The Queen of Hearts

by Wilkie Collins

  CHAPTER III.

  MORE years passed; my mother followed my aunt to the grave, and stillI was as far as ever from making any discoveries in relation to UncleGeorge. Shortly after the period of this last affliction my health gaveway, and I departed, by my doctor's advice, to try some baths in thesouth of France.

  I traveled slowly to my destination, turning aside from the direct road,and stopping wherever I pleased. One evening, when I was not more thantwo or three days' journey from the baths to which I was bound, I wasstruck by the picturesque situation of a little town placed on the browof a hill at some distance from the main road, and resolved to have anearer look at the place, with a view to stopping there for the night,if it pleased me. I found the principal inn clean and quiet--orderedmy bed there--and, after dinner, strolled out to look at the church. Nothought of Uncle George was in my mind when I entered the building; andyet, at that very moment, chance was leading me to the discovery which,for so many years past, I had vainly endeavored to make--the discoverywhich I had given up as hopeless since the day of my mother's death.

  I found nothing worth notice in the church, and was about to leave itagain, when I caught a glimpse of a pretty view through a side door, andstopped to admire it.

  The churchyard formed the foreground, and below it the hill-side slopedaway gently into the plain, over which the sun was setting in fullglory. The cure of the church was reading his breviary, walking up anddown a gravel-path that parted the rows of graves. In the course of mywanderings I had learned to speak French as fluently as most Englishmen,and when the priest came near me I said a few words in praise ofthe view, and complimented him on the neatness and prettiness ofthe churchyard. He answered with great politeness, and we got intoconversation together immediately.

  As we strolled along the gravel-walk, my attention was attracted by oneof the graves standing apart from the rest. The cross at the head of itdiffered remarkably, in some points of appearance, from the crosses onthe other graves. While all the rest had garlands hung on them, thisone cross was quite bare; and, more extraordinary still, no name wasinscribed on it.

  The priest, observing that I stopped to look at the grave, shook hishead and sighed.

  "A countryman of yours is buried there," he said. "I was present at hisdeath. He had borne the burden of a great sorrow among us, in this town,for many weary years, and his conduct had taught us to respect and pityhim with all our hearts."

  "How is it that his name is not inscribed over his grave?" I inquired.

  "It was suppressed by his own desire," answered the priest, with somelittle hesitation. "He confessed to me in his last moments that he hadlived here under an assumed name. I asked his real name, and he toldit to me, with the particulars of his sad story. He had reasons fordesiring to be forgotten after his death. Almost the last words he spokewere, 'Let my name die with me.' Almost the last request he made wasthat I would keep that name a secret from all the world excepting onlyone person."

  "Some relative, I suppose?" said I.

  "Yes--a nephew," said the priest.

  The moment the last word was out of his mouth, my heart gave a strangeanswering bound. I suppose I must have changed color also, for the curelooked at me with sudden attention and interest.

  "A nephew," the priest went on, "whom he had loved like his own child.He told me that if this nephew ever traced him to his burial-place,and asked about him, I was free in that case to disclose all I knew. 'Ishould like my little Charley to know the truth,' he said. 'In spite ofthe difference in our ages, Charley and I were playmates years ago.'"

  My heart beat faster, and I felt a choking sensation at the throat themoment I heard the priest unconsciously mention my Christian name inmentioning the dying man's last words.

  As soon as I could steady my voice and feel certain of myself-possession, I communicated my family name to the cure, and askedhim if that was not part of the secret that he had been requested topreserve.

  He started back several steps, and clasped his hands amazedly.

  "Can it be?" he said, in low tones, gazing at me earnestly, withsomething like dread in his face.

  I gave him my passport, and looked away toward the grave. The tearscame into my eyes as the recollections of past days crowded back on me.Hardly knowing what I did, I knelt down by the grave, and smoothed thegrass over it with my hand. Oh, Uncle George, why not have told yoursecret to your old playmate? Why leave him to find you _here?_

  The priest raised me gently, and begged me to go with him into his ownhouse. On our way there, I mentioned persons and places that I thoughtmy uncle might have spoken of, in order to satisfy my companion thatI was really the person I represented myself to be. By the time we hadentered his little parlor, and had sat down alone in it, we were almostlike old friends together.

