CHAPTER III.

THE SECRET TOLD.

On their arrival at the cottage on Saturday evening it was manifest to Phil that his mother was very tired, and he debated with himself as to whether it would not be better to delay breaking his news to her till the morrow. But he felt that it would be hard to have to do so; so, after waiting till she had rested awhile, and had partaken of some refreshment, he drew his chair a little closer to hers and began.

"Mother," he said abruptly, feeling at the same time a hot flush of colour mount to his face, "I have not only brought you myself to-day, but some very special news into the bargain."

"Indeed, my dear boy. By very special news I presume you mean news which I shall be glad to hear. Don't keep me on tenterhooks longer than you can help."

"The fact is, mamsie, that I've fallen in love with Fanny Sudlow (you know Fanny--have known her for years), and--and although it may seem egotistical to say so, I've every reason to believe she doesn't dislike me--indeed, far from it. My intention was to call on the Vicar while down here, and ask his consent to our engagement; but, by great good fortune, I encountered him in the train this afternoon so I took advantage of the opportunity to tell him what I am now telling you, and I must say that the dear old boy listened to me most kindly, and, in short, I'm to meet him at the vestry at eleven on Monday, when---- But, good gracious, mother, you are ill! What can I get you? What can I do for you?"

Mrs. Winslade had been lying back in her easy-chair; but the moment the confession that he was in love escaped Phil's lips her frame seemed to become suddenly rigid, while her face blanched to the hue of one at the point of death. Slowly her figure rose from its half-recumbent position till it sat stiffly upright, her long slender hands grasping each an arm of the chair. It was at that moment Phil lifted his eyes and caught sight of her face. He sprang to his feet in alarm, but his mother put up her hand with a restraining gesture, and he sank back in his chair, unable to take his eyes off her face.

"It has come at last--that which I have so long dreaded!" said Mrs. Winslade, speaking in a hard dry voice, wholly different from her customary low and mellow tones. "Of course it was folly to hope that the blow could be much longer delayed, and if it had not come now it must have come a little later." She paused, as if to crush down the emotion which she found it so hard to keep back. "To-day, when you asked me to reveal to you my life's secret, I told you that you knew not what you asked, and for your own sake I refused to tell it you. Now, however, you _must_ be told. There is no help for it--would to heaven there were! My poor boy, you are about to pass from the land of sunshine into that of shadow, and it is my hand that perforce must thrust you there."

"Mother," said Phil, a little proudly, "it seems to me that you underrate both my strength and my courage. If you, a woman, have been able uncomplainingly to carry this dark secret (whatever its nature may be) all these years, why should you fear that I, a man, may sink under the burden of it?" Next moment he was on his knees in front of her and her arms were round his neck. "Forgive me," he added, "I know that in this, as in everything, you have acted for the best."

"Mine is a terrible confession for a mother to have to make to her son," began Mrs. Winslade a few minutes later, when she and Phil had in some measure recovered their composure. "As you are aware," she went on, "I have never talked to you much about your father. He died when you were about three years old, and to you he is nothing more than a name."

"That is all, mother--a name. Whenever I have ventured to speak of him, which has not been often, you have seemed so distressed, so unaccountably put about, that I have refrained from questioning you about him, and have been glad to turn our talk to other things."

"That I had ample cause for my reticence you will presently learn." She paused, and sat gazing into the glowing embers in the grate for what, to Phil, seemed a long time. Then she roused herself with a sigh, and, turning her eyes full upon him, said slowly: "Do you happen ever to have heard of a certain criminal, who was notorious enough in his day, but who by this time is happily well-nigh forgotten--Philip Cordery by name?"

"Why, it was only the other day, so to speak, that I met with a magazine article giving an account of his career, which had a strange fascination for me. He was known as 'The Prince of Forgers.' But what of him?"

"Merely this--that Philip Cordery, the so-called Prince of Forgers, was your father."

"Mother!" was the only word that broke from the young man's lips. It was the half-stifled cry of one struck suddenly in some vital part. Horror, incredulity, and shame the most bitter, all seemed to appeal to her out of his dilated eyes to take back her words. Then with an abrupt gesture he rose. As he crossed the room a groan forced its way from his lips. Although the lamp had been lighted long before, the curtains were still undrawn; on these pleasant spring evenings it was the custom to leave them so till bedtime. Phil opened the long window and stepped out into the veranda. A fine rain had begun to fall; sweet fresh odours seemed to be wandering aimlessly to and fro; there was a sense of silent gratitude in the air, for all nature had been athirst. Phil stood there minute after minute, resting his head against the cool pillar of the veranda. His soul was sick within him, his mind was in a tumult in which nothing formulated itself clearly save the one hideous, overwhelming fact that Philip Cordery was his father, and that he was the son of a felon. As yet he only suffered vaguely, like one who, having been suddenly struck down, comes back to consciousness by degrees. He was stunned, he was dazed, the real anguish had yet to come. A dash of cold rain in his face recalled him in some measure to himself. He stepped back into the room and shut the window, and, crossing to his mother, he stooped and pressed his damp cheek for a moment against hers.

