Clare gave her mother the welcome of the dead. This child would have spoken nothing but kind commonplaces had she been alive. She was dead, and none knew her malady. On her fourth finger were two wedding-rings.
When hours of weeping had silenced the mother’s anguish, she, for some comfort she saw in it, pointed out that strange thing to Richard, speaking low in the chamber of the dead; and then he learnt that it was his own lost ring Clare wore in the two worlds. He learnt from her husband that Clare’s last request had been that neither of the rings should be removed. She had written it; she would not speak it.
“I beg of my husband, and all kind people who may have the care of me between this and the grave, to bury me with my hands untouched.”
The tracing of the words showed the bodily torment she was suffering, as she wrote them on a scrap of paper found beside her pillow.
In wonder, as the dim idea grew from the waving of Clare’s dead hand, Richard paced the house, and hung about the awful room; dreading to enter it, reluctant to quit it. The secret Clare had buried while she lived, arose with her death. He saw it play like flame across her marble features. The memory of her voice was like a knife at his nerves. His coldness to her started up accusingly: her meekness was bitter blame.
On the evening of the fourth day, her mother came to him in his bedroom, with a face so white that he asked himself if aught worse could happen to a mother than the loss of her child. Choking she said to him, “Read this,” and thrust a leather-bound pocket-book trembling in his hand. She would not breathe to him what it was. She entreated him not to open it before her.
“Tell me,” she said, “tell me what you think. John must not hear of it. I have nobody to consult but you O Richard!”
“My Diary” was written in the round hand of Clare’s childhood on the first page. The first name his eye encountered was his own.
“Richard’s fourteenth birthday. I have worked him a purse and put it under his pillow, because he is going to have plenty of money. He does not notice me now because he has a friend now, and he is ugly, but Richard is not, and never will be.”
The occurrences of that day were subsequently recorded, and a childish prayer to God for him set down. Step by step he saw her growing mind in his history. As she advanced in years she began to look back, and made much of little trivial remembrances, all bearing upon him.