‘Dear Friend,’ said the open letter, ‘in telling me that I have still a kindly place in your memory, you have given me a pleasure which I am glad to have lived long enough to experience. Thank you. And I ask you to take this “Thank you” in its full sense of respect and gratitude.
‘I knew that’—here there was a word scored out, but the dame deciphered it to be ‘Lucy’—‘she had left a daughter under your care. I have thought of her—very often thought of her; and wished that it might be in my power to serve her as I would have served her mother, had I known of her misfortunes in time. But whenever I thought of writing to you about her, my pen was stopped by the same strange stupor—paralysis or whatever it may be that affects my brains whenever certain memories are stirred—the same which rendered me dumb and incapable of listening to you, when you might have given me explanations that would no doubt have made my suffering less. I do not ask for explanations now; perhaps it would be best to give me none. I am sure it would be best; and yet I have a longing to know anything you may have to tell me about Lucy. Time has taken the sting from memory: there is no bitterness in my thought of her—I do not think there ever was any bitterness in my thoughts about her. Looking back, I only see the bright days when we were so happy together, dreaming of our future. Then there is the black day when you told me she was married. Somebody died that day—my better self, I always think. Since then, I seem to have been toiling through a long tunnel, so numbed with cold and sunk in darkness that I have felt nothing and seen nothing.
‘But the information contained in your note about the intended marriage of Lucy’s child to Philip Hadleigh has brought me back into the daylight. The change was so sudden, that for a little while my eyes were dazzled and my mind confused. I see clearly now. Here is my opportunity to serve Lucy. There can be nothing you can tell me which can affect my craving to serve her; and I can only do it by guarding her daughter. I proceed to England by the next steamer which leaves the nearest port.
‘I am aware that you will find it difficult to understand me from what I have written here. I have tried to make my purpose plain to you in the packet which is inclosed with this; but what is put down there is for the present intended only for you. Before you break the seal, I ask you, in Lucy’s name, to keep my confidence from your niece, and even from your husband, until we meet. Should this be asking too much, I beseech you to put the packet into the fire without opening it. Let me assure you at once that in withholding my purpose for a time from others, you will in nowise harm—or even run the risk of harming the living or the dead, whilst you may be able to assist me greatly in the service I wish to do for your sister’s child.
‘Decide as you will: I trust you shall be satisfied that the grounds for your decision are as sufficient as mine are for the course I have adopted.’
Here was the question she found it so difficult to answer: could she accept this trust? It was contrary to all her notions of right that she should have any thought which she might not communicate to her husband. She had never had a secret; her life had run so smoothly that there had been no occasion for one. She was grateful for having been spared the temptations to falsehood, which a secret, however trifling in itself, entails. But she took no special credit to herself on this account. Indeed, the good woman found it hard to understand why there should be any mysteries in the conduct of people at all. The straightforward course appeared to her so much easier to travel than the crooked ways which some choose or fall into unawares, that she wondered why, on purely selfish grounds, they should continue in them, when the way out was so simple.
At this moment her theory was put to a severe test. She was asked to keep a secret, but it was not her own or of her seeking. Then she should refuse to accept the trust. On the other hand, she was assured by one in whose honesty she had every reason to place implicit faith, that the secret meant no harm to any one—that she was only required to keep it for a time, and that by so doing she would aid him in carrying into effect his design for the welfare of Madge.
She took a practical view of the mode in which he proposed to benefit the child of the woman he had loved long ago. He was rich, he was childless: of course his purpose must be to make her his heiress. Then why should he make such a mystery of such a generous act? She had heard of people who took the drollest possible way of bequeathing their fortunes. Maybe it amused them: maybe they were a little wrong in the head, and were therefore to be pitied. Why, then, should she not humour him, by letting him have his own way so long as it was harmless, as she would do with any person whose eccentricity could not be agreeably dealt with otherwise? This was coming nearer to a settlement of her doubts.
Now she could either burn the sealed letter, or send it to him at his lawyer’s, whose address he gave her for further communications. But the argument was in favour of opening it; and what lingering hesitation she might have on the subject was decided by that strain of curiosity which the best of women have inherited.
She deliberately cut the envelope with her scissors and unfolded the paper on her lap. The contents were somewhat of the nature she expected; but the way in which he purposed benefiting Madge was different from anything she could have guessed.