Strange fears were working within her, Dr. Bevary"s manner was so different from ordinary. "I think I see it all," she gasped. "The worst has happened."
"The best has happened," responded Dr. Bevary. "Miss Gwinn, you have requested me more than once to bring you here without preparation should the time arrive--for that you could bear certainty, but not suspense.
Will you see her?"
Her face had grown white and rigid as marble. Unable to speak, she pointed forward with her hand. Dr. Bevary drew it within his own to support her. In a clean, cool chamber, on a pallet bed, lay a dead woman. Dr. Kerr gently drew back the snow-white sheet, with which the face was covered. A pale, placid face, with a little band of light hair folded underneath the cap. She--Miss Gwinn--did not stir: she gave way to neither emotion nor violence; but her bloodless lips were strained back from her teeth, and her face was as white as that of the dead.
"G.o.d"s ways are not as our ways," whispered Dr. Bevary. "You have been acting for revenge: He has sent peace. Whatsoever He does is for the best."
She made no reply: she remained still and rigid. Dr. Bevary stroked the left hand of the dead, lying in its utter stillness--stroked, as if unconsciously, the wedding-ring on the third finger. He had been led to believe that it was placed on that finger, years and years ago, by his brother-in-law, James Lewis Hunter. And had been led to believe a lie!
And she who had invented the lie, who had wrought the delusion, who had embittered Mr. Hunter"s life with the same dread belief, stood there at the doctor"s side, looking at the dead.
It is a solemn thing to persist though but tacitly in the acting of a vile falsehood, in the mysterious presence of death. Even Miss Gwinn was not strong-minded enough for that. As Dr. Bevary turned to her with a remark upon the past, she burst forth into a cry, and gave utterance to words that fell upon the physician"s ear like a healing balm, soothing and binding up a long-open wound.
CHAPTER X.
THE YEARS GONE BY.
Those readers will be disappointed who look for any very romantic _denoument_ of "A Life"s Secret." The story is a short and sad one.
Suggesting the wretchedness and evil that may result when truth is deviated from; the lengths to which a blind, unholy desire for revenge will carry an ill-regulated spirit; and showing how, in the moral government of the world, sin casts its baleful consequences upon the innocent as well as the guilty.
When the carriage of Dr. Bevary, containing himself and Miss Gwinn, drove from Mr. Hunter"s door on the unknown errand, he--Mr.
Hunter--staggered to a seat, rather than walked to it. That he was very ill that day, both mentally and bodily, he was only too conscious of.
Austin Clay had said to him, "Do not return: I will manage," or words to that effect. At present Mr. Hunter felt himself incapable of returning.
He sank down in the easy chair, and closed his eyes, his thoughts thrown back to the past. An ill-starred past: one that had left its bane on his after life, and whose consequences had clung to him. It is impossible but that ill-doing must leave its results behind: the laws of G.o.d and man alike demand it. Mr. Hunter, in early life, had been betrayed into committing a wrong act; and Miss Gwinn, in the gratification of her pa.s.sionate revenge, had visited it upon him all too heavily. Heavily, most heavily was it pressing upon him now. That unhappy visit to Wales, which had led to all the evil, was especially present to his mind this day. A handsome young man, in the first dawn of manhood, he had gone to the fashionable Welsh watering-place--partly to renew a waste of strength more imaginary than real; partly in the love of roving natural to youth; partly to enjoy a few weeks" relaxation. "If you want good and comfortable lodgings, go to Miss Gwinn"s house on the South Parade," some friend, whom he encountered at his journey"s end, had said to him. And to Miss Gwinn"s he went. He found Miss Gwinn a cold, proud woman--it was she whom you have seen--bearing the manners of a lady. The servant who waited upon him was garrulous, and proclaimed, at the first interview, amidst other gossip, that her mistress had but a limited income--a hundred, or a hundred and fifty pounds a year, she believed; that she preferred to eke it out by letting her drawing-room and adjoining bed-room, and to live well; rather than to rusticate and pinch. Miss Gwinn and her motives were nothing to the young sojourner, and he turned a careless, if not a deaf ear, to the gossip. "She does it chiefly for the sake of Miss Emma," added the girl: and the listener so far roused himself as to ask apathetically who "Miss Emma" was. It was her mistress"s young sister, the girl replied: there must be twenty good years between them. Miss Emma was but nineteen, and had just come home from boarding-school: her mistress had brought her up ever since her mother died. Miss Emma was not at home now, but was expected on the morrow, she went on. Miss Emma was not without her good looks, but her mistress took care they should not be seen by everybody. She"d hardly let her go about the house when strangers were in it, lest she should be met in the pa.s.sages. Mr. Hunter laughed. Good looks had attractions for him in those days, and he determined to see for himself, in spite of Miss Gwinn, whether Miss Emma"s looks were so good that they might not be looked at. Now, by the merest accident--at least, it happened by accident in the first instance, and not by intention--one chief point of complication in the future ill was unwittingly led to. In this early stage of the affair, while the servant maid was exercising her tongue in these items of domestic news, the friend who had recommended Mr. Hunter to the apartments, arrived at the house and called out to him from the foot of the stairs, his high clear voice echoing through the house.
