CHAPTER I.

Transcriber's Note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have

been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal

signs=.

On page 202, a reference to "Uncle John" has been changed to "Uncle

Joseph."

[Illustration: "I SIT DOWN UNASKED, AND I ANNOUNCE MY OWN NAME--ANDREW

TREVERTON."]

THE DEAD SECRET;

A Novel.

BY WILKIE COLLINS,

AUTHOR OF

"THE WOMAN IN WHITE," "POOR MISS FINCH," "NO NAME,"

"MAN AND WIFE," "THE MOONSTONE," &c.

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS._

_NEW YORK:_

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,

FRANKLIN SQUARE.

1874.

WILKIE COLLINS'S NOVELS.

HARPER'S ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY EDITION.

_12mo, Cloth, $1 50 per Volume._

_ARMADALE._

_BASIL._

_HIDE-AND-SEEK._

_THE NEW MAGDALEN._

_NO NAME._

_MAN AND WIFE._

_POOR MISS FINCH._

_THE MOONSTONE._

_THE WOMAN IN WHITE._

_THE DEAD SECRET._

_QUEEN OF HEARTS._

PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by

HARPER & BROTHERS,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

THE DEAD SECRET.

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.

THE TWENTY-THIRD OF AUGUST, 1829.

"Will she last out the night, I wonder?"

"Look at the clock, Mathew."

"Ten minutes past twelve! She HAS lasted the night out. She has lived,

Robert, to see ten minutes of the new day."

These words were spoken in the kitchen of a large country-house

situated on the west coast of Cornwall. The speakers were two of the

men-servants composing the establishment of Captain Treverton, an

officer in the navy, and the eldest male representative of an old

Cornish family. Both the servants communicated with each other

restrainedly, in whispers--sitting close together, and looking round

expectantly toward the door whenever the talk flagged between them.

"It's an awful thing," said the elder of the men, "for us two to be

alone here, at this dark time, counting out the minutes that our

mistress has left to live!"

"Robert," said the other, "you have been in the service here since you

were a boy--did you ever hear that our mistress was a play-actress

when our master married her?"

"How came you to know that?" inquired the elder servant, sharply.

"Hush!" cried the other, rising quickly from his chair.

A bell rang in the passage outside.

"Is that for one of us?" asked Mathew.

"Can't you tell, by the sound, which is which of those bells yet?"

exclaimed Robert, contemptuously. "That bell is for Sarah Leeson. Go

out into the passage and look."

The younger servant took a candle and obeyed. When he opened the

kitchen-door, a long row of bells met his eye on the wall opposite.

Above each of them was painted, in neat black letters, the

distinguishing title of the servant whom it was specially intended to

summon. The row of letters began with Housekeeper and Butler, and

ended with Kitchen-maid and Footman's Boy.

Looking along the bells, Mathew easily discovered that one of them was

still in motion. Above it were the words Lady's-Maid. Observing this,

he passed quickly along the passage, and knocked at an old-fashioned

oak door at the end of it. No answer being given, he opened the door

and looked into the room. It was dark and empty.

"Sarah is not in the housekeeper's room," said Mathew, returning to

his fellow-servant in the kitchen.

"She is gone to her own room, then," rejoined the other. "Go up and

tell her that she is wanted by her mistress."

The bell rang again as Mathew went out.

"Quick!--quick!" cried Robert. "Tell her she is wanted directly.

Wanted," he continued to himself in lower tones, "perhaps for the last

time!"

Mathew ascended three flights of stairs--passed half-way down a long

arched gallery--and knocked at another old-fashioned oak door. This

time the signal was answered. A low, clear, sweet voice, inside the

room, inquired who was waiting without? In a few hasty words Mathew

told his errand. Before he had done speaking the door was quietly and

quickly opened, and Sarah Leeson confronted him on the threshold, with

her candle in her hand.

Not tall, not handsome, not in her first youth--shy and irresolute in

manner--simple in dress to the utmost limits of plainness--the

lady's-maid, in spite of all these disadvantages, was a woman whom it

was impossible to look at without a feeling of curiosity, if not of

interest. Few men, at first sight of her, could have resisted the

desire to find out who she was; few would have been satisfied with

receiving for answer, She is Mrs. Treverton's maid; few would have

refrained from the attempt to extract some secret information for

themselves from her face and manner; and none, not even the most

patient and practiced of observers, could have succeeded in

discovering more than that she must have passed through the ordeal of

some great suffering at some former period of her life. Much in her

manner, and more in her face, said plainly and sadly: I am the wreck

of something that you might once have liked to see; a wreck that can

never be repaired--that must drift on through life unnoticed,

unguided, unpitied--drift till the fatal shore is touched, and the

waves of Time have swallowed up these broken relics of me forever.

This was the story that was told in Sarah Leeson's face--this, and no

more.

No two men interpreting that story for themselves, would probably have

agreed on the nature of the suffering which this woman had undergone.

It was hard to say, at the outset, whether the past pain that had set

its ineffaceable mark on her had been pain of the body or pain of the

mind. But whatever the nature of the affliction she had suffered, the

traces it had left were deeply and strikingly visible in every part of

her face.

Her cheeks had lost their roundness and their natural color; her lips,

singularly flexible in movement and delicate in form, had faded to an

unhealthy paleness; her eyes, large and black and overshadowed by

unusually thick lashes, had contracted an anxious startled look, which

never left them, and which piteously expressed the painful acuteness

of her sensibility, the inherent timidity of her disposition. So far,

the marks which sorrow or sickness had set on her were the marks

common to most victims of mental or physical suffering. The one

extraordinary personal deterioration which she had undergone consisted

in the unnatural change that had passed over the color of her hair. It

was as thick and soft, it grew as gracefully, as the hair of a young

girl; but it was as gray as the hair of an old woman. It seemed to

contradict, in the most startling manner, every personal assertion of

youth that still existed in her face. With all its haggardness and

paleness, no one could have looked at it and supposed for a moment

that it was the face of an elderly woman. Wan as they might be, there

was not a wrinkle in her cheeks. Her eyes, viewed apart from their

prevailing expression of uneasiness and timidity, still preserved that

bright, clear moisture which is never seen in the eyes of the old. The

skin about her temples was as delicately smooth as the skin of a

child. These and other physical signs which never mislead, showed

that she was still, as to years, in the very prime of her life. Sickly

and sorrow-stricken as she was, she looked, from the eyes downward, a

woman who had barely reached thirty years of age. From the eyes

upward, the effect of her abundant gray hair, seen in connection with

her face, was not simply incongruous--it was absolutely startling; so

startling as to make it no paradox to say that she would have looked

most natural, most like herself, if her hair had been dyed. In her

case, Art would have seemed to be the truth, because Nature looked

like falsehood.

What shock had stricken her hair, in the very maturity of its

luxuriance, with the hue of an unnatural old age? Was it a serious

illness, or a dreadful grief, that had turned her gray in the prime of

her womanhood? That question had often been agitated among her

fellow-servants, who were all struck by the peculiarities of her

personal appearance, and rendered a little suspicious of her, as well,

by an inveterate habit that she had of talking to herself. Inquire as

they might, however, their curiosity was always baffled. Nothing more

could be discovered than that Sarah Leeson was, in the common phrase,

touchy on the subject of her gray hair and her habit of talking to

herself, and that Sarah Leeson's mistress had long since forbidden

every one, from her husband downward, to ruffle her maid's

tranquillity by inquisitive questions.

She stood for an instant speechless, on that momentous morning of the

twenty-third of August, before the servant who summoned her to her

mistress's death-bed--the light of the candle flaring brightly over

her large, startled, black eyes, and the luxuriant, unnatural gray

hair above them. She stood a moment silent--her hand trembling while

she held the candlestick, so that the extinguisher lying loose in it

rattled incessantly--then thanked the servant for calling her. The

trouble and fear in her voice, as she spoke, seemed to add to its

sweetness; the agitation of her manner took nothing away from its

habitual gentleness, its delicate, winning, feminine restraint.

Mathew, who, like the other servants, secretly distrusted and disliked

her for differing from the ordinary pattern of professed lady's-maids,

was, on this particular occasion, so subdued by her manner and her

tone as she thanked him, that he offered to carry her candle for her

to the door of her mistress's bed-chamber. She shook her head, and

thanked him again, then passed before him quickly on her way out of

the gallery.

The room in which Mrs. Treverton lay dying was on the floor beneath.

Sarah hesitated twice before she knocked at the door. It was opened by

Captain Treverton.

The instant she saw her master she started back from him. If she had

dreaded a blow she could hardly have drawn away more suddenly, or with

an expression of greater alarm. There was nothing in Captain

Treverton's face to warrant the suspicion of ill-treatment, or even of

harsh words. His countenance was kind, hearty, and open; and the tears

were still trickling down it which he had shed by his wife's bedside.

"Go in," he said, turning away his face. "She does not wish the nurse

to attend; she only wishes for you. Call me if the doctor--" His voice

faltered, and he hurried away without attempting to finish the

sentence.

Sarah Leeson, instead of entering her mistress's room, stood looking

after her master attentively, with her pale cheeks turned to a deathly

whiteness--with an eager, doubting, questioning terror in her eyes.

When he had disappeared round the corner of the gallery, she listened

for a moment outside the door of the sick-room--whispered affrightedly

to herself, "Can she have told him?"--then opened the door, with a

visible effort to recover her self-control; and, after lingering

suspiciously on the threshold for a moment, went in.

Mrs. Treverton's bed-chamber was a large, lofty room, situated in the

western front of the house, and consequently overlooking the sea-view.

The night-light burning by the bedside displayed rather than dispelled

the darkness in the corners of the room. The bed was of the

old-fashioned pattern, with heavy hangings and thick curtains drawn

all round it. Of the other objects in the chamber, only those of the

largest and most solid kind were prominent enough to be tolerably

visible in the dim light. The cabinets, the wardrobe, the full-length

looking-glass, the high-backed arm-chair, these, with the great

shapeless bulk of the bed itself, towered up heavily and gloomily into

view. Other objects were all merged together in the general obscurity.

Through the open window, opened to admit the fresh air of the new

morning after the sultriness of the August night, there poured

monotonously into the room the dull, still, distant roaring of the

surf on the sandy coast. All outer noises were hushed at that first

dark hour of the new day. Inside the room the one audible sound was

the slow, toilsome breathing of the dying woman, raising itself in its

mortal frailness, awfully and distinctly, even through the far

thunder-breathing from the bosom of the everlasting sea.

"Mistress," said Sarah Leeson, standing close to the curtains, but not

withdrawing them, "my master has left the room, and has sent me here

in his place."

"Light!--give me more light."

The feebleness of mortal sickness was in the voice; but the accent of

the speaker sounded resolute even yet--doubly resolute by contrast

with the hesitation of the tones in which Sarah had spoken. The strong

nature of the mistress and the weak nature of the maid came out, even

in that short interchange of words spoken through the curtain of a

death-bed.

Sarah lit two candles with a wavering hand--placed them hesitatingly

on a table by the bedside--waited for a moment, looking all round her

with suspicious timidity--then undrew the curtains.

The disease of which Mrs. Treverton was dying was one of the most

terrible of all the maladies that afflict humanity, one to which women

are especially subject, and one which undermines life without, in most

cases, showing any remarkable traces of its corroding progress in the

face. No uninstructed person, looking at Mrs. Treverton when her

attendant undrew the bed-curtain, could possibly have imagined that

she was past all help that mortal skill could offer to her. The slight

marks of illness in her face, the inevitable changes in the grace and

roundness of its outline, were rendered hardly noticeable by the

marvelous preservation of her complexion in all the light and delicacy

of its first girlish beauty. There lay her face on the pillow--tenderly

framed in by the rich lace of her cap, softly crowned by her shining

brown hair--to all outward appearance, the face of a beautiful woman

recovering from a slight illness, or reposing after unusual fatigue.

Even Sarah Leeson, who had watched her all through her malady, could

hardly believe, as she looked at her mistress, that the Gates of Life

had closed behind her, and that the beckoning hand of Death was

signing to her already from the Gates of the Grave.

Some dog's-eared books in paper covers lay on the counterpane of the

bed. As soon as the curtain was drawn aside Mrs. Treverton ordered her

attendant by a gesture to remove them. They were plays, underscored in

certain places by ink lines, and marked with marginal annotations

referring to entrances, exits, and places on the stage. The servants,

talking down stairs of their mistress's occupation before her

marriage, had not been misled by false reports. Their master, after he

had passed the prime of life, had, in very truth, taken his wife from

the obscure stage of a country theatre, when little more than two

years had elapsed since her first appearance in public. The

dog's-eared old plays had been once her treasured dramatic library;

she had always retained a fondness for them from old associations;

and, during the latter part of her illness, they had remained on her

bed for days and days together.

Having put away the plays, Sarah went back to her mistress; and, with

more of dread and bewilderment in her face than grief, opened her lips

to speak. Mrs. Treverton held up her hand, as a sign that she had

another order to give.

"Bolt the door," she said, in the same enfeebled voice, but with the

same accent of resolution which had so strikingly marked her first

request to have more light in the room. "Bolt the door. Let no one in,

till I give you leave."

"No one?" repeated Sarah, faintly. "Not the doctor? not even my

master?"

"Not the doctor--not even your master," said Mrs. Treverton, and

pointed to the door. The hand was weak; but even in that momentary

action of it there was no mistaking the gesture of command.

Sarah bolted the door, returned irresolutely to the bedside, fixed her

large, eager, startled eyes inquiringly on her mistress's face, and,

suddenly bending over her, said in a whisper:

"Have you told my master?"

"No," was the answer. "I sent for him, to tell him--I tried hard to

speak the words--it shook me to my very soul, only to think how I

should best break it to him--I am so fond of him! I love him so

dearly! But I should have spoken in spite of that, if he had not

talked of the child. Sarah! he did nothing but talk of the child--and

that silenced me."

Sarah, with a forgetfulness of her station which might have appeared

extraordinary even in the eyes of the most lenient of mistresses,

flung herself back in a chair when the first word of Mrs. Treverton's

reply was uttered, clasped her trembling hands over her face, and

groaned to herself, "Oh, what will happen! what will happen now!"

Mrs. Treverton's eyes had softened and moistened when she spoke of her

love for her husband. She lay silent for a few minutes; the working of

some strong emotion in her being expressed by her quick, hard, labored

breathing, and by the painful contraction of her eyebrows. Ere long,

she turned her head uneasily toward the chair in which her attendant

was sitting, and spoke again--this time in a voice which had sunk to a

whisper.

"Look for my medicine," said she; "I want it."

Sarah started up, and with the quick instinct of obedience brushed

away the tears that were rolling fast over her cheeks.

"The doctor," she said. "Let me call the doctor."

"No! The medicine--look for the medicine."

"Which bottle? The opiate--"

"No. Not the opiate. The other."

Sarah took a bottle from the table, and looking attentively at the

written direction on the label, said that it was not yet time to take

that medicine again.

"Give me the bottle."

"Oh, pray don't ask me. Pray wait. The doctor said it was as bad as

dram-drinking, if you took too much."

Mrs. Treverton's clear gray eyes began to flash; the rosy flush

deepened on her cheeks; the commanding hand was raised again, by an

effort, from the counterpane on which it lay.

"Take the cork out of the bottle," she said, "and give it to me. I

want strength. No matter whether I die in an hour's time or a week's.

Give me the bottle."

"No, no--not the bottle!" said Sarah, giving it up, nevertheless,

under the influence of her mistress's look. "There are two doses left.

Wait, pray wait till I get a glass."

She turned again toward the table. At the same instant Mrs. Treverton

raised the bottle to her lips, drained it of its contents, and flung

it from her on the bed.

"She has killed herself!" cried Sarah, running in terror to the door.

"Stop!" said the voice from the bed, more resolute than ever, already.

"Stop! Come back and prop me up higher on the pillows."

Sarah put her hand on the bolt.

"Come back!" reiterated Mrs. Treverton. "While there is life in me, I

will be obeyed. Come back!" The color began to deepen perceptibly all

over her face, and the light to grow brighter in her widely opened

eyes.

Sarah came back; and with shaking hands added one more to the many

pillows which supported the dying woman's head and shoulders. While

this was being done the bed-clothes became a little discomposed. Mrs.

Treverton shuddered, and drew them up to their former position, close

round her neck.

"Did you unbolt the door?" she asked.

"No."

"I forbid you to go near it again. Get my writing-case, and the pen

and ink, from the cabinet near the window."

Sarah went to the cabinet and opened it; then stopped, as if some

sudden suspicion had crossed her mind, and asked what the writing

materials were wanted for.

"Bring them, and you will see."

The writing-case, with a sheet of note-paper on it, was placed upon

Mrs. Treverton's knees; the pen was dipped into the ink, and given to

her; she paused, closed her eyes for a minute, and sighed heavily;

then began to write, saying to her waiting-maid, as the pen touched

the paper--"Look."

Sarah peered anxiously over her shoulder, and saw the pen slowly and

feebly form these three words: _To my Husband_.

"Oh, no! no! For God's sake, don't write it!" she cried, catching at

her mistress's hand--but suddenly letting it go again the moment Mrs.

Treverton looked at her.

The pen went on; and more slowly, more feebly, formed words enough to

fill a line--then stopped. The letters of the last syllable were all

blotted together.

"Don't!" reiterated Sarah, dropping on her knees at the bedside.

"Don't write it to him if you can't tell it to him. Let me go on

bearing what I have borne so long already. Let the Secret die with you

and die with me, and be never known in this world--never, never,

never!"

"The Secret must be told," answered Mrs. Treverton. "My husband ought

to know it, and must know it. I tried to tell him, and my courage

failed me. I can not trust you to tell him, after I am gone. It must

be written. Take you the pen; my sight is failing, my touch is dull.

Take the pen, and write what I tell you."

Sarah, instead of obeying, hid her face in the bed-cover, and wept

bitterly.

"You have been with me ever since my marriage," Mrs. Treverton went

on. "You have been my friend more than my servant. Do you refuse my

last request? You do! Fool! look up and listen to me. On your peril,

refuse to take the pen. Write, or I shall not rest in my grave.

_Write, or as true as there is a Heaven above us, I will come to you

from the other world!_"

Sarah started to her feet with a faint scream.

"You make my flesh creep!" she whispered, fixing her eyes on her

mistress's face with a stare of superstitious horror.

At the same instant, the overdose of the stimulating medicine began to

affect Mrs. Treverton's brain. She rolled her head restlessly from

side to side of the pillow--repeated vacantly a few lines from one of

the old play-books which had been removed from her bed--and suddenly

held out the pen to the servant, with a theatrical wave of the hand,

and a glance upward at an imaginary gallery of spectators.

"Write!" she cried, with an awful mimicry of her old stage voice.

"Write!" And the weak hand was waved again with a forlorn, feeble

imitation of the old stage gesture.

Closing her fingers mechanically on the pen that was thrust between

them, Sarah, with her eyes still expressing the superstitious terror

which her mistress's words had aroused, waited for the next command.

Some minutes elapsed before Mrs. Treverton spoke again. She still

retained her senses sufficiently to be vaguely conscious of the effect

which the medicine was producing on her, and to be desirous of

combating its further progress before it succeeded in utterly

confusing her ideas. She asked first for the smelling-bottle, next

for some Eau de Cologne.

