A Terrible Secret: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

It was at Margate this meeting took place—that most popular and most vulgar of all English watering-places; and the Cheshire baronet had looked just once at the peach-bloom face, the blue eyes of laughing light, the blushing, dimpling, seventeen-year-old face, and fallen in love at once and forever.

He was a very impetuous young man, a very selfish and unstable young man, with whom, all his life, to wish was to have. He had been spoiled by a doting mother from his cradle, spoiled by obsequious servants, spoiled by Inez Catheron's boundless worship. And he wished for this "rose of the rose-bud garden of girls" as he had never wished for anything in his two-and-twenty years of life. As a man in a dream he went through that magic ceremony, "Miss Dobb, allow me to present my friend, Sir Victor Catheron," and they were free to look at each other, talk to each other, fall in love with each other as much as they pleased. As in a dream he lingered by her side three golden hours, as in a dream he said, "Good afternoon," and walked back to his hotel smoking a cigar, the world glorified above and about him. As in a dream they told him she was the only daughter and heiress of a well-to-do London soap-boiler, and he did not wake.

She was the daughter of a soap-boiler. The paternal manufactory was in the grimiest part of the grimy metropolis; but, remarkable to say, she had as much innate pride, self-respect, and delicacy as though "all the blood of all the Howards" flowed in those blue veins.

He wasn't a bad sort of young fellow, as young fellows go, and frantically in love. There was but one question to ask, just eight days after this—"Will you be my wife?"—but one answer, of course—"Yes."

But one answer, of course! How would it be possible for a soap-boiler's daughter to refuse a baronet? And yet his heart had beaten with a fear that turned him dizzy and sick as he asked it; for she had shrunk away for one instant, frightened by his fiery wooing, and the sweet face had grown suddenly and startlingly pale. Is it not the rule that all maidens shall blush when their lovers ask the question of questions?

The rosy brightness, the smiles, the dimples, all faded out of this face, and a white look of sudden fear crossed it. The startled eyes had shrank from his eager, flushed face and looked over the wide sea. For fully five minutes she never spoke or stirred. To his dying day that hour was with him—his passionate love, his sick, horrible fear, his dizzy rapture, when she spoke at last, only one word—"yes." To his dying day he saw her as he saw her then, in her summery muslin dress, her gipsy hat, the pale, troubled look chasing the color from the drooping face.

But the answer was "yes." Was he not a baronet? Was she not a well-trained English girl? And the ecstasy of pride, of joy, of that city soap-boiler's family, who shall paint? "Awake my muse" and—but, no! it passeth all telling. They bowed down before him (figuratively), this good British tradesman and his fat wife, and worshipped him. They burned incense at his shrine; they adored the ground he walked on; they snubbed their neighbors, and held their chins at an altitude never attained by the family of Dobb before. And in six weeks Miss Ethel Dobb became Lady Catheron.

It was the quietest, the dullest, the most secret of weddings—not a soul present except Papa and Mamma Dobb, a military swell in the grenadier guards—Pythias, at present, to Sir Victor's Damon—the parson, and the pew-opener. He was madly in love, but he was ashamed of the family soap-boiling, and he was afraid of his cousin Inez.

He told them a vague story enough of family matters, etc., that rendered secrecy for the present necessary, and nobody cross-questioned the baronet. That the parson was a parson, the marriage bona fide, his daughter "my lady," and himself the prospective grandfather of many baronets, was enough for the honest soap-boiler.

For the bride herself, she said little, in a shy, faltering little way. She was very fond of her dashing, high-born, impulsive lover, and very well content not to come into the full blaze and dazzle of high life just yet. If any other romance had ever figured in her simple life, the story was finished and done with, the book read and put away.