In Mrs. Winslade's eyes, as she sat fronting the fire, pale, erect, with that absolute quietude which comes from the intensity of restrained emotion, there was nothing to be read but infinite compassion--compassion for the son whom hard circumstance had forced her to smite thus sorely.

"So that is the secret you have kept from me for so long a time," said Phil quietly, as he resumed his seat.

"That is the secret."

"Well, mother, being what it was, I can't wonder at your locking it up in your own breast, at your safeguarding it from the world; still, it might, perhaps--I only say perhaps--have been better if you had told me years ago."

"Ah, my son, do not say that! Should I not have been a wretch to cast a blight over your young life one hour before I was absolutely compelled to do so? But you know, or, at least, you can guess, why I have at length broken the seal of silence which I imposed on myself so many years ago, and have told you this to-night."

"Yes, I think I know," he said with a sort of slow sadness. "After what I told you just now--that I had won the love of one of the dearest girls on earth--you felt that the time had come when I must walk blindfold no longer, when, at every risk, the bandage must be plucked from my eyes."

"The necessity was a hard one, but there seemed to me no help for it."

"None whatever. It will be a hard thing and a bitter to have to tell the Vicar on Monday morning."

"After all these years, is there no other way than that?"

"None that I can see. The understanding between Fanny and myself has gone so far that I could not withdraw from it honourably, even were I wishful of doing so. No, mother, there is nothing left me save to tell everything to the Vicar and leave him to decide the matter in whatever way may seem best to himself."

For a little while neither of them spoke.

Then Phil said: "Mr. Sudlow is an honourable man, no one more so, and I feel sure, and so must you, mother, that your secret--or ours, as I must now call it--will be as safe with him as though it were still unspoken."

Mrs. Winslade did not reply; only to herself she said: "My poor Phil, you forget that there is such a person as Mrs. Sudlow to be reckoned with."

Phil was bending forward, staring into the fire with gloomy eyes, his elbows resting on his knees, and his chin supported by his hands. "Of course it is too much, altogether too much to expect," he went on disconsolately, "however good and kind-hearted a man Mr. Sudlow may be and is, that he will ever consent to accept me in the light of a prospective son-in-law. No; he will insist on the engagement being at once broken off; and, under the circumstances, how can anyone blame him?"

Mrs. Winslade still sat without speaking. Not a word of what her son had said could she controvert. His life was wrecked so far as his love for Fanny Sudlow was concerned, and she had not even a solitary spar to fling to him. Far more clearly than he she realised what must inevitably come to pass when once her life's secret had passed beyond her keeping and his.

After a little space Phil's sombre thoughts found a vent for themselves in another channel.

"Mother," he said abruptly, "it seems to me something incredible that I should really be the son of such a man as Philip Cordery."

"It is none the less a fact which cannot be gainsaid."

"He--he died in prison, did he not?"

"He did, years before we came to live at Iselford."

Again for a little while the silence remained unbroken. Then Mrs. Winslade drew herself together like a woman who has nerved herself for the performance of a duty which, however painful it may be, must yet be gone through with.

"Now that you have been told so much it is only right that you should be told more," she presently said. "You shall hear my story once for all. After to-night I trust there will be no need for either you or I ever to refer to it again." She closed her lids for a few moments like one conjuring up in memory the scenes of bygone years.

Then with her still beautiful eyes--large, dark, and just now charged with a pathos too deep for words--fixed on her son, she began: "My mother was dead and I was living at home with my father, who was rector of Long Dritton, in Midlandshire, when I first set eyes on Philip Cordery. At that time he was a man of two or three and thirty--handsome, plausible, well-read, or so to all seeming; master of more than one showy accomplishment, and, in addition, a man who had been, or professed to have been, nearly everywhere. No wonder that I, a simple country-bred girl, who knew nothing whatever of the world, felt mightily flattered when this grand gentleman, for such he appeared in my eyes, began by complimenting me on my looks, and, a little later, went on to pay me attentions of a kind which could scarcely be misunderstood. Such being the case, it is almost needless to add that I presently ended by falling in love with him.