  I thought it best that I should begin by telling all that I have relatedhere on the subject of Uncle George, and his disappearance from home. Myhost listened with a very sad face, and said, when I had done:

  "I can understand your anxiety to know what I am authorized to tellyou, but pardon me if I say first that there are circumstances in youruncle's story which it may pain you to hear--" He stopped suddenly.

  "Which it may pain me to hear as a nephew?" I asked.

  "No," said the priest, looking away from me, "as a son."

  I gratefully expressed my sense of the delicacy and kindness which hadprompted my companion's warning, but I begged him, at the same time, tokeep me no longer in suspense and to tell me the stern truth, no matterhow painfully it might affect me as a listener.

  "In telling me all you knew about what you term the Family Secret,"said the priest, "you have mentioned as a strange coincidence that yoursister's death and your uncle's disappearance took place at the sametime. Did you ever suspect what cause it was that occasioned yoursister's death?"

  "I only knew what my father told me, and what all our friendsbelieved--that she had a tumor in the neck, or, as I sometimes heard itstated, from the effect on her constitution of a tumor in the neck."

  "She died under an operation for the removal of that tumor," said thepriest, in low tones; "and the operator was your Uncle George."

  In those few words all the truth burst upon me.

  "Console yourself with the thought that the long martyrdom of his lifeis over," the priest went on. "He rests; he is at peace. He and hislittle darling understand each other, and are happy now. That thoughtbore him up to the last on his death-bed. He always spoke of your sisteras his 'little darling.' He firmly believed that she was waiting toforgive and console him in the other world--and who shall say he wasdeceived in that belief?"

  Not I! Not anyone who has ever loved and suffered, surely!

  "It was out of the depths of his self-sacrificing love for the childthat he drew the fatal courage to undertake the operation," continuedthe priest. "Your father naturally shrank from attempting it. Hismedical brethren whom he consulted all doubted the propriety of takingany measures for the removal of the tumor, in the particular conditionand situation of it when they were called in. Your uncle alone differedwith them. He was too modest a man to say so, but your mother foundit out. The deformity of her beautiful child horrified her. She wasdesperate enough to catch at the faintest hope of remedying it thatanyone might hold out to her; and she persuaded your uncle to put hisopinion to the proof. Her horror at the deformity of the child, and herdespair at the prospect of its lasting for life, seem to have utterlyblinded her to all natural sense of the danger of the operation. Itis hard to know how to say it to you, her son, but it must be told,nevertheless, that one day, when your father was out, she untrulyinformed your uncle that his brother had consented to the performance ofthe operation, and that he had gone purposely out of the house becausehe had not nerve enough to stay and witness it. After that, your uncleno longer hesitated. He had no fear of results, provided he could becertain of his own courage. All he dreaded was the effect on him of hislove for the child when he first found himself face to
face with thedreadful necessity of touching her skin with the knife."

  I tried hard to control myself, but I could not repress a shudder atthose words.

  "It is useless to shock you by going into particulars," said the priest,considerately. "Let it be enough if I say that your uncle's fortitudefailed to support him when he wanted it most. His love for the childshook the firm hand which had never trembled before. In a word, theoperation failed. Your father returned, and found his child dying.The frenzy of his despair when the truth was told him carried him toexcesses which it shocks me to mention--excesses which began in hisdegrading his brother by a blow, which ended in his binding himselfby an oath to make that brother suffer public punishment for his fatalrashness in a court of law. Your uncle was too heartbroken by what hadhappened to feel those outrages as some men might have felt them. Helooked for one moment at his sister-in-law (I do not like to say yourmother, considering what I have now to tell you), to see if she wouldacknowledge that she had encouraged him to attempt the operation, andthat she had deceived him in saying that he had his brother's permissionto try it. She was silent, and when she spoke, it was to join herhusband in denouncing him as the murderer of their child. Whether fearof your father's anger, or revengeful indignation against your unclemost actuated her, I cannot presume to inquire in your presence. I canonly state facts."

  The priest paused and looked at me anxiously. I could not speak to himat that moment--I could only encourage him to proceed by pressing hishand.

