THE CONFESSION CONTINUED.
"My husband had been about three days gone when bad weather set in.
For several hours the lake was lashed by a wild storm of wind and
rain. Then the rain ceased, and fitful gleams of sunshine lighted up
the landscape, but the wind still blew in fierce troubled gusts, and
so continued for several days. On the sixth day after my husband's
departure I was surprised by a visit from Captain Lant, whom I had not
seen since my wedding-day. He was very grave, but there was nothing in
his looks from which I could augur that he was the bearer of ill news.
He was not a man whom I could ever have liked, but I bade him welcome
for my husband's sake. His first words told me that I had lost that
husband for ever. Mr. Fairfax had been drowned during the storm three
days before, while out sketching in a small boat on the Lake of
Zurich. His body had been recovered; had been recognised by Captain
Lant, in whose company my husband was making the excursion, but who
had not been on the lake; and had been buried the following morning in
the churchyard nearest the scene of the accident. In corroboration of
his story, Captain Lant brought me my husband's vest, his purse, his
ring, his watch, his pencil-case, and a small pocket-book, the whole
of which articles had the appearance of having been in the water for
several hours. I could not doubt the truth of his tale.
"Captain Lant stayed with me, and did all that could be done to
facilitate my arrangements for leaving the villa and returning to
England. Among the luggage which my husband had not taken with him,
was found a pocket-book containing bank-notes to the value of two
hundred pounds. The notes were sealed up in an envelope that was
endorsed with my name, and had these words written below: 'In case of
any accident happening to myself.' This proof of my husband's
affectionate forethought touched me to the quick. He might have had a
presentiment of the terrible ending that was so soon to befall him.
"Before Captain Lant and I parted we had a long conversation together.
I told him that I knew nothing whatever of my late husband's social
position, nor whether he had a single relative in the world. On these
two points I was desirous that Captain Lant should afford me some
information, but he professed to be as ignorant in the matter as I
was. Although Mr. Fairfax and he had been very good friends, their
friendship was only a thing of three years' growth, and of my
husband's antecedents he could say nothing with certainty. He himself
believed him to have been the son of a small farmer in the south of
England, and that his money had come to him from a rich uncle. Further
than that he professed to know nothing, and with this scanty
information I was obliged to rest satisfied. Captain Lant and I parted
at the diligence office. He was going forward to Rome, while all my
desire was to get back to England.
"On feeling for my notes a few minutes after landing from the steamer,
I found that they had been stolen. I had omitted to take the numbers
of them, and the police could do nothing to assist me. Four sovereigns
and some loose silver was all the money I had in the world. After a
couple of days spent at a quiet boarding-house in London, I set out
for Dupley Walls. It was late in autumn, and the weather was
excessively cold. There was no railway in those days, and the coach by
which I had to travel was full inside. I travelled outside, and had to
be lifted down at Tydsbury, so benumbed was I with the intense cold.
No news from home had reached me during the time of my sojourn on the
continent, and now, at the Tydsbury hotel, I heard for the first time
that my father was dead. I heard it to all outward seeming as a
stranger might have heard it; none there knew who I was.
"I parted with my last half-crown at the hotel, and then I set out
to walk the three miles to Dupley Walls. You must bear in mind
that I had not been at the hall since I was four years old, and that,
consequently, the way was entirely strange to me. I did not leave the
little town till dusk, and the snow was falling fast by the time I got
fairly out into the country lanes. I inquired at one or two cottages
by the way, but I must have wandered far out of the direct road, for
when I at length reached Dupley Walls, wet through and half dead with
cold and fatigue, the turret clock was just striking twelve. The house
loomed vast and dark before me, with nowhere a single ray of light to
bid me welcome. My heart grew faint within me. I lay down under the
portico and prayed that I might die. How long I had lain thus I cannot
tell, when I was roused to partial consciousness by hearing a sound as
if some metallic substance had fallen on to the flagged floor of the
hall inside. Then I heard faint sounds as if some one were moving
about in the darkness, and presently a dim thread of light shone from
under the door. As I afterwards learned, my mother had been to pay her
customary visit to the Black Room upstairs, and in returning across
the hall had dropped her lamp to the ground. On seeing the thread of
light I staggered to my feet, and beat with both my hands against the
door. Then a voice cried out, 'Who are you? and what do you want?'
