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.