Joan Haste - H. Rider Haggard (fiction books to read .TXT) 📗
- Author: H. Rider Haggard
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out there, running a lodging-house of my own. But it wasn’t any use: I
just thought of you all day and dreamed of you all night, and the end
of it was that I sold up the concern and started home. And now if you
will marry me respectable so much the better, and if you won’t—well,
I must put up with it, and sha’n’t show you any more temper, for I’ve
tried to get along without you and I can’t, that’s the fact. You seem
to be pretty flourishing, anyway; somebody in the train told me that
you had come into a lot of money and bought Monk’s Lodge, so I walked
here straight, I was in such a hurry to see you. Why, what’s the
matter with you, George? You look like a ghost. Come, give me a kiss
and take me into the house. I’ll clear out by-and-by if you wish it.’
“These, Joan, were your mother’s exact words, as she stood there in
the moonlight near the roadway, holding you in her arms. I have not
forgotten a syllable of them.
“When she finished I was forced to speak. ‘I can’t take you in there,’
I said, ‘because I am married and it is my wife’s house.’ She turned
ghastly white, and had I not caught her I think that she would have
fallen.
“‘O my God!” she said, ‘I never thought of this. Well, George, you
won’t cast me off for all that, will you? I was your wife before she
was, and this is your daughter.’
“Then, Joan, though it nearly choked me, I lied to her again, for what
else was I to do? ‘You never were my wife,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got
another daughter now. Also all this is your own fault, for had I known
that you were alive, I would not have married. You have yourself to
thank, Jane, and no one else. Why did you send me that false
certificate?’
“‘I suppose so,’ she answered heavily. ‘Well, I’d best be off; but you
needn’t have been so ready to believe things. Will you look after the
child if anything happens to me, George? She’s a pretty babe, and I’ve
taught her to say Daddy to nothing.’
“I told your mother not to talk in that strain, and asked her where
she was going to spend the night, saying that I would see her again on
the morrow. She answered, at her sister’s, Mrs. Gillingwater, and held
you up for me to kiss. Then she walked away, and that was the last
time that I saw her alive.
“It seems that she went to the Crown and Mitre, and made herself known
to your aunt, telling her that she had been abroad to America, where
she had come to trouble, but that she had money, in proof of which she
gave her notes for fifty pounds to put into a safe place. Also she
said that I was the agent for people who knew about her in the States,
and was paid to look after her child. Then she ate some supper, and
saying that she would like to take a walk and look at the old place,
as she might have to go up to London on the morrow, she went out. Next
morning she was found dead beneath the cliff, though how she came
there, there was nothing to show.
“That, Joan, is the story of your mother’s life and death.”
“You mean the story of my mother’s life and murder,” she answered.
“Had you not told her that lie she would never have committed
suicide.”
“You are hard upon me, Joan. She was more to blame than I was.
Moreover, I do not believe that she killed herself. It was not like
her to have done so. At the place where she fell over the cliff there
stood a paling, of which the top rail, that was quite rotten, was
found to have been broken. I think that my poor wife, being very
unhappy, walked along the cliff and leaned upon this rail wondering
what she should do, when suddenly it broke and she was killed, for I
am sure that she had no idea of making away with herself.
“After her death Mrs. Gillingwater came to me and repeated the tale
which her sister had told her, as to my having been appointed agent to
some person unknown in America. Here was a way out of my trouble, and
I took it, saying that what she had heard was true. This was the
greatest of my sins; but the temptation was too strong for me, for had
the truth come out I should have been utterly destroyed, my wife would
have been no wife, her child would have been a bastard, I should have
been liable to a prosecution for bigamy, and, worse of all, my
daughter’s heritage might possibly have passed from her to you.”
“To me?” said Joan.
“Yes, to you; for under my father-in-law’s will all his property is
strictly settled first upon his daughter, my late wife, with a life
interest to myself, and then upon my lawful issue. You are my only
lawful issue, Joan; and it would seem, therefore, that you are legally
entitled to your half-sister’s possessions, though of course, did you
take them, it would be an act of robbery, seeing that the man who
bequeathed them certainly desired to endow his own descendants and no
one else, the difficulty arising from the fact of my marriage with his
daughter being an illegal one. I have taken the opinions of four
leading lawyers upon the case, giving false names to the parties
concerned. Of these, two have advised that you would be entitled to
the property, since the law is always strained against illegitimate
issue, and two that equity would intervene and declare that her
grandfather’s inheritance must come to Emma, as he doubtless intended,
although there was an accidental irregularity in the marriage of the
mother.
