“You need not be afraid, sir,” answered Joan contemptuously; “I would rather cut my fingers off than touch a farthing of the money to which I have no right at all. I don’t even know that I will accept your legacy.”
“I hope that you will do so, Joan, for it will put you in a position of complete independence, will provide for your children, and will enable you to live apart from your husband, should you by any chance fail to get on with him. And now I have told you the whole truth, and it only remains for me to most humbly beg your forgiveness. I have done my best for you, Joan, according to my lights; for, as I could not acknowledge you, I thought it would be well that you should be brought up in your mother’s class—though here I did not make sufficient allowance for the secret influences of race, seeing that, not withstanding your education, you are in heart and appearance a lady. I might, indeed, have taken you to live with me, as I often longed to do; but I feared lest such an act should expose me to suspicion, suspicion should lead to inquiry, and inquiry to my ruin and to that of my daughter Emma. Doubtless it would have been better, as well as more honest, if I had faced the matter out; but at the time I could not find the courage, and the opportunity went by. My early life had not been altogether creditable, and I could not bear the thought of once more becoming the object of scandal and of disgrace, or of imperilling the fortune and position to which after so many struggles I had at length attained. That, Joan, is my true story; and now again I say that I hope to hear you forgive me before I die, and promise that you will not, unless it is absolutely necessary, reveal these facts to your half-sister, Lady Graves, for if you do I verily believe that it will break her heart. The dread lest she should learn this history has haunted me for years, and caused me to strain every nerve to secure her marriage with a man of position and honourable name, so that, even should it be discovered that she had none, she might find a refuge in her disgrace. Thank Heaven that I, who have failed in so many things, have at least succeeded in this, so that, come what may when I am dead, she is provided for and safe.”
“I suppose, sir, that Sir Henry Graves knows all this?”
“Knows it! Of course not. Had he known it I doubt if he would have married her.”
“Possibly not. He might even have married somebody else,” Joan answered. “It seems, then, that you palmed off Miss Emma upon him under a false description.”
“I did,” he said, with a groan. “It was wrong, like the rest; but one evil leads to another.”
“Yes, sir, one evil leads to another, as I shall show you presently. You ask me to forgive you, and you talk about the breaking of Lady Graves’s heart. Perhaps you do not know that mine is already broken through you, or to what a fate you have given me over. I will tell you. Your daughter’s husband, Sir Henry Graves, and I loved each other, and I have borne his child. He wished to marry me, though, believing myself to be what you have taught me to believe, I was against it from the first. When he learned my state he insisted upon marrying me, like the honourable man that he is, and told his mother of his intention. She came to me in London and pleaded with me, almost on her knees, that I should ward off this disgrace from her family, and preserve her son from taking a step which would ruin him. I was moved by her entreaties, and I felt the truth of what she said; but I knew well that, should he come to marry me, as within a few days he was to do, for our child’s and our love’s sake, if not for my own, I could never find the strength to deny him.
“What was I to do? I was too ill to run away, and he would have hunted me out. Therefore it came to this, that I must choose between suicide—which was both wicked and impossible, for I could not murder another as well as myself—and the still more dreadful step that at length I took. You know the man Samuel Rock, my husband, and perhaps you know also that for a long while he has persecuted me with his passion, although again and again I have told him that he was hateful to me. While I was ill he obtained my address in London—I believe that he bought it from my aunt, Mrs. Gillingwater, the woman in whose charge you were satisfied to leave me—and two days after I had seen Lady Graves, he came to visit me, gaining admission by passing himself off as Sir Henry to my landlady, Mrs. Bird.
“You can guess the rest. To put myself out of temptation, and to save the man I loved from being disgraced and contaminated by me, I married the man I hated—a man so base that, even when I had told him all, and bargained that I should live apart from him for many months, he was yet content to take me. I did more than this even: I wrote in such a fashion to Sir Henry as I knew must shock and revolt him; and then I married, leaving him to believe that I had thrown him over because the husband whom I had chosen was richer than himself. Perhaps you cannot guess why I should thus have dishonoured both of us, and subjected myself to the horrible shame of making myself vile in Sir Henry’s eyes. This was the reason: had I not done so, had he once suspected the true motives of my sacrifice, the plot would have failed. I should have sold myself for nothing, for then he would never have married Emma Levinger. And now, that my cup may be full, my child is dead, and to-morrow I must give myself over to my husband according to the terms of my bond. This, sir, is the fruit of all your falsehoods; and I say, Ask God to forgive you, but not the poor girl—your own daughter—whom you have robbed of honour and happiness, and handed over to misery and shame.”
Thus Joan spoke to him, in a quiet, an almost mechanical voice indeed, but standing on her feet above the dying man, and with eyes and gestures that betrayed her absorbing indignation. When she had finished, her father, who was crouched in the chair before her, let fall his hands, wherewith he had hidden his face, and she saw that he was gasping for breath and that his lips were blue.