Уилки Коллинз - The Dead Secret - A Novel

The residence of the doctor was at some little distance, but Mr. and Mrs. Frankland arrived there before one o'clock, and found him at home. He was a young man, with a mild, grave face, and a quiet, subdued manner. Daily contact with suffering and sorrow had perhaps prematurely steadied and saddened his character. Merely introducing her husband and herself to him, as persons who were deeply interested in his patient at the lodging-house, Rosamond left it to Leonard to ask the first questions relating to the condition of her mother's health.

The doctor's answer was ominously prefaced by a few polite words, which were evidently intended to prepare his hearers for a less hopeful report than they might have come there expecting to receive. Carefully divesting the subject of all professional technicalities, he told them that his patient was undoubtedly affected with serious disease of the heart. The exact nature of this disease he candidly acknowledged to be a matter of doubt, which various medical men might decide in various ways. According to the opinion which he had himself formed from the symptoms, he believed that the patient's malady was connected with the artery which conveys blood directly from the heart through the system. Having found her singularly unwilling to answer questions relating to the nature of her past life, he could only guess that the disease was of long standing; that it was originally produced by some great mental shock, followed by long-wearing anxiety (of which her face showed palpable traces); and that it had been seriously aggravated by the fatigue of a journey to London, which she acknowledged she had undertaken at a time when great nervous exhaustion rendered her totally unfit to travel. Speaking according to this view of the case, it was his painful duty to tell her friends that any violent emotion would unquestionably put her life in danger. At the same time, if the mental uneasiness from which she was now suffering could be removed, and if she could be placed in a quiet, comfortable country home, among people who would be unremittingly careful in keeping her composed, and in suffering her to want for nothing, there was reason to hope that the progress of the disease might be arrested, and that her life might be spared for some years to come.

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 recognized 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 on 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?"