The Dead Secret: A Novel

by Wilkie Collins

The bare doubt freed Rosamond in an instant from all the self-distrust, all the embarrassment, all the hesitation about choosing her words and directing her actions which had fettered her generous impulses up to this time. She ran to the bed, raised the worn, shrinking figure in her arms, and laid the poor weary head gently on her warm, young bosom. "I have come at last, mother, to take my turn at nursing you," she said. Her heart swelled as those simple words came from it—her eyes overflowed—she could say no more.

"Don't cry!" murmured the faint, sweet voice timidly. "I have no right to bring you here and make you sorry. Don't, don't cry!"

"Oh, hush! hush! I shall do nothing but cry if you talk to me like that!" said Rosamond. "Let us forget that we have ever been parted—call me by my name—speak to me as I shall speak to my own child, if God spares me to see him grow up. Say 'Rosamond,' and—oh, pray, pray—tell me to do something for you!" She tore asunder passionately the strings of her bonnet, and threw it from her on the nearest chair. "Look! here is your glass of lemonade on the table. Say 'Rosamond, bring me my lemonade!' say it familiarly, mother! say it as if you knew that I was bound to obey you!"

She repeated the words after her daughter, but still not in steady tones—repeated them with a sad, wondering smile, and with a lingering of the voice on the name of Rosamond, as if it was a luxury to her to utter it.

"You made me so happy with that message and with the kiss you sent me from your child," she said, when Rosamond had given her the lemonade, and was seated quietly by the bedside again. "It was such a kind way of saying that you pardoned me! It gave me all the courage I wanted to speak to you as I am speaking now. Perhaps my illness has changed me—but I don't feel frightened and strange with you, as I thought I should, at our first meeting after you knew the Secret. I think I shall soon get well enough to see your child. Is he like what you were at his age? If he is, he must be very, very—" She stopped. "I may think of that," she added, after waiting a little, "but I had better not talk of it, or I shall cry too; and I want to have done with sorrow now."

While she spoke those words, while her eyes were fixed with wistful eagerness on her daughter's face, the whole instinct of neatness was still mechanically at work in her weak, wasted fingers. Rosamond had tossed her gloves from her on the bed but the minute before; and already her mother had taken them up, and was smoothing them out carefully and folding them neatly together, all the while she spoke.

"Call me 'mother' again," she said, as Rosamond took the gloves from her and thanked her with a kiss for folding them up. "I have never heard you call me 'mother' till now—never, never till now, from the day when you were born!"

Rosamond checked the tears that were rising in her eyes again, and repeated the word.

"It is all the happiness I want, to lie here and look at you, and hear you say that! Is there any other woman in the world, my love, who has a face so beautiful and so kind as yours?" She paused and smiled faintly. "I can't look at those sweet rosy lips now," she said, "without thinking how many kisses they owe me!"

"If you had only let me pay the debt before!" said Rosamond, taking her mother's hand, as she was accustomed to take her child's, and placing it on her neck. "If you had only spoken the first time we met, when you came to nurse me! How sorrowfully I have thought of that since! Oh, mother, did I distress you much in my ignorance? Did it make you cry when you thought of me after that?"