The Secret of Wyvern Towers

by T. W. Speight

"For me the next three years were very happy ones, I was not merely Clara Lemoine's companion, but her bosom friend. She was a warm-hearted girl of strong attachments, and I soon learned to love her very dearly. At the end of that time Mrs. Lemoine, who had been an invalid for years, died. The home was broken up, and Clara went out to Calcutta to join her father, who held a position in the Indian Civil Service. There, after a time, she met Colonel Drelincourt and married him, becoming his second wife.

"After about a year the colonel, together with his regiment, returned to England, his wife, of course, accompanying him. Some three or four years later he was ordered out to Egypt at a few days' notice, and was under the necessity of leaving his young wife, to whom he was passionately attached, behind him. He had not been gone a month when she was prematurely confined at a London hotel, but the child, a girl, only lived three weeks.

"By this time I had been a couple of years married, and you, my dear one, were born a fortnight before Mrs. Drelincourt's child. Clara, while in India, had written to me from time to time, and I had duly replied to her letters, so that the link between us had never been broken. She knew of my marriage, and of many, but not the whole, of the circumstances connected with it. She had called upon me at my house in the suburbs of London only a few days before the birth of her daughter. Within an hour of the child's death she sent me a telegram, asking me to go and see her without delay. This I did, and then it was that she went on her knees to me and implored me, with the most passionate entreaties, to give up my child to her, so that she might be enabled to pass it off to her husband in the place of the one that was dead.

"It was a proposition to which, much as I loved Clara Lemoine, and willing though I was to make almost any sacrifice for her, I could not for some time persuade myself to accede. But she bore down my opposition by degrees. Colonel Drelincourt, who was not on good terms with his only son, was extremely desirous of having another child--a boy preferably, but better, far better, a girl than none at all.

"He had been informed in due course of the birth of his daughter, and Clara dreaded the effect which the tidings of the child's death would have upon him--dreaded, or so she made out, that his love for her (there being no likelihood of her having any more children) might gradually fade into indifference, or even turn into positive dislike. 'I will not face my husband without his child, or one he believes to be his, in my arms,' she said. 'If you refuse to give me yours, I will drown myself.' And in the mood in which she then was she was quite capable of doing so.

"But, over and above all this, there were circumstances in my own life which, when I called them to mind, compelled me in my own despite to lend a more favorable ear to Mrs. Drelincourt's entreaties. My husband was a bad and cruel man. (It is better you should know the truth, however painful it may be.) He was both a drunkard and a spendthrift, and something worse than either. He had deserted me months before you were born, leaving me all but penniless.

"I neither knew where he was nor when to expect him back; and it was his return I dreaded more than anything else in the world. Could I have been sure that I should never see him again, I should have felt comparatively happy. But I might hear his knock at the door at any hour of the day or night, and the fear of it turned my life into a perpetual nightmare. Oh, I had good cause for being afraid of him!

"Not to weary you, it will be enough to say that I finally gave way and yielded to Mrs. Drelincourt's entreaties. Of what it cost me to do so I will say nothing.

"When Mrs. Drelincourt was well enough to leave the London hotel, at which she was an entire stranger, it was to go down to Wyvern Towers. It was at a little country station, at which she made a stoppage for the purpose, that you were given over into her charge. Our faithful servant; since dead, with whose services it was impossible to dispense, was our sole confidant in the affair.

"For the next four years I lived as companion to an invalid lady, to whom some portion of my history was known, and who did not object to my passing under a fictitious name--the one by which I have ever since been known. At the end of that time Mrs. Drelincourt sent for me.