Cairo! Cairo! A light shot up into Hylda’s eyes. The Duchess had spoken without thought, but, as she spoke, she watched the sudden change in Hylda. What did it mean? Cairo—why should Cairo have waked her so? Suddenly she recalled certain vague references of Lord Windlehurst, and, for the first time, she associated Hylda with Claridge Pasha in a way which might mean much, account for much, in this life she was leading.
“Perhaps! Perhaps!” answered Hylda abstractedly, after a moment.
The Duchess got to her feet. She had made progress. She would let her medicine work.
“I’m going to bed, my dear. I’m sixty-five, and I take my sleep when I can get it. Think it over, Sicily—Cairo!”
She left the room, saying to herself that Eglington was a fool, and that danger was ahead. “But I hold a red light—poor darling!” she said aloud, as she went up the staircase. She did not know that Eglington, standing in a deep doorway, heard her, and seized upon the words eagerly and suspiciously, and turned them over in his mind.
Below, at the desk where Eglington’s mother used to write, Hylda sat with a bundle of letters before her. For some moments she opened, glanced through them, and put them aside. Presently she sat back in her chair, thinking—her mind was invaded by the last words of the Duchess; and somehow they kept repeating themselves with the words in the late Countess’s diary: “Is it only the mother in me, not the love in me?” Mechanically her hand moved over the portfolio of the late Countess, and it involuntarily felt in one of its many pockets. Her hand came upon a letter. This had remained when the others had been taken out. It was addressed to the late Earl, and was open. She hesitated a moment, then, with a strange premonition and a tightening of her heart-strings, she spread it out and read it.
At first she could scarcely see because of the mist in her eyes; but presently her sight cleared, and she read quickly, her cheeks burning with excitement, her heart throbbing violently. The letter was the last expression of a disappointed and barren life. The slow, stammering tongue of an almost silent existence had found the fulness of speech. The fountains of the deep had been broken up, and Sybil Eglington’s repressed emotions, undeveloped passions, tortured by mortal sufferings, and refined and vitalised by the atmosphere blown in upon her last hours from the Hereafter, were set free, given voice and power at last.
The letter reviewed the life she had lived with her husband during twenty-odd years, reproved herself for not speaking out and telling him his faults at the beginning, and for drawing in upon herself, when she might have compelled him to a truer understanding; and, when all that was said, called him to such an account as only the dying might make—the irrevocable, disillusionising truth which may not be altered, the poignant record of failure and its causes.
“... I could not talk well, I never could, as a girl,” the
letter ran; “and you could talk like one inspired, and so
speciously, so overwhelmingly, that I felt I could say nothing in
disagreement, not anything but assent; while all the time I felt how
hollow was so much you said—a cloak of words to cover up the real
thought behind. Before I knew the truth, I felt the shadow of
secrecy in your life. When you talked most, I felt you most
secretive, and the feeling slowly closed the door upon all frankness
and sympathy and open speech between us. I was always shy and self-
conscious and self-centred, and thought little of myself; and I
needed deep love and confidence and encouragement to give out what
was in me. I gave nothing out, nothing to you that you wanted, or
sought for, or needed. You were complete, self-contained. Harry,
my beloved babe Harry, helped at first; but, as the years went on,
he too began to despise me for my little intellect and slow
intelligence, and he grew to be like you in all things—and
secretive also, though I tried so hard to be to him what a mother
should be. Oh, Bobby, Bobby—I used to call you that in the days
before we were married, and I will call you that now when all is
over and done—why did you not tell me all? Why did you not tell me
that my boy, my baby Harry, was not your only child, that there had
been another wife, and that your eldest son was alive?
“I know all. I have known all for years. The clergyman who married
you to Mercy Claridge was a distant relative of my mother’s, and
before he died he told me. When you married her, he knew you only
as James Fetherdon, but, years afterwards, he saw and recognised
you. He held his peace then, but at last he came to me. And I did
not speak. I was not strong enough, nor good enough, to face the
trouble of it all. I could not endure the scandal, to see my own
son take the second place—he is so brilliant and able and
unscrupulous, like yourself; but, oh, so sure of winning a great
place in the world, surer than yourself ever was, he is so
calculating and determined and ambitious! And though he loves me
little, as he loves you little, too, yet he is my son, and for what
he is we are both responsible, one way or another; and I had not the
courage to give him the second place, and the Quaker, David
Claridge, the first place. Why Luke Claridge, his grandfather,
chose the course he did, does not concern me, no more than why you
chose secrecy, and kept your own firstborn legitimate son, of whom
you might well be proud, a stranger to you and his rights all these
years. Ah, Eglington, you never knew what love was, you never had
a heart—experiment, subterfuge, secrecy, ‘reaping where you had
not sowed, and gathering where you had not strawed.’ Always,
experiment, experiment, experiment!
“I shall be gone in a few hours—I feel it, but before I go I must
try to do right, and to warn you. I have had such bad dreams about
you and Harry—they haunt me—that I am sure you will suffer
terribly, will have some awful tragedy, unless you undo what was
done long ago, and tell the truth to the world, and give your titles
and estates where they truly belong. Near to death, seeing how
little life is, and how much right is in the end, I am sure that I
was wrong in holding my peace; for Harry cannot prosper with this
black thing behind him, and you cannot die happy if you smother up
the truth. Night after night I have dreamed of you in your
laboratory, a vague, dark, terrifying dream of you in that
laboratory which I have hated so. It has always seemed to me the
place where some native evil and cruelty in your blood worked out
its will. I know I am an ignorant woman, with no brain, but God has
given me clear sight at the last, and the things I see are true
things, and I must warn you. Remember that....”
The letter ended there. She had been interrupted or seized with illness, and had never finished it, and had died a few hours afterwards; and the letter was now, for the first time, read by her whom it most concerned, into whose heart and soul the words sank with an immitigable pain and agonised amazement. A few moments with this death-document had transformed Hylda’s life.