This last, poured onto her handkerchief and applied to her forehead,

seemed to prove successful in partially clearing her faculties. Her

eyes recovered their steady look of intelligence; and, when she again

addressed her maid, reiterating the word "Write," she was able to

enforce the direction by beginning immediately to dictate in quiet,

deliberate, determined tones. Sarah's tears fell fast; her lips

murmured fragments of sentences in which entreaties, expressions of

penitence, and exclamations of fear were all strangely mingled

together; but she wrote on submissively, in wavering lines, until she

had nearly filled the first two sides of the note-paper. Then Mrs.

Treverton paused, looked the writing over, and, taking the pen, signed

her name at the end of it. With this effort, her powers of resistance

to the exciting effect of the medicine seemed to fail her again. The

deep flush began to tinge her cheeks once more, and she spoke

hurriedly and unsteadily when she handed the pen back to her maid.

"Sign!" she cried, beating her hand feebly on the bed-clothes. "Sign

'Sarah Leeson, witness.' No!--write 'Accomplice.' Take your share of

it; I won't have it shifted on me. Sign, I insist on it! Sign as I

tell you."

Sarah obeyed; and Mrs. Treverton taking the paper from her, pointed to

it solemnly, with a return of the stage gesture which had escaped her

a little while back.

"You will give this to your master," she said, "when I am dead; and

you will answer any questions he puts to you as truly as if you were

before the judgment-seat."

Clasping her hands fast together, Sarah regarded her mistress, for the

first time, with steady eyes, and spoke to her for the first time in

steady tones.

"If I only knew that I was fit to die," she said, "oh, how gladly I

would change places with you!"

"Promise me that you will give the paper to your master," repeated

Mrs. Treverton. "Promise--no! I won't trust your promise--I'll have

your oath. Get the Bible--the Bible the clergyman used when he was

here this morning. Get it, or I shall not rest in my grave. Get it,

_or I will come to you from the other world_."

The mistress laughed as she reiterated that threat. The maid

shuddered, as she obeyed the command which it was designed to impress

on her.

"Yes, yes--the Bible the clergyman used," continued Mrs. Treverton,

vacantly, after the book had been produced. "The clergyman--a poor

weak man--I frightened him, Sarah. He said, 'Are you at peace with all

the world?' and I said, 'All but one.' You know who."

"The Captain's brother? Oh, don't die at enmity with any body. Don't

die at enmity even with _him_," pleaded Sarah.

"The clergyman said so too," murmured Mrs. Treverton, her eyes

beginning to wander childishly round the room, her tones growing

suddenly lower and more confused. "'You must forgive him,' the

clergyman said. And I said, 'No, I forgive all the world, but not my

husband's brother.' The clergyman got up from the bedside, frightened,

Sarah. He talked about praying for me, and coming back. Will he come

back?"

"Yes, yes," answered Sarah. "He is a good man--he will come back--and

oh! tell him that you forgive the Captain's brother! Those vile words

he spoke of you when you were married will come home to him some day.

Forgive him--forgive him before you die!"

Saying those words, she attempted to remove the Bible softly out of

her mistress's sight. The action attracted Mrs. Treverton's attention,

and roused her sinking faculties into observation of present things.

"Stop!" she cried, with a gleam of the old resolution flashing once

more over the dying dimness of her eyes. She caught at Sarah's hand

with a great effort, placed it on the Bible, and held it there. Her

other hand wandered a little over the bed-clothes, until it

encountered the written paper addressed to her husband. Her fingers

closed on it, and a sigh of relief escaped her lips.

"Ah!" she said, "I know what I wanted the Bible for. I'm dying with

all my senses about me, Sarah; you can't deceive me even yet." She

stopped again, smiled a little, whispered to herself rapidly, "Wait,

wait, wait!" then added aloud, with the old stage voice and the old

stage gesture: "No! I won't trust you on your promise. I'll have your

oath. Kneel down. These are my last words in this world--disobey them

if you dare!"

Sarah dropped on her knees by the bed. The breeze outside,

strengthening just then with the slow advance of the morning, parted

the window-curtains a little, and wafted a breath of its sweet

fragrance joyously into the sick-room. The heavy beating hum of the

distant surf came in at the same time, and poured out its unresting

music in louder strains. Then the window-curtains fell to again

heavily, the wavering flame of the candle grew steady once more, and

the awful silence in the room sank deeper than ever.

"Swear!" said Mrs. Treverton. Her voice failed her when she had

pronounced that one word. She struggled a little, recovered the power

of utterance, and went on: "Swear that you will not destroy this paper

after I am dead."

Even while she pronounced these solemn words, even at that last

struggle for life and strength, the ineradicable theatrical instinct

showed, with a fearful inappropriateness, how firmly it kept its place

in her mind. Sarah felt the cold hand that was still laid on hers

lifted for a moment--saw it waving gracefully toward her--felt it

descend again, and clasp her own hand with a trembling, impatient

pressure. At that final appeal, she answered faintly,

"I swear it."

"Swear that you will not take this paper away with you, if you leave

the house, after I am dead."

Again Sarah paused before she answered--again the trembling pressure

made itself felt on her hand, but more weakly this time--again the

words dropped affrightedly from her lips--

"I swear it."

"Swear!" Mrs. Treverton began for the third time. Her voice failed her

once more; and she struggled vainly to regain the command over it.

Sarah looked up, and saw signs of convulsion beginning to disfigure

the white face--saw the fingers of the white, delicate hand getting

crooked as they reached over toward the table on which the

medicine-bottles were placed.

"You drank it all," she cried, starting to her feet, as she

comprehended the meaning of that gesture. "Mistress, dear mistress,

you drank it all--there is nothing but the opiate left. Let me go--let

me go and call--"

A look from Mrs. Treverton stopped her before she could utter another

word. The lips of the dying woman were moving rapidly. Sarah put her

ear close to them. At first she heard nothing but panting, quick-drawn

breaths--then a few broken words mingled confusedly with them:

"I hav'n't done--you must swear--close, close, come close--a third

thing--your master--swear to give it--"

The last words died away very softly. The lips that had been forming

them so laboriously parted on a sudden and closed again no more. Sarah

sprang to the door, opened it, and called into the passage for help;

then ran back to the bedside, caught up the sheet of note-paper on

which she had written from her mistress's dictation, and hid it in her

bosom. The last look of Mrs. Treverton's eyes fastened sternly and

reproachfully on her as she did this, and kept their expression

unchanged, through the momentary distortion of the rest of the

features, for one breathless moment. That moment passed, and, with the

next, the shadow which goes before the presence of death stole up and

shut out the light of life in one quiet instant from all the face.

The doctor, followed by the nurse and by one of the servants, entered

the room; and, hurrying to the bedside, saw at a glance that the time

for his attendance there had passed away forever. He spoke first to

the servant who had followed him.

"Go to your master," he said, "and beg him to wait in his own room

until I can come and speak to him."

Sarah still stood--without moving or speaking, or noticing any one--by

the bedside.

The nurse, approaching to draw the curtains together, started at the

sight of her face, and turned to the doctor.

"I think this person had better leave the room, Sir?" said the nurse,

with some appearance of contempt in her tones and looks. "She seems

unreasonably shocked and terrified by what has happened."

"Quite right," said the doctor. "It is best that she should

withdraw.--Let me recommend you to leave us for a little while," he

added, touching Sarah on the arm.

She shrank back suspiciously, raised one of her hands to the place

where the letter lay hidden in her bosom, and pressed it there firmly,

while she held out the other hand for a candle.

"You had better rest for a little in your own room," said the doctor,

giving her a candle. "Stop, though," he continued, after a moment's

reflection. "I am going to break the sad news to your master, and I

may find that he is anxious to hear any last words that Mrs. Treverton

may have spoken in your presence. Perhaps you had better come with me,

and wait while I go into Captain Treverton's room."

"No! no!--oh, not now--not now, for God's sake!" Speaking those words

in low, quick, pleading tones, and drawing back affrightedly to the

door, Sarah disappeared without waiting a moment to be spoken to

again.

"A strange woman!" said the doctor, addressing the nurse. "Follow her,

and see where she goes to, in case she is wanted and we are obliged to

send for her. I will wait here until you come back."

When the nurse returned she had nothing to report but that she had

followed Sarah Leeson to her own bedroom, had seen her enter it, had

listened outside, and had heard her lock the door.

"A strange woman!" repeated the doctor. "One of the silent, secret

sort."

"One of the wrong sort," said the nurse. "She is always talking to

herself, and that is a bad sign, in my opinion. I distrusted her, Sir,

the very first day I entered the house."

CHAPTER II.

THE CHILD.

The instant Sarah Leeson had turned the key of her bedroom door, she

took the sheet of note-paper from its place of concealment in her

bosom--shuddering, when she drew it out, as if the mere contact of it

hurt her--placed it open on her little dressing-table, and fixed her

eyes eagerly on the lines which the note contained. At first they swam

and mingled together before her. She pressed her hands over her eyes,

for a few minutes, and then looked at the writing again.

The characters were clear now--vividly clear, and, as she fancied,

unnaturally large and near to view. There was the address: "To my

Husband;" there the first blotted line beneath, in her dead mistress's

handwriting; there the lines that followed, traced by her own pen,

with the signature at the end--Mrs. Treverton's first, and then her

own. The whole amounted to but very few sentences, written on one

perishable fragment of paper, which the flame of a candle would have

consumed in a moment. Yet there she sat, reading, reading, reading,

over and over again; never touching the note, except when it was

absolutely necessary to turn over the first page; never moving, never

speaking, never raising her eyes from the paper. As a condemned

prisoner might read his death-warrant, so did Sarah Leeson now read

the few lines which she and her mistress had written together not half

an hour since.

The secret of the paralyzing effect of that writing on her mind lay,

not only in itself, but in the circumstances which had attended the

act of its production.

The oath which had been proposed by Mrs. Treverton under no more

serious influence than the last caprice of her disordered faculties,

stimulated by confused remembrances of stage words and stage

situations, had been accepted by Sarah Leeson as the most sacred and

inviolable engagement to which she could bind herself. The threat of

enforcing obedience to her last commands from beyond the grave, which

the mistress had uttered in mocking experiment on the superstitious

fears of the maid, now hung darkly over the weak mind of Sarah, as a

judgment which might descend on her, visibly and inexorably, at any

moment of her future life. When she roused herself at last, and pushed

away the paper and rose to her feet, she stood quite still for an

instant, before she ventured to look behind her. When she did look, it

was with an effort and a start, with a searching distrust of the empty

dimness in the remoter corners of the room.

Her old habit of talking to herself began to resume its influence, as

she now walked rapidly backward and forward, sometimes along the room

and sometimes across it. She repeated incessantly such broken phrases

as these: "How can I give him the letter?--Such a good master; so kind

to us all.--Why did she die, and leave it all to _me_?--I can't bear

it alone; it's too much for me." While reiterating these sentences,

she vacantly occupied herself in putting things about the room in

order, which were set in perfect order already. All her looks, all her

actions, betrayed the vain struggle of a weak mind to sustain itself

under the weight of a heavy responsibility. She arranged and

re-arranged the cheap china ornaments on her chimney-piece a dozen

times over--put her pin-cushion first on the looking-glass, then on

the table in front of it--changed the position of the little porcelain

dish and tray on her wash-hand-stand, now to one side of the basin,

and now to the other. Throughout all these trifling actions the

natural grace, delicacy, and prim neat-handedness of the woman still

waited mechanically on the most useless and aimless of her occupations

of the moment. She knocked nothing down, she put nothing awry; her

footsteps at the fastest made no sound--the very skirts of her dress

were kept as properly and prudishly composed as if it was broad

daylight and the eyes of all her neighbors were looking at her.

From time to time the sense of the words she was murmuring confusedly

to herself changed. Sometimes they disjointedly expressed bolder and

more self-reliant thoughts. Once they seemed to urge her again to the

dressing-table and the open letter on it, against her own will. She

read aloud the address, "To my Husband," and caught the letter up

sharply, and spoke in firmer tones. "Why give it to him at all? Why

not let the secret die with her and die with me, as it ought? Why

should he know it? He shall _not_ know it!"

Saying those last words, she desperately held the letter within an

inch of the flame of the candle. At the same moment the white curtain

over the window before her stirred a little, as the freshening air

found its way through the old-fashioned, ill-fitting sashes. Her eye

caught sight of it, as it waved gently backward and forward. She

clasped the letter suddenly to her breast with both hands, and shrank

back against the wall of the room, her eyes still fastened on the

curtain with the same blank look of horror which they had exhibited

when Mrs. Treverton had threatened to claim her servant's obedience

from the other world.

"Something moves," she gasped to herself, in a breathless whisper.

"Something moves in the room."

The curtain waved slowly to and fro for the second time. Still fixedly

looking at it over her shoulder, she crept along the wall to the door.

"Do you come to me already?" she said, her eyes riveted on the curtain

while her hand groped over the lock for the key. "Before your grave

is dug? Before your coffin is made? Before your body is cold?"

She opened the door and glided into the passage; stopped there for a

moment, and looked back into the room.

"Rest!" she said. "Rest, mistress--he shall have the letter."

The staircase-lamp guided her out of the passage. Descending

hurriedly, as if she feared to give herself time to think, she reached

Captain Treverton's study, on the ground-floor, in a minute or two.

The door was wide open, and the room was empty.

After reflecting a little, she lighted one of the chamber-candles

standing on the hall-table, at the lamp in the study, and ascended the

stairs again to her master's bedroom. After repeatedly knocking at the

door and obtaining no answer, she ventured to go in. The bed had not

been disturbed, the candles had not been lit--to all appearance the

room had not even been entered during the night.

There was but one other place to seek him--the chamber in which his

wife lay dead. Could she summon the courage to give him the letter

there? She hesitated a little--then whispered, "I must! I must!"

The direction she now compelled herself to take led her a little way

down the stairs again. She descended very slowly this time, holding

cautiously by the banisters, and pausing to take breath almost at

every step. The door of what had been Mrs. Treverton's bedroom was

opened, when she ventured to knock at it, by the nurse, who inquired,

roughly and suspiciously, what she wanted there.

"I want to speak to my master."

"Look for him somewhere else. He was here half an hour ago. He is gone

now."

"Do you know where he has gone?"

"No. I don't pry into other people's goings and comings. I mind my own

business."

With that discourteous answer, the nurse closed the door again. Just

as Sarah turned away from it she looked toward the inner end of the

passage. The door of the nursery was situated there. It was ajar, and

a dim gleam of candle-light was flickering through it.

[Illustration: "AND TOWARD THE OPENING THUS MADE SARAH NOW ADVANCED."]

She went in immediately, and saw that the candle-light came from an

inner room, usually occupied, as she well knew, by the nursery-maid

and by the only child of the house of Treverton--a little girl named

Rosamond, aged, at that time, nearly five years.

"Can he be there?--in that room, of all the rooms in the house!"

Quickly as the thought arose in her mind, Sarah raised the letter

(which she had hitherto carried in her hand) to the bosom of her

dress, and hid it for the second time, exactly as she had hidden it on

leaving her mistress's bedside.

She then stole across the nursery on tiptoe toward the inner room. The

entrance to it, to please some caprice of the child's, had been

arched, and framed with trellis-work, gayly colored, so as to resemble

the entrance to a summer-house. Two pretty chintz curtains, hanging

inside the trellis-work, formed the only barrier between the day-room

and the bedroom. One of these was looped up, and toward the opening

thus made Sarah now advanced, after cautiously leaving her candle in

the passage outside.

The first object that attracted her attention in the child's bedroom

was the figure of the nurse-maid, leaning back, fast asleep, in an

easy-chair by the window. Venturing, after this discovery, to look

more boldly into the room, she next saw her master sitting with his

back toward her, by the side of the child's crib. Little Rosamond was

awake, and was standing up in bed with her arms round her father's

neck. One of her hands held over his shoulder the doll that she had

taken to bed with her, the other was twined gently in his hair. The

child had been crying bitterly, and had now exhausted herself, so that

she was only moaning a little from time to time, with her head laid

wearily on her father's bosom.

The tears stood thick in Sarah's eyes as they looked on her master and

on the little hands that lay round his neck. She lingered by the

raised curtain, heedless of the risk she ran, from moment to moment,

of being discovered and questioned--lingered until she heard Captain

Treverton say soothingly to the child:

"Hush, Rosie, dear! hush, my own love! Don't cry any more for poor

mamma. Think of poor papa, and try to comfort him."

Simple as the words were, quietly and tenderly as they were spoken,

they seemed instantly to deprive Sarah Leeson of all power of

self-control. Reckless whether she was heard or not, she turned and

ran into the passage as if she had been flying for her life. Passing

the candle she had left there, without so much as a look at it, she

made for the stairs, and descended them with headlong rapidity to the

kitchen-floor. There one of the servants who had been sitting up met

her, and, with a face of astonishment and alarm, asked what was the

matter.

"I'm ill--I'm faint--I want air," she answered, speaking thickly and

confusedly. "Open the garden door, and let me out."

The man obeyed, but doubtfully, as if he thought her unfit to be

trusted by herself.

"She gets stranger than ever in her ways," he said, when he rejoined

his fellow-servant, after Sarah had hurried past him into the open

air. "Now our mistress is dead, she will have to find another place, I

suppose. I, for one, sha'n't break my heart when she's gone. Shall

you?"

CHAPTER III.

THE HIDING OF THE SECRET.

The cool, sweet air in the garden, blowing freshly over Sarah's face,

seemed to calm the violence of her agitation. She turned down a side

walk, which led to a terrace and overlooked the church of the

neighboring village.

The daylight out of doors was clear already. The misty auburn light

that goes before sunrise was flowing up, peaceful and lovely, behind a

line of black-brown moorland, over all the eastern sky. The old

church, with the hedge of myrtle and fuchsia growing round the little

cemetery in all the luxuriance which is only seen in Cornwall, was

clearing and brightening to view, almost as fast as the morning

firmament itself. Sarah leaned her arms heavily on the back of a

garden-seat, and turned her face toward the church. Her eyes wandered

from the building itself to the cemetery by its side, rested there,

and watched the light growing warmer and warmer over the lonesome

refuge where the dead lay at rest.

"Oh, my heart! my heart!" she said. "What must it be made of not to

break?"

She remained for some time leaning on the seat, looking sadly toward

the church-yard, and pondering over the words which she had heard

Captain Treverton say to the child. They seemed to connect themselves,

as every thing else now appeared to connect itself in her mind, with

the letter that had been written on Mrs. Treverton's death-bed. She

drew it from her bosom once more, and crushed it up angrily in her

fingers.

"Still in my hands! still not seen by any eyes but mine!" she said,

looking down at the crumpled pages. "Is it all my fault? If she was

alive now--if she had seen what I saw, if she had heard what I heard

in the nursery--could she expect me to give him the letter?"

Her mind was apparently steadied by the reflection which her last

words expressed. She moved away thoughtfully from the garden-seat,

crossed the terrace, descended some wooden steps, and followed a

shrubbery path which led round by a winding track from the east to the

north side of the house.

