one but herself to depend on; she shall have the power of keeping it a secret from her husband with perfect impunity; she shall be tried, she shall be shaken in her mortal frailness, by one moment of fearful temptation; she shall conquer it, and, of her own free will, she shall tell her husband all that she knows herself. Now, Lenny, what do you call that woman? an impostor?”

“No: a victim.”

“Who goes of her own accord to the sacrifice? and who is to be sacrificed?”

“I never said that.”

“What would you do with her, Lenny, if you were writing the story? I mean, how would you make her husband behave to her? It is a question in which a man’s nature is concerned, and a woman is not competent to decide it. I am perplexed about how to end the story. How would you end it, love?” As she ceased, her voice sank sadly to its gentlest pleading tones. She came close to him, and twined her fingers in his hair fondly. “How would you end it, love?” she repeated, stooping down till her trembling lips just touched his forehead.

He moved uneasily in his chair, and replied — ”I am not a writer of novels, Rosamond.”

“But how would you act, Lenny, if you were that husband?”

“It is hard for me to say,” he answered. “I have not your vivid imagination, my dear. I have no power of putting myself, at a moment’s notice, into a position that is not my own, and of knowing how I should act in it.”

“But suppose your wife was close to you — as close as I am now? Suppose she had just told you the dreadful secret, and was standing before you — as I am standing now — with the happiness of her whole life to come depending on one kind word from your lips? Oh, Lenny, you would not let her drop broken-hearted at your feet? You would know, let her birth be what it might, that she was still the same faithful creature who had cherished and served and trusted and worshipped you since her marriage-day, and who asked nothing in return but to lay her head on your bosom, and to hear you say that you loved her? You would know that she had nerved herself to tell the fatal secret, because, in her loyalty and love to her husband, she would rather die forsaken and despised, than live, deceiving him? You would know all this, and you would open your arms to the mother of your child, to the wife of your first love, though she was the lowliest of all lowly born women in the estimation of the world? Oh, you would, Lenny, I know you would!”

“Rosamond! how your hands tremble; how your voice alters! You are agitating yourself about this supposed story of yours, as if you were talking of real events.”

“You would take her to your heart, Lenny? You would open your arms to her without an instant of unworthy doubt?”

“Hush! hush! I hope I should.”

“Hope? only hope? Oh, think again, love, think again; and say you know you should!”

“Must I, Rosamond? Then I do say it.” She drew back as the words passed his lips, and took the letter from the table.

“You have not yet asked me, Lenny, to read the letter that I found in the Myrtle Room. I offer to read it now of my own accord.”

She trembled a little as she spoke those few decisive words, but her utterance of them was clear and steady, as if her consciousness of being now irrevocably pledged to make the disclosure had strengthened her at last to dare all hazards and end all suspense.

Her husband turned toward the place from which the sound of her voice had reached him, with a mixed expression of perplexity and surprise in his face. “You pass so suddenly from one subject to another,” he said, “that I hardly know how to follow you. What in the world, Rosamond, takes you, at one jump, from a romantic argument about a situation in a novel, to the plain, practical business of reading an old letter?”

“Perhaps there is a closer connection between the two than you suspect,” she answered.

“A closer connection? What connection? I don’t understand.”

“The letter will explain.”

“Why the letter? Why should you not explain?”

She stole one anxious look at his face, and saw that a sense of something serious to come was now overshadowing his mind for the first time.

“Rosamond!” he exclaimed, “there is some mystery — ”

“There are no mysteries between us two,” she interposed quickly. “There never have been any, love; there never shall be.” She moved a little nearer to him to take her old favorite place on his knee, then checked herself, and drew back again to the table. Warning tears in her eyes bade her distrust her own firmness, and read the letter where she could not feel the beating of his heart.

“Did I tell you,” she resumed, after waiting an instant to compose herself,” where I found the folded piece of paper which I put into your hand in the Myrtle Room?”

“No,” he replied, “I think not.”

“I found it at the back of the frame of that picture — the picture of the ghostly woman with the wicked face. I opened it immediately, and saw that it was a letter. The address inside, the first line under it, and one of the two signatures which it contained, were in a handwriting that I knew.”

“Whose!”

“The handwriting of the late Mrs. Treverton.”

“Of your mother?”

“Of the late Mrs. Treverton.”

“Gracious God, Rosamond! why do you speak of her in that way?”

“Let me read, and you will know. You have seen, with my eyes, what the Myrtle Room is like; you have seen, with my eyes, every object which the search through it brought to light; you must now see, with my eyes, what this letter contains. It is the Secret of the Myrtle Room.”

