CONTAINS IMPORTANT REVELATIONS, AND
TERMINATES FATALLY.
The next day Mrs. Somerton grew worse, and in the afternoon she
insisted that she was dying. The doctor, on the contrary, insisted that
she was not doing anything of the sort.
In the afternoon she expressed a strong desire to see Mr. Christopher
Tallant.
“I must see him, Luke. There is something which he should know before
I die--something of the greatest importance to others besides himself.
Do, pray, send for him. It does not matter what yon senseless doctor
says; I can feel I am dying, and I durst not die without seeing Mr.
Tallant.”
So Luke communicated this strange intelligence to Mr. Tallant, and
that gentleman proceeded at once to the farm.
“Oh, how ill you look, sir; how much you are changed,” said the sick
woman, when Mr. Tallant appeared.
Mr. Tallant paid no heed to the remark, but sat down upon the nearest
chair, and asked what she had to say to him.
“I am dying, sir, I am dying,” said Mrs. Somerton.
“I hope not,” said Mr. Tallant; “you look ill and excited, but not like
dying.”
“They all say that,” she replied; “but sometimes the patient knows more
than the doctors. Luke and Amy, will you leave me with Mr. Tallant; I
have something to say to him. You will know of it hereafter, but don’t
stand by and hear me confess my own wickedness. I am going to confess
in time for a great wrong to be remedied--that is something in the way
of atonement.”
Mr. Somerton and his daughter exchanged looks of blank astonishment,
and left the room.
“Yes, yes, that is some comfort. There’s little good exposing a wrong
when it cannot be remedied,” the sick woman went on, as if communing
with herself. “The very thought does me good; I shall feel easier when
the load is off my mind.”
“What is this secret, Sarah?” Mr. Tallant asked, and his thoughts
wandered back to the time when she acted as his housekeeper; the sound
of her Christian name coming from his own mouth seemed like the revival
of an old memory.
“Are they gone?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the merchant; “do not delay; I have business letters of
importance to write for post.”
“You would not think I was a very ambitious woman, Mr. Tallant; it is
true, nevertheless. I was vain and full of being great when I was a
girl, and all my life long I seem to have been going backwards instead
of onwards. Nothing has come about as I expected.”
“We have all our disappointments,” said Mr. Tallant, dryly; “I hope
you are not going to recount all yours.”
“How hard you are, sir; how little you seem moved by my wretched
position. Have you no fears concerning this confession I am about to
make?”
“None,” said the merchant; “my troubles are about over. You can’t hit
me any harder than I have been hit already, whatever you may have to
tell.”
“You remember your second wife,” went on the woman, half raising
herself in bed; “you remember her dark eyes, and her graceful, ladylike
form. You remember how she wore her dark hair, and how musical her
voice was?”
The merchant did remember. The loss of this woman had been the saddest
episode in his life.
“Have you never seen any one like her?” the sick woman asked, looking
steadfastly at him.
“Never,” he replied; “but why all this mystery?--go straight to the
point, my dear woman, at once, or I must leave you.”
“I have not much more to say. I thought your own fatherly instinct
would have assisted me. Do you remember that you left me in charge of
your child after Mrs. Tallant’s death? You were so stricken with grief
that you never saw the child but once; and when the poor lady was
buried you travelled on the Continent for more than six months. I had
an infant two months old when your child was born. You left your house
and child in my care. I was to do everything that was right and proper
under the circumstances. Do you remember?”
The woman grew very much excited, and would not be content with Mr.
Tallant’s solemn nod in the affirmative.
“Do you remember?” she repeated.
“I do,” he said.
“Do you remember, when you returned home, that you came of your own
accord and asked to see the child, and how you called it Phœbe, after
its mother--do you remember?”
“Yes, most assuredly,” said the merchant.
“That child was my own child. I changed them before you had been gone a
month.”
Here she paused to see what effect the revelation had upon her hearer.
But she could glean nothing from Mr. Tallant’s solemn, passive face.
“Amy Somerton is your daughter, and the young lady called Phœbe Tallant
is mine.”
She went on--“And now I can die in peace. It was all ambition. I
thought to be somebody through the means of my child; it was not all
for her own sake that I did it. I thought of it night and day before I
did it--night and day, and day and night, and I changed my mind many
a time, until at last Luke, my husband, became accustomed to the new
face, and then I could not go back from my purpose. And yet all my
plans fail, everything goes wrong, and this secret has burnt into my
life like a red-hot coal, until I am dying of it--dying of it.”
Then she sank back exhausted, and the merchant sat by with his eyes
fixed upon her face, but without making the slightest effort to
give her any assistance. He was a good deal stunned by the woman’s
revelation; but if all other things had been well, he could have borne
it without scarcely a pang either of indignation or regret, for both
girls had been well cared for. They had lived like sisters, now for
a long time past, and Amy had picked up an education almost equal to
Phœbe’s.
“What proof have you of this base and ungrateful fraud?” he asked, when
the woman opened her eyes again.