This part of the building had been uninhabited and neglected for more

than half a century past. In the time of Captain Treverton's father

the whole range of the north rooms had been stripped of their finest

pictures and their most valuable furniture, to assist in redecorating

the west rooms, which now formed the only inhabited part of the house,

and which were amply sufficient for the accommodation of the family

and of any visitors who came to stay with them. The mansion had been

originally built in the form of a square, and had been strongly

fortified. Of the many defenses of the place, but one now remained--a

heavy, low tower (from which and from the village near, the house

derived its name of Porthgenna Tower), standing at the southern

extremity of the west front. The south side itself consisted of

stables and out-houses, with a ruinous wall in front of them, which,

running back eastward at right angles, joined the north side, and so

completed the square which the whole outline of the building

represented.

The outside view of the range of north rooms, from the weedy, deserted

garden below, showed plainly enough that many years had passed since

any human creature had inhabited them. The window-panes were broken

in some places, and covered thickly with dirt and dust in others.

Here, the shutters were closed--there, they were only half opened. The

untrained ivy, the rank vegetation growing in fissures of the

stone-work, the festoons of spiders' webs, the rubbish of wood,

bricks, plaster, broken glass, rags, and strips of soiled cloth, which

lay beneath the windows, all told the same tale of neglect. Shadowed

by its position, this ruinous side of the house had a dark, cold,

wintry aspect, even on the sunny August morning when Sarah Leeson

strayed into the deserted northern garden. Lost in the labyrinth of

her own thoughts, she moved slowly past flower-beds, long since rooted

up, and along gravel walks overgrown by weeds; her eyes wandering

mechanically over the prospect, her feet mechanically carrying her on

wherever there was a trace of a footpath, lead where it might.

The shock which the words spoken by her master in the nursery had

communicated to her mind, had set her whole nature, so to speak, at

bay, and had roused in her, at last, the moral courage to arm herself

with a final and desperate resolution. Wandering more and more slowly

along the pathways of the forsaken garden, as the course of her ideas

withdrew her more and more completely from all outward things, she

stopped insensibly on an open patch of ground, which had once been a

well-kept lawn, and which still commanded a full view of the long

range of uninhabited north rooms.

"What binds me to give the letter to my master at all?" she thought to

herself, smoothing out the crumpled paper dreamily in the palm of her

hand. "My mistress died without making me swear to do that. Can she

visit it on me from the other world, if I keep the promises I swore to

observe, and do no more? May I not risk the worst that can happen, so

long as I hold religiously to all that I undertook to do on my oath?"

She paused here in reasoning with herself--her superstitious fears

still influencing her out of doors, in the daylight, as they had

influenced her in her own room, in the time of darkness. She

paused--then fell to smoothing the letter again, and began to recall

the terms of the solemn engagement which Mrs. Treverton had forced her

to contract.

What had she actually bound herself to do? Not to destroy the letter,

and not to take it away with her if she left the house. Beyond that,

Mrs. Treverton's desire had been that the letter should be given to

her husband. Was that last wish binding on the person to whom it had

been confided? Yes. As binding as an oath? No.

As she arrived at that conclusion, she looked up.

At first her eyes rested vacantly on the lonely, deserted north front

of the house; gradually they became attracted by one particular window

exactly in the middle, on the floor above the ground--the largest and

the gloomiest of all the row; suddenly they brightened with an

expression of intelligence. She started; a faint flush of color flew

into her cheeks, and she hastily advanced closer to the wall of the

house.

The panes of the large window were yellow with dust and dirt, and

festooned about fantastically with cobwebs. Below it was a heap of

rubbish, scattered over the dry mould of what might once have been a

bed of flowers or shrubs. The form of the bed was still marked out by

an oblong boundary of weeds and rank grass. She followed it

irresolutely all round, looking up at the window at every step--then

stopped close under it, glanced at the letter in her hand, and said to

herself abruptly--

"I'll risk it!"

As the words fell from her lips, she hastened back to the inhabited

part of the house, followed the passage on the kitchen-floor which led

to the housekeeper's room, entered it, and took down from a nail in

the wall a bunch of keys, having a large ivory label attached to the

ring that connected them, on which was inscribed, "Keys of the North

Rooms."

She placed the keys on a writing-table near her, took up a pen, and

rapidly added these lines on the blank side of the letter which she

had written under her mistress's dictation--

"If this paper should ever be found (which I pray with my

whole heart it never may be), I wish to say that I have

come to the resolution of hiding it, because I dare not

show the writing that it contains to my master, to whom it

is addressed. In doing what I now propose to do, though I

am acting against my mistress's last wishes, I am not

breaking the solemn engagement which she obliged me to

make before her on her death-bed. That engagement forbids

me to destroy this letter, or to take it away with me if I

leave the house. I shall do neither--my purpose is to

conceal it in the place, of all others, where I think there

is least chance of its ever being found again. Any hardship

or misfortune which may follow as a consequence of this

deceitful proceeding on my part, will fall on myself.

Others, I believe in my conscience, will be the happier for

the hiding of the dreadful Secret which this letter

contains."

She signed those lines with her name--pressed them hurriedly over the

blotting-pad that lay with the rest of the writing materials on the

table--took the note in her hand, after first folding it up--and then,

snatching at the bunch of keys, with a look all round her as if she

dreaded being secretly observed, left the room. All her actions since

she had entered it had been hasty and sudden; she was evidently afraid

of allowing herself one leisure moment to reflect.

On quitting the housekeeper's room, she turned to the left, ascended a

back staircase, and unlocked a door at the top of it. A cloud of dust

flew all about her as she softly opened the door; a mouldy coolness

made her shiver as she crossed a large stone hall, with some black old

family portraits hanging on the walls, the canvases of which were

bulging out of the frames. Ascending more stairs, she came upon a row

of doors, all leading into rooms on the first floor of the north side

of the house.

She knelt down, putting the letter on the boards beside her, opposite

the key-hole of the fourth door she came to after reaching the top of

the stairs, peered in distrustfully for an instant, then began to try

the different keys till she found one that fitted the lock. She had

great difficulty in accomplishing this, from the violence of her

agitation, which made her hands tremble to such a degree that she was

hardly able to keep the keys separate one from the other. At length

she succeeded in opening the door. Thicker clouds of dust than she had

yet met with flew out the moment the interior of the room was visible;

a dry, airless, suffocating atmosphere almost choked her as she

stooped to pick up the letter from the floor. She recoiled from it at

first, and took a few steps back toward the staircase. But she

recovered her resolution immediately.

"I can't go back now!" she said, desperately, and entered the room.

She did not remain in it more than two or three minutes. When she came

out again her face was white with fear, and the hand which had held

the letter when she went into the room held nothing now but a small

rusty key.

After locking the door again, she examined the large bunch of keys

which she had taken from the housekeeper's room, with closer attention

than she had yet bestowed on them. Besides the ivory label attached to

the ring that connected them, there were smaller labels, of parchment,

tied to the handles of some of the keys, to indicate the rooms to

which they gave admission. The particular key which she had used had

one of these labels hanging to it. She held the little strip of

parchment close to the light, and read on it, in written characters

faded by time--

"_The Myrtle Room._"

The room in which the letter was hidden had a name, then! A prettily

sounding name that would attract most people, and keep pleasantly in

their memories. A name to be distrusted by her, after what she had

done, on that very account.

She took her housewife from its usual place in the pocket of her

apron, and, with the scissors which it contained, cut the label from

the key. Was it enough to destroy that one only? She lost herself in a

maze of useless conjecture; and ended by cutting off the other labels,

from no other motive than instinctive suspicion of them.

Carefully gathering up the strips of parchment from the floor, she put

them, along with the little rusty key which she had brought out of the

Myrtle Room, in the empty pocket of her apron. Then, carrying the

large bunch of keys in her hand, and carefully locking the doors that

she had opened on her way to the north side of Porthgenna Tower, she

retraced her steps to the housekeeper's room, entered it without

seeing any body, and hung up the bunch of keys again on the nail in

the wall.

Fearful, as the morning hours wore on, of meeting with some of the

female servants, she next hastened back to her bedroom. The candle

she had left there was still burning feebly in the fresh daylight.

When she drew aside the window-curtain, after extinguishing the

candle, a shadow of her former fear passed over her face, even in the

broad daylight that now flowed in upon it. She opened the window, and

leaned out eagerly into the cool air.

Whether for good or for evil, the fatal Secret was hidden now--the act

was done. There was something calming in the first consciousness of

that one fact. She could think more composedly, after that, of

herself, and of the uncertain future that lay before her.

Under no circumstances could she have expected to remain in her

situation, now that the connection between herself and her mistress

had been severed by death. She knew that Mrs. Treverton, in the last

days of her illness, had earnestly recommended her maid to Captain

Treverton's kindness and protection, and she felt assured that the

wife's last entreaties, in this as in all other instances, would be

viewed as the most sacred of obligations by the husband. But could she

accept protection and kindness at the hand of the master whom she had

been accessory to deceiving, and whom she had now committed herself to

deceiving still? The bare idea of such baseness was so revolting, that

she accepted, almost with a sense of relief, the one sad alternative

that remained--the alternative of leaving the house immediately.

And how was she to leave it? By giving formal warning, and so exposing

herself to questions which would be sure to confuse and terrify her?

Could she venture to face her master again, after what she had

done--to face him, when his first inquiries would refer to her

mistress, when he would be certain to ask her for the last mournful

details, for the slightest word that had been spoken during the

death-scene that she alone had witnessed? She started to her feet, as

the certain consequences of submitting herself to that unendurable

trial all crowded together warningly on her mind, took her cloak from

its place on the wall, and listened at her door in sudden suspicion

and fear. Had she heard footsteps? Was her master sending for her

already?

No; all was silent outside. A few tears rolled over her cheeks as she

put on her bonnet, and felt that she was facing, by the performance of

that simple action, the last, and perhaps the hardest to meet, of the

cruel necessities in which the hiding of the Secret had involved her.

There was no help for it. She must run the risk of betraying every

thing, or brave the double trial of leaving Porthgenna Tower, and

leaving it secretly.

Secretly--as a thief might go? Without a word to her master? without

so much as one line of writing to thank him for his kindness and to

ask his pardon? She had unlocked her desk, and had taken from it her

purse, one or two letters, and a little book of Wesley's Hymns, before

these considerations occurred to her. They made her pause in the act

of shutting up the desk. "Shall I write?" she asked herself, "and

leave the letter here, to be found when I am gone?"

A little more reflection decided her in the affirmative. As rapidly as

her pen could form the letters, she wrote a few lines addressed to

Captain Treverton, in which she confessed to having kept a secret from

his knowledge which had been left in her charge to divulge; adding,

that she honestly believed no harm could come to him, or to any one in

whom he was interested, by her failing to perform the duty intrusted

to her; and ended by asking his pardon for leaving the house secretly,

and by begging, as a last favor, that no search might ever be made for

her. Having sealed this short note, and left it on her table, with her

master's name written outside, she listened again at the door; and,

after satisfying herself that no one was yet stirring, began to

descend the stairs at Porthgenna Tower for the last time.

At the entrance of the passage leading to the nursery she stopped. The

tears which she had restrained since leaving her room began to flow

again. Urgent as her reasons now were for effecting her departure

without a moment's loss of time, she advanced, with the strangest

inconsistency, a few steps toward the nursery door. Before she had

gone far, a slight noise in the lower part of the house caught her ear

and instantly checked her further progress.

While she stood doubtful, the grief at her heart--a greater grief than

any she had yet betrayed--rose irresistibly to her lips, and burst

from them in one deep gasping sob. The sound of it seemed to terrify

her into a sense of the danger of her position, if she delayed a

moment longer. She ran out again to the stairs, reached the

kitchen-floor in safety, and made her escape by the garden door which

the servant had opened for her at the dawn of the morning.

On getting clear of the premises at Porthgenna Tower, instead of

taking the nearest path over the moor that led to the high-road, she

diverged to the church; but stopped before she came to it, at the

public well of the neighborhood, which had been sunk near the cottages

of the Porthgenna fishermen. Cautiously looking round her, she dropped

into the well the little rusty key which she had brought out of the

Myrtle Room; then hurried on, and entered the church-yard. She

directed her course straight to one of the graves, situated a little

apart from the rest. On the head-stone were inscribed these words:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

HUGH POLWHEAL,

AGED 26 YEARS.

HE MET WITH HIS DEATH

THROUGH THE FALL OF A ROCK

IN

PORTHGENNA MINE,

DECEMBER 17TH, 1823.

Gathering a few leaves of grass from the grave, Sarah opened the

little book of Wesley's Hymns which she had brought with her from the

bedroom of Porthgenna Tower, and placed the leaves delicately and

carefully between the pages. As she did this, the wind blew open the

title-page of the Hymns, and displayed this inscription on it, written

in large, clumsy characters--"Sarah Leeson, her book. The gift of Hugh

Polwheal."

Having secured the blades of grass between the pages of the book, she

retraced her way toward the path leading to the high-road. Arrived on

the moor, she took out of her apron pocket the parchment labels that

had been cut from the keys, and scattered them under the furze-bushes.

"Gone," she said, "as I am gone! God help and forgive me--it is all

done and over now!"

With those words she turned her back on the old house and the

sea-view below it, and followed the moorland path on her way to the

high-road.

* * * * *

Four hours afterward Captain Treverton desired one of the servants at

Porthgenna Tower to inform Sarah Leeson that he wished to hear all she

had to tell him of the dying moments of her mistress. The messenger

returned with looks and words of amazement, and with the letter that

Sarah had addressed to her master in his hand.

The moment Captain Treverton had read the letter, he ordered an

immediate search to be made after the missing woman. She was so easy

to describe and to recognize, by the premature grayness of her hair,

by the odd, scared look in her eyes, and by her habit of constantly

talking to herself, that she was traced with certainty as far as

Truro. In that large town the track of her was lost, and never

recovered again.

Rewards were offered; the magistrates of the district were interested

in the case; all that wealth and power could do to discover her was

done--and done in vain. No clew was found to suggest a suspicion of

her whereabouts, or to help in the slightest degree toward explaining

the nature of the secret at which she had hinted in her letter. Her

master never saw her again, never heard of her again, after the

morning of the twenty-third of August, eighteen hundred and

twenty-nine.

BOOK II.

CHAPTER I.

FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER.

The church of Long Beckley (a large agricultural village in one of the

midland counties of England), although a building in no way remarkable

either for its size, its architecture, or its antiquity, possesses,

nevertheless, one advantage which mercantile London has barbarously

denied to the noble cathedral church of St. Paul. It has plenty of

room to stand in, and it can consequently be seen with perfect

convenience from every point of view, all around the compass.

The large open space around the church can be approached in three

different directions. There is a road from the village, leading

straight to the principal door. There is a broad gravel walk, which

begins at the vicarage gates, crosses the church-yard, and stops, as

in duty bound, at the vestry entrance. There is a footpath over the

fields, by which the lord of the manor, and the gentry in general who

live in his august neighborhood, can reach the side door of the

building, whenever their natural humility may incline them to

encourage Sabbath observance in the stables by going to church, like

the lower sort of worshipers, on their own legs.

At half-past seven o'clock, on a certain fine summer morning, in the

year eighteen hundred and forty-four, if any observant stranger had

happened to be standing in some unnoticed corner of the church-yard,

and to be looking about him with sharp eyes, he would probably have

been the witness of proceedings which might have led him to believe

that there was a conspiracy going on in Long Beckley, of which the

church was the rallying-point, and some of the most respectable

inhabitants the principal leaders. Supposing him to have been looking

toward the vicarage as the clock chimed the half-hour, he would have

seen the vicar of Long Beckley, the Reverend Doctor Chennery, leaving

his house suspiciously, by the back way, glancing behind him guiltily

as he approached the gravel walk that led to the vestry, stopping

mysteriously just outside the door, and gazing anxiously down the road

that led from the village.

Assuming that our observant stranger would, upon this, keep out of

sight, and look down the road, like the vicar, he would next have seen

the clerk of the church--an austere, yellow-faced man--a Protestant

Loyola in appearance, and a working shoemaker by trade--approaching

with a look of unutterable mystery in his face, and a bunch of big

keys in his hands. He would have seen the vicar nod in an abstracted

manner to the clerk, and say, "Fine morning, Thomas. Have you had your

breakfast yet?" He would have heard Thomas reply, with a suspicious

regard for minute particulars: "I have had a cup of tea and a crust,

Sir." And he would then have seen these two local conspirators, after

looking up with one accord at the church clock, draw off together to

the side door which commanded a view of the footpath across the

fields.

Following them--as our inquisitive stranger could not fail to do--he

would have detected three more conspirators advancing along the

footpath. The leader of this treasonable party was an elderly

gentleman, with a weather-beaten face and a bluff, hearty manner. His

two followers were a young gentleman and a young lady, walking

arm-in-arm, and talking together in whispers. They were dressed in the

plainest morning costume. The faces of both were rather pale, and the

manner of the lady was a little flurried. Otherwise there was nothing

remarkable to observe in them, until they came to the wicket-gate

leading into the church-yard; and there the conduct of the young

gentleman seemed, at first sight, rather inexplicable. Instead of

holding the gate open for the lady to pass through, he hung back,

allowed her to open it for herself, waited till she had got to the

church-yard side, and then, stretching out his hand over the gate,

allowed her to lead him through the entrance, as if he had suddenly

changed from a grown man to a helpless little child.

Noting this, and remarking also that, when the party from the fields had

arrived within greeting distance of the vicar, and when the clerk had

used his bunch of keys to open the church-door, the young lady's

companion was led into the building (this time by Doctor Chennery's hand),

as he had been previously led through the wicket-gate, our observant

stranger must have arrived at one inevitable conclusion--that the

person requiring such assistance as this was suffering under the

affliction of blindness. Startled a little by that discovery, he would

have been still further amazed, if he had looked into the church, by

seeing the blind man and the young lady standing together before the

altar rails, with the elderly gentleman in parental attendance. Any

suspicions he might now entertain that the bond which united the

conspirators at that early hour of the morning was of the hymeneal

sort, and that the object of their plot was to celebrate a wedding

with the strictest secrecy, would have been confirmed in five minutes

by the appearance of Doctor Chennery from the vestry in full

canonicals, and by the reading of the marriage service in the reverend

gentleman's most harmonious officiating tones. The ceremony concluded,

the attendant stranger must have been more perplexed than ever by

observing that the persons concerned in it all separated, the moment

the signing, the kissing, and congratulating duties proper to the

occasion had been performed, and quickly retired in the various

directions by which they had approached the church.

Leaving the clerk to return by the village road, the bride,

bridegroom, and elderly gentleman to turn back by the footpath over

the fields, and the visionary stranger of these pages to vanish out of

them in any direction that he pleases--let us follow Doctor Chennery

to the vicarage breakfast-table, and hear what he has to say about his

professional exertions of the morning in the familiar atmosphere of

his own family circle.

The persons assembled at the breakfast were, first, Mr. Phippen, a

guest; secondly, Miss Sturch, a governess; thirdly, fourthly, and

fifthly, Miss Louisa Chennery (aged eleven years), Miss Amelia

Chennery (aged nine years), and Master Robert Chennery (aged eight

years). There was no mother's face present, to make the household

picture complete. Doctor Chennery had been a widower since the birth

of his youngest child.

The guest was an old college acquaintance of the vicar's, and he was

supposed to be now staying at Long Beckley for the benefit of his

health. Most men of any character at all contrive to get a reputation

of some sort which individualizes them in the social circle amid

which they move. Mr. Phippen was a man of some little character, and

he lived with great distinction in the estimation of his friends on

the reputation of being A Martyr to Dyspepsia.

