A Secret Inheritance. B. L. Farjeon

natural that I should desire to know something of what has been hidden from me."

      "You are assuming, sir, that something has been hidden."

      "I have not been quite a machine, Mrs. Fortress. Give me credit for at least an average amount of intelligence. It is not possible for me to be blind to the fact that there has been a mystery in our family."

      "It is you who say so, sir, not I."

      "I know, and know, also, that of your own prompting you will say little or nothing. To what can I appeal? To your womanly sympathies, to your sense of justice? Until this moment I have been silent. As a boy I had to submit, and latterly as a man. My parents were living, and their lightest wish was a law to me. But the chains are loosened now; they have fallen from me into my mother's grave. Surely you cannot, in reason or injustice, refuse to answer a few simple questions."

      "Upon the subject you have referred to, sir, I have nothing to tell."

      "That is to say, you are determined to tell me nothing."

      She rose from her chair, and said, "With your permission, sir, I will wish you farewell."

      "No, no; sit down again for a few minutes. I will not detain you long, and I will endeavour not to press unwelcome questions upon you. In all human probability this is the last opportunity we shall have of speaking together; for even supposing that at some future time you should yourself desire to volunteer explanations which you now withhold from me, you will not know how to communicate with me."

      "Is it your intention to leave Rosemullion, sir?"

      "I shall make speedy arrangements to quit it for ever. It has not been so filled with light and love as to become endeared to me. I shall leave it not only willingly but with pleasure, and I shall never again set foot in it."

      "There is no saying what may happen in the course of life, sir. Have you made up your mind where you are going to live?"

      "In no settled place. I shall travel."

      "Change of scene will be good for you, sir. It is altogether the best thing you could do."

      "Of that," I said impatiently, "I am the best judge. My future life can be of no interest to you. It is of the past I wish to speak. Have you any objection to inform me for how long you have been in my mother's service?"

      "You were but a little over two years of age, sir, at the time I entered it."

      "For nearly twenty years, then. You do not look old, Mrs. Fortress."

      "I am forty-two, sir."

      "Then you were twenty-three when you came to us?"

      "Yes, sir."

      "We were poor at the time, and were living in common lodgings in London?"

      "That is so, sir."

      "My father's means were so straitened, if my memory does not betray me, that every shilling of our income had to be reckoned. You did not--excuse me for the question, Mrs. Fortress--you did not serve my parents for love?"

      "No, sir; it was purely a matter of business between your father and me."

      "You are--again I beg you to excuse me--not the kind of person to work for nothing, or even for small wages."

      "Your father paid me liberally, sir."

      "And yet we were so poor that until we came suddenly and unexpectedly into a fortune, my father could never afford to give me a shilling. Truly your duties must have been no ordinary ones that you should have been engaged under such circumstances. It is, I suppose, useless for me to ask for an explanation of the nature of those duties?"

      "Quite useless, sir."

      "Will you tell me nothing, Mrs. Fortress, that will throw light upon the dark spaces of my life?"

      "I have nothing to tell, sir."

      To a man less under control than myself this iteration of unwillingness would have been intolerable, but I knew that nothing was to be gained by giving way to anger. I should have been the sufferer and the loser by it.

      "Looking down, Mrs. Fortress, upon the dead body of my mother, you made the remark that it was a happy release."

      "Death is to all a happy release, sir."

      "A common platitude, which does not deceive me."

      "You cannot forget, sir, that your mother was a great sufferer."

      "I forget very little. Mrs. Fortress, in this interview I think you have not behaved graciously--nay, more, that you have not behaved with fairness or justice."

      "Upon that point, sir," she said composedly, "you may not be a competent judge."

      Her manner was so perfectly respectful that I could not take exception to this retort. She seemed, however, to be aware that she was upon dangerous ground, for she rose, and I made no further attempt to detain her. But now it was she who lingered, unbidden, with something on her mind of which she desired to speak. I raised my head, and wondered whether, of her own free will, she was about to satisfy my curiosity.

      "If I thought you were not angry, sir," she said, "and would not take offence, I should like to ask you a question, and if you answer it according to my expectation, one other in connection with it."

      "I shall not take offence," I said, "and I promise to exercise less reserve than you have done."

      "I thank you, sir," she said, gazing steadily at me, so steadily, indeed, as to cause me to doubt whether, in a combat of will-power between us I should be the victor. "My questions are very simple. Do you ever hear the sounds of music, without being able to account for them?"

      The question, simple as it was, startled, and for a moment almost unnerved me. What she suggested had occurred to me, at intervals perhaps of two or three months, and always when I was alone, and had worked myself into a state of exaltation. I do not exactly know at what period of my life this strange experience commenced, but my impression is that it came to me first in the night when I awoke from sleep, and was lying in the dark. It had occurred at those times within the last two or three years, and had it not been that it had already become somewhat familiar to me in hours of sunshine as well as in hours of darkness, I should probably have decided that it was but the refrain of a dream by which I was haunted. In daylight I frequently searched for the cause, but never with success. Lately I had given up the search, and had argued myself into a half belief that it was a delusion, produced by my dwelling upon the subject, and magnifying it into undue importance. For the most part the mysterious strains were faint, but very sweet and melodious; they seemed to come from afar off, and as I listened to them they gradually died away into a musical whisper, and grew fainter and more faint till they were lost altogether. But it had happened on two or three occasions, instead of their dying softly away and leaving me in a state of calm happiness, that the sweet strains were abruptly broken by what sounded now like a wail, now like a suppressed shriek. This violent and, to my senses, cruel termination of the otherwise melodious sounds set my blood boiling dangerously, and unreasonably infuriated me--so much so that the power I held over myself was ingulfed in a torrent of wild passion which I could not control. The melodious strains were always the same, and the air was strange to me. I had never heard it from a visible musician.

      Not to a living soul had I ever spoken of the delusion, and that the subject should now be introduced into our conversation, and not introduced by me, could not but strike me as of singular portent. As Mrs. Fortress asked the question I heard once more the soft spiritual strains, and I involuntarily raised my right hand in the act of listening; I hear them at the present moment as I write, and I lay aside my pen a while, until they shall pass away. So! They are gone--but they will come again.

      I answered Mrs. Fortress briefly, but not without agitation.

      "Yes, I have heard such sounds as those you mention."

      "You hear them now?"

      "Yes, I hear them now. Do you?"

      "My powers of imagination, sir, are less powerful than yours,"