A Terrible Secret: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

"Do you believe in presentiments, Edith?" he asked. "I have a presentiment that we will never meet again like this—that something will have come between us before we meet again. I cannot define it. I cannot explain it. I only know it is there."

"I don't believe in presentiments," Edith answered cheerfully. "I never had one in my life. I believe they are only another name for dyspepsia; and telegrams and hurried night journeys are mostly conductive to gloom. When the sun shines to-morrow morning, and you have had a strong cup of coffee, you will be ready to laugh at your presentiments. Nothing is likely to come between us."

"Nothing shall—nothing, I swear it!" He caught her in his arms with a straining clasp, and kissed her passionately for the first time. "Nothing in this lower world shall ever separate us. I have no life now apart from you. And nothing, not death itself, shall postpone our marriage. It was postponed once; I wish it never had been. It shall never be postponed again."

"Go, go!" Edith cried; "some one is coming—you will be late."

There was not a minute to spare. He dashed down the stairs, down the portico steps, and sprang into the carriage beside his aunt. The driver cracked his whip, the horses started, the carriage rolled away into the gloom and the night. Edith Darrell stood at the window until the last sound of the wheels died away, and for long after. A strange silence seemed to have fallen upon the great house with the going of its mistress. In the embrasure of the window, in the dim blue starlight, the girl sat down to think. There was some mystery, involving the murder of the late Lady Catheron, at work here, she felt. Grief for the loss of his wife might have driven Sir Victor Catheron mad, but why make such a profound secret of it? Why give out that he was dead? Why allow his son to step into the title before his time? If Juan Catheron were the murderer, Juan Catheron the outlaw and Pariah of his family, why screen him as though he had been the idol and treasure of all, and let the dead go unavenged? Why this strange terror of Lady Helena's? why her insufferable aversion to her nephew marrying at all?

Yes, there was something hidden, something on the cards not yet brought to light; and to the death-bed of Sir Victor Catheron the elder, Sir Victor Catheron the younger had been summoned to hear the whole truth.

Would he tell it to her upon his return, she wondered. Well, if he did not, she had no right to complain—she had her secret from him. There was madness in the family—she shrank a little at the thought for the first time. Who knew, whether latent and unsuspected, the taint might not be in the blood and brains of the man to whom she was about to bind herself for life? Who was to tell when it might break forth, in what horrible shape it might show itself? To be the widowed wife of a madman—what wealth and title on earth could compensate for that? She shivered as she sat, partly with the chill night air, partly with the horror of the thought. In her youth, and health, and beauty, her predecessor had been struck down, the bride of another Sir Victor. So long she sat there that a clock up in the lofty turret struck, heavily and solemnly, twelve. The house was still as the grave—all shut up except this room where she sat, all retired except her maid and the butler. They yawned sleepily, and waited for her to retire. Chilled and white, the girl arose at last, took her night-light, and went slowly up to bed.

"Is the game worth the candle after all?" she thought. "Ah me! what a miserable, vacillating creature I am. Whatever comes—the worst or the best—there is nothing for it now but to go on to the end."

Meantime, through the warm, starry night, the train was speeding on to London, bearing Sir Victor Catheron to the turning point of his life. He and his aunt had their carriage all to themselves. Still in dead silence, still with that pale, terrified look on her face, Lady Helena lay back in a corner among the cushions. Once or twice her nephew spoke to her—the voice in which she answered him hardly sounded like her own. He gave it up at last; there was nothing for it but to wait and let the end come. He drew his cap over his eyes, lay back in the opposite seat, and dozed and dreamed of Edith.

In the chill, gray light of an overcast morning they reached Easton station. A sky like brown paper lay over the million roofs of the great Babylon; a dull, dim fog, that stifled you, filled the air. The fog and raw cold were more like November than the last month of summer. Blue and shivering in the chill light, Sir Victor buttoned up his light overcoat, assisted his aunt into a cab, and gave the order—"St. John's Wood. Drive for your life!"