Wherever Mr. Phippen went, the woes of Mr. Phippen's stomach went with

him. He dieted himself publicly, and physicked himself publicly. He

was so intensely occupied with himself and his maladies, that he would

let a chance acquaintance into the secret of the condition of his

tongue at five minutes' notice; being just as perpetually ready to

discuss the state of his digestion as people in general are to discuss

the state of the weather. On this favorite subject, as on all others,

he spoke with a wheedling gentleness of manner, sometimes in softly

mournful, sometimes in languidly sentimental tones. His politeness was

of the oppressively affectionate sort, and he used the word "dear"

continually in addressing himself to others. Personally, he could not

be called a handsome man. His eyes were watery, large, and light gray;

they were always rolling from side to side in a state of moist

admiration of something or somebody. His nose was long, drooping,

profoundly melancholy--if such an expression may be permitted, in

reference to that particular feature. For the rest, his lips had a

lachrymose twist; his stature was small; his head large, bald, and

loosely set on his shoulders; his manner of dressing himself

eccentric, on the side of smartness; his age about five-and-forty; his

condition that of a single man. Such was Mr. Phippen, the Martyr to

Dyspepsia, and the guest of the vicar of Long Beckley.

Miss Sturch, the governess, may be briefly and accurately described as

a young lady who had never been troubled with an idea or a sensation

since the day when she was born. She was a little, plump, quiet,

white-skinned, smiling, neatly dressed girl, wound up accurately to

the performance of certain duties at certain times; and possessed of

an inexhaustible vocabulary of commonplace talk, which dribbled

placidly out of her lips whenever it was called for, always in the

same quantity, and always of the same quality, at every hour in the

day, and through every change in the seasons. Miss Sturch never

laughed, and never cried, but took the safe middle course of smiling

perpetually. She smiled when she came down on a morning in January,

and said it was very cold. She smiled when she came down on a morning

in July, and said it was very hot. She smiled when the bishop came

once a year to see the vicar; she smiled when the butcher's boy came

every morning for orders. Let what might happen at the vicarage,

nothing ever jerked Miss Sturch out of the one smooth groove in which

she ran perpetually, always at the same pace. If she had lived in a

royalist family, during the civil wars in England, she would have rung

for the cook, to order dinner, on the morning of the execution of

Charles the First. If Shakspeare had come back to life again, and had

called at the vicarage at six o'clock on Saturday evening, to explain

to Miss Sturch exactly what his views were in composing the tragedy of

Hamlet, she would have smiled and said it was extremely interesting,

until the striking of seven o'clock; at which time she would have left

him in the middle of a sentence, to superintend the housemaid in the

verification of the washing-book. A very estimable young person, Miss

Sturch (as the ladies of Long Beckley were accustomed to say); so

judicious with the children, and so attached to her household duties;

such a well-regulated mind, and such a crisp touch on the piano; just

nice-looking enough, just well-dressed enough, just talkative enough;

not quite old enough, perhaps, and a little too much inclined to be

embraceably plump about the region of the waist--but, on the whole, a

most estimable young person--very much so, indeed.

On the characteristic peculiarities of Miss Sturch's pupils, it is not

necessary to dwell at very great length. Miss Louisa's habitual

weakness was an inveterate tendency to catch cold. Miss Amelia's

principal defect was a disposition to gratify her palate by eating

supplementary dinners and breakfasts at unauthorized times and

seasons. Master Robert's most noticeable failings were caused by

alacrity in tearing his clothes, and obtuseness in learning the

Multiplication Table. The virtues of all three were of much the same

nature--they were well grown, they were genuine children, and they

were boisterously fond of Miss Sturch.

To complete the gallery of family portraits, an outline, at the least,

must be attempted of the vicar himself. Doctor Chennery was, in a

physical point of view, a credit to the Establishment to which he was

attached. He stood six feet two in his shooting-shoes; he weighed

fifteen stone; he was the best bowler in the Long Beckley

cricket-club; he was a strictly orthodox man in the matter of wine and

mutton; he never started disagreeable theories about people's future

destinies in the pulpit, never quarreled with any body out of the

pulpit, never buttoned up his pockets when the necessities of his poor

brethren (Dissenters included) pleaded with him to open them. His

course through the world was a steady march along the high and dry

middle of a safe turnpike-road. The serpentine side-paths of

controversy might open as alluringly as they pleased on his right hand

and on his left, but he kept on his way sturdily, and never regarded

them. Innovating young recruits in the Church army might entrappingly

open the Thirty-nine Articles under his very nose, but the veteran's

wary eye never looked a hair's-breadth further than his own signature

at the bottom of them. He knew as little as possible of theology, he

had never given the Privy Council a minute's trouble in the whole

course of his life, he was innocent of all meddling with the reading

or writing of pamphlets, and he was quite incapable of finding his way

to the platform of Exeter Hall. In short, he was the most unclerical

of clergymen--but, for all that, he had such a figure for a surplice

as is seldom seen. Fifteen stone weight of upright muscular flesh,

without an angry spot or sore place in any part of it, has the merit

of suggesting stability, at any rate--an excellent virtue in pillars

of all kinds, but an especially precious quality, at the present time,

in a pillar of the Church.

As soon as the vicar entered the breakfast-parlor, the children

assailed him with a chorus of shouts. He was a severe disciplinarian

in the observance of punctuality at meal-times; and he now stood

convicted by the clock of being too late for breakfast by a quarter of

an hour.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting, Miss Sturch," said the vicar; "but I

have a good excuse for being late this morning."

"Pray don't mention it, Sir," said Miss Sturch, blandly rubbing her

plump little hands one over the other. "A beautiful morning. I fear we

shall have another warm day.--Robert, my love, your elbow is on the

table.--A beautiful morning, indeed!"

"Stomach still out of order--eh, Phippen?" asked the vicar, beginning

to carve the ham.

Mr. Phippen shook his large head dolefully, placed his yellow

forefinger, ornamented with a large turquoise ring, on the centre

check of his light-green summer waistcoat--looked piteously at Doctor

Chennery, and sighed--removed the finger, and produced from the breast

pocket of his wrapper a little mahogany case--took out of it a neat

pair of apothecary's scales, with the accompanying weights, a morsel

of ginger, and a highly polished silver nutmeg-grater. "Dear Miss

Sturch will pardon an invalid?" said Mr. Phippen, beginning to grate

the ginger feebly into the nearest tea-cup.

"Guess what has made me a quarter of an hour late this morning," said

the vicar, looking mysteriously all round the table.

"Lying in bed, papa," cried the three children, clapping their hands

in triumph.

"What do _you_ say, Miss Sturch?" asked Doctor Chennery.

Miss Sturch smiled as usual, rubbed her hands as usual, cleared her

throat softly as usual, looked at the tea-urn, and begged, with the

most graceful politeness, to be excused if she said nothing.

"Your turn now, Phippen," said the vicar. "Come, guess what has kept

me late this morning."

"My dear friend," said Mr. Phippen, giving the Doctor a brotherly

squeeze of the hand, "don't ask me to guess--I know! I saw what you

eat at dinner yesterday--I saw what you drank after dinner. No

digestion could stand it--not even yours. Guess what has made you late

this morning? Pooh! pooh! I know. You dear, good soul, you have been

taking physic!"

"Hav'n't touched a drop, thank God, for the last ten years!" said

Doctor Chennery, with a look of devout gratitude. "No, no; you're all

wrong. The fact is, I have been to church; and what do you think I

have been doing there? Listen, Miss Sturch--listen, girls, with all

your ears. Poor blind young Frankland is a happy man at last--I have

married him to our dear Rosamond Treverton this very morning!"

"Without telling us, papa!" cried the two girls together in their

shrillest tones of vexation and surprise. "Without telling us, when

you know how we should have liked to see it!"

"That was the very reason why I did not tell you, my dears," answered

the vicar. "Young Frankland has not got so used to his affliction yet,

poor fellow, as to bear being publicly pitied and stared at in the

character of a blind bridegroom. He had such a nervous horror of being

an object of curiosity on his wedding-day, and Rosamond, like a

kind-hearted girl as she is, was so anxious that his slightest

caprices should be humored, that we settled to have the wedding at an

hour in the morning when no idlers were likely to be lounging about

the neighborhood of the church. I was bound over to the strictest

secrecy about the day, and so was my clerk Thomas. Excepting us two,

and the bride and bridegroom, and the bride's father, Captain

Treverton, nobody knew--"

"Treverton!" exclaimed Mr. Phippen, holding his tea-cup, with the

grated ginger in the bottom of it, to be filled by Miss Sturch.

"Treverton! (No more tea, dear Miss Sturch.) How very remarkable! I

know the name. (Fill up with water, if you please.) Tell me, my dear

doctor (many, many thanks; no sugar--it turns acid on the stomach), is

this Miss Treverton whom you have been marrying (many thanks again; no

milk, either) one of the Cornish Trevertons?"

"To be sure she is!" rejoined the vicar. "Her father, Captain

Treverton, is the head of the family. Not that there's much family to

speak of now. The Captain, and Rosamond, and that whimsical old brute

of an uncle of hers, Andrew Treverton, are the last left now of the

old stock--a rich family, and a fine family, in former times--good

friends to Church and State, you know, and all that--"

"Do you approve, Sir, of Amelia having a second helping of bread and

marmalade?" asked Miss Sturch, appealing to Doctor Chennery, with the

most perfect unconsciousness of interrupting him. Having no spare room

in her mind for putting things away in until the appropriate time came

for bringing them out, Miss Sturch always asked questions and made

remarks the moment they occurred to her, without waiting for the

beginning, middle, or end of any conversations that might be

proceeding in her presence. She invariably looked the part of a

listener to perfection, but she never acted it except in the case of

talk that was aimed point-blank at her own ears.

"Oh, give her a second helping, by all means!" said the vicar,

carelessly; "if she must over-eat herself, she may as well do it on

bread and marmalade as on any thing else."

"My dear, good soul," exclaimed Mr. Phippen, "look what a wreck I am,

and don't talk in that shockingly thoughtless way of letting our sweet

Amelia over-eat herself. Load the stomach in youth, and what becomes

of the digestion in age? The thing which vulgar people call the

inside--I appeal to Miss Sturch's interest in her charming pupil as an

excuse for going into physiological particulars--is, in point of fact,

an Apparatus. Digestively considered, Miss Sturch, even the fairest

and youngest of us is an Apparatus. Oil our wheels, if you like; but

clog them at your peril. Farinaceous puddings and mutton-chops;

mutton-chops and farinaceous puddings--those should be the parents'

watch-words, if I had my way, from one end of England to the other.

Look here, my sweet child--look at me. There is no fun, dear, about

these little scales, but dreadful earnest. See! I put in the balance

on one side dry bread (stale, dry bread, Amelia!), and on the other

some ounce weights. 'Mr. Phippen, eat by weight. Mr. Phippen! eat the

same quantity, day by day, to a hair's-breadth. Mr. Phippen! exceed

your allowance (though it is only stale, dry bread) if you dare!'

Amelia, love, this is not fun--this is what the doctors tell me--the

doctors, my child, who have been searching my Apparatus through and

through for thirty years past with little pills, and have not found

out where my wheels are clogged yet. Think of that, Amelia--think of

Mr. Phippen's clogged Apparatus--and say 'No, thank you,' next time.

Miss Sturch, I beg a thousand pardons for intruding on your province;

but my interest in that sweet child--Chennery, you dear, good soul,

what were we talking about? Ah! the bride--the interesting bride! And

so she is one of the Cornish Trevertons? I knew something of Andrew

years ago. He was a bachelor, like myself, Miss Sturch. His Apparatus

was out of order, like mine, dear Amelia. Not at all like his brother,

the Captain, I should suppose? And so she is married? A charming girl,

I have no doubt. A charming girl!"

"No better, truer, prettier girl in the world," said the vicar.

"A very lively, energetic person," remarked Miss Sturch.

"How I shall miss her!" cried Miss Louisa. "Nobody else amused me as

Rosamond did, when I was laid up with that last bad cold of mine."

"She used to give us such nice little early supper-parties," said Miss

Amelia.

"She was the only girl I ever saw who was fit to play with boys," said

Master Robert. "She could catch a ball, Mr. Phippen, Sir, with one

hand, and go down a slide with both her legs together."

"Bless me!" said Mr. Phippen. "What an extraordinary wife for a blind

man! You said he was blind from his birth, my dear doctor, did you

not? Let me see, what was his name? You will not bear too hardly on my

loss of memory, Miss Sturch? When indigestion has done with the body,

it begins to prey on the mind. Mr. Frank Something, was it not?"

"No, no--Frankland," answered the vicar, "Leonard Frankland. And not

blind from his birth by any means. It is not much more than a year ago

since he could see almost as well as any of us."

"An accident, I suppose!" said Mr. Phippen. "You will excuse me if I

take the arm-chair?--a partially reclining posture is of great

assistance to me after meals. So an accident happened to his eyes? Ah,

what a delightfully easy chair to sit in!"

"Scarcely an accident," said Doctor Chennery. "Leonard Frankland was a

difficult child to bring up: great constitutional weakness, you know,

at first. He seemed to get over that with time, and grew into a quiet,

sedate, orderly sort of boy--as unlike my son there as possible--very

amiable, and what you call easy to deal with. Well, he had a turn for

mechanics (I am telling you all this to make you understand about his

blindness), and, after veering from one occupation of that sort to

another, he took at last to watch-making. Curious amusement for a boy;

but any thing that required delicacy of touch, and plenty of patience

and perseverance, was just the thing to amuse and occupy Leonard. I

always said to his father and mother, 'Get him off that stool, break

his magnifying-glasses, send him to me, and I'll give him a back at

leap-frog, and teach him the use of a bat.' But it was no use. His

parents knew best, I suppose, and they said he must be humored. Well,

things went on smoothly enough for some time, till he got another

long illness--as I believe, from not taking exercise enough. As soon

as he began to get round, back he went to his old watch-making

occupations again. But the bad end of it all was coming. About the

last work he did, poor fellow, was the repairing of my watch--here it

is; goes as regular as a steam-engine. I hadn't got it back into my

fob very long before I heard that he was getting a bad pain at the

back of his head, and that he saw all sorts of moving spots before his

eyes. 'String him up with lots of port wine, and give him three hours

a day on the back of a quiet pony'--that was my advice. Instead of

taking it, they sent for doctors from London, and blistered him behind

the ears and between the shoulders, and drenched the lad with mercury,

and moped him up in a dark room. No use. The sight got worse and

worse, flickered and flickered, and went out at last like the flame of

a candle. His mother died--luckily for her, poor soul--before that

happened. His father was half out of his mind: took him to oculists in

London and oculists in Paris. All they did was to call the blindness

by a long Latin name, and to say that it was hopeless and useless to

try an operation. Some of them said it was the result of the long

weaknesses from which he had twice suffered after illness. Some said

it was an apoplectic effusion in his brain. All of them shook their

heads when they heard of the watch-making. So they brought him back

home, blind; blind he is now; and blind he will remain, poor dear

fellow, for the rest of his life."

"You shock me; my dear Chennery, you shock me dreadfully," said Mr.

Phippen. "Especially when you state that theory about long weakness

after illness. Good Heavens! Why, _I_ have had long weaknesses--I have

got them now. Spots did he see before his eyes? I see spots, black

spots, dancing black spots, dancing black bilious spots. Upon my word

of honor, Chennery, this comes home to me--my sympathies are painfully

acute--I feel this blind story in every nerve of my body; I do,

indeed!"

"You would hardly know that Leonard was blind, to look at him," said

Miss Louisa, striking into the conversation with a view to restoring

Mr. Phippen's equanimity. "Except that his eyes look quieter than

other people's, there seems no difference in them now. Who was that

famous character you told us about, Miss Sturch, who was blind, and

didn't show it any more than Leonard Frankland?"

"Milton, my love. I begged you to remember that he was the most famous

of British epic poets," answered Miss Sturch with suavity. "He

poetically describes his blindness as being caused by 'so thick a drop

serene.' You shall read about it, Louisa. After we have had a little

French, we will have a little Milton, this morning. Hush, love, your

papa is speaking."

"Poor young Frankland!" said the vicar, warmly. "That good, tender,

noble creature I married him to this morning seems sent as a

consolation to him in his affliction. If any human being can make him

happy for the rest of his life, Rosamond Treverton is the girl to do

it."

"She has made a sacrifice," said Mr. Phippen; "but I like her for

that, having made a sacrifice myself in remaining single. It seems

indispensable, indeed, on the score of humanity, that I should do so.

How could I conscientiously inflict such a digestion as mine on a

member of the fairer portion of creation? No; I am a sacrifice in my

own proper person, and I have a fellow-feeling for others who are like

me. Did she cry much, Chennery, when you were marrying her?"

"Cry!" exclaimed the vicar, contemptuously. "Rosamond Treverton is not

one of the puling, sentimental sort, I can tell you. A fine, buxom,

warm-hearted, quick-tempered girl, who looks what she means when she

tells a man she is going to marry him. And, mind you, she has been

tried. If she hadn't loved him with all her heart and soul, she might

have been free months ago to marry any body she pleased. They were

engaged long before this cruel affliction befell young Frankland--the

fathers, on both sides, having lived as near neighbors in these parts

for years. Well, when the blindness came, Leonard at once offered to

release Rosamond from her engagement. You should have read the letter

she wrote to him, Phippen, upon that. I don't mind confessing that I

blubbered like a baby over it when they showed it to me. I should have

married them at once the instant I read it, but old Frankland was a

fidgety, punctilious kind of man, and he insisted on a six months'

probation, so that she might be certain of knowing her own mind. He

died before the term was out, and that caused the marriage to be put

off again. But no delays could alter Rosamond--six years, instead of

six months, would not have changed her. There she was this morning as

fond of that poor, patient blind fellow as she was the first day they

were engaged. 'You shall never know a sad moment, Lenny, if I can help

it, as long as you live'--these were the first words she said to him

when we all came out of church. 'I hear you, Rosamond,' said I. 'And

you shall judge me, too, Doctor,' says she, quick as lightning. 'We

will come back to Long Beckley, and you shall ask Lenny if I have not

kept my word.' With that she gave me a kiss that you might have heard

down here at the vicarage, bless her heart! We'll drink her health

after dinner, Miss Sturch--we'll drink both their healths, Phippen, in

a bottle of the best wine I have in my cellar."

"In a glass of toast-and-water, so far as I am concerned, if you will

allow me," said Mr. Phippen, mournfully. "But, my dear Chennery, when

you were talking of the fathers of these two interesting young people,

you spoke of their living as near neighbors here, at Long Beckley. My

memory is impaired, as I am painfully aware; but I thought Captain

Treverton was the eldest of the two brothers, and that he always

lived, when he was on shore, at the family place in Cornwall?"

"So he did," returned the vicar, "in his wife's lifetime. But since

her death, which happened as long ago as the year 'twenty-nine--let me

see, we are now in the year 'forty-four--and that makes--"

The vicar stopped for an instant to calculate, and looked at Miss

Sturch.

"Fifteen years ago, Sir," said Miss Sturch, offering the accommodation

of a little simple subtraction to the vicar, with her blandest smile.