"Lewis! Will you come out and take a stroll?"
Lewis Hunter hastened down, proclaiming his acquiescence, and the maid proceeded to the parlour of her mistress.
"The gentleman"s name is Lewis, ma"am. You said you forgot to ask it of him."
Miss Gwinn, methodical in all she did, took a sheet of note-paper and inscribed the name upon it, "Mr. Lewis," as a reminder for the time when she should require to make out his bill. When Mr. Hunter found out their error--for the maid henceforth addressed him as "Mr. Lewis," or "Mr.
Lewis, sir"--it rather amused him, and he did not correct the mistake.
He had no motive whatever for concealing his name: he did not wish it concealed. On the other hand, he deemed it of no importance to set them right; it signified not a jot to him whether they called him "Mr. Lewis"
or "Mr. Hunter." Thus they knew him as, and believed him to be, Mr.
Lewis only. He never took the trouble to undeceive them, and nothing occurred to require the mistake to be corrected. The one or two letters only which arrived for him--for he had gone there for idleness, not to correspond with his friends--were addressed to the post-office, in accordance with his primary directions, not having known where he should lodge.
Miss Emma came home: a very pretty and agreeable girl. In the narrow pa.s.sage of the house--one of those shallow residences built for letting apartments at the sea-side--she encountered the stranger, who happened to be going out as she entered. He lifted his hat to her.
"Who is that, Nancy?" she asked of the chattering maid.
"It"s the new lodger, Miss Emma: Lewis his name is. Did you ever see such good looks? And he has asked a thousand questions about you."
Now, the fact was, Mr. Hunter--stay, we will also call him Mr. Lewis for the time being, as they had fallen into the error, and it may be convenient to us--had not asked a single question about the young lady, save the one when her name was first spoken of, "Who is Miss Emma?"
Nancy had supplied information enough for a "thousand" questions, unasked; and perhaps she saw no difference.
"Have you made any acquaintance with Mr. Lewis, Agatha?" Emma inquired of her sister.
"When do I make acquaintance with the people who take my apartments?"
replied Miss Gwinn, in a tone of reproof. "They naturally look down upon me as a letter of lodgings--and I am not one to bear that."
Now comes the unhappy tale. It shall be glanced at as briefly as possible in detail; but it is necessary that parts of it should be explained.
Acquaintanceship sprang up between Mr. Lewis and Emma Gwinn. At first, they met in the town, or on the beach, accidentally; later, I very much fear that the meetings were tacitly, if not openly, more intentional.
Both were agreeable, both were young; and a liking for each other"s society arose in each of them. Mr. Lewis found his time hang somewhat heavily on his hands, for his friend had left; and Emma Gwinn was not prevented from walking out as she pleased. Only one restriction was laid upon her by her sister: "Emma, take care that you make no acquaintance with strangers, or suffer it to be made with you. Speak to none."
An injunction which Miss Emma disobeyed. She disobeyed it in a particularly marked manner. It was not only that she did permit Mr.
Lewis to make acquaintance with her, but she allowed it to ripen into intimacy. Worse still, the meetings, I say, from having been at first really accidental, grew to be sought. Sought on the one side as much as on the other. Ah! young ladies, I wish this little history could be a warning to you, never to deviate from the strict line of right--never to stray, by so much as a thoughtless step, from the straight path of duty.
Once allow yourselves to do so, and you know not where it may end.
Slight acts of disobedience, that appear in themselves as the merest trifles, may yet be fraught with incalculable mischief. The falling into the habit of pa.s.sing a pleasant hour of intercourse with Mr. Lewis, sauntering on the beach in social and intellectual converse--and it was no worse--appeared a very venial offence to Emma Gwinn. But she did it in direct disobedience to the command and wish of her sister; and she knew that she so did it. She knew also that she owed to that sister, who had brought her up and cared for her from infancy, the allegiance that a child gives to a mother. In this stage of the affair, she was chiefly to blame. Mr. Lewis did not suppose that blame attached to him. There was no reason why he should not while away an occasional hour in pleasant chat with a young lady; there was no harm in the meetings, taking them in the abstract. The blame lay with her. It is no excuse to urge that Miss Gwinn exercised over her a too strict authority, that she kept her secluded from society with an unusually tight hand. Miss Gwinn had a motive in this: her sister knew nothing of it, and resented the restriction as a personal wrong. To elude her vigilance, and walk about with a handsome young man, seemed a return justifiable, and poor Emma Gwinn never dreamt of any ill result. At length it was found out by Miss Gwinn. She did not find out much. Indeed, there was not much to find, except that there was more friendship between Mr. Lewis and Emma than there was between Mr. Lewis and herself, and that they often met to stroll on the beach, and enjoy the agreeable benefit of the sea-breezes.
