A Terrible Secret: A Novel

by May Agnes Fleming

"I don't know," she answered, in a stifled voice. "My thoughts have been very dark—very desperate. There were times when there seemed no light on earth, no hope in Heaven. I dare not tell you—I dare not think—how wicked and reckless my heart has been."

"Poor child!" he said, with a touch of infinite compassion. "You were so young—it was all so sudden, so terrible, so incomprehensible. Draw up that hassock, Edith, and sit here by my side, and listen. No, you must let go my hand. How can I tell whether you will not shrink from it and me with horror when you know all."

Without a word, she drew the low seat close to the bed, and shading her face with her hand, listened, motionless as a statue, to the brief story of the secret that had held them apart so long.

"It all begins," Sir Victor's faint, low voice said, "with the night of my father's death, three weeks before our wedding-day. That night I learned the secret of my mother's murder, and learned to pity my unhappy father as I had never pitied him before. Do you remember, Edith, the words you spoke to Lady Helena the day before you ran away from Powyss Place? You said Inez Catheron was not the murderer, though she had been accused of it, nor Juan Catheron, though he had been suspected of it—that you believed Sir Victor Catheron had killed his own wife. Edith, you were right. Sir Victor Catheron murdered his own wife!

"I learned it that fatal night. Lady Helena and Inez had known it all along. Juan Catheron more than suspected it. Bad as he was, he kept that secret. My mother was stabbed by my father's hand.

"Why did he do it? you ask. I answer, because he was mad—mad for weeks before. And he knew it, though no one else did. With the cunning of insanity he kept his secret, not even his wife suspected that his reason was unsound. He was a monomaniac. Insanity, as you have heard, is hereditary in our family, in different phases; the phase it took with him was homicidal mania. On all other points he was sane—on this, almost from the first, he had been insane—the desire to take his wife's life.

"It is horrible, is it not—almost incredibly horrible? It is true, nevertheless. Before the honeymoon was ended, his homicidal mania developed itself—an almost insurmountable desire, whenever he was alone in her presence, to take her life. Out of the very depth and intensity of his passion for her his madness arose. He loved her with the whole strength of his heart and being, and—the mad longing was with him always, to end her life while she was all his own—in short, to kill her.

"He could not help it; he knew his madness—he shrank in horror from it—he battled with it—he prayed for help—and for over a year he controlled himself. But it was always there—always. How long it might have lain dormant—how long he would have been able to withstand his mad desire, no one can tell. But Juan Catheron came and claimed her as his wife, and jealousy finished what a dreadful hereditary insanity had begun.

"On that fatal evening he had seen them together somewhere in the grounds, and though he hid what he felt, the sight had goaded him almost to frenzy. Then came the summons from Lady Helena to go to Powyss Place. He set out, but before he had gone half-way, the demon of jealously whispered in his ear, 'Your wife is with Juan Catheron now—go back and surprise them.' He turned and went back—a madman—the last glimpse of reason and self-control gone. He saw his wife, not with Juan Catheron, but peacefully and innocently asleep by the open window of the room where he had left her. The dagger, used as a paper knife, lay on the table near. I say he was utterly mad for the time. In a moment the knife was up to the hilt in her heart, dealing death with that one strong blow! He drew it out and—she lay dead before him.

"Then a great, an awful horror, fell upon him. Not of the consequence of his crime; only of that which lay so still and white before him. He turned like the madman he was and fled. By some strange chance he met no one. In passing through the gates he flung the dagger among the fern, leaped on his horse, and was gone.