"Of course," continued Doctor Chennery. "Well, since Mrs. Treverton

died, fifteen years ago, Captain Treverton has never been near

Porthgenna Tower. And, what is more, Phippen, at the first opportunity

he could get, he sold the place--sold it, out and out, mine,

fisheries, and all--for forty thousand pounds."

"You don't say so!" exclaimed Mr. Phippen. "Did he find the air

unhealthy? I should think the local produce, in the way of food, must

be coarse now, in those barbarous regions? Who bought the place?"

"Leonard Frankland's father," said the vicar. "It is rather a long

story, that sale of Porthgenna Tower, with some curious circumstances

involved in it. Suppose we take a turn in the garden, Phippen? I'll

tell you all about it over my morning cigar. Miss Sturch, if you want

me, I shall be on the lawn somewhere. Girls! mind you know your

lessons. Bob! remember that I've got a cane in the hall, and a

birch-rod in my dressing-room. Come, Phippen, rouse up out of that

arm-chair. You won't say No to a turn in the garden?"

"My dear fellow, I will say Yes--if you will kindly lend me an

umbrella, and allow me to carry my camp-stool in my hand," said Mr.

Phippen. "I am too weak to encounter the sun, and I can't go far

without sitting down.--The moment I feel fatigued, Miss Sturch, I open

my camp-stool, and sit down any where, without the slightest regard

for appearances.--I am ready, Chennery, whenever you are--equally

ready, my good friend, for the garden and the story about the sale of

Porthgenna Tower. You said it was a curious story, did you not?"

"I said there was some curious circumstances connected with it,"

replied the vicar. "And when you hear about them, I think you will say

so too. Come along! you will find your camp-stool, and a choice of all

the umbrellas in the house, in the hall."

With those words, Doctor Chennery opened his cigar-case, and led the

way out of the breakfast-parlor.

CHAPTER II.

THE SALE OF PORTHGENNA TOWER.

"How charming! how pastoral! how exquisitely soothing!" said Mr.

Phippen, sentimentally surveying the lawn at the back of the

vicarage-house, under the shadow of the lightest umbrella he could

pick out of the hall. "Three years have passed, Chennery, since I last

stood on this lawn. There is the window of your old study, where I had

my attack of heart-burn last time--in the strawberry season; don't

you remember? Ah! and there is the school-room! Shall I ever forget

dear Miss Sturch coming to me out of that room--a ministering angel

with soda and ginger--so comforting, so sweetly anxious about stirring

it up, so unaffectedly grieved that there was no sal-volatile in the

house! I do so enjoy these pleasant recollections, Chennery; they are

as great a luxury to me as your cigar is to you. Could you walk on the

other side, my dear fellow? I like the smell, but the smoke is a

little too much for me. Thank you. And now about the story? What was

the name of the old place--I am so interested in it--it began with a

P, surely?"

"Porthgenna Tower," said the vicar.

"Exactly," rejoined Mr. Phippen, shifting the umbrella tenderly from

one shoulder to the other. "And what in the world made Captain

Treverton sell Porthgenna Tower?"

"I believe the reason was that he could not endure the place after the

death of his wife," answered Doctor Chennery. "The estate, you know,

has never been entailed; so the Captain had no difficulty in parting

with it, except, of course, the difficulty of finding a purchaser."

"Why not his brother?" asked Mr. Phippen. "Why not our eccentric

friend, Andrew Treverton?"

"Don't call him my friend," said the vicar. "A mean, groveling,

cynical, selfish old wretch! It's no use shaking your head, Phippen,

and trying to look shocked. I know Andrew Treverton's early history as

well as you do. I know that he was treated with the basest ingratitude

by a college friend, who took all he had to give, and swindled him at

last in the grossest manner. I know all about that. But one instance

of ingratitude does not justify a man in shutting himself up from

society, and railing against all mankind as a disgrace to the earth

they walk on. I myself have heard the old brute say that the greatest

benefactor to our generation would be a second Herod, who could

prevent another generation from succeeding it. Ought a man who can

talk in that way to be the friend of any human being with the

slightest respect for his species or himself?"

"My friend!" said Mr. Phippen, catching the vicar by the arm, and

mysteriously lowering his voice--"My dear and reverend friend! I

admire your honest indignation against the utterer of that exceedingly

misanthropical sentiment; but--I confide this to you, Chennery, in

the strictest secrecy--there are moments--morning moments

generally--when my digestion is in such a state that I have actually

agreed with that annihilating person, Andrew Treverton! I have woke up

with my tongue like a cinder--I have crawled to the glass and looked

at it--and I have said to myself, 'Let there be an end of the human

race rather than a continuance of this!'"

"Pooh! pooh!" cried the vicar, receiving Mr. Phippen's confession with

a burst of irreverent laughter. "Take a glass of cool small beer next

time your tongue is in that state, and you will pray for a continuance

of the brewing part of the human race, at any rate. But let us go back

to Porthgenna Tower, or I shall never get on with my story. When

Captain Treverton had once made up his mind to sell the place, I have

no doubt that, under ordinary circumstances, he would have thought of

offering it to his brother, with a view, of course, to keeping the

estate in the family. Andrew was rich enough to have bought it; for,

though he got nothing at his father's death but the old gentleman's

rare collection of books, he inherited his mother's fortune, as the

second son. However, as things were at that time (and are still, I am

sorry to say), the Captain could make no personal offers of any kind

to Andrew; for the two were not then, and are not now, on speaking, or

even on writing terms. It is a shocking thing to say, but the worst

quarrel of the kind I ever heard of is the quarrel between those two

brothers."

"Pardon me, my dear friend," said Mr. Phippen, opening his camp-stool,

which had hitherto dangled by its silken tassel from the hooked handle

of the umbrella. "May I sit down before you go any further? I am

getting a little excited about this part of the story, and I dare not

fatigue myself. Pray go on. I don't think the legs of my camp-stool

will make holes in the lawn. I am so light--a mere skeleton, in fact.

Do go on!"

"You must have heard," pursued the vicar, "that Captain Treverton,

when he was advanced in life, married an actress--rather a violent

temper, I believe; but a person of spotless character, and as fond of

her husband as a woman could be; therefore, according to my view of

it, a very good wife for him to marry. However, the Captain's friends,

of course, made the usual senseless outcry, and the Captain's

brother, as the only near relation, took it on himself to attempt

breaking off the marriage in the most offensively indelicate way.

Failing in that, and hating the poor woman like poison, he left his

brother's house, saying, among many other savage speeches, one

infamous thing about the bride, which--which, upon my honor, Phippen,

I am ashamed to repeat. Whatever the words were, they were unluckily

carried to Mrs. Treverton's ears, and they were of the kind that no

woman--let alone a quick-tempered woman like the Captain's wife--ever

forgives. An interview followed between the two brothers--and it led,

as you may easily imagine, to very unhappy results. They parted in the

most deplorable manner. The Captain declared, in the heat of his

passion, that Andrew had never had one generous impulse in his heart

since he was born, and that he would die without one kind feeling

toward any living soul in the world. Andrew replied that, if he had no

heart, he had a memory, and that he should remember those farewell

words as long as he lived. So they separated. Twice afterward the

Captain made overtures of reconciliation. The first time when his

daughter Rosamond was born; the second time when Mrs. Treverton died.

On each occasion the elder brother wrote to say that, if the younger

would retract the atrocious words he had spoken against his

sister-in-law, every atonement should be offered to him for the harsh

language which the Captain had used, in the hastiness of anger, when

they last met. No answer was received from Andrew to either letter;

and the estrangement between the two brothers has continued to the

present time. You understand now why Captain Treverton could not

privately consult Andrew's inclinations before he publicly announced

his intention of parting with Porthgenna Tower."

Although Mr. Phippen declared, in answer to this appeal, that he

understood perfectly, and although he begged with the utmost

politeness that the vicar would go on, his attention seemed, for the

moment, to be entirely absorbed in inspecting the legs of his

camp-stool, and in ascertaining what impression they made on the

vicarage lawn. Doctor Chennery's own interest, however, in the

circumstances that he was relating, seemed sufficiently strong to make

up for any transient lapse of attention on the part of his guest.

After a few vigorous puffs at his cigar (which had been several times

in imminent danger of going out while he was speaking), he went on

with his narrative in these words:

"Well, the house, the estate, the mine, and the fisheries of

Porthgenna were all publicly put up for sale a few months after Mrs.

Treverton's death; but no offers were made for the property which it

was possible to accept. The ruinous state of the house, the bad

cultivation of the land, legal difficulties in connection with the

mine, and quarter-day difficulties in the collection of the rents, all

contributed to make Porthgenna what the auctioneers would call a bad

lot to dispose of. Failing to sell the place, Captain Treverton could

not be prevailed on to change his mind and live there again. The death

of his wife almost broke his heart--for he was, by all accounts, just

as fond of her as she had been of him--and the very sight of the place

that was associated with the greatest affliction of his life became

hateful to him. He removed, with his little girl and a relative of

Mrs. Treverton, who was her governess, to our neighborhood, and rented

a pretty little cottage across the church fields. The house nearest to

it was inhabited at that time by Leonard Frankland's father and

mother. The new neighbors soon became intimate; and thus it happened

that the couple whom I have been marrying this morning were brought up

together as children, and fell in love with each other almost before

they were out of their pinafores."

"Chennery, my dear fellow, I don't look as if I was sitting all on one

side, do I?" cried Mr. Phippen, suddenly breaking into the vicar's

narrative, with a look of alarm. "I am shocked to interrupt you; but

surely your grass is amazingly soft in this part of the country. One

of my camp-stool legs is getting shorter and shorter every moment. I'm

drilling a hole! I'm toppling over! Gracious Heavens! I feel myself

going--I shall be down, Chennery; upon my life, I shall be down!"

"Stuff!" cried the vicar, pulling up first Mr. Phippen, and then Mr.

Phippen's camp-stool, which had rooted itself in the grass, all on one

side. "Here, come on to the gravel walk; you can't drill holes in

that. What's the matter now?"

"Palpitations," said Mr. Phippen, dropping his umbrella, and placing

his hand over his heart, "and bile. I see those black spots

again--those infernal, lively black spots dancing before my eyes.

Chennery, suppose you consult some agricultural friend about the

quality of your grass. Take my word for it, your lawn is softer than

it ought to be.--Lawn!" repeated Mr. Phippen to himself,

contemptuously, as he turned round to pick up his umbrella. "It isn't

a lawn--it is a bog!"

"There, sit down," said the vicar, "and don't pay the palpitations and

the black spots the compliment of bestowing the smallest attention on

them. Do you want any thing to drink? Shall it be physic, or beer, or

what?"

"No, no! I am so unwilling to give trouble," answered Mr. Phippen. "I

would rather suffer--rather, a great deal. I think if you would go on

with your story, Chennery, it would compose me. I have not the

faintest idea of what led to it, but I think you were saying something

interesting on the subject of pinafores!"

"Nonsense!" said Doctor Chennery. "I was only telling you of the

fondness between the two children who have now grown up to be man and

wife. And I was going on to tell you that Captain Treverton, shortly

after he settled in our neighborhood, took to the active practice of

his profession again. Nothing else seemed to fill up the gap that the

loss of Mrs. Treverton had made in his life. Having good interest with

the Admiralty, he can always get a ship when he applies for one; and

up to the present time, with intervals on shore, he has resolutely

stuck to the sea--though he is getting, as his daughter and his

friends think, rather too old for it now. Don't look puzzled, Phippen;

I am not going so wide of the mark as you think. These are some of the

necessary particulars that must be stated first. And now they are

comfortably disposed of, I can get round at last to the main part of

my story--the sale of Porthgenna Tower.--What is it now? Do you want

to get up again?"

Yes, Mr. Phippen did want to get up again, for the purpose of

composing the palpitations and dispersing the black spots, by trying

the experiment of a little gentle exercise. He was most unwilling to

occasion any trouble, but would his worthy friend Chennery give him an

arm, and carry the camp-stool, and walk slowly in the direction of the

school-room window, so as to keep Miss Sturch within easy hailing

distance, in case it became necessary to try the last resource of

taking a composing draught? The vicar, whose inexhaustible good nature

was proof against every trial that Mr. Phippen's dyspeptic infirmities

could inflict on it, complied with all these requests, and went on

with his story, unconsciously adopting the tone and manner of a

good-humored parent who was doing his best to soothe the temper of a

fretful child.

"I told you," he said, "that the elder Mr. Frankland and Captain

Treverton were near neighbors here. They had not been long acquainted

before the one found out from the other that Porthgenna Tower was for

sale. On first hearing this, old Frankland asked a few questions about

the place, but said not a word on the subject of purchasing it. Soon

after that the Captain got a ship and went to sea. During his absence

old Frankland privately set off for Cornwall to look at the estate,

and to find out all he could about its advantages and defects from the

persons left in charge of the house and lands. He said nothing when he

came back, until Captain Treverton returned from his first cruise; and

then the old gentleman spoke out one morning, in his quiet, decided

way.

"'Treverton,' said he, 'if you will sell Porthgenna Tower at the price

at which you bought it in, when you tried to dispose of it by auction,

write to your lawyer, and tell him to take the title-deeds to mine,

and ask for the purchase-money.'

"Captain Treverton was naturally a little astonished at the readiness

of this offer; but people like myself, who knew old Frankland's

history, were not so surprised. His fortune had been made by trade,

and he was foolish enough to be always a little ashamed of

acknowledging that one simple and creditable fact. The truth was, that

his ancestors had been landed gentry of importance before the time of

the Civil War, and the old gentleman's great ambition was to sink the

merchant in the landed grandee, and to leave his son to succeed him in

the character of a squire of large estate and great county influence.

He was willing to devote half his fortune to accomplish this scheme;

but half his fortune would not buy him such an estate as he wanted, in

an important agricultural county like ours. Rents are high, and land

is made the most of with us. An estate as extensive as the estate at

Porthgenna would fetch more than double the money which Captain

Treverton could venture to ask for it, if it was situated in these

parts. Old Frankland was well aware of that fact, and attached all

possible importance to it. Besides, there was something in the feudal

look of Porthgenna Tower, and in the right over the mine and

fisheries, which the purchase of the estate included, that flattered

his notions of restoring the family greatness. Here he and his son

after him could lord it, as he thought, on a large scale, and direct

at their sovereign will and pleasure the industry of hundreds of poor

people, scattered along the coast, or huddled together in the little

villages inland. This was a tempting prospect, and it could be secured

for forty thousand pounds--which was just ten thousand pounds less

than he had made up his mind to give, when he first determined to

metamorphose himself from a plain merchant into a magnificent landed

gentleman. People who knew these facts were, as I have said, not much

surprised at Mr. Frankland's readiness to purchase Porthgenna Tower;

and Captain Treverton, it is hardly necessary to say, was not long in

clinching the bargain on his side. The estate changed hands; and away

went old Frankland, with a tail of wiseacres from London at his heels,

to work the mine and the fisheries on new scientific principles, and

to beautify the old house from top to bottom with bran-new mediæval

decorations under the direction of a gentleman who was said to be an

architect, but who looked, to my mind, the very image of a Popish

priest in disguise. Wonderful plans and projects were they not? And

how do you think they succeeded?"

"Do tell me, my dear fellow!" was the answer that fell from Mr.

Phippen's lips.--"I wonder whether Miss Sturch keeps a bottle of

camphor julep in the family medicine-chest?" was the thought that

passed through Mr. Phippen's mind.

"Tell you!" exclaimed the vicar. "Why, of course, every one of his

plans turned out a complete failure. His Cornish tenantry received him

as an interloper. The antiquity of his family made no impression upon

them. It might be an old family, but it was not a Cornish family, and,

therefore, it was of no importance in their eyes. They would have gone

to the world's end for the Trevertons; but not a man would move a

step out of his way for the Franklands. As for the mine, it seemed to

be inspired with the same mutinous spirit that possessed the tenantry.

The wiseacres from London blasted in all directions on the profoundest

scientific principles, and brought about sixpennyworth of ore to the

surface for every five pounds spent in getting it up. The fisheries

turned out little better. A new plan for curing pilchards, which was a

marvel of economy in theory, proved to be a perfect phenomenon of

extravagance in practice. The only item of luck in old Frankland's

large sum of misfortunes was produced by his quarreling in good time

with the mediæval architect, who was like a Popish priest in disguise.

This fortunate event saved the new owner of Porthgenna all the money

he might otherwise have spent in restoring and redecorating the whole

suite of rooms on the north side of the house, which had been left to

go to rack and ruin for more than fifty years past, and which remain

in their old neglected condition to this day. To make a long story

short, after uselessly spending more thousands of pounds at Porthgenna

than I should like to reckon up, old Frankland gave in at last, left

the place in disgust to the care of his steward, who was charged never

to lay out another farthing on it, and returned to this neighborhood.

Being in high dudgeon, and happening to catch Captain Treverton on

shore when he got back, the first thing he did was to abuse Porthgenna

and all the people about it a little too vehemently in the Captain's

presence. This led to a coolness between the two neighbors, which

might have ended in the breaking off of all intercourse, but for the

children on either side, who would see each other just as often as

ever, and who ended, by dint of willful persistency, in putting an end

to the estrangement between the fathers by making it look simply

ridiculous. Here, in my opinion, lies the most curious part of the

story. Important family interests depended on those two young people

falling in love with each other; and, wonderful to relate, that (as

you know, after my confession at breakfast-time) was exactly what they

did. Here is a case of the most romantic love-match, which is also the

marriage, of all others, that the parents on both sides had the

strongest worldly interest in promoting. Shakspeare may say what he

pleases, the course of true love does run smooth sometimes. Never was

the marriage service performed to better purpose than when I read it

this morning. The estate being entailed on Leonard, Captain

Treverton's daughter now goes back, in the capacity of mistress, to

the house and lands which her father sold. Rosamond being an only

child, the purchase-money of Porthgenna, which old Frankland once

lamented as money thrown away, will now, when the Captain dies, be the

marriage-portion of young Frankland's wife. I don't know what you

think of the beginning and middle of my story, Phippen, but the end

ought to satisfy you, at any rate. Did you ever hear of a bride and

bridegroom who started with fairer prospects in life than our bride

and bridegroom of to-day?"

Before Mr. Phippen could make any reply, Miss Sturch put her head out

of the school-room window; and seeing the two gentlemen approaching,

beamed on them with her invariable smile. Then addressing the vicar,

said in her softest tones:

"I regret extremely to trouble you, Sir, but I find Robert very

intractable this morning with his Multiplication Table."

"Where does he stick now?" asked Doctor Chennery.

"At seven times eight, Sir," replied Miss Sturch.

"Bob!" shouted the vicar through the window. "Seven times eight?"

"Forty-three," answered the whimpering voice of the invisible Bob.

"You shall have one more chance before I get my cane," said Doctor

Chennery. "Now, then, look out! Seven times--"

"My dear, good friend," interposed Mr. Phippen, "if you cane that very

unhappy boy he will scream. My nerves have been tried once this

morning by the camp-stool. I shall be totally shattered if I hear

screams. Give me time to get out of the way, and allow me also to

spare dear Miss Sturch the sad spectacle of correction (so shocking to

sensibilities like hers) by asking her for a little camphor julep, and

so giving her an excuse for getting out of the way like me. I think I

could have done without the camphor julep under any other

circumstances; but I ask for it unhesitatingly now, as much for Miss

Sturch's sake as for the sake of my own poor nerves.--Have you got

camphor julep, Miss Sturch? Say yes, I beg and entreat, and give me an

opportunity of escorting you out of the way of the screams."