But that was quite enough for Miss Gwinn. An uncontrollable storm of pa.s.sionate anger ensued, which was vented upon Emma. She stood over her, and forced her to attire herself for travelling, protesting that not another hour should she pa.s.s in the house while Mr. Lewis remained. Then she started with Emma, to place her under the care of an aunt, who lived so far off as to be a day"s journey.
"It"s a shame!" was the comment of sympathetic Nancy, who deemed Miss Gwinn the most unreasonable woman under the sun. Nancy was herself engaged to an enterprising porter, to whom she intended to be married some fine Easter, when they had saved up sufficient to lay in a stock of goods and chattels. And she forthwith went straight to Mr. Lewis, and communicated to him what had occurred, giving him Miss Emma"s new address.
"He"ll follow her if he have got any spirit," was her inward thought.
"It"s what my Joe would do by me, if I was forced off to desert places by a old dragon."
It was precisely what Mr. Lewis did. Upon the return of Miss Gwinn, he gave notice to quit her house, where he had already stayed longer than he intended to do originally. Miss Gwinn had no suspicion but that he returned to his home--wherever that might be.
You may be inclined to ask why Miss Gwinn had fallen into anger so great. That she loved her young sister with an intense and jealous love was certain. Miss Gwinn was of a peculiar temperament, and she could not bear that one spark of Emma"s affection should stray from her. Emma, on the contrary, scarcely cared for her eldest sister: entertaining for her a very cool regard indeed, not to be called a sisterly one: and the cause may have lain in the stern manners of Miss Gwinn. Deeply, ardently as she loved Emma, her manners were to her invariably cold and stern: and this does not beget love from the young. Emma also resented the jealous restrictions imposed on her, lest she should make any acquaintance that might lead to marriage. It had been better possibly that Miss Gwinn had disclosed to her the reasons that existed against it. There was madness in the Gwinn family. One of the parents had died in an asylum, and the medical men suspected (as Miss Gwinn knew) that the children might be subject to it. She did not fear it for herself, but she did fear it for Emma: in point of fact, the young girl had already, some years back, given indications of it. It was therefore Miss Gwinn"s intention and earnest wish--a very right and proper wish--that Emma should never marry. There was one other sister, Elizabeth, a year older than Emma. She had gone on a visit to Jersey some little time before; and, to Miss Gwinn"s dismay and consternation, had married a farmer there, without asking leave. There was nothing for Miss Gwinn but to bury the dismay within her, and to resolve that Emma should be guarded more closely than before. But Emma Gwinn, knowing nothing of the prompting motives, naturally resented the surveillance.
Mr. Lewis followed Emma to her place of retirement. He had really grown to like her: but the pursuit may have had its rise as much in the boyish desire to thwart Miss Gwinn--or, as he expressed it, "to pay her off"--as in love. However that might have been, Emma Gwinn welcomed him all too gladly, and the walks were renewed.
It was an old tale, that, which ensued. Thanks to improved manners and morals, we can say an "old" tale, in contradistinction to a modern one.
A secret marriage in these days would be looked upon askance by most people. Under the purest, the most domestic, the wisest court in the world, manners and customs have taken a turn with us, and society calls underhand doings by their right name, and turns its back upon them.
Nevertheless, private marriages and run-a-way marriages were not done away with in the days when James Lewis Hunter contracted his.
I wonder whether one ever took place--where it was contracted in disobedience and defiance--that did not bring, in some way or other, its own punishment? To few, perhaps, was it brought home as it was to Mr.
