“Ah! that busybody,” exclaimed Andrew, tersely.
“Yes, Andrew, she seems to know more of the family history than your own wife. She, with some other ladies and myself, was standing in the west gallery this morning, when she said: ‘Mrs. Willing, there is one room you have not shown us, and I, for one, am dying to see it. I have often heard my father tell of its many lovely curios brought from foreign lands, and its beautiful occupant long since dead. He was a boon companion of your husband’s father.’”
“I told Mrs. Bradley that I had no knowledge of any such room and that she must have been misinformed.”
“Oh, no indeed,” she replied. “It is in the western gable, and should lead right out from this gallery.”
“Now I know you are mistaken,” I answered. “That gable is false. There is no room such as you mention in the gable. Do you not see the solid wall all along this gallery? and the gable lies directly back of it.”
“She smiled incredulously and looked at the other ladies as much as to say: ‘She can tell us, but she won’t.’ I led the way from the gallery, and the subject was dropped; but I have come to you for information, Andrew. If there is any mystery about that gable you must know it, and I should hear from your lips instead of from those of a gossip.”
As Victoria spoke Andrew’s face underwent a gradual change, and as she finished he gravely took her on his knee. “Mrs. Bradley has laid bare our family skeleton,” he said. “It is not pleasant to relate, but now that a busybody has partly enlightened you, it is well that you should know the truth instead of perhaps receiving a garbled account of it from a stranger. You have been told that my father died from an accidental pistol shot. So I was led to believe until my twenty-first year. Roger believed the same; then our mother told us of the gabled room, the knowledge of which was as much a surprise to us as it is now to you. We had always believed the gable to be false. My father when a young man, had fitted up in a most lavish style the western gable, making two elegant rooms of it, filling them with all the rare things which he could gather. Here he installed his favorite slave girl. After a time he went to England and married my mother. The very night of their return while he was showing my mother the house, as they went to ascend the stairs leading to the gabled room, his slave girl, smarting from her fancied wrongs, barred their progress and asked for freedom papers for herself and child. My father refused her, and straightway she shot him and then herself. Shortly after this Roger and I were born. My mother never spoke of her sorrow to anybody, but ordered every trace of the tragedy to be obliterated. No person ever entered the rooms after that except to board the windows. Everything was left as its unhappy occupant had stepped from it. The stairs were taken down and a solid wall built. My mother never spoke of it but once on our twenty-first birthday. Never again did I hear her allude to it in the faintest manner. That is the story, Victoria. Do you wonder at my silence regarding it? Is it a topic to be dwelt upon? A father’s shame and dishonor; a mother’s blighted life?”
“No, no, my husband. I would never have asked you to tell it had I known. Forgive me for unwittingly being the one to rake up these dead ashes of a buried past.”
“There is nothing to forgive, dear wife. I think I feel better for the telling. Mrs. Bradley knows not as much as I have told you, for my mother succeeded in keeping the real facts to herself. The servants were all freed and given money enough to go far away, so there was no babbling. It was given out as an accident and so believed by most.”
“What became of the child?” asked Victoria.