While Miss Sturch--whose well-trained sensibilities were proof against

the longest paternal caning and the loudest filial acknowledgment of

it in the way of screams--tripped up stairs to fetch the camphor

julep, as smiling and self-possessed as ever, Master Bob, finding

himself left alone with his sisters in the school-room, sidled up to

the youngest of the two, produced from the pocket of his trowsers

three frowsy acidulated drops looking very much the worse for wear,

and, attacking Miss Amelia on the weak, or greedy side of her

character, artfully offered the drops in exchange for information on

the subject of seven times eight. "You like 'em?" whispered Bob. "Oh,

don't I!" answered Amelia. "Seven times eight?" asked Bob.

"Fifty-six," answered Amelia. "Sure?" said Bob. "Certain," said

Amelia. The drops changed hands, and the catastrophe of the domestic

drama changed with them. Just as Miss Sturch appeared with the camphor

julep at the garden door, in the character of medical Hebe to Mr.

Phippen, her intractable pupil showed himself to his father at the

school-room window, in the character, arithmetically speaking, of a

reformed son. The cane reposed for the day; and Mr. Phippen drank his

glass of camphor julep with a mind at ease on the twin subjects of

Miss Sturch's sensibilities and Master Bob's screams.

"Most gratifying in every way," said the Martyr to Dyspepsia, smacking

his lips with great relish, as he drained the last drops out of the

glass. "My nerves are spared, Miss Sturch's feelings are spared, and

the dear boy's back is spared. You have no idea how relieved I feel,

Chennery. Whereabouts were we in that delightful story of yours when

this little domestic interruption occurred?"

"At the end of it, to be sure," said the vicar. "The bride and

bridegroom are some miles on their way by this time to spend the

honey-moon at St. Swithin's-on-Sea. Captain Treverton is only left

behind for a day. He received his sailing orders on Monday, and he

will be off to Portsmouth to-morrow morning to take command of his

ship. Though he won't admit it in plain words, I happen to know that

Rosamond has persuaded him to make this his last cruise. She has a

plan for getting him back to Porthgenna, to live there with her

husband, which I hope and believe will succeed. The west rooms at the

old house, in one of which Mrs. Treverton died, are not to be used at

all by the young married couple. They have engaged a builder--a

sensible, practical man, this time--to survey the neglected north

rooms, with a view to their redecoration and thorough repair in every

way. This part of the house can not possibly be associated with any

melancholy recollections in Captain Treverton's mind, for neither he

nor any one else ever entered it during the period of his residence at

Porthgenna. Considering the change in the look of the place which this

project of repairing the north rooms is sure to produce, and taking

into account also the softening effect of time on all painful

recollections, I should say there was a fair prospect of Captain

Treverton's returning to pass the end of his days among his old

tenantry. It will be a great chance for Leonard Frankland if he does,

for he would be sure to dispose the people at Porthgenna kindly toward

their new master. Introduced among his Cornish tenants under Captain

Treverton's wing, Leonard is sure to get on well with them, provided

he abstains from showing too much of the family pride which he has

inherited from his father. He is a little given to overrate the

advantages of birth and the importance of rank--but that is really the

only noticeable defect in his character. In all other respects I can

honestly say of him that he deserves what he has got--the best wife in

the world. What a life of happiness, Phippen, seems to be awaiting

these lucky young people! It is a bold thing to say of any mortal

creatures, but, look as far as I may, not a cloud can I see any where

on their future prospects."

"You excellent creature!" exclaimed Mr. Phippen, affectionately

squeezing the vicar's hand. "How I enjoy hearing you! how I luxuriate

in your bright view of life!"

"And is it not the true view--especially in the case of young

Frankland and his wife?" inquired the vicar.

"If you ask me," said Mr. Phippen, with a mournful smile, and a

philosophic calmness of manner, "I can only answer that the direction

of a man's speculative views depends--not to mince the matter--on the

state of his secretions. Your biliary secretions, dear friend, are all

right, and you take bright views. My biliary secretions are all wrong,

and I take dark views. You look at the future prospects of this young

married couple, and say there is no cloud over them. I don't dispute

the assertion, not having the pleasure of knowing either bride or

bridegroom. But I look up at the sky over our heads--I remember that

there was not a cloud on it when we first entered the garden--I now

see, just over those two trees growing so close together, a cloud that

has appeared unexpectedly from nobody knows where--and I draw my own

conclusions. Such," said Mr. Phippen, ascending the garden steps on

his way into the house, "is my philosophy. It may be tinged with bile,

but it is philosophy for all that."

"All the philosophy in the world," said the vicar, following his guest

up the steps, "will not shake my conviction that Leonard Frankland and

his wife have a happy future before them."

Mr. Phippen laughed, and, waiting on the steps till his host joined

him, took Doctor Chennery's arm in the friendliest manner.

"You have told a charming story, Chennery," he said, "and you have

ended it with a charming sentiment. But, my dear friend, though your

healthy mind (influenced by an enviably easy digestion) despises my

bilious philosophy, don't quite forget the cloud over the two trees.

Look up at it now--it is getting darker and bigger already."

CHAPTER III.

THE BRIDE AND BRIDEGROOM.

Under the roof of a widowed mother, Miss Mowlem lived humbly at St.

Swithin's-on-Sea. In the spring of the year eighteen hundred and

forty-four, the heart of Miss Mowlem's widowed mother was gladdened by

a small legacy. Turning over in her mind the various uses to which the

money might be put, the discreet old lady finally decided on investing

it in furniture, on fitting up the first floor and the second floor of

her house in the best taste, and on hanging a card in the parlor

window to inform the public that she had furnished apartments to let.

By the summer the apartments were ready, and the card was put up. It

had hardly been exhibited a week before a dignified personage in black

applied to look at the rooms, expressed himself as satisfied with

their appearance, and engaged them for a month certain, for a newly

married lady and gentleman, who might be expected to take possession

in a few days. The dignified personage in black was Captain

Treverton's servant, and the lady and gentleman, who arrived in due

time to take possession, were Mr. and Mrs. Frankland.

The natural interest which Mrs. Mowlem felt in her youthful first

lodgers was necessarily vivid in its nature; but it was apathy itself

compared to the sentimental interest which her daughter took in

observing the manners and customs of the lady and gentleman in their

capacity of bride and bridegroom. From the moment when Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland entered the house, Miss Mowlem began to study them with all

the ardor of an industrious scholar who attacks a new branch of

knowledge. At every spare moment of the day, this industrious young

lady occupied herself in stealing up stairs to collect observations,

and in running down stairs to communicate them to her mother. By the

time the married couple had been in the house a week, Miss Mowlem had

made such good use of her eyes, ears, and opportunities that she could

have written a seven days' diary of the lives of Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland with the truth and minuteness of Mr. Samuel Pepys himself.

But, learn as much as we may, the longer we live the more information

there is to acquire. Seven days' patient accumulation of facts in

connection with the honey-moon had not placed Miss Mowlem beyond the

reach of further discoveries. On the morning of the eighth day, after

bringing down the breakfast tray, this observant spinster stole up

stairs again, according to custom, to drink at the spring of knowledge

through the key-hole channel of the drawing-room door. After an

absence of five minutes she descended to the kitchen, breathless with

excitement, to announce a fresh discovery in connection with Mr. and

Mrs. Frankland to her venerable mother.

"Whatever do you think she's doing now?" cried Miss Mowlem, with

widely opened eyes and highly elevated hands.

"Nothing that's useful," answered Mrs. Mowlem, with sarcastic

readiness.

"She's actually sitting on his knee! Mother, did you ever sit on

father's knee when you were married?"

"Certainly not, my dear. When me and your poor father married, we were

neither of us flighty young people, and we knew better."

"She's got her head on his shoulder," proceeded Miss Mowlem, more and

more agitatedly, "and her arms round his neck--both her arms, mother,

as tight as can be."

"I won't believe it," exclaimed Mrs. Mowlem, indignantly. "A lady like

her, with riches, and accomplishments, and all that, demean herself

like a housemaid with a sweetheart. Don't tell me, I won't believe

it!"

It was true though, for all that. There were plenty of chairs in Mrs.

Mowlem's drawing-room; there were three beautifully bound books on

Mrs. Mowlem's Pembroke table (the Antiquities of St. Swithin's,

Smallridge's Sermons, and Klopstock's Messiah in English prose)--Mrs.

Frankland might have sat on purple morocco leather, stuffed with the

best horse-hair, might have informed and soothed her mind with

archæological diversions, with orthodox native theology, and with

devotional poetry of foreign origin--and yet, so frivolous is the

nature of woman, she was perverse enough to prefer doing nothing, and

perching herself uncomfortably on her husband's knee!

She sat for some time in the undignified position which Miss Mowlem

had described with such graphic correctness to her mother--then drew

back a little, raised her head, and looked earnestly into the quiet,

meditative face of the blind man.

"Lenny, you are very silent this morning," she said. "What are you

thinking about? If you will tell me all your thoughts, I will tell you

all mine."

"Would you really care to hear all my thoughts?" asked Leonard.

"Yes; all. I shall be jealous of any thoughts that you keep to

yourself. Tell me what you were thinking of just now! Me?"

"Not exactly of you."

"More shame for you. Are you tired of me in eight days? I have not

thought of any body but you ever since we have been here. Ah! you

laugh. Oh, Lenny, I do love you so; how can I think of any body but

you? No! I sha'n't kiss you. I want to know what you were thinking

about first."

"Of a dream, Rosamond, that I had last night. Ever since the first

days of my blindness--Why, I thought you were not going to kiss me

again till I had told you what I was thinking about!"

"I can't help kissing you, Lenny, when you talk of the loss of your

sight. Tell me, my poor love, do I help to make up for that loss? Are

you happier than you used to be? and have I some share in making that

happiness, though it is ever so little?"

She turned her head away as she spoke, but Leonard was too quick for

her. His inquiring fingers touched her cheek. "Rosamond, you are

crying," he said.

"I crying!" she answered, with a sudden assumption of gayety. "No,"

she continued, after a moment's pause. "I will never deceive you,

love, even in the veriest trifle. My eyes serve for both of us now,

don't they? you depend on me for all that your touch fails to tell

you, and I must never be unworthy of my trust--must I? I did cry,

Lenny--but only a very little. I don't know how it was, but I never,

in all my life, seemed to pity you and feel for you as I did just at

that moment. Never mind, I've done now. Go on--do go on with what you

were going to say."

"I was going to say, Rosamond, that I have observed one curious thing

about myself since I lost my sight. I dream a great deal, but I never

dream of myself as a blind man. I often visit in my dreams places that

I saw and people whom I knew when I had my sight, and though I feel as

much myself, at those visionary times, as I am now when I am

wide-awake, I never by any chance feel blind. I wander about all sorts

of old walks in my sleep, and never grope my way. I talk to all sorts

of old friends in my sleep, and see the expression in their faces

which, waking, I shall never see again. I have lost my sight more than

a year now, and yet it was like the shock of a new discovery to me to

wake up last night from my dream, and remember suddenly that I was

blind."

"What dream was it, Lenny?"

"Only a dream of the place where I first met you when we were both

children. I saw the glen, as it was years ago, with the great twisted

roots of the trees, and the blackberry bushes twining about them in a

still shadowed light that came through thick leaves from the rainy

sky. I saw the mud on the walk in the middle of the glen, with the

marks of the cows' hoofs in some places, and the sharp circles in

others where some countrywomen had been lately trudging by on pattens.

I saw the muddy water running down on either side of the path after

the shower; and I saw you, Rosamond, a naughty girl, all covered with

clay and wet--just as you were in the reality--soiling your bright

blue pelisse and your pretty little chubby hands by making a dam to

stop the running water, and laughing at the indignation of your

nurse-maid when she tried to pull you away and take you home. I saw

all that exactly as it really was in the by-gone time; but, strangely

enough, I did not see myself as the boy I then was. You were a little

girl, and the glen was in its old neglected state, and yet, though I

was all in the past so far, I was in the present as regarded myself.

Throughout the whole dream I was uneasily conscious of being a grown

man--of being, in short, exactly what I am now, excepting always that

I was not blind."

"What a memory you must have, love, to be able to recall all those

little circumstances after the years that have passed since that wet

day in the glen! How well you recollect what I was as a child! Do you

remember in the same vivid way what I looked like a year ago when you

saw me--Oh, Lenny, it almost breaks my heart to think of it!--when you

saw me for the last time?"

"Do I remember, Rosamond! My last look at your face has painted your

portrait in my memory in colors that can never change. I have many

pictures in my mind, but your picture is the clearest and brightest of

all."

"And it is the picture of me at my best--painted in my youth, dear,

when my face was always confessing how I loved you, though my lips

said nothing. There is some consolation in that thought. When years

have passed over us both, Lenny, and when time begins to set his mark

on me, you will not say to yourself, 'My Rosamond is beginning to

fade; she grows less and less like what she was when I married her.' I

shall never grow old, love, for you! The bright young picture in your

mind will still be my picture when my cheeks are wrinkled and my hair

is gray."

"Still your picture--always the same, grow as old as I may."

"But are you sure it is clear in every part? Are there no doubtful

lines, no unfinished corners any where? I have not altered yet since

you saw me--I am just what I was a year ago. Suppose I ask you what I

am like now, could you tell me without making a mistake?"

"Try me."

"May I? You shall be put through a complete catechism! I don't tire

you sitting on your knee, do I? Well, in the first place, how tall am

I when we both stand up side by side?"

"You just reach to my ear."

"Quite right, to begin with. Now for the next question. What does my

hair look like in your portrait?"

"It is dark brown--there is a great deal of it--and it grows rather

too low on your forehead for the taste of some people--"

"Never mind about 'some people;' does it grow too low for your taste?"

"Certainly not. I like it to grow low; I like all those little natural

waves that it makes against your forehead; I like it taken back, as

you wear it, in plain bands, which leave your ears and your cheeks

visible; and above all things, I like that big glossy knot that it

makes where it is all gathered up together at the back of your head."

"Oh, Lenny, how well you remember me, so far! Now go a little lower."

"A little lower is down to your eyebrows. They are very nicely shaped

eyebrows in my picture--"

"Yes, but they have a fault. Come! tell me what the fault is."

"They are not quite so strongly marked as they might be."

"Right again! And my eyes?"

"Brown eyes, large eyes, wakeful eyes, that are always looking about

them. Eyes that can be very soft at one time, and very bright at

another. Eyes tender and clear, just at the present moment, but

capable, on very slight provocation, of opening rather too widely, and

looking rather too brilliantly resolute."

"Mind you don't make them look so now! What is there below the eyes?"

"A nose that is not quite big enough to be in proper proportion with

them. A nose that has a slight tendency to be--"

"Don't say the horrid English word! Spare my feelings by putting it in

French. Say _retroussé_, and skip over my nose as fast as possible."

"I must stop at the mouth, then, and own that it is as near perfection

as possible. The lips are lovely in shape, fresh in color, and

irresistible in expression. They smile in my portrait, and I am sure

they are smiling at me now."

"How could they do otherwise when they are getting so much praise? My

vanity whispers to me that I had better stop the catechism here. If I

talk about my complexion, I shall only hear that it is of the dusky

sort; and that there is never red enough in it except when I am

walking, or confused, or angry. If I ask a question about my figure, I

shall receive the dreadful answer, 'You are dangerously inclined to be

fat.' If I say, How do I dress? I shall be told, Not soberly enough;

you are as fond as a child of gay colors--No! I will venture no more

questions. But, vanity apart, Lenny, I am so glad, so proud, so happy

to find that you can keep the image of me clearly in your mind. I

shall do my best now to look and dress like your last remembrance of

me. My love of loves! I will do you credit--I will try if I can't make

you envied for your wife. You deserve a hundred thousand kisses for

saying your catechism so well--and there they are!"

While Mrs. Frankland was conferring the reward of merit on her

husband, the sound of a faint, small, courteously significant cough

made itself timidly audible in a corner of the room. Turning round

instantly, with the quickness that characterized all her actions, Mrs.

Frankland, to her horror and indignation, confronted Miss Mowlem

standing just inside the door, with a letter in her hand and a blush

of sentimental agitation on her simpering face.

"You wretch! how dare you come in without knocking at the door?" cried

Rosamond, starting to her feet with a stamp, and passing in an instant

from the height of fondness to the height of indignation.

Miss Mowlem shook guiltily before the bright, angry eyes that looked

through and through her, turned very pale, held out the letter

apologetically, and said in her meekest tones that she was very

sorry.

"Sorry!" exclaimed Rosamond, getting even more irritated by the

apology than she had been by the intrusion, and showing it by another

stamp of the foot; "who cares whether you are sorry? I don't want your

sorrow--I won't have it. I never was so insulted in my life--never,

you mean, prying, inquisitive creature!"

"Rosamond! Rosamond! pray don't forget yourself!" interposed the quiet

voice of Mr. Frankland.

"Lenny, dear, I can't help it! That creature would drive a saint mad.

She has been prying after us ever since we have been here--you have,

you ill-bred, indelicate woman!--I suspected it before--I am certain

of it now! Must we lock our doors to keep you out?--we won't lock our

doors! Fetch the bill! We give you warning. Mr. Frankland gives you

warning--don't you, Lenny? I'll pack up all your things, dear: she

sha'n't touch one of them. Go down stairs and make out your bill, and

give your mother warning. Mr. Frankland says he won't have his rooms

burst into, and his doors listened at by inquisitive women--and I say

so too. Put that letter down on the table--unless you want to open it

and read it--put it down, you audacious woman, and fetch the bill, and

tell your mother we are going to leave the house directly!"

At this dreadful threat, Miss Mowlem, who was soft and timid, as well

as curious, by nature, wrung her hands in despair, and overflowed

meekly in a shower of tears.

"Oh! good gracious Heavens above!" cried Miss Mowlem, addressing

herself distractedly to the ceiling, "what will mother say! whatever

will become of me now! Oh, ma'am! I thought I knocked--I did, indeed!

Oh, ma'am! I humbly beg pardon, and I'll never intrude again. Oh,

ma'am! mother's a widow, and this is the first time we have let the

lodgings, and the furniture's swallowed up all our money, and oh,

ma'am! ma'am! how I shall catch it if you go!" Here words failed Miss

Mowlem, and hysterical sobs pathetically supplied their place.

"Rosamond!" said Mr. Frankland. There was an accent of sorrow in his

voice this time, as well as an accent of remonstrance. Rosamond's

quick ear caught the alteration in his tone. As she looked round at

him her color changed, her head drooped a little, and her whole

expression altered on the instant. She stole gently to her husband's

side with softened, saddened eyes, and put her lips caressingly close

to his ear.

"Lenny," she whispered, "have I made you angry with me?"

"I can't be angry with you, Rosamond," was the quiet answer. "I only

wish, love, that you could have controlled yourself a little sooner."

"I am so sorry--so very, very sorry!" The fresh, soft lips came closer

still to his ear as they whispered these penitent words; and the

cunning little hand crept up tremblingly round his neck and began to

play with his hair. "So sorry, and so ashamed of myself! But it was

enough to make almost any body angry, just at first--wasn't it, dear?