“I have told you all this, Joan, as I am telling you everything,
because I wish to keep nothing back; but I trust that your generosity
and sense of right will never allow you to raise the question, for
this money belongs to Emma and to her alone. For you I have done my
best out of my savings, and in some few days or weeks you will inherit
about four thousand pounds, which will give you a competence
independent of your husband.”
“You need not be afraid, sir,” answered Joan contemptuously; “I would
rather cut my fingers off than touch a farthing of the money to which
I have no right at all. I don’t even know that I will accept your
legacy.”
“I hope that you will do so, Joan, for it will put you in a position
of complete independence, will provide for your children, and will
enable you to live apart from your husband, should you by any chance
fail to get on with him. And now I have told you the whole truth, and
it only remains for me to most humbly beg your forgiveness. I have
done my best for you, Joan, according to my lights; for, as I could
not acknowledge you, I thought it would be well that you should be
brought up in your mother’s class—though here I did not make
sufficient allowance for the secret influences of race, seeing that,
notwithstanding your education, you are in heart and appearance a
lady. I might, indeed, have taken you to live with me, as I often
longed to do; but I feared lest such an act should expose me to
suspicion, suspicion should lead to inquiry, and inquiry to my ruin
and to that of my daughter Emma. Doubtless it would have been better,
as well as more honest, if I had faced the matter out; but at the time
I could not find the courage, and the opportunity went by. My early
life had not been altogether creditable, and I could not bear the
thought of once more becoming the object of scandal and of disgrace,
or of imperilling the fortune and position to which after so many
struggles I had at length attained. That, Joan, is my true story; and
now again I say that I hope to hear you forgive me before I die, and
promise that you will not, unless it is absolutely necessary, reveal
these facts to your half-sister, Lady Graves, for if you do I verily
believe that it will break her heart. The dread lest she should learn
this history has haunted me for years, and caused me to strain every
nerve to secure her marriage with a man of position and honourable
name, so that, even should it be discovered that she had none, she
might find refuge in her disgrace. Thank Heaven that I, who have
failed in so many things, have at least succeeded in this, so that,
come what may when I am dead, she is provided for and safe.”
“I suppose, sir, that Sir Henry Graves knows all this?”
“Knows it! Of course not. Had he known it I doubt if he would have
married her.”
“Possibly not. He might even have married somebody else,” Joan
answered. “It seems, then, that you palmed off Miss Emma upon him
under a false description.”
“I did,” he said, with a groan. “It was wrong, like the rest; but one
evil leads to another.”
“Yes, sir, one evil leads to another, as I shall show you presently.
You ask me to forgive you, and you talk about the breaking of Lady
Graves’s heart. Perhaps you do not know that mine is already broken
through you, or to what a fate you have given me over. I will tell
you. Your daughter’s husband, Sir Henry Graves, and I loved each
other, and I have borne his child. He wished to marry me, though,
believing myself to be what you have taught me to believe, I was
against it from the first. When he learned my state he insisted upon
marrying me, like the honourable man that he is, and told his mother
of his intention. She came to me in London and pleaded with me, almost
on her knees, that I should ward off this disgrace from her family,
and preserve her son from taking a step which would ruin him. I was
moved by her entreaties, and I felt the truth of what she said; but I
knew well that, should he come to marry me, as within a few days he
was to do, for our child’s and our love’s sake, if not for my own, I
could never find the strength to deny him.
“What was I to do? I was too ill to run away, and he would have hunted
me out. Therefore it came to this, that I must choose between
suicide—which was both wicked and impossible, for I could not murder
another as well as myself—and the still more dreadful step that at
length I took. You know the man Samuel Rock, my husband, and perhaps
you know also that for a long while he has persecuted me with his
passion, although again and again I have told him that he was hateful
to me. While I was ill he obtained my address in London—I believe
that he bought it from my aunt, Mrs. Gillingwater, the woman in whose
charge you were satisfied to leave me—and two days after I had seen
Lady Graves, he came to visit me, gaining admission by passing himself
off as Sir Henry to my landlady, Mrs. Bird.
“You can guess the rest. To
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