“Look at the picture of your wife--the one which hangs in the
library--and then tell me how it is that you have not found out the
deception long ago. Amy grows more like the lady who is gone every day,
and Phœbe has not a feature in her face to remind you of her.”
Mr. Tallant saw the justice of the remark in an instant, and it seemed
like a rebuke when he remembered how dearly the wife was beloved. With
the picture and the familiar face of the assumed Amy Somerton in his
mind for a moment, his whole nature cried out in proof of the woman’s
story; and now he bethought himself of the strange interest he had
always taken in the girl, and how indifferent he had been in comparison
to Phœbe, lovable as she undoubtedly was, beautiful as everybody must
confess her to be.
It seemed for a moment as if a new link of interest between himself and
the world had been forged by this confession.
“You will wait until I am dead, sir--pray do--before you repeat my
story: do, do wait; I should not like to lose Luke’s respect in my last
moments.”
“I will not divulge what you have confessed, at present at least,” said
the merchant; “but justice must be done.”
“Yes, yes, that is right; but I am not long for this world--there is no
hurry now.”
The merchant promised to keep her secret for the present, but she could
get no other promise from him.
She asked his forgiveness, and he forgave her.
When he left her she seemed to be considerably better. Exhausted by
the excitement of her confession, she lay motionless when Amy and her
father returned. She had been slightly feverish all day; towards night
brain fever set in, and then the doctor confessed there was danger.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Mr. Tallant had sent for his London lawyer, who remained
closeted with him all the next day. In the afternoon a clerk came down
with parchment and other materials for engrossing, and Mr. Christopher
Tallant made a new and final will, little thinking how soon it would
come to be read aloud for the benefit of the parties interested therein.
He had taken every means for verifying the rumours which had reached
him concerning his son; for many days past he had had a private
detective upon his track, who had laid before him unmistakable proofs
of his son’s commercial dishonesty. The detective had even hunted out
the card scandal at the Ashford Club, in which Mr. Richard Tallant
had not altogether escaped suspicion. He laid before the father shares
recently transferred by Richard Tallant in the Meter Iron Works
Company, whose stock had begun to fall in the market. The managing
director had sold shares at par which had been at ten premium, and
there was evidently a scheme on foot to run them down to a discount,
and then Mr. Richard Tallant would buy up all he could get, for there
was not a better concern in all England than the Meter Works.
It was a sore home-thrust this dealing with the Meter shares; but not
the worst blow of all. Certain bill transactions, in which something
very nearly akin to forgery had been committed, were disclosed, and
Richard Tallant appeared to be a designing sharper of the first
class,--one of the leading Stock Exchange conspirators, through
whose arts so many concerns had been brought to ruin, and from which
disasters the conspirators had reaped great golden harvests.
The merchant was a just man, and he would have every possible proof
of his son’s dishonour before he wiped him out for ever. He had ample
proof, and he wiped him out accordingly.
On the second night after Mrs. Somerton’s confession the lawyer and
his clerk returned to London, and the merchant, having sent to inquire
after the bailiff’s wife, who continued dangerously ill, took a light
supper, retired to his bedroom, and dismissed his man for the night.
He took with him the vignette of which Mrs. Somerton had spoken; he
pulled an arm-chair towards the fire, and sat gazing at the picture
long after everybody was a-bed.
He sat there when the last embers in the grate had faded out, and
he sat there when the sun rose the next morning--sat there with the
picture at his feet--sat there with the red sunlight streaming through
the blind, and through apertures in the door of the adjoining room; he
sat there with his head upon his breast, his hands hanging down, and
with his eyes wide open; but he had been dead for several hours when
daylight looked in upon his corpse.
The sunshine was streaming in upon him, we say, and it was so; for on
that morning the sun had risen with unusual splendour.
The east was all ablaze with crimson and golden hues, and from its
gorgeous throne the sun shone forth as if with a burning glowing sense
of its own grandeur. Troops of radiant beams, bearing commissions
from the mighty king of day, gleamed above “the high-raised clouds,”
dispersed “the morning fogs,” flung wreaths of sunny beauty upon the
mantling hills, and glimmered in golden glittering sheen upon the
windows of Barton Hall.
Not upon the windows only did the sunbeams fall, we say, but they
penetrated the darkened rooms and fell upon the dead man; and here
they played softly upon his whitened hair, and stole about the room as
if they sought for somebody whom he loved that they might bring them
to his side. Through every cleft and crevice the morning sunbeams
streamed; a thousand motes sprang up and danced in the columns
of light, as if they mocked the grave; and a reflection from the
merchant’s watch-seals trembled like an active eye upon the wall.
Still the merchant slept on in his long, long sleep, until at length
the sun rose higher and higher, paling with his growing radiance the
gaudy colours of his throne, and sending forth streams of purer and
brighter light. By-and-by a door was opened in the quiet room, followed
by an expression of horror and amazement, and then hurried footsteps
came and went, additional doors were opened and shut, and in a few
minutes the household was astir, heavily laden with the morning’s sad
discovery.