And you will forgive me--won't you, Lenny?--if I promise never to

behave so badly again? Never mind that wretched whimpering fool at the

door," said Rosamond, undergoing a slight relapse as she looked round

at Miss Mowlem, standing immovably repentant against the wall, with

her face buried in a dingy-white pocket-handkerchief. "I'll make it up

with her; I'll stop her crying; I'll take her out of the room; I'll do

any thing in the world that's kind to her, if you will only forgive

me."

"A polite word or two is all that is wanted--nothing more than a

polite word or two," said Mr. Frankland, rather coldly and

constrainedly.

"Don't cry any more, for goodness sake!" said Rosamond, walking

straight up to Miss Mowlem, and pulling the dingy-white

pocket-handkerchief away from her face without the least ceremony.

"There! leave off, will you? I am very sorry I was in a

passion--though you had no business to come in without knocking--I

never meant to distress you, and I'll never say a hard word to you

again, if you will only knock at the door for the future, and leave

off crying now. _Do_ leave off crying, you tiresome creature! We are

not going away. We don't want your mother, or the bill, or any thing.

Here! here's a present for you, if you'll leave off crying. Here's my

neck-ribbon--I saw you trying it on yesterday afternoon, when I was

lying down on the bedroom sofa, and you thought I was asleep. Never

mind; I'm not angry about that. Take the ribbon--take it as a

peace-offering, if you won't as a present. You _shall_ take it!--No,

I don't mean that--I mean, please take it! There, I've pinned it on.

And now, shake hands and be friends, and go up stairs and see how it

looks in the glass." With these words, Mrs. Frankland opened the door,

administered, under the pretense of a pat on the shoulder, a

good-humored shove to the amazed and embarrassed Miss Mowlem, closed

the door again, and resumed her place in a moment on her husband's

knee.

"I've made it up with her, dear. I've sent her away with my bright

green ribbon, and it makes her look as yellow as a guinea, and as ugly

as--" Rosamond stopped, and looked anxiously into Mr. Frankland's

face. "Lenny!" she said, sadly, putting her cheek against his, "are

you angry with me still?"

"My love, I was never angry with you. I never can be."

"I will always keep my temper down for the future, Lenny!"

"I am sure you will, Rosamond. But never mind that. I am not thinking

of your temper now."

"Of what, then?"

"Of the apology you made to Miss Mowlem."

"Did I not say enough? I'll call her back if you like--I'll make

another penitent speech--I'll do any thing but kiss her. I really

can't do that--I can't kiss any body now but you."

"My dear, dear love, how very much like a child you are still in some

of your ways! You said more than enough to Miss Mowlem--far more. And

if you will pardon me for making the remark, I think in your

generosity and good-nature you a little forgot yourself with the young

woman. I don't so much allude to your giving her the ribbon--though,

perhaps, that might have been done a little less familiarly--but, from

what I heard you say, I infer that you actually went the length of

shaking hands with her."

"Was that wrong? I thought it was the kindest way of making it up."

"My dear, it is an excellent way of making it up between equals. But

consider the difference between your station in society and Miss

Mowlem's."

"I will try and consider it, if you wish me, love. But I think I take

after my father, who never troubles his head (dear old man!) about

differences of station. I can't help liking people who are kind to

me, without thinking whether they are above my rank or below it; and

when I got cool, I must confess I felt just as vexed with myself for

frightening and distressing that unlucky Miss Mowlem as if her station

had been equal to mine. I will try to think as you do, Lenny; but I am

very much afraid that I have got, without knowing exactly how, to be

what the newspapers call a Radical."

"My dear Rosamond! don't talk of yourself in that way, even in joke.

You ought to be the last person in the world to confuse those

distinctions in rank on which the whole well-being of society

depends."

"Does it really? And yet, dear, we don't seem to have been created

with such very wide distinctions between us. We have all got the same

number of arms and legs; we are all hungry and thirsty, and hot in the

summer and cold in the winter; we all laugh when we are pleased, and

cry when we are distressed; and, surely, we have all got very much the

same feelings, whether we are high or whether we are low. I could not

have loved you better, Lenny, than I do now if I had been a duchess,

or less than I do now if I had been a servant-girl."

"My love, you are not a servant-girl. And, as to what you say about

being a duchess, let me remind you that you are not so much below a

duchess as you seem to think. Many a lady of high title can not look

back on such a line of ancestors as yours. Your father's family,

Rosamond, is one of the oldest in England: even _my_ father's family

hardly dates back so far; and we were landed gentry when many a name

in the peerage was not heard of. It is really almost laughably absurd

to hear you talking of yourself as a Radical."

"I won't talk of myself so again, Lenny--only don't look so serious. I

will be a Tory, dear, if you will give me a kiss, and let me sit on

your knee a little longer."

Mr. Frankland's gravity was not proof against his wife's change of

political principles, and the conditions which she annexed to it. His

face cleared up, and he laughed almost as gayly as Rosamond herself.

"By the bye," he said, after an interval of silence had given him time

to collect his thoughts, "did I not hear you tell Miss Mowlem to put a

letter down on the table? Is it a letter for you or for me?"

"Ah! I forgot all about the letter," said Rosamond, running to the

table. "It is for you, Lenny--and, goodness me! here's the Porthgenna

postmark on it."

"It must be from the builder whom I sent down to the old house about

the repairs. Lend me your eyes, love, and let us hear what he says."

Rosamond opened the letter, drew a stool to her husband's feet, and,

sitting down with her arms on his knees, read as follows:

"TO LEONARD FRANKLAND, ESQ.:

"SIR,--Agreeably to the instructions with which you favored

me, I have proceeded to survey Porthgenna Tower, with a

view to ascertaining what repairs the house in general, and

the north side of it in particular, may stand in need of.

"As regards the outside, a little cleaning and new pointing

is all that the building wants. The walls and foundations

seem made to last forever. Such strong, solid work I never

set eyes on before.

"Inside the house, I can not report so favorably. The rooms

in the west front, having been inhabited during the period

of Captain Treverton's occupation, and having been well

looked after since, are in tolerably sound condition. I

should say two hundred pounds would cover the expense of

all repairs in my line which these rooms need. This sum

would not include the restoration of the western staircase,

which has given a little in some places, and the banisters

of which are decidedly insecure from the first to the

second landing. From twenty-five to thirty pounds would

suffice to set this all right.

"In the rooms on the north front, the state of

dilapidation, from top to bottom, is as bad as can be. From

all that I could ascertain, nobody ever went near these

rooms in Captain Treverton's time, or has ever entered them

since. The people who now keep the house have a

superstitious dread of opening any of the north doors, in

consequence of the time that has elapsed since any living

being has passed through them. Nobody would volunteer to

accompany me in my survey, and nobody could tell me which

keys fitted which room doors in any part of the north side.

I could find no plan containing the names or numbers of

the rooms; nor, to my surprise, were there any labels

attached separately to the keys. They were given to me, all

hanging together on a large ring, with an ivory label on

it, which was only marked--Keys of the North Rooms. I take

the liberty of mentioning these particulars in order to

account for my having, as you might think, delayed my stay

at Porthgenna Tower longer than is needful. I lost nearly a

whole day in taking the keys off the ring, and fitting them

at hazard to the right doors. And I occupied some hours of

another day in marking each door with a number on the

outside, and putting a corresponding label to each key,

before I replaced it on the ring, in order to prevent the

possibility of future errors and delays.

"As I hope to furnish you, in a few days, with a detailed

estimate of the repairs needed in the north part of the

house, from basement to roof, I need only say here that

they will occupy some time, and will be of the most

extensive nature. The beams of the staircase and the

flooring of the first story have got the dry rot. The damp

in some rooms, and the rats in others, have almost

destroyed the wainscotings. Four of the mantel-pieces have

given out from the walls, and all the ceilings are either

stained, cracked, or peeled away in large patches. The

flooring is, in general, in a better condition than I had

anticipated; but the shutters and window-sashes are so

warped as to be useless. It is only fair to acknowledge

that the expense of setting all these things to

rights--that is to say, of making the rooms safe and

habitable, and of putting them in proper condition for the

upholsterer--will be considerable. I would respectfully

suggest, in the event of your feeling any surprise or

dissatisfaction at the amount of my estimate, that you

should name a friend in whom you place confidence, to go

over the north rooms with me, keeping my estimate in his

hand. I will undertake to prove, if needful, the necessity

of each separate repair, and the justice of each separate

charge for the same, to the satisfaction of any competent

and impartial person whom you may please to select.

"Trusting to send you the estimate in a few days,

"I remain, Sir,

"Your humble servant,

"THOMAS HORLOCK."

"A very honest, straightforward letter," said Mr. Frankland.

"I wish he had sent the estimate with it," said Rosamond. "Why could

not the provoking man tell us at once in round numbers what the

repairs will really cost?"

"I suspect, my dear, he was afraid of shocking us, if he mentioned the

amount in round numbers."

"That horrid money! It is always getting in one's way, and upsetting

one's plans. If we haven't got enough, let us go and borrow of

somebody who has. Do you mean to dispatch a friend to Porthgenna to go

over the house with Mr. Horlock? If you do, I know who I wish you

would send."

"Who?"

"Me, if you please--under your escort, of course. Don't laugh, Lenny;

I would be very sharp with Mr. Horlock; I would object to every one of

his charges, and beat him down without mercy. I once saw a surveyor go

over a house, and I know exactly what to do. You stamp on the floor,

and knock at the walls, and scrape at the brick-work, and look up all

the chimneys, and out of all the windows--sometimes you make notes in

a little book, sometimes you measure with a foot-rule, sometimes you

sit down all of a sudden, and think profoundly--and the end of it is

that you say the house will do very well indeed, if the tenant will

pull out his purse, and put it in proper repair."

"Well done, Rosamond! You have one more accomplishment than I knew of;

and I suppose I have no choice now but to give you an opportunity of

displaying it. If you don't object, my dear, to being associated with

a professional assistant in the important business of checking Mr.

Horlock's estimate, I don't object to paying a short visit to

Porthgenna whenever you please--especially now I know that the west

rooms are still habitable."

"Oh, how kind of you! how pleased I shall be! how I shall enjoy seeing

the old place again before it is altered! I was only five years old,

Lenny, when we left Porthgenna, and I am so anxious to see what I can

remember of it, after such a long, long absence as mine. Do you know,

I never saw any thing of that ruinous north side of the house?--and I

do so dote on old rooms! We will go all through them, Lenny. You shall

have hold of my hand, and look with my eyes, and make as many

discoveries as I do. I prophesy that we shall see ghosts, and find

treasures, and hear mysterious noises--and, oh heavens! what clouds of

dust we shall have to go through. Pouf! the very anticipation of them

chokes me already."

"Now we are on the subject of Porthgenna, Rosamond, let us be serious

for one moment. It is clear to me that these repairs of the north

rooms will cost a large sum of money. Now, my love, I consider no sum

of money misspent, however large it may be, if it procures you

pleasure. I am with you heart and soul--"

He paused. His wife's caressing arms were twining round his neck

again, and her cheek was laid gently against his. "Go on, Lenny," she

said, with such an accent of tenderness in the utterance of those

three simple words that his speech failed him for the moment, and all

his sensations seemed absorbed in the one luxury of listening.

"Rosamond," he whispered, "there is no music in the world that touches

me as your voice touches me now! I feel it all through me, as I used

sometimes to feel the sky at night, in the time when I could see." As

he spoke, the caressing arms tightened round his neck, and the fervent

lips softly took the place which the cheek had occupied. "Go on,

Lenny," they repeated, happily as well as tenderly now, "you said you

were with me, heart and soul. With me in what?"

"In your project, love, for inducing your father to retire from his

profession after this last cruise, and in your hope of prevailing on

him to pass the evening of his days happily with us at Porthgenna. If

the money spent in restoring the north rooms, so that we may all live

in them for the future, does indeed so alter the look of the place to

his eyes as to dissipate his old sorrowful associations with it, and

to make his living there again a pleasure instead of a pain to him, I

shall regard it as money well laid out. But, Rosamond, are you sure of

the success of your plan before we undertake it? Have you dropped any

hint of the Porthgenna project to your father?"

"I told him, Lenny, that I should never be quite comfortable unless he

left the sea and came to live with us--and he said that he would. I

did not mention a word about Porthgenna--nor did he--but he knows that

we shall live there when we are settled, and he made no conditions

when he promised that our home should be his home."

"Is the loss of your mother the only sad association he has with the

place?"

"Not quite. There is another association, which has never been

mentioned, but which I may tell you, because there are no secrets

between us. My mother had a favorite maid who lived with her from the

time of her marriage, and who was, accidentally, the only person

present in her room when she died. I remember hearing of this woman as

being odd in her look and manner, and no great favorite with any body

but her mistress. Well, on the morning of my mother's death, she

disappeared from the house in the strangest way, leaving behind her a

most singular and mysterious letter to my father, asserting that in my

mother's dying moments a Secret had been confided to her which she was

charged to divulge to her master when her mistress was no more; and

adding that she was afraid to mention this secret, and that, to avoid

being questioned about it, she had resolved on leaving the house

forever. She had been gone some hours when the letter was opened--and

she has never been seen or heard of since that time. This circumstance

seemed to make almost as strong an impression on my father's mind as

the shock of my mother's death. Our neighbors and servants all thought

(as I think) that the woman was mad; but he never agreed with them,

and I know that he has neither destroyed nor forgotten the letter from

that time to this."

"A strange event, Rosamond--a very strange event. I don't wonder that

it has made a lasting impression on him."

"Depend upon it, Lenny, the servants and the neighbors were right--the

woman was mad. Any way, however, it was certainly a singular event in

our family. All old houses have their romance--and that is the romance

of our house. But years and years have passed since then; and, what

with time, and what with the changes we are going to make, I have no

fear that my dear, good father will spoil our plans. Give him a new

north garden at Porthgenna, where he can walk the decks, as I call

it--give him new north rooms to live in--and I will answer for the

result. But all this is in the future; let us get back to the present

time. When shall we pay our flying visit to Porthgenna, Lenny, and

plunge into the important business of checking Mr. Horlock's estimate

for the repairs?"

"We have three weeks more to stay here, Rosamond."

"Yes; and then we must go back to Long Beckley. I promised that best

and biggest of men, the vicar, that we would pay our first visit to

him. He is sure not to let us off under three weeks or a month."

"In that case, then, we had better say two months hence for the visit

to Porthgenna. Is your writing-case in the room, Rosamond?"

"Yes; close by us, on the table."

"Write to Mr. Horlock then, love--and appoint a meeting in two months'

time at the old house. Tell him also, as we must not trust ourselves

on unsafe stairs--especially considering how dependent I am on

banisters--to have the west staircase repaired immediately. And, while

you have the pen in your hand, perhaps it may save trouble if you

write a second note to the housekeeper at Porthgenna, to tell her when

she may expect us."

Rosamond sat down gayly at the table, and dipped her pen in the ink

with a little flourish of triumph.

"In two months," she exclaimed joyfully, "I shall see the dear old

place again! In two months, Lenny, our profane feet will be raising

the dust in the solitudes of the North Rooms."

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

TIMON OF LONDON.

Timon of Athens retreated from an ungrateful world to a cavern by the

sea-shore, vented his misanthropy in magnificent poetry, and enjoyed

the honor of being called "My Lord." Timon of London took refuge from

his species in a detached house at Bayswater--expressed his sentiments

in shabby prose--and was only addressed as "Mr. Treverton." The one

point of resemblance which it is possible to set against these points

of contrast between the two Timons consisted in this: that their

misanthropy was, at least, genuine. Both were incorrigible haters of

mankind.

There is probably no better proof of the accuracy of that definition

of man which describes him as an imitative animal, than is to be found

in the fact that the verdict of humanity is always against any

individual member of the species who presumes to differ from the rest.

A man is one of a flock, and his wool must be of the general color. He

must drink when the rest drink, and graze where the rest graze. Let

him walk at noonday with perfect composure of countenance and decency

of gait, with not the slightest appearance of vacancy in his eyes or

wildness in his manner, from one end of Oxford Street to the other

without his hat, and let every one of the thousands of hat-wearing

people whom he passes be asked separately what they think of him, how

many will abstain from deciding instantly that he is mad, on no other

evidence than the evidence of his bare head? Nay, more; let him

politely stop each one of those passengers, and let him explain in the

plainest form of words, and in the most intelligible manner, that his

head feels more easy and comfortable without a hat than with one, how

many of his fellow mortals who decided that he was mad on first

meeting him, will change their opinion when they part from him after

hearing his explanation? In the vast majority of cases, the very

explanation itself would be accepted as an excellent additional proof

that the intellect of the hatless man was indisputably deranged.

Starting at the beginning of the march of life out of step with the

rest of the mortal regiment, Andrew Treverton paid the penalty of his

irregularity from his earliest days. He was a phenomenon in the

nursery, a butt at school, and a victim at college. The ignorant

nurse-maid reported him as a queer child; the learned school-master

genteelly varied the phrase, and described him as an eccentric boy;

the college tutor, harping on the same string, facetiously likened his

head to a roof, and said there was a slate loose in it. When a slate

is loose, if nobody fixes it in time, it ends by falling off. In the

roof of a house we view that consequence as a necessary result of

neglect; in the roof of a man's head we are generally very much

shocked and surprised by it.

Overlooked in some directions and misdirected in others, Andrew's

uncouth capacities for good tried helplessly to shape themselves. The

better side of his eccentricity took the form of friendship. He became

violently and unintelligibly fond of one among his school-fellows--a

boy who treated him with no especial consideration in the play-ground,

and who gave him no particular help in the class. Nobody could

discover the smallest reason for it, but it was nevertheless a

notorious fact that Andrew's pocket-money was always at this boy's

service, that Andrew ran about after him like a dog, and that Andrew

over and over again took the blame and punishment on his own shoulders

which ought to have fallen on the shoulders of his friend. When, a few

years afterward, that friend went to college, the lad petitioned to be

sent to college too, and attached himself there more closely than ever

to the strangely chosen comrade of his school-boy days. Such devotion

as this must have touched any man possessed of ordinary generosity of

disposition. It made no impression whatever on the inherently base

nature of Andrew's friend. After three years of intercourse at

college--intercourse which was all selfishness on one side and all

self-sacrifice on the other--the end came, and the light was let in

cruelly on Andrew's eyes. When his purse grew light in his friend's

hand, and when his acceptances were most numerous on his friend's

bills, the brother of his honest affection, the hero of his simple

admiration, abandoned him to embarrassment, to ridicule, and to

solitude, without the faintest affectation of penitence--without so

much even as a word of farewell.

He returned to his father's house, a soured man at the outset of

life--returned to be upbraided for the debts that he had contracted to

serve the man who had heartlessly outraged and shamelessly cheated

him. He left home in disgrace to travel on a small allowance. The

travels were protracted, and they ended, as such travels often do, in

settled expatriation. The life he led, the company he kept, during his

long residence abroad, did him permanent and fatal harm. When he at

last returned to England, he presented himself in the most hopeless of

all characters--the character of a man who believes in nothing. At

this period of his life, his one chance for the future lay in the good

results which his brother's influence over him might have produced.