  He resumed in these terms:

  "Meanwhile, your uncle turned to your father, and spoke the last wordshe was ever to address to his eldest brother in this world. He said, 'Ihave deserved the worst your anger can inflict on me, but I will spareyou the scandal of bringing me to justice in open court. The law, if itfound me guilty, could at the worst but banish me from my country and myfriends. I will go of my own accord. God is my witness that I honestlybelieved I could save the child from deformity and suffering. I haverisked all and lost all. My heart and spirit are broken. I am fit fornothing but to go and hide myself, and my shame and misery, from alleyes that have ever looked on me. I shall never come back, never expectyour pity or forgiveness. If you think less harshly of me when I amgone, keep secret what has happened; let no other lips say of mewhat yours and your wife's have said. I shall think that forbearanceatonement enough--atonement greater than I have deserved. Forget me inthis world. May we meet in another, where the secrets of all hearts areopened, and where the child who is gone before may make peace betweenus!' He said those words and went out. Your father never saw him orheard from him again."

  I knew the reason now why my father had never confided the truth toanyone, his own family included. My mother had evidently confessedall to her sister under the seal of secrecy, and there the dreadfuldisclosure had been arrested.

  "Your uncle told me," the priest continued, "that before he left Englandhe took leave of you by stealth, in a place you were staying at by thesea-side. He had not the heart to quit his country and his friendsforever without kissing you for the last time. He followed you in thedark, and caught you up in his arms, and left you again before you had achance of discovering him. The next day he quitted England."

  "For this place?" I asked.

  "Yes. He had spent a week here once with a student friend at the timewhen he was a pupil in the Hotel Dieu, and to this place he returned tohide, to suffer, and to die. We all saw that he was a man crushed andbroken by some great sorrow, and we respected him and his affliction. Helived alone, and only came out of doors toward evening, when he used tosit on the brow of the hill yonder, with his head on his hand, lookingtoward England. That place seemed a favorite with him, and he is buriedclose by it. He revealed the story of his past life to no living soulhere but me, and to me he only spoke when his last hour was approaching.What he had suffered during his long exile no man can presume to say.I, who saw more of him than anyone, never heard a word of complaint fallfrom his lips. He had the courage of the martyrs while he lived, andthe resignation of the saints when he died. Just at the last his mindwandered. He said he saw his little darling waiting by the bedside tolead him away, and he died with a smile on his face--the first I hadever seen there."

  The priest ceased, and we went out together in the mournful twilight,and stood for a little while on the brow of the hill where Uncle Georgeused to sit, with his face turned toward England. How my heart achedfor him as I thought of what he must have suffered in the silence andsolitude of his long exile! Was it well for me that I had discovered theFamily Secret at last? I have sometimes thought not. I have sometimeswished that the darkness had never been cleared away which once hid fromme the fate of Uncle George.

  THE THIRD DAY.

  FINE again. Our guest rode out, with her ragged little groom, as usual.There was no news yet in the paper--that is to say, no news of George orhis ship.

  On this day Morgan completed his second story, and in two or three daysmore I expected to finish the last of my own contributions. Owen wasstill behindhand and still despondent.

  The lot drawing to-night was Five. This proved to be the number of thefirst of Morgan's stories, which he had completed before we began thereadings. His second story, finished this day, being still uncorrectedby me, could not yet be added to the common stock.

  On being informed that it had come to his turn to occupy the attentionof the company, Morgan startled us by immediately objecting to thetrouble of reading his own composition, and by coolly handing it overto me, on the ground that my numerous corrections had made it, to allintents and purposes, my story.

  Owen and I both remonstrated; and Jessie, mischievously persisting inher favorite jest at Morgan's expense, entreated that he would read, ifit was only for her sake. Finding that we were all determined, and allagainst him, he declared that, rather than hear our voices any longer,he would submit to the minor inconvenience of listening to his own.Accordingly, he took his manuscript back again, and, with an air ofsurly resignation, spread it open before him.

  "I don't think you will like this story, miss," he began, addressingJessie, "but I shall read it, nevertheless, with the greatest pleasure.It begins in a stable--it gropes its way through a dream--it keepscompany with a hostler--and it stops without an end. What do you thinkof that?"

  After favoring his audience with this promising preface, Morgan indulgedhimself in a chuckle of supreme satisfaction, and then began to read,without wasting another preliminary word on any one of us.

  BROTHER MORGAN'S STORY of THE DREAM-WOMAN.