"'My name is Helen Fairfax,' I replied, 'and I want to see Lady
Pollexfen.'
"There was a dead silence for full two minutes, then I heard the
rustle of a silk dress, and presently the great bolts were drawn one
by one, and then the door of my lost home was flung wide open, but not
for me to enter. On the threshold stood a tall figure, dark and
threatening, dark except for the white hands, gemmed with rings, one
of which held on high a small antique lamp, and the white face full of
wrath and menace.
"'I am Lady Pollexfen,' said this phantom, in a cold, passionless
voice. 'Once more I ask, Who are you?'
"'Your daughter, madam. Helena, your unhappy child.'
"'My daughter Helena died and was buried long ago. You may be her
ghost for aught I know or care. In any case, this is no place for you:
within this door you can never enter: under this roof you can never
come. Go! I have no daughter. I am childless and a widow.'
"'But, madam--mother, hear me! I am your daughter--I----'
"'I tell you that I have no daughter,' she interrupted, in her cold,
imperative way. 'My daughter fell into shame, and then to me she
became as utterly dead as if the ocean were rolling over her bones:
dead in heart and dead in memory. You are an impostor. Go!'
"'Oh! mother, listen to me. I am not an impostor. I am your own
daughter Helena. No shame clings to my name. My husband is dead, and
this is the only place in the wide world where I can ask for shelter
or a crust of bread.'
"'Not so much as a crust of bread shall you ever have from me. You
know my will. Go at once and never darken this door again. When you
die, may you die uncared for and unknown! May your eyes be closed by
the hands of strangers, and may the hands of strangers lay you in your
grave! Go!'
"Speaking thus, Lady Pollexfen faded back into the darkness. Slowly
and resistlessly the door was closed: slowly and deliberately the
great bolts were pushed into their sockets: the silk dress rustled;
the ribbon of light shone for a moment under the door; then all was
darkness and silence, and I was alone.
"I crept away from the cruel door into the less cruel night. The night
and the snow seemed like friends that would wrap me round, and tend
me, and hush me into a sleep that should know no waking in this bitter
world. I was like one on whose soul sits some awful nightmare which
makes him seem, even in his own eyes, something other than himself. I
knew that the woman who had smitten me with those cruel words was my
mother, but I was past wondering at that, or at anything else. All
that had befallen me was only in the common course of events, and it
was quite right and proper that I should be walking there alone at
that hour, with my back turned to the roof that should have sheltered
me, and with no spot in all the wide world on which I could claim to
lay my head. In my heart there was no bitterness; only a dull, vague
longing for peace and rest and a deep winding-sheet of snow. There was
something within me that would allow me neither pause nor rest till I
had left the park of Dupley Walls behind. I had shunned the ordinary
lodge-entrance, and had gained access to the grounds through a stile
in a bye-lane, connected with which is a right of footpath across one
corner of the estate. I went back by the same road, and at length
recognised in a bewildered sort of way that I was out of the park and
had all the world before me where to choose. A light snow was still
falling, but the wind had died down, and with it had gone that
intensity of cold from which I had suffered before. I dragged myself
slowly onward, but more by a sort of instinct than by any exertion of
will. But beyond this point I have no clear recollection of anything.
I only know that when I woke up I found myself in the Home of the
Sisterhood of Good Works, to which place I had been conveyed by a
charitable carrier who had found me lying insensible in the snow.