She bent close over the faint, faded writing, and read these words:

“To my Husband —

“We have parted, Arthur, forever, and I have not had the courage to embitter our farewell by confessing that I have deceived you — cruelly and basely deceived you. But a few minutes since, you were weeping by my bedside and speaking of our child. My wronged, my beloved husband, the little daughter of your heart is not yours, is not mine. She is a love-child, whom I have imposed on you for mine. Her father was a miner at Porthgenna; her mother is my maid, Sarah Leeson.”

Rosamond paused, but never raised her head from the letter. She heard her husband lay his hand suddenly on the table; she heard him start to his feet; she heard him draw his breath heavily in one quick gasp; she heard him whisper to himself the instant after — ”A love-child!” With a fearful, painful distinctness she heard those three words. The tone in which he whispered them turned her cold. But she never moved, for there was more to read; and while more remained, if her life had depended on it, she could not have looked up.

In a moment more she went on, and read these lines next:

“I have many heavy sins to answer for, but this one sin you must pardon, Arthur, for I committed it through fondness for you. That fondness told me a secret which you sought to hide from me. That fondness told me that your barren wife would never make your heart all her own until she had borne you a child; and your lips proved it true. Your first words, when you came back from sea, and when the infant was placed in your arms, were — ’I have never loved you, Rosamond, as I love you now.’ If you had not said that, I should never have kept my guilty secret.

“I can add no more, for death is very near me. How the fraud was committed, and what my other motives were, I must leave you to discover from the mother of the child, who writes this under my dictation, and who is charged to give it to you when I am no more. You will be merciful to the poor little creature who bears my name. Be merciful also to her unhappy parent: she is only guilty of too blindly obeying me. If there is anything that mitigates the bitterness of my remorse, it is the remembrance that my act of deceit saved the most faithful and the most affectionate of women from shame that she had not deserved. Remember me forgivingly, Arthur — words may tell how I have sinned against you; no words can tell how I have loved you!”

She had struggled on thus far, and had reached the last line on the second page of the letter, when she paused again, and then tried to read the first of the two signatures — ”Rosamond Treverton.” She faintly repeated two syllables of that familiar Christian name — the name that was on her husband’s lips every hour of the day! — and strove to articulate the third, but her voice failed her. All the sacred household memories which that ruthless letter had profaned forever seemed to tear themselves away from her heart at the same moment. With a low, moaning cry she dropped her arms on the table, and laid her head down on them, and hid her face.

She heard nothing, she was conscious of nothing, until she felt a touch on her shoulder — a light touch from a hand that trembled. Every pulse in her body bounded in answer to it, and she looked up.

Her husband had guided himself near to her by the table. The tears were glistening in his dim, sightless eyes. As she rose and touched him, his arms opened, and closed fast around her.

“My own Rosamond!” he said, “come to me and be comforted!”

BOOK VI.

CHAPTER I.

UNCLE JOSEPH.

THE
day and the night had passed, and the new morning had come, before the husband and wife could trust themselves to speak calumny of the Secret, and to face resignedly the duties and the sacrifices which the discovery of it imposed on them.

Leonard’s first question referred to those lines in the letter which Rosamond had informed him were in a handwriting that she knew. Finding that he was at a loss to understand what means she could have of forming an opinion on this point, she explained that, after Captain Treverton’s death, many letters had naturally fallen into her possession which had been written by Mrs. Treverton to her husband. They treated of ordinary domestic subjects, and she had read them often enough to become thoroughly acquainted with the peculiarities of Mrs. Treverton’s handwriting. It was remarkably large, firm, and masculine in character; and the address, the line under it, and the uppermost of the two signatures in the letter which had been found in the Myrtle Room, exactly resembled it in every particular.

The next question related to the body of the letter. The writing of this, of the second signature (“Sarah Leeson”), and of the additional lines on the third page, also signed by Sarah Leeson, proclaimed itself in each case to be the production of the same person. While stating that fact to her husband, Rosamond did not forget to explain to him that, while reading the letter on the previous day, her strength and courage had failed her before she got to the end of it. She added that the postscript which she had thus omitted to read was of importance, because it mentioned the circumstances under which the Secret had been hidden; and begged that he would listen while she made him acquainted with its contents without any further delay.

Sitting as close to his side, now, as if they were enjoying their first honeymoon days over again, she read these last lines — the lines which her mother had written sixteen years before, on the morning when she fled from Porthgenna Tower: