Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (237 page)

Rosamond’s heart bounded at the picture of the future which her fancy drew from the suggestions that lay hidden in the doctor’s last words. “She can command every advantage you have mentioned and more, if more is required!” she interposed eagerly, before her husband could speak again. “Oh, Sir, if rest among kind friends is all that her poor weary heart wants, thank God we can give it!”

“We can give it,” said Leonard, continuing the sentence for his wife, “if the doctor will sanction our making a communication to his patient, which is of a nature to relieve her of all anxiety, but which, it is necessary to add, she is at present quite unprepared to receive.”

“May I ask,” said the doctor, “who is to be intrusted with the responsibility of making the communication you mention?”

“There are two persons who could be intrusted with it,” answered Leonard. “One is the old man whom you have seen by your patient’s bedside. The other is my wife.”

“In that case,” rejoined the doctor, looking at Rosamond, “there can be no doubt that this lady is the fittest person to undertake the duty.” He paused, and reflected for a moment; then added — ”May I inquire, however, before I venture on guiding your decision one way or the other, whether the lady is as familiarly known to my patient, and is on the same intimate terms with her, as the old man?”

“I am afraid I must answer No to both those questions,” replied Leonard “And I ought, perhaps, to tell you, at the same time, that your patient believes my wife to be now in Cornwall. Her first appearance in the sick-room would, I fear, cause great surprise to the sufferer, and possibly some little alarm as well.”

“Under those circumstances,” said the doctor, “the risk of trusting the old man, simple as he is, seems to be infinitely the least risk of the two — for the plain reason that his presence can cause her no surprise However unskillfully he may break the news, he will have the great advantage over this lady of not appearing unexpectedly at the bedside. If the hazardous experiment must be tried — and I assume that it must, from what you have said — you have no choice, I think, but to trust it, with proper cautions and instructions, to the old man to carry out.”

After arriving at that conclusion, there was no more to be said on either side The interview terminated, and Rosamond and her husband hastened back to give Uncle Joseph his instructions at the hotel.

As they approached the door of their sitting-room they were surprised by hearing the sound of music inside. On entering, they found the old man crouched upon a stool, listening to a shabby little musical box which was placed on a table close by him, and which was playing an air that Rosamond recognised immediately as the “Batti, Batti” of Mozart.

“I hope you will pardon me for making music to keep myself company while you were away,” said Uncle Joseph, starting up in some little confusion, and touching the stop of the box. “This is, if you please, of all my friends and companions, the oldest that is left. The divine Mozart, the king of all the composers that ever lived, gave it with his own hand, Madam, to my brother, when Max was a boy in the music school at Vienna. Since my niece left me in Cornwall, I have not had the heart to make Mozart sing to me out of this little bit of box until to-day. Now that you have made me happy about Sarah again, my ears ache once more for the tiny ting-ting that has always the same friendly sound to my heart, travel where I may. But enough so!” said the old man, placing the box in the leather case by his side, which Rosamond had noticed there when she first saw him at Porthgenna. “I shall put back my singing-bird into his cage, and shall ask, when that is done, if you will be pleased to tell me what it is that the doctor has said?”

Rosamond answered his request by relating the substance of the conversation which had passed between her husband and the doctor. She then, with many preparatory cautions, proceeded to instruct the old man how to disclose the discovery of the Secret to his niece. She told him that the circumstances in connection with it must be first stated, not as events that had really happened, but as events that might be supposed to have happened. She put the words that he would have to speak into his mouth, choosing the fewest and the plainest that would answer the purpose; she showed him how he might glide almost imperceptibly from referring to the discovery as a thing that might be supposed, to referring to it as a thing that had really happened; and she impressed upon him, as most important of all, to keep perpetually before his niece’s mind the fact that the discovery of the Secret had not awakened one bitter feeling or one resentful thought toward her, in the minds of either of the persons who had been so deeply interested in finding it out.

Uncle Joseph listened with unwavering attention until Rosamond had done; then rose from his seat, fixed his eyes intently our her face, and detected an expression of anxiety and doubt in it which he rightly interpreted as referring to himself.

“May I make you sure, before I go away, that I shall forget nothing?” he asked, very earnestly. “I have no head to invent, it is true; but I have something in me that can remember, and the more especially when it is for Sarah’s sake. If you please, listen now, and hear if I can say to you over again all that you have said to me?”

Standing before Rosamond, with something in his look and manner strangely and touchingly suggestive of the long-past days of his childhood, and of the time when he had said his earliest lessons at his mother’s knee, he now repeated, from first to last, the instructions that had been given to him, with a verbal exactness, with an easy readiness of memory, which, in a man of his age, was nothing less than astonishing “Have I kept it all as I should?” he asked, simply, when he had come to an end. “And may I go my ways now, and take my good news to Sarah’s bedside?”

It was still necessary to detain him, while Rosamond and her husband consulted together on the best and safest means of following up the avowal that the Secret was discovered, by the announcement of their own presence in London.

After some consideration, Leonard asked his wife to produce the document which the lawyer had drawn out that morning, and to write a few lines, from his dictation, on the blank side of the paper, requesting Mrs. Jazeph to read the form of declaration, and to affix her signature to it, if she felt that it required her, in every particular, to affirm nothing that was not the exact truth. When this had been done, and when the leaf on which Mrs. Frankland had written had been folded outward, so that it might be the first page to catch the eye, Leonard directed that the paper should be given to the old man, and explained to him what he was to do with it, in these words:

“When you have broken the news about the Secret to your niece,” he said, “and when you have allowed her full time to compose herself, if she asks questions about my wife and myself (as I believe she will), hand that paper to her for answer, and beg her to read it. Whether she is willing to sign it or not, she is sure to inquire how you came by it. Tell her in return that you have received it from Mrs. Frankland — using the word ‘received,’ so that she may believe at first that it was sent to you from Porthgenna by post. If you find that she signs the declaration, and that she is not much agitated after doing so, then tell her in the same gradual way in which you tell the truth about the discovery of the Secret, that my wife gave the paper to you with her own hands, and that she is now in London — ”

“Waiting and longing to see her,” added Rosamond “You, who forget nothing, will not, I am sure, forget to say that.”

The little compliment to his powers of memory made Uncle Joseph colour with pleasure, as if he was a boy again. Promising to prove worthy of the trust reposed in him, and engaging to come back and relieve Mrs. Frankland of all suspense before the day was out, he took his leave, and went forth hopefully on his momentous errand.

Rosamond watched him from the window, threading his way in and out among the throng of passengers on the pavement, until be was lost to view. How nimbly the light little figure sped away out of sight! How gayly the unclouded sunlight poured down on the cheerful bustle in the street! The whole being of the great city basked in the summer glory of the day; all its mighty pulses beat high, and all its myriad voices whispered of hope!

CHAPTER III.

THE STORY OF THE PAST.

THE
afternoon wore away and the evening came, and still there were no signs of Uncle Joseph’s return.

Toward seven o’clock, Rosamond was summoned by the nurse, who reported that the child was awake and fretful. After soothing and quieting him, she took him back with her to the sitting-room, having first, with her usual consideration for the comfort of any servant whom she employed, sent the nurse downstairs, with a leisure hour at her own disposal, after the duties of the day. “I don’t like to be away from you, Lenny, at this anxious time,” she said, when she rejoined her husband; “so I have brought the child in here. He is not likely to be troublesome again, and the having him to take care of is really a relief to me in our present state of suspense.”

The clock on the mantel-piece chimed the half-hour past seven. The carriages in the street were following one another more and more rapidly, filled with people in full dress, on their way to dinner, or on their way to the opera. The hawkers were shouting proclamations of news in the neighbouring square, with the second editions of the evening papers under their arms. People who had been serving behind the counter all day were standing at the shop door to get a breath of fresh air. Working men were trooping homeward, now singly, now together, in weary, shambling gangs. Idlers, who had come out after dinner, were lighting cigars at corners of streets, and looking about them, uncertain which way they should turn their steps next. It was just that transitional period of the evening at which the street-life of the day is almost over, and the street-life of the night has not quite begun — just the time, also, at which Rosamond, after vainly trying to find relief from the weariness of waiting by looking out of window, was becoming more and more deeply absorbed in her own anxious thoughts — when her attention was abruptly recalled to events in the little world about her by the opening of the room door. She looked up immediately from the child lying asleep on her lap, and saw that Uncle Joseph had returned at last.

The old man came in silently, with the form of declaration which he had taken away with him, by Mr. Frankland’s desire, open in his hand. As he approached nearer to the window, Rosamond noticed that his face looked as if it had grown strangely older during the few hours of his absence. He came close up to her, and still not saying a word, laid his trembling forefinger low down on the open paper, and held it before her so that she could look at the place thus indicated without rising from her chair.

His silence and the change in his face struck her with a sudden dread which made her hesitate before she spoke to him. “Have you told her all?” she asked, after a moment’s delay, putting the question in low, whispering tones, and not heeding the paper.

“This answers that I have,” he said, still pointing to the declaration. “See! here is the name, signed in the place that was left for it — signed by her own hand.”

Rosamond glanced at the paper. There indeed was the signature, “S. Jazeph;” and underneath it were added, in traced lines of parenthesis, these explanatory words — ”Formerly, Sarah Leeson.”

“Why don’t you speak?” exclaimed Rosamond, looking at him in growing alarm. “Why don’t you tell us how she bore it?”

“Ah! don’t ask me, don’t ask me!” he answered, shrinking back from her hand, as she tried in her eagerness to lay it on his arm. “I forgot nothing. I said the words as you taught me to say them — I went the roundabout way to the truth with my tongue; but my face took the short cut, and got to the end first. Pray, of your goodness to me, ask nothing about it! Be satisfied, if you please, with knowing that she is better and quieter and happier now. The bad is over and past, and the good is all to come. If I tell you how she looked, if I tell you what she said, if I tell you all that happened when first she knew the truth, the fright will catch me round the heart again, and all the sobbing and crying that I have swallowed down will rise once more and choke me. I must keep my head clear and my eyes dry — or how shall I say to you all the things that I have promised Sarah, as I love my own soul and hers, to tell, before I lay myself down to rest to-night?” He stopped, took out a coarse little cotton pocket-handkerchief, with a flaring white pattern on a dull blue ground, and dried a few tears that had risen in his eyes while he was speaking. “My life has had so much happiness in it,” he said, self-reproachfully, looking at Rosamond, “that my courage, when it is wanted for the time of trouble, is not easy to find. And yet, I am German! all my nation are philosophers! — why is it that I alone am as soft in my brains, and as weak in my heart, as the pretty little baby there, that is lying asleep in your lap?”