A Life's Secret: A Novel

by Mrs. Henry Wood

Mr. Lewis followed Emma to her place of retirement. He had really grown to like her: but the pursuit may have had its rise as much in the boyish desire to thwart Miss Gwinn—or, as he expressed it, 'to pay her off'—as in love. However that might have been, Emma Gwinn welcomed him all too gladly, and the walks were renewed.

It was an old tale, that, which ensued. Thanks to improved manners and morals, we can say an 'old' tale, in contradistinction to a modern one. A secret marriage in these days would be looked upon askance by most people. Under the purest, the most domestic, the wisest court in the world, manners and customs have taken a turn with us, and society calls underhand doings by their right name, and turns its back upon them. Nevertheless, private marriages and run-a-way marriages were not done away with in the days when James Lewis Hunter contracted his.

I wonder whether one ever took place—where it was contracted in disobedience and defiance—that did not bring, in some way or other, its own punishment? To few, perhaps, was it brought home as it was to Mr. Hunter. No apology can be offered for the step he took: not even his youth, or his want of experience, or the attachment which had grown up in his heart for Emma. He knew that his family would have objected to the marriage. In fact, he dared not tell his purpose. Her position was not equal to his—at least, old Mr. Hunter, a proud man, would not have deemed it to be so—and he would have objected on the score of his son's youth. The worst bar of all would have been the tendency to insanity of the Gwinns—but of this James Hunter knew nothing. So he took that one false, blind, irrevocable step of contracting a private marriage; and the consequences came bitterly home to him. The marriage was a strictly legal one. James Hunter was honourable enough to take care of that: and both of them guarded the secret jealously. Emma remained at her aunt's, and wore her ring inside her dress, attached to a neck ribbon. Her husband only saw her sometimes; to avoid suspicion he lived chiefly at his father's home in London. Six months afterwards, Emma Gwinn—nay, Emma Hunter—lay upon her death-bed. A fever broke out in the neighbourhood, which she caught; and a different illness also supervened. Miss Gwinn, apprised of her danger, hastened to her. She stood over her in a shock of horror—whence had those symptoms arisen, and what meant that circle of gold that Emma in her delirium kept hold of on her neck? Medical skill could not save her, and just before her death, in a lucid interval, she confessed her marriage—the bare fact only—none of its details; she loved her husband too truly to expose him to the dire wrath of her sister. And she died without giving the slightest clue to his real name—Hunter. It was the fever that killed her.

Dire wrath, indeed! That was scarcely the word for it. Insane wrath would be better. In Miss Gwinn's injustice (violent people always are unjust) she persisted in attributing Emma's death to Mr. Lewis. In her bitter grief, she jumped to the belief that the secret must have preyed upon Emma's brain in the delirium of fever, and that that prevented her recovery. It is very probable that the secret did prey upon it, though, it is to be hoped, not to the extent assumed by Miss Gwinn.

Mr. Lewis knew nothing of the illness. He was in France with his father at the time it happened, and had not seen his wife for three weeks. Perhaps the knowledge of his absence abroad, caused Emma not to attempt to apprise him when first seized; afterwards she was too ill to do so. But by a strange coincidence he arrived from London the day after the funeral.

Nobody need envy him the interview with Miss Gwinn. On her part it was not a seemly one. Glad to get out of the house and be away from her reproaches, the stormy interview was concluded almost as soon as it had begun. He returned straight to London, her last words ringing their refrain on his ears—that his wife was dead and he had killed her: Miss Gwinn being still in ignorance that his proper name was anything but Lewis. Following immediately upon this—it was curious that it should be so—Miss Gwinn received news that her sister Elizabeth, Mrs. Gardener, was ill in Jersey. She hastened to her: for Elizabeth was nearly, if not quite, as dear to her as Emma had been. Mrs. Gardener's was a peculiar and unusual illness, and it ended in a confirmed and hopeless affection of the brain.

Once more Miss Gwinn's injustice came into play. Just as she had persisted in attributing Emma's death to Mr. Lewis, so did she now attribute to him Elizabeth's insanity: that is, she regarded him as its remote cause. That the two young sisters had been much attached to each other was undoubted: but to think that Elizabeth's madness came on through sorrow for Emma's death, or at the tidings of what had preceded it, was absurdly foolish. The poor young lady was placed in an asylum in London, of which Dr. Bevary was one of the visiting physicians; he was led to take an unusual interest in the case, and this brought him acquainted with Miss Gwinn. Within a year of her being placed there, the husband, Mr. Gardener, died in Jersey. His affairs turned out to be involved, and from that time the cost of keeping her there devolved on Miss Gwinn.

Private asylums are expensive, and Miss Gwinn could only maintain her sister in one at the cost of giving up her own home. Ill-conditioned though she was, we must confess she had her troubles. She gave it up without a murmur: she would have given up her life to benefit either of those, her young sisters. Retaining but a mere pittance, she devoted all her means to the comfort of Elizabeth, and found a home with her brother, in Ketterford. Where she spent her days bemoaning the lost and cherishing a really insane hatred against Mr. Lewis—a desire for revenge. She had never come across him, until that Easter Monday, at Ketterford. And that, you will say, is scarcely correct, since it was not himself she met then, but his brother. Deceived by the resemblance, she attacked Mr. Henry Hunter in the manner you remember; and Austin Clay saved him from the gravel-pit. But the time soon came when she stood face to face with him. It was the hour she had so longed for: the hour of revenge. What revenge? But for the wicked lie she subsequently forged, there could have been no revenge. The worst she could have proclaimed was, that James Lewis Hunter, when he was a young man, had so far forgotten his duty to himself, and to the world's decencies, as to contract a secret marriage. He might have got over that. He had mourned his young wife sincerely at the time, but later grew to think that all things were for the best—that it was a serious source of embarrassment removed from his path. Nothing more or less had he to acknowledge.

What revenge would Miss Gwinn have reaped from this? None. Certainly none to satisfy one so vindictive as she. It never was clear to herself what revenge she had desired: all her efforts had been directed to the discovering of him. She found him a man of social ties. He had married Louisa Bevary; he had a fair daughter; he was respected by the world: all of which excited the anger of Miss Gwinn.

Remembering her violent nature, it was only to be expected that Mr. Hunter should shrink from meeting Miss Gwinn when he first knew she had tracked him and was in London. He had never told his wife the episode in his early life, and would very much have disliked its tardy disclosure to her through the agency of Miss Gwinn. Fifty pounds would he have willingly given to avoid a meeting with her. But she came to his very home; so to say, into the presence of his wife and child; and he had to see her, and make the best of it. You must remember the interview. Mr. Hunter's agitation previous to it, was caused by the dread of the woman's near presence, of the disturbance she might make in his household, of the discovery his wife was in close danger of making—that he was a widower when she married him, and not a bachelor. Any husband of the present day might show the same agitation I think under similar circumstances. But Mr. Hunter did not allow this agitation to sway him when before Miss Gwinn; once shut up with her, he was cool and calm as a cucumber; rather defied her than not, civilly; and asked what she meant by intruding upon him, and what she had to complain of: which of course was but adding fuel to the woman's flame. It was quite true, all he said, and there was nothing left to hang a peg of revenge upon. And so she invented one. The demon of mischief put it into her mind to impose upon him with the lie that his first wife, Emma, was not dead, but living. She told him that she (she, herself) had imposed upon him with a false story in that long-past day, in saying that Emma was dead and buried. It was another sister who had died, she added—not Emma: Emma had been ill with the fever, but was recovering; and she had said this to separate her from him. Emma, she continued, was alive still, a patient in the lunatic asylum.