The Legacy of Cain. Wilkie Collins
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member of my family is other than my own daughter. This is deceit, I admit; but it is deceit that injures no one. I hope you see the necessity for it, as I do.”
There could be no doubt of the necessity.
If the child was described as adopted, there would be curiosity about the circumstances, and inquiries relating to the parents. Prevaricating replies lead to suspicion, and suspicion to discovery. But for the wise course which the Minister had decided on taking, the poor child’s life might have been darkened by the horror of the mother’s crime, and the infamy of the mother’s death.
Having quieted my friend’s needless scruples by this perfectly sincere expression of opinion, I ventured to approach the central figure in his domestic circle, by means of a question relating to his wife. How had that lady received the unfortunate little creature, for whose appearance on the home-scene she must have been entirely unprepared?
The Minister’s manner showed some embarrassment; he prefaced what he had to tell me with praises of his wife, equally creditable no doubt to both of them. The beauty of the child, the pretty ways of the child, he said, fascinated the admirable woman at first sight. It was not to be denied that she had felt, and had expressed, misgivings, on being informed of the circumstances under which the Minister’s act of mercy had been performed. But her mind was too well balanced to incline to this state of feeling, when her husband had addressed her in defense of his conduct. She then understood that the true merit of a good action consisted in patiently facing the sacrifices involved. Her interest in the new daughter being, in this way, ennobled by a sense of Christian duty, there had been no further difference of opinion between the married pair.
I listened to this plausible explanation with interest, but, at the same time, with doubts of the lasting nature of the lady’s submission to circumstances; suggested, perhaps, by the constraint in the Minister’s manner. It was well for both of us when we changed the subject. He reminded me of the discouraging view which the Doctor had taken of the prospect before him.
“I will not attempt to decide whether your friend is right or wrong,” he said. “Trusting, as I do, in the mercy of God, I look hopefully to a future time when all that is brightest and best in the nature of my adopted child will be developed under my fostering care. If evil tendencies show themselves, my reliance will be confidently placed on pious example, on religious instruction, and, above all, on intercession by prayer. Repeat to your friend,” he concluded, “what you have just heard me say. Let him ask himself if he could confront the uncertain future with my cheerful submission and my steadfast hope.”
He intrusted me with that message, and gave me his hand. So we parted.
I agreed with him, I admired him; but my faith seemed to want sustaining power, as compared with his faith. On his own showing (as it appeared to me), there would be two forces in a state of conflict in the child’s nature as she grew up—inherited evil against inculcated good. Try as I might, I failed to feel the Minister’s comforting conviction as to which of the two would win.
CHAPTER IX. THE GOVERNOR RECEIVES A VISIT.
A few days after the good man had left us, I met with a serious accident, caused by a false step on the stone stairs of the prison.
The long illness which followed this misfortune, and my removal afterward (in the interests of my recovery) to a milder climate than the climate of England, obliged me to confide the duties of governor of the prison to a representative. I was absent from my post for rather more than a year. During this interval no news reached me from my reverend friend.
Having returned to the duties of my office, I thought of writing to the Minister. While the proposed letter was still in contemplation, I was informed that a lady wished to see me. She sent in her card. My visitor proved to be the Minister’s wife.
I observed her with no ordinary attention when she entered the room.
Her dress was simple; her scanty light hair, so far as I could see it under her bonnet, was dressed with taste. The paleness of her lips, and the faded color in her face, suggested that she was certainly not in good health. Two peculiarities struck me in her personal appearance. I never remembered having seen any other person with such a singularly narrow and slanting forehead as this lady presented; and I was impressed, not at all agreeably, by the flashing shifting expression in her eyes. On the other hand, let me own that I was powerfully attracted and interested by the beauty of her voice. Its fine variety of compass, and its musical resonance of tone, fell with such enchantment on the ear, that I should have liked to put a book of poetry into her hand, and to have heard her read it in summer-time, accompanied by the music of a rocky stream.
The object of her visit—so far as she explained it at the outset—appeared to be to offer her congratulations on my recovery, and to tell me that her husband had assumed the charge of a church in a large town not far from her birthplace.
Even those commonplace words were made interesting by her delicious voice. But however sensitive to sweet sounds a man may be, there are limits to his capacity for deceiving himself—especially when he happens to be enlightened by experience of humanity within the walls of a prison. I had, it may be remembered, already doubted the lady’s good temper, judging from her husband’s over-wrought description of her virtues. Her eyes looked at me furtively; and her manner, gracefully self-possessed as it was, suggested that she had something of a delicate, or disagreeable, nature to say to me, and that she was at a loss how to approach the subject so as to produce the right impression on my mind at the outset. There was a momentary silence between us. For the sake of saying something, I asked how she and the Minister liked their new place of residence.
“Our new place of residence,” she answered, “has been made interesting by a very unexpected event—an event (how shall I describe it?) which has increased our happiness and enlarged our family circle.”
There she stopped: expecting me, as I fancied, to guess what she meant. A woman, and that woman a mother, might have fulfilled her anticipations. A man, and that man not listening attentively, was simply puzzled.
“Pray excuse my stupidity,” I said; “I don’t quite understand you.”
The lady’s temper looked at me out of the lady’s shifting eyes, and hid itself again in a moment. She set herself right in my estimation by taking the whole blame of our little misunderstanding on her own innocent shoulders.
“I ought to have spoken more plainly,” she said. “Let me try what I can do now. After many years of disappointment in my married life, it has pleased Providence to bestow on me the happiness—the inexpressible happiness—of being a mother. My baby is a sweet little girl; and my one regret is that I cannot nurse her myself.”
My languid interest in the Minister’s wife was not stimulated by the announcement of this domestic event.
I felt no wish to see the “sweet little girl”; I was not even reminded of another example of long-deferred maternity, which had occurred within the limits of my own family circle. All my sympathies attached themselves to the sad little figure of the adopted child. I remembered the poor baby on my knee, enchanted by the ticking of my watch—I thought of her, peacefully and prettily asleep under the horrid shelter of the condemned cell—and it is hardly too much to say that my heart was heavy, when I compared her prospects with the prospects of her baby-rival. Kind as he was, conscientious as he was, could the Minister be expected to admit to an equal share in his love the child endeared to him as a father, and the child who merely reminded him of an act of mercy? As for his wife, it seemed the merest waste of time to put her state of feeling (placed between the two children) to the test of inquiry. I tried the useless experiment, nevertheless.
“It is pleasant to think,” I began, “that your other daughter—”
She interrupted me, with the utmost gentleness: “Do you mean the child that my husband was foolish enough to adopt?”
“Say rather fortunate enough to adopt,” I persisted. “As your own little girl grows up, she will