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CHAPTER III.
MORE years passed; my mother followed my aunt to the grave, and
still I was as far as ever from making any discoveries in
relation to Uncle George. Shortly after the period of this last
affliction my health gave way, and I departed, by my doctor's
advice, to try some baths in the south of France.
I traveled slowly to my destination, turning aside from the
direct road, and stopping wherever I pleased. One evening, when I
was not more than two or three days' journey from the baths to
which I was bound, I was struck by the picturesque situation of a
little town placed on the brow of a hill at some distance from
the main road, and resolved to have a nearer look at the place,
with a view to stopping there for the night, if it pleased me. I
found the principal inn clean and quiet--ordered my bed
there--and, after dinner, strolled out to look at the church. No
thought of Uncle George was in my mind when I entered the
building; and yet, at that very moment, chance was leading me to
the discovery which, for so many years past, I had vainly
endeavored to make--the discovery which I had given up as
hopeless since the day of my mother's death.
I found nothing worth notice in the church, and was about to
leave it again, when I caught a glimpse of a pretty view through
a side door, and stopped to admire it.
The churchyard formed the foreground, and below it the hill-side
sloped away gently into the plain, over which the sun was setting
in full glory. The cure of the church was reading his breviary,
walking up and down a gravel-path that parted the rows of graves.
In the course of my wanderings I had learned to speak French as
fluently as most Englishmen, and when the priest came near me I
said a few words in praise of the view, and complimented him on
the neatness and prettiness of the churchyard. He answered with
great politeness, and we got into conversation together
immediately.
As we strolled along the gravel-walk, my attention was attracted
by one of the graves standing apart from the rest. The cross at
the head of it differed remarkably, in some points of appearance,
from the crosses on the other graves. While all the rest had
garlands hung on them, this one cross was quite bare; and, more
extraordinary still, no name was inscribed on it.
The priest, observing that I stopped to look at the grave, shook
his head and sighed.
"A countryman of yours is buried there," he said. "I was present
at his death. He had borne the burden of a great sorrow among us,
in this town, for many weary years, and his conduct had taught us
to respect and pity him with all our hearts."
"How is it that his name is not inscribed over his grave?" I
inquired.
"It was suppressed by his own desire," answered the priest, with
some little hesitation. "He confessed to me in his last moments
that he had lived here under an assumed name. I asked his real
name, and he told it to me, with the particulars of his sad
story. He had reasons for desiring to be forgotten after his
death. Almost the last words he spoke were, 'Let my name die with
me.' Almost the last request he made was that I would keep that
name a secret from all the world excepting only one person."
"Some relative, I suppose?" said I.
"Yes--a nephew," said the priest.
The moment the last word was out of his mouth, my heart gave a
strange answering bound. I suppose I must have changed color
also, for the cure looked at me with sudden attention and
interest.
"A nephew," the priest went on, "whom he had loved like his own
child. He told me that if this nephew ever traced him to his
burial-place, and asked about him, I was free in that case to
disclose all I knew. 'I should like my little Charley to know the
truth,' he said. 'In spite of the difference in our ages, Charley
and I were playmates years ago.' "
My heart beat faster, and I felt a choking sensation at the
throat the moment I heard the priest unconsciously mention my
Christian name in mentioning the dying man's last words.
As soon as I could steady my voice and feel certain of my
self-possession, I communicated my family name to the cure, and
asked him if that was not part of the secret that he had been
requested to preserve.
He started back several steps, and clasped his hands amazedly.
"Can it be?" he said, in low tones, gazing at me earnestly, with
something like dread in his face.
I gave him my passport, and looked away toward the grave. The
tears came into my eyes as the recollections of past days crowded
back on me. Hardly knowing what I did, I knelt down by the grave,
and smoothed the grass over it with my hand. Oh, Uncle George,
why not have told your secret to your old playmate? Why leave him
to find you here?
The priest raised me gently, and begged me to go with him into
his own house. On our way there, I mentioned persons and places
that I thought my uncle might have spoken of, in order to satisfy
my companion that I was really the person I represented myself to
be. By the time we had entered his little parlor, and had sat
down alone in it, we were almost like old friends together.
I thought it best that I should begin by telling all that I have
related here on the subject of Uncle George, and his
disappearance from home. My host listened with a very sad face,
and said, when I had done:
"I can understand your anxiety to know what I am authorized to
tell you, but pardon me if I say first that there are
circumstances in your uncle's story which it may pain you to
hear--" He stopped suddenly.
"Which it may pain me to hear as a nephew?" I asked.
"No," said the priest, looking away from me, "as a son."
I gratefully expressed my sense of the delicacy and kindness
which had prompted my companion's warning, but I begged him, at
the same time, to keep me no longer in suspense and to tell me
the stern truth, no matter how painfully it might affect me as a
listener.
"In telling me all you knew about what you term the Family
Secret," said the priest, "you have mentioned as a strange
coincidence that your sister's death and your uncle's
disappearance took place at the same time. Did you ever suspect
what cause it was that occasioned your sister's death?"
"I only knew what my father told me, an d what all our friends
believed--that she had a tumor in the neck, or, as I sometimes
heard it stated, from the effect on her constitution of a tumor
in the neck."
"She died under an operation for the removal of that tumor," said
the priest, in low tones; "and the operator was your Uncle
George."
In those few words all the truth burst upon me.
"Console yourself with the thought that the long martyrdom of his
life is over," the priest went on. "He rests; he is at peace. He
and his little darling understand each other, and are happy now.