Hunter. No apology can be offered for the step he took: not even his youth, or his want of experience, or the attachment which had grown up in his heart for Emma. He knew that his family would have objected to the marriage. In fact, he dared not tell his purpose. Her position was not equal to his--at least, old Mr. Hunter, a proud man, would not have deemed it to be so--and he would have objected on the score of his son"s youth. The worst bar of all would have been the tendency to insanity of the Gwinns--but of this James Hunter knew nothing. So he took that one false, blind, irrevocable step of contracting a private marriage; and the consequences came bitterly home to him. The marriage was a strictly legal one. James Hunter was honourable enough to take care of that: and both of them guarded the secret jealously. Emma remained at her aunt"s, and wore her ring inside her dress, attached to a neck ribbon. Her husband only saw her sometimes; to avoid suspicion he lived chiefly at his father"s home in London. Six months afterwards, Emma Gwinn--nay, Emma Hunter--lay upon her death-bed. A fever broke out in the neighbourhood, which she caught; and a different illness also supervened. Miss Gwinn, apprised of her danger, hastened to her. She stood over her in a shock of horror--whence had those symptoms arisen, and what meant that circle of gold that Emma in her delirium kept hold of on her neck? Medical skill could not save her, and just before her death, in a lucid interval, she confessed her marriage--the bare fact only--none of its details; she loved her husband too truly to expose him to the dire wrath of her sister. And she died without giving the slightest clue to his real name--Hunter. It was the fever that killed her.
Dire wrath, indeed! That was scarcely the word for it. Insane wrath would be better. In Miss Gwinn"s injustice (violent people always are unjust) she persisted in attributing Emma"s death to Mr. Lewis. In her bitter grief, she jumped to the belief that the secret must have preyed upon Emma"s brain in the delirium of fever, and that that prevented her recovery. It is very probable that the secret did prey upon it, though, it is to be hoped, not to the extent a.s.sumed by Miss Gwinn.
Mr. Lewis knew nothing of the illness. He was in France with his father at the time it happened, and had not seen his wife for three weeks.
Perhaps the knowledge of his absence abroad, caused Emma not to attempt to apprise him when first seized; afterwards she was too ill to do so.
But by a strange coincidence he arrived from London the day after the funeral.
n.o.body need envy him the interview with Miss Gwinn. On her part it was not a seemly one. Glad to get out of the house and be away from her reproaches, the stormy interview was concluded almost as soon as it had begun. He returned straight to London, her last words ringing their refrain on his ears--that his wife was dead and he had killed her: Miss Gwinn being still in ignorance that his proper name was anything but Lewis. Following immediately upon this--it was curious that it should be so--Miss Gwinn received news that her sister Elizabeth, Mrs. Gardener, was ill in Jersey. She hastened to her: for Elizabeth was nearly, if not quite, as dear to her as Emma had been. Mrs. Gardener"s was a peculiar and unusual illness, and it ended in a confirmed and hopeless affection of the brain.
Once more Miss Gwinn"s injustice came into play. Just as she had persisted in attributing Emma"s death to Mr. Lewis, so did she now attribute to him Elizabeth"s insanity: that is, she regarded him as its remote cause. That the two young sisters had been much attached to each other was undoubted: but to think that Elizabeth"s madness came on through sorrow for Emma"s death, or at the tidings of what had preceded it, was absurdly foolish. The poor young lady was placed in an asylum in London, of which Dr. Bevary was one of the visiting physicians; he was led to take an unusual interest in the case, and this brought him acquainted with Miss Gwinn. Within a year of her being placed there, the husband, Mr. Gardener, died in Jersey. His affairs turned out to be involved, and from that time the cost of keeping her there devolved on Miss Gwinn.
Private asylums are expensive, and Miss Gwinn could only maintain her sister in one at the cost of giving up her own home. Ill-conditioned though she was, we must confess she had her troubles. She gave it up without a murmur: she would have given up her life to benefit either of those, her young sisters. Retaining but a mere pittance, she devoted all her means to the comfort of Elizabeth, and found a home with her brother, in Ketterford. Where she spent her days bemoaning the lost and cherishing a really insane hatred against Mr. Lewis--a desire for revenge. She had never come across him, until that Easter Monday, at Ketterford. And that, you will say, is scarcely correct, since it was not himself she met then, but his brother. Deceived by the resemblance, she attacked Mr. Henry Hunter in the manner you remember; and Austin Clay saved him from the gravel-pit. But the time soon came when she stood face to face with _him_. It was the hour she had so longed for: the hour of revenge. What revenge? But for the wicked lie she subsequently forged, there could have been no revenge. The worst she could have proclaimed was, that James Lewis Hunter, when he was a young man, had so far forgotten his duty to himself, and to the world"s decencies, as to contract a secret marriage. He might have got over that. He had mourned his young wife sincerely at the time, but later grew to think that all things were for the best--that it was a serious source of embarra.s.sment removed from his path. Nothing more or less had he to acknowledge.
What revenge would Miss Gwinn have reaped from this? None. Certainly none to satisfy one so vindictive as she. It never was clear to herself what revenge she had desired: all her efforts had been directed to the discovering of him. She found him a man of social ties. He had married Louisa Bevary; he had a fair daughter; he was respected by the world: all of which excited the anger of Miss Gwinn.
Remembering her violent nature, it was only to be expected that Mr.