"There I lay very ill for a long time. During one part of my illness
my mind wandered, and from certain words I let drop at that time,
the Sisterhood were induced to write to Lady Pollexfen. She--my
mother--came. She saw me when I was unconscious of her presence, and
she saw me afterwards when I was slowly coming hack to life and
health. Then was the unwritten compact entered into by which it was
agreed that when sufficiently recovered I should go and live at Dupley
Walls, not as the daughter of its mistress, but, under the assumed
name of Sister Agnes, as Lady Pollexfen's paid companion and very
humble friend.
"In the meantime you, my darling Janet, had been born. I nursed you
myself till you were six months old. Then Lady Pollexfen insisted on
your being put out, and on my going to live at Dupley Walls. But
previously to doing this her ladyship extorted from me a double
promise. First, never by word, look, or deed to reveal to any one the
fact of the relationship between herself and me. Secondly, never till
my dying day to reveal either to you or to any one else the fact that
you and I were mother and daughter. This double promise was not made
by me without first consulting those whose opinions I was bound to
revere. At that time I looked upon the promise as a penalty in part
for the errors of my life. Since that time I have often felt inclined
to doubt the wisdom of having made it. The penalty has been a far
heavier one than I thought it would be. To see you, my daughter, the
one sweet flower that has blossomed out of my withered life, to see
you and know you as my own, and yet not to dare to claim you as such,
surely that was too great a penance for one weak mortal to bear!
"My narrative is nearly at a close. By the time you have read thus far
you will understand why you were brought up at Miss Chinfeather's
academy, and why you were sent from that place to Dupley Walls. Lady
Pollexfen's strange treatment will also in part be understood by you.
You were a disturbing element in that fossilized life to which she had
become accustomed. Still, if I have read her character aright, you,
her granddaughter, are far more precious in her sight than I, her
daughter, ever was. I am very very happy to think that such is the
case; and I have sometimes ventured to hope that after I shall be
gone, you and she may be drawn still more closely together. That the
withered ashes of her affections may yet derive some vital heat from
the generous impulses of your heart. That her pride may give way
sufficiently to induce her to place you in your proper position in the
world, and to allow your hands, as being those of the one nearest and
dearest to her, to tend her lovingly on that downward path which she
and I are alike treading; and of which the end can be no great
distance away.
"I have necessarily left one of the most important points of my
narrative till the last.
"When Captain Lant told me that he knew nothing positive as to the
antecedents of your father, but that he believed him to have been the
son of a small farmer in the south of England, and that his money had
been left him by a rich uncle, I believed him implicitly. But during
the long solitary years by which my life has been marked since that
time I have gone back in thought a thousand times to those few brief
wedded months, and have brooded over all the circumstances by which
they were surrounded. One result of this perpetual brooding has been
that I have learned in my own mind to distrust the statement made by
Captain Lant. I cannot believe that Mr. Fairfax was the son of a small
farmer. He was a gentleman, and had about him all the signs of one who
had been brought up among gentlefolks. From hints and odd words
dropped by him at different times and afterwards recalled by me in
memory, I gathered that he had travelled extensively, that he had been
at college, that he was a member of one or two West-end clubs, that he
had at one time kept his own hunters, and that he was personally known
to several people of rank. In all this there was nothing that betrayed
the farmer's son.
"From this conviction--not arrived at in a day or a month--of
Captain Lant's untruthfulness, a suspicion has gradually forced itself
upon me--and at the present moment it is nothing more than a
suspicion--that the entire story of Mr. Fairfax's sudden death was
neither more nor less than a clever fabrication to get rid of a woman
for whom he no longer cared. It may seem cruel to you, my dear Janet,
even to hint at such a thing in connexion with a man whose memory you
ought to revere, especially as I have not the slightest atom of
positive proof on which to base such a suspicion. But now, if ever,
the whole truth must be told you. About all Captain Lant's statements
there was an air of unreality which did not strike me so forcibly at
the time as it did afterwards, when I went back in recollection over
the events of that terrible time. Sometimes the suspicion that I was
nothing more than the victim of a clever lie would deepen in my mind
till it almost assumed the proportions of a certainty. At other times
it would wither and lose all its vivid colouring, and seem nothing
more than the dream of a distempered brain. It might have been nothing
more than such a dream for any action I have taken in it to prove
either its truth or its falsity. My love for Mr. Fairfax died out long
ago, and nothing could revivify the cold ashes. If he were not really
dead, but merely wished to cast me off, he had attained his end, and
so enough. Had it been possible to lure him back to my side, the wish
to do so had long passed away. I coveted neither riches nor position:
my life had aims that were directed otherwhere.
"But with you, my daughter, the case is entirely different. You hold
your position at Dupley Walls by a precarious tenure. Lady Pollexfen
is a woman of capricious temper and inflexible will. She might choose
to turn you adrift to-morrow: to cast you on the world, helpless and
alone. On the other hand, she may have made adequate provision for you
in the case of anything happening to herself. But this is a matter
respecting which I am entirely ignorant, and were I to speak to her
ladyship respecting it I should only be scouted for my pains. It is
true that you are nearer to her in blood than any one now living (I am
writing of myself as though I were already dead), but a woman of Lady
Pollexfen's peculiar disposition is just as likely as not to repudiate
any claim which might have its origin in that fact; and it must be
borne in mind that the absolute disposal of Dupley Walls, and any
other property she may be possessed of, is vested entirely in her own
hands.
"Under these perplexing circumstances, and with a future on which your
foothold is so insecure, it has sometimes seemed to me that the wisest
plan with regard to your interests would be to endeavour to unravel
the mystery by which the antecedents and social position of your
father are surrounded. Behind the cloud with which Mr. Fairfax chose
to enshroud his life previously to our marriage, friends, relatives,
fortune, happiness, may all await you, his child. So at least my
dreams have run at times; and dreams at times come true.
"The terms of my oath to Lady Pollexfen forbade me from making any
such inquiry on my own account, but in this matter you are entirely
unfettered. If, therefore, your friends and counsellors, Major
Strickland and Father Spiridion, think it desirable that such an
investigation should be made in your interests, place the matter
unreservedly into their hands, and leave them to deal with it in
whatever way they may think best. That its issue may prove to be for
your welfare and happiness is your dying mother's fervent prayer.
"Further, should my vague suspicion that Mr. Fairfax did not meet his
death at the time and under the circumstances as told me by Captain
Lant, prove to have some foundation in fact, and should the story turn
out to have been merely an invention to get rid of a wife who had
become burdensome to him, in such a case your father is probably still
among the living. Should such prove to be the fact it is by no means
unlikely that the daughter of his discarded wife might be cherished
and welcomed by him as even the child of a happier marriage might not
be. Should the future give you a father--one who will welcome you with
open hand and open heart--go to him and be to him as a daughter.
Forget your mother's wrongs: on this point I solemnly charge you: let
the dead past bury its dead. Be dutiful and loving as a daughter ought
to be, and leave it for a Higher Power to set straight that which is
crooked, and to weigh the human heart aright.
"You have been known all these years as Janet Holme, but your real
name, the one by which you were baptized, is Janet Fairfax. When you
were sent away to Miss Chinfeather's seminary it was necessary that
your name should be enrolled in the books of that establishment. My
mother would not allow you to go either by the name of Miss Fairfax or
Miss Pollexfen. My own name being Helena Holme Pollexfen, my mother
chose that you should be designated and known as Janet Holme, and in
this, as in every other matter, her wishes were acceded to.
"I need hardly tell you that the miniature contained in the box in
which I shall deposit this paper is that of your father, nor that the
wedding-ring which you will find near it is the one he placed on my
finger the day he took me for his wife. The relics brought me by
Captain Lant as proofs of your father's death I was unfortunate enough
to lose during my journey back to England.
"And now, dear Janet, my story is told."
[The few remaining pages of Sister Agnes's confession are omitted as
having no bearing on the history of the Great Mogul Diamond. They
consisted of tender confidences and loving advice, and as such are
sacred to the eyes of her for whom they were written.]