That thought bore him up to the last on his death-bed. He always
spoke of your sister as his 'little darling.' He firmly believed
that she was waiting to forgive and console him in the other
world--and who shall say he was deceived in that belief?"
Not I! Not anyone who has ever loved and suffered, surely!
"It was out of the depths of his self-sacrificing love for the
child that he drew the fatal courage to undertake the operation,"
continued the priest. "Your father naturally shrank from
attempting it. His medical brethren whom he consulted all doubted
the propriety of taking any measures for the removal of the
tumor, in the particular condition and situation of it when they
were called in. Your uncle alone differed with them. He was too
modest a man to say so, but your mother found it out. The
deformity of her beautiful child horrified her. She was desperate
enough to catch at the faintest hope of remedying it that anyone
might hold out to her; and she persuaded your uncle to put his
opinion to the proof. Her horror at the deformity of the child,
and her despair at the prospect of its lasting for life, seem to
have utterly blinded her to all natural sense of the danger of
the operation. It is hard to know how to say it to you, her son,
but it must be told, nevertheless, that one day, when your father
was out, she untruly informed your uncle that his brother had
consented to the performance of the operation, and that he had
gone purposely out of the house because he had not nerve enough
to stay and witness it. After that, your uncle no longer
hesitated. He had no fear of results, provided he could be
certain of his own courage. All he dreaded was the effect on him
of his love for the child when he first found himself face to
face with the dreadful necessity of touching her skin with the
knife."
I tried hard to control myself, but I could not repress a shudder
at those words.
"It is useless to shock you by going into particulars," said the
priest, considerately. "Let it be enough if I say that your
uncle's fortitude failed to support him when he wanted it most.
His love for the child shook the firm hand which had never
trembled before. In a word, the operation failed. Your father
returned, and found his child dying. The frenzy of his despair
when the truth was told him carried him to excesses which it
shocks me to mention--excesses which began in his degrading his
brother by a blow, which ended in his binding himself by an oath
to make that brother suffer public punishment for his fatal
rashness in a court of law. Your uncle was too heartbroken by
what had happened to feel those outrages as some men might have
felt them. He looked for one moment at his sister-in-law (I do
not like to say your mother, considering what I have now to tell
you), to see if she would acknowledge that she had encouraged him
to attempt the operation, and that she had deceived him in saying
that he had his brother's permission to try it. She was silent,
and when she spoke, it was to join her husband in denouncing him
as the murderer of their child. Whether fear of your father's
anger, or revengeful indignation against your uncle most actuated
her, I cannot presume to inquire in your presence. I can only
state facts."
The priest paused and looked at me anxiously. I could not speak
to him at that moment--I could only encourage him to proceed by
pressing his hand.
He resumed in these terms:
"Meanwhile, your uncle turned to your father, and spoke the last
words he was ever to address to his eldest brother in this world.
He said, 'I have deserved the worst your anger can inflict on me,
but I will spare you the scandal of bringing me to justice in
open court. The law, if it found me guilty, could at the worst
but banish me from my country and my friends. I will go of my own
accord. God is my witness that I honestly believed I could save
the child from deformity and suffering. I have risked all and
lost all. My heart and spirit are broken. I am fit for nothing
but to go and hide myself, and my shame and misery, from all eyes
that have ever looked on me. I shall never come back, never
expect your pity or forgiveness. If you think less harshly of me
when I am gone, keep secret what has happened; let no other lips
say of me what yours and your wife's have said. I shall think
that forbearance atonement enough--atonement greater than I have
deserved. Forget me in this world. May we meet in another, where
the secrets of all hearts are opened, and where the child who is
gone before may make peace between us!' He said those words and
went out. Your father never saw him or heard from him again."
I knew the reason now why my father had never confided the truth
to anyone, his own family included. My mother had evidently
confessed all to her sister under the seal of secrecy, and there
the dreadful disclosure had been arrested.
"Your uncle told me," the priest continued, "that before he left
England he took leave of you by stealth, in a place you were
staying at by the sea-side. Tie had not the heart to quit his
country and his friends forever without kissing you for the last
time. He followed you in the dark, and caught you up in his arms,
and left you again before you had a chance of discovering him.
The next day he quitted England."
"For this place?" I asked.
"Yes. He had spent a week here once with a student friend at the
time when he was a pupil in the Hotel Dieu, and to this place he
returned to hide, to suffer, and to die. We all saw that he was a
man crushed and broken by some great sorrow, and we respected him
and his affliction. He lived alone, and only came out of doors
toward evening, when he used to sit on the brow of the hill
yonder, with his head on his hand, looking toward England. That
place seemed a favorite with him, and he is buried close by it.
He revealed the story of his past life to no living soul here but
me, and to me he only spoke when his last hour was approaching.
What he had suffered during his long exile no man can presume to
say. I, who saw more of him than anyone, never heard a word of
complaint fall from his lips. He had the courage of the martyrs
while he lived, and the resignation of the saints when he died.
Just at the last his mind wandered. He said he saw his little
darling waiting by the bedside to lead him away, and he died with
a smile on his face--the first I had ever seen there."
The priest ceased, and we went out together in the mournful
twilight, and stood for a little while on the brow of the hill
where Uncle George used to sit, with his face turned toward
England. How my heart ached for him as I thought of what he must
have suffered in the silence and solitude of his long exile! Was
it well for me that I had discovered the Family Secret at last? I
have sometimes thought not. I have sometimes wished that the
darkness had never been cleared away which once hid from me the
fate of Uncle George.
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