"Ours was a famous hunting county, and Mr. Cordery, who kept a couple of horses, had taken rooms for the season in the neighbouring town of Baxwade Regis. He was hand and glove with the master, Lord Packbridge, and was made welcome at several of the best houses round about. He won my father's heart, in the first instance, by putting down his name for a very handsome subscription to the Church Restoration Fund. I hardly know how it came about, but before long he began to be a frequent guest at the rectory. I suppose my father was taken by him, as most people seemed to be, and certainly I have never met anyone more gifted with the faculty of attracting others than he was. Well, there came a day when Philip Cordery asked my father to bestow on him the hand of his only child. Before doing so, however, he had drawn from my lips the avowal that I loved him. In what way he contrived to satisfy my father as to his means and position in life, I never heard; but that he did satisfy him is certain, seeing that my father gave his unqualified sanction to our engagement. I deemed myself the happiest of girls. We were married in the early summer and went for a month's tour on the Continent.

"On one point I must do Philip Cordery justice. He did not marry me for the sake of my fortune, which, indeed, was only a matter of a few hundreds of pounds left me by my mother's sister. Neither could he expect anything at my father's death, for the living of Long Dritton was a very poor one, and my father's purse was never shut against the claims of charity. It was a great blow to me when, within a couple of months of my marriage, my father died after a few days' illness; but when, eighteen months later, my other great trouble fell upon me, I no longer grieved that he had been taken.

"My husband had hired a small furnished house at St. John's Wood, London, which stood in its own grounds and was surrounded by a high wall. Its position was a very secluded one, so much so that it could not be overlooked from any other house. Your father had never enlightened me in definite terms as to the nature of the business in which he was engaged, but I had a vague notion that he was connected, although in what capacity I was wholly ignorant, with some important firm in the City. Sometimes his duties took him from home for a week or ten days at a time. At other times there would be days when he never went beyond the precincts of his own garden. He had given me to understand that his great hobby was experimental chemistry, and he had fitted up a room on the top floor of the house as a laboratory where he often worked till far into the night, and the door of which, whether he was engaged there or not, was always kept locked. Considering the number of people whose acquaintance he had made in the shires, it seemed strange that he should know so few people in London, but so it was. He belonged to no club, we saw very little company, and he rarely took me anywhere except now and then to the theatre. Such callers as we had were all men, many of them being foreigners of different nationalities. I usually got away from them to my own room as soon as possible, and Philip seemed pleased that I should do so.

"All this time, although many of my illusions had taken to themselves wings, I was by no means unhappy. Philip, while never demonstrative, was kind in his careless, easy-going fashion; in fact, I may say that I believe he was as fond of me as it was in his nature to be of anyone. And then, by-and-by, you were born, and life seemed to me a sweeter thing than it had ever been before.

"It was when you were about four months old that the crash came. There is no need for me to dwell on that time, nor to recapitulate in detail all I had to go through. It is enough to say--and it may now be said once for all--that Philip Cordery was proved to have been the leader and guiding spirit of one of the most notorious gangs of bank-note forgers with which the present century has had to do. I saw him but twice after his conviction. A month or two after my second interview with him he died. A little later, through the death of an uncle, I came in for a legacy (taking his name at the same time), the income derivable from which has enabled me to keep up a home such as you have known as long as you can remember. At my death the capitalised amount will become yours to deal with as you may deem best."

Philip had refrained from interrupting his mother's narrative by a word; indeed, his interest in the tragic story she had to tell was too intense to allow of his willingly breaking in upon it even for a moment. When she had come to an end the silence that ensued was broken by a deep-drawn sigh from him. "Poor mother! poor mother!" he murmured half aloud. It was on her and on all she had undergone that his thoughts were dwelling just then, rather than on that mysterious entity--to him he would remain for ever a mystery and a wonder--Philip Cordery, the author of his being; or even on the effect which his mother's revelation might have on his own future.

Presently Mrs. Winslade spoke again. "You will now be able to comprehend one thing which has doubtless puzzled you more than enough in days gone by, and that is why I have led so persistently secluded a life, seeing so little company under my own roof and scarcely ever visiting anywhere. Never feeling sure from day to day that the secret of my past might not by some mischance become public property, I was determined that the good folk of Iselford should not have it in their power to say that I forced my way into their society under false pretences--that I had sought them out and sat by their firesides, being conscious all the time there was that in my history which I would be ashamed to have them know. It is they who have sought me out; it is they who have thrust themselves on me. In so far my conscience holds me free from blame."