The two had hardly resumed their intercourse of early days, when the

quarrel occasioned by Captain Treverton's marriage broke it off

forever. From that time, for all social interests and purposes, Andrew

was a lost man. From that time he met the last remonstrances that were

made to him by the last friends who took any interest in his fortunes

always with the same bitter and hopeless form of reply: "My dearest

friend forsook and cheated me," he would say. "My only brother has

quarreled with me for the sake of a play-actress. What am I to expect

of the rest of mankind after that? I have suffered twice for my belief

in others--I will never suffer a third time. The wise man is the man

who does not disturb his heart at its natural occupation of pumping

blood through his body. I have gathered my experience abroad and at

home, and have learned enough to see through the delusions of life

which look like realities to other men's eyes. My business in this

world is to eat, drink, sleep, and die. Every thing else is

superfluity--and I have done with it."

The few people who ever cared to inquire about him again, after being

repulsed by such an avowal as this, heard of him three or four years

after his brother's marriage in the neighborhood of Bayswater. Local

report described him as having bought the first cottage he could find

which was cut off from other houses by a wall all round it. It was

further rumored that he was living like a miser; that he had got an

old man-servant, named Shrowl, who was even a greater enemy to mankind

than himself; that he allowed no living soul, not even an occasional

char-woman, to enter the house; that he was letting his beard grow,

and that he had ordered his servant Shrowl to follow his example. In

the year eighteen hundred and forty-four, the fact of a man's not

shaving was regarded by the enlightened majority of the English nation

as a proof of unsoundness of intellect. At the present time Mr.

Treverton's beard would only have interfered with his reputation for

respectability. Seventeen years ago it was accepted as so much

additional evidence in support of the old theory that his intellects

were deranged. He was at that very time, as his stock-broker could

have testified, one of the sharpest men of business in London; he

could argue on the wrong side of any question with an acuteness of

sophistry and sarcasm that Dr. Johnson himself might have envied; he

kept his household accounts right to a farthing--but what did these

advantages avail him, in the estimation of his neighbors, when he

presumed to live on another plan than theirs, and when he wore a hairy

certificate of lunacy on the lower part of his face? We have advanced

a little in the matter of partial toleration of beards since that

time; but we have still a good deal of ground to get over. In the

present year of progress, eighteen hundred and sixty-one, would the

most trustworthy banker's clerk in the whole metropolis have the

slightest chance of keeping his situation if he left off shaving his

chin?

Common report, which calumniated Mr. Treverton as mad, had another

error to answer for in describing him as a miser. He saved more than

two thirds of the income derived from his comfortable fortune, not

because he liked hoarding up money, but because he had no enjoyment of

the comforts and luxuries which money is spent in procuring. To do him

justice, his contempt for his own wealth was quite as hearty as his

contempt for the wealth of his neighbors. Thus characteristically

wrong in endeavoring to delineate his character, report was,

nevertheless, for once in a way, inconsistently right in describing

his manner of life. It was true that he had bought the first cottage

he could find that was secluded within its own walls--true that nobody

was allowed, on any pretense whatever, to enter his doors--and true

that he had met with a servant, who was even bitterer against all

mankind than himself, in the person of Mr. Shrowl.

The life these two led approached as nearly to the existence of the

primitive man (or savage) as the surrounding conditions of

civilization would allow. Admitting the necessity of eating and

drinking, the first object of Mr. Treverton's ambition was to sustain

life with the least possible dependence on the race of men who

professed to supply their neighbors' bodily wants, and who, as he

conceived, cheated them infamously on the strength of their

profession.

Having a garden at the back of the house, Timon of London dispensed

with the green-grocer altogether by cultivating his own vegetables.

There was no room for growing wheat, or he would have turned farmer

also on his own account; but he could outwit the miller and the baker,

at any rate, by buying a sack of corn, grinding it in his own

hand-mill, and giving the flour to Shrowl to make into bread. On the

same principle, the meat for the house was bought wholesale of the

City salesmen--the master and servant eating as much of it in the

fresh state as they could, salting the rest, and setting butchers at

defiance. As for drink, neither brewer nor publican ever had the

chance of extorting a farthing from Mr. Treverton's pocket. He and

Shrowl were satisfied with beer--and they brewed for themselves. With

bread, vegetables, meat, and malt liquor, these two hermits of modern

days achieved the great double purpose of keeping life in and keeping

the tradesmen out.

Eating like primitive men, they lived in all other respects like

primitive men also. They had pots, pans, and pipkins, two deal tables,

two chairs, two old sofas, two short pipes, and two long cloaks. They

had no stated meal-times, no carpets and bedsteads, no cabinets,

book-cases, or ornamental knickknacks of any kind, no laundress, and

no char-woman. When either of the two wanted to eat and drink, he cut

off his crust of bread, cooked his bit of meat, drew his drop of beer,

without the slightest reference to the other. When either of the two

thought he wanted a clean shirt, which was very seldom, he went and

washed one for himself. When either of the two discovered that any

part of the house was getting very dirty indeed, he took a bucket of

water and a birch-broom, and washed the place out like a dog-kennel.

And, lastly, when either of the two wanted to go to sleep, he wrapped

himself up in his cloak, lay down on one of the sofas, and took what

repose he required, early in the evening or late in the morning, just

as he pleased.

When there was no baking, brewing, gardening, or cleaning to be done,

the two sat down opposite each other, and smoked for hours, generally

without uttering a word. Whenever they did speak, they quarreled.

Their ordinary dialogue was a species of conversational prize-fight,

beginning with a sarcastic affectation of good-will on either side,

and ending in hearty exchanges of violent abuse--just as the boxers go

through the feeble formality of shaking hands before they enter on the

serious practical business of beating each other's faces out of all

likeness to the image of man. Not having so many disadvantages of

early refinement and education to contend against as his master,

Shrowl generally won the victory in these engagements of the tongue.

Indeed, though nominally the servant, he was really the ruling spirit

in the house--acquiring unbounded influence over his master by dint of

outmarching Mr. Treverton in every direction on his own ground.

Shrowl's was the harshest voice; Shrowl's were the bitterest sayings;

and Shrowl's was the longest beard. The surest of all retributions is

the retribution that lies in wait for a man who boasts. Mr. Treverton

was rashly given to boasting of his independence, and when retribution

overtook him it assumed a personal form, and bore the name of Shrowl.

* * * * *

On a certain morning, about three weeks after Mrs. Frankland had

written to the housekeeper at Porthgenna Tower to mention the period

at which her husband and herself might be expected there, Mr.

Treverton descended, with his sourest face and his surliest manner,

from the upper regions of the cottage to one of the rooms on the

ground-floor, which civilized tenants would probably have called the

parlor. Like his elder brother, he was a tall, well-built man; but his

bony, haggard, sallow face bore not the slightest resemblance to the

handsome, open, sunburnt face of the Captain. No one seeing them

together could possibly have guessed that they were brothers--so

completely did they differ in expression as well as in feature. The

heart-aches that he had suffered in youth; the reckless, wandering,

dissipated life that he had led in manhood; the petulance, the

disappointment, and the physical exhaustion of his latter days, had so

wasted and worn him away that he looked his brother's elder by almost

twenty years. With unbrushed hair and unwashed face, with a tangled

gray beard, and an old, patched, dirty flannel dressing-gown that hung

about him like a sack, this descendant of a wealthy and ancient family

looked as if his birthplace had been the work-house, and his vocation

in life the selling of cast-off clothes.

It was breakfast-time with Mr. Treverton--that is to say, it was the

time at which he felt hungry enough to think about eating something.

In the same position over the mantel-piece in which a looking-glass

would have been placed in a household of ordinary refinement, there

hung in the cottage of Timon of London a side of bacon. On the deal

table by the fire stood half a loaf of heavy-looking brown-bread; in a

corner of the room was a barrel of beer, with two battered pewter pots

hitched onto nails in the wall above it; and under the grate lay a

smoky old gridiron, left just as it had been thrown down when last

used and done with. Mr. Treverton took a greasy clasp-knife out of the

pocket of his dressing-gown, cut off a rasher of bacon, jerked the

gridiron onto the fire, and began to cook his breakfast. He had just

turned the rasher, when the door opened, and Shrowl entered the room,

with his pipe in his mouth, bent on the same eating errand as his

master.

In personal appearance, Shrowl was short, fat, flabby, and perfectly

bald, except at the back of his head, where a ring of bristly

iron-gray hair projected like a collar that had got hitched out of its

place. To make amends for the scantiness of his hair, the beard which

he had cultivated by his master's desire grew far over his cheeks, and

drooped down on his chest in two thick jagged peaks. He wore a very

old long-tailed dress-coat, which he had picked up a bargain in

Petticoat Lane--a faded yellow shirt, with a large torn

frill--velveteen trowsers, turned up at the ankles--and Blucher boots

that had never been blacked since the day when they last left the

cobbler's stall. His color was unhealthily florid, his thick lips

curled upward with a malicious grin, and his eyes were the nearest

approach, in form and expression, to the eyes of a bull terrier

which those features are capable of achieving when they are placed in

the countenance of a man. Any painter wanting to express strength,

insolence, ugliness, coarseness, and cunning in the face and figure of

one and the same individual, could have discovered no better model for

the purpose, all the world over, than he might have found in the

person of Mr. Shrowl.

[Illustration: "HE HAD JUST TURNED THE RASHER, WHEN THE DOOR OPENED,

AND SHROWL ENTERED THE ROOM."]

Neither master nor servant exchanged a word or took the smallest

notice of each other on first meeting. Shrowl stood stolidly

contemplative, with his hands in his pockets, waiting for his turn at

the gridiron. Mr. Treverton finished his cooking, took his bacon to

the table, and, cutting a crust of bread, began to eat his breakfast.

When he had disposed of the first mouthful, he condescended to look up

at Shrowl, who was at that moment opening his clasp-knife and

approaching the side of bacon with slouching steps and sleepily greedy

eyes.

"What do you mean by that?" asked Mr. Treverton, pointing with

indignant surprise at Shrowl's breast. "You ugly brute, you've got a

clean shirt on!"

"Thankee, Sir, for noticing it," said Shrowl, with a sarcastic

affectation of humility. "This is a joyful occasion, this is. I

couldn't do no less than put a clean shirt on, when it's my master's

birthday. Many happy returns, Sir. Perhaps you thought I should forget

that to-day was your birthday? Lord bless your sweet face, I wouldn't

have forgot it on any account. How old are you to-day? It's a long

time ago, Sir, since you was a plump smiling little boy, with a frill

round your neck, and marbles in your pocket, and trowsers and

waistcoat all in one, and kisses and presents from Pa and Ma and uncle

and aunt, on your birthday. Don't you be afraid of me wearing out this

shirt by too much washing. I mean to put it away in lavender against

your next birthday; or against your funeral, which is just as likely

at your time of life--isn't it, Sir?"

"Don't waste a clean shirt on my funeral," retorted Mr. Treverton. "I

hav'n't left you any money in my will, Shrowl. You'll be on your way

to the work-house when I'm on my way to the grave."

"Have you really made your will at last, Sir?" inquired Shrowl,

pausing, with an appearance of the greatest interest, in the act of

cutting off his slice of bacon. "I humbly beg pardon, but I always

thought you was afraid to do it."

The servant had evidently touched intentionally on one of the master's

sore points. Mr. Treverton thumped his crust of bread on the table,

and looked up angrily at Shrowl.

"Afraid of making my will, you fool!" said he. "I don't make it, and I

won't make it, on principle."

Shrowl slowly sawed off his slice of bacon, and began to whistle a

tune.

"On principle," repeated Mr. Treverton. "Rich men who leave money

behind them are the farmers who raise the crop of human wickedness.

When a man has any spark of generosity in his nature, if you want to

put it out, leave him a legacy. When a man is bad, if you want to make

him worse, leave him a legacy. If you want to collect a number of men

together for the purpose of perpetuating corruption and oppression on

a large scale, leave them a legacy under the form of endowing a public

charity. If you want to give a woman the best chance in the world of

getting a bad husband, leave her a legacy. _Make my will!_ I have a

pretty strong dislike of my species, Shrowl, but I don't quite hate

mankind enough yet to do such mischief among them as that!" Ending his

diatribe in those words, Mr. Treverton took down one of the battered

pewter pots, and refreshed himself with a pint of beer.

Shrowl shifted the gridiron to a clear place in the fire, and chuckled

sarcastically.

"Who the devil would you have me leave my money to?" cried Mr.

Treverton, overhearing him. "To my brother, who thinks me a brute now;

who would think me a fool then; and who would encourage swindling,

anyhow, by spending all my money among doxies and strolling players?

To the child of that player-woman, whom I have never set eyes on, who

has been brought up to hate me, and who would turn hypocrite directly

by pretending, for decency's sake, to be sorry for my death? To _you_,

you human baboon!--you, who would set up a usury office directly, and

prey upon the widow, the fatherless, and the unfortunate generally,

all over the world? Your good health, Mr. Shrowl! I can laugh as well

as you--especially when I know I'm not going to leave you sixpence."

Shrowl, in his turn, began to get a little irritated now. The jeering

civility which he had chosen to assume on first entering the room gave

place to his habitual surliness of manner and his natural growling

intonation of voice.

"You just let me alone--will you?" he said, sitting down sulkily to

his breakfast. "I've done joking for to-day; suppose you finish too.

What's the use of talking nonsense about your money? You must leave it

to somebody."

"Yes, I will," said Mr. Treverton. "I will leave it, as I have told

you over and over again, to the first Somebody I can find who honestly

despises money, and who can't be made the worse, therefore, by having

it."

"That means nobody," grunted Shrowl.

"I know it does!" retorted his master.

Before Shrowl could utter a word of rejoinder, there was a ring at the

gate-bell of the cottage.

"Go out," said Mr. Treverton, "and see what that is. If it's a woman

visitor, show her what a scarecrow you are, and frighten her away. If

it's a man visitor--"

"If it's a man visitor," interposed Shrowl, "I'll punch his head for

interrupting me at my breakfast."

Mr. Treverton filled and lit his pipe during his servant's absence.

Before the tobacco was well alight, Shrowl returned, and reported a

man visitor.

"Did you punch his head?" asked Mr. Treverton.

"No," said Shrowl. "I picked up his letter. He poked it under the gate

and went away. Here it is."

The letter was written on foolscap paper, superscribed in a round

legal hand. As Mr. Treverton opened it, two slips cut from newspapers

dropped out. One fell on the table before which he was sitting; the

other fluttered to the floor. This last slip Shrowl picked up and

looked over its contents, without troubling himself to go through the

ceremony of first asking leave.

After slowly drawing in and slowly puffing out again one mouthful of

tobacco-smoke, Mr. Treverton began to read the letter. As his eye fell

on the first lines, his lips began to work round the mouth-piece of

the pipe in a manner that was very unusual with him. The letter was

not long enough to require him to turn over the first leaf of it--it

ended at the bottom of the opening sheet. He read it down to the

signature--then looked up to the address, and went through it again

from the beginning. His lips still continued to work round the

mouth-piece of the pipe, but he smoked no more. When he had finished

the second reading, he set the letter down very gently on the table,

looked at his servant with an unaccustomed vacancy in the expression

of his eyes, and took the pipe out of his mouth with a hand that

trembled a little.

"Shrowl," he said, very quietly, "my brother, the Captain, is

drowned."

"I know he is," answered Shrowl, without looking up from the

newspaper-slip. "I'm reading about it here."

"The last words my brother said to me when we quarreled about the

player-woman," continued Mr. Treverton, speaking as much to himself as

to his servant, "were that I should die without one kind feeling in my

heart toward any living creature."

"So you will," muttered Shrowl, turning the slip over to see if there

was any thing worth reading at the back of it.

"I wonder what he thought about me when he was dying?" said Mr.

Treverton, abstractedly, taking up the letter again from the table.

"He didn't waste a thought on you or any body else," remarked Shrowl.

"If he thought at all, he thought about how he could save his life.

When he had done thinking about that, he had done living too." With

this expression of opinion Mr. Shrowl went to the beer-barrel, and

drew his morning draught.

"Damn that player-woman!" muttered Mr. Treverton. As he said the words

his face darkened and his lips closed firmly. He smoothed the letter

out on the table. There seemed to be some doubt in his mind whether he

had mastered all its contents yet--some idea that there ought to be

more in it than he had yet discovered. In going over it for the third

time, he read it to himself aloud and very slowly, as if he was

determined to fix every separate word firmly in his memory. This was

the letter:

"SIR,--As the old legal adviser and faithful friend of your

family, I am desired by Mrs. Frankland, formerly Miss

Treverton, to acquaint you with the sad news of your

brother's death. This deplorable event occurred on board

the ship of which he was captain, during a gale of wind in

which the vessel was lost on a reef of rocks off the island

of Antigua. I inclose a detailed account of the shipwreck,

extracted from _The Times_, by which you will see that your

brother died nobly in the performance of his duty toward

the officers and men whom he commanded. I also send a slip

from the local Cornish paper, containing a memoir of the

deceased gentleman.

"Before closing this communication, I must add that no will

has been found, after the most rigorous search, among the

papers of the late Captain Treverton. Having disposed, as

you know, of Porthgenna, the only property of which he was

possessed at the time of his death was personal property,

derived from the sale of his estate; and this, in

consequence of his dying intestate, will go in due course

of law to his daughter, as his nearest of kin.

"I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

"ALEXANDER NIXON."

The newspaper-slip, which had fallen on the table, contained the

paragraph from _The Times_. The slip from the Cornish paper, which had

dropped to the floor, Shrowl poked under his master's eyes, in a fit

of temporary civility, as soon as he had done reading it. Mr.

Treverton took not the slightest notice either of the one paragraph or

the other. He still sat looking at the letter, even after he had read

it for the third time.

"Why don't you give the strip of print a turn, as well as the sheet of

writing?" asked Shrowl. "Why don't you read about what a great man

your brother was, and what a good life he led, and what a wonderful

handsome daughter he's left behind him, and what a capital marriage

she's made along with the man that's owner of your old family estate?

_She_ don't want your money now, at any rate! The ill wind that blowed

her father's ship on the rocks has blowed forty thousand pounds of

good into her lap. Why don't you read about it? She and her husband

have got a better house in Cornwall than you have got here. Ain't you

glad of that? They were going to have repaired the place from top to

bottom for your brother to go and live along with 'em in clover when

he came back from sea. Who will ever repair a place for you? I wonder

whether your niece would knock the old house about for your sake, now,

if you was to clean yourself up and go and ask her?"

At the last question, Shrowl paused in the work of aggravation--not

for want of more words, but for want of encouragement to utter them.

For the first time since they had kept house together, he had tried to

provoke his master and had failed. Mr. Treverton listened, or appeared

to listen, without moving a muscle--without the faintest change to

anger in his face. The only words he said when Shrowl had done were

these two--

"Go out!"

Shrowl was not an easy man to move, but he absolutely changed color

when he heard himself suddenly ordered to leave the room.

"Go out!" reiterated Mr. Treverton. "And hold your tongue henceforth

and forever about my brother and my brother's daughter. I never _have_

set eyes upon the player-woman's child, and I never will. Hold your

tongue--leave me alone--go out!"

"I'll be even with him for this," thought Shrowl as he slowly withdrew

from the room.

When he had closed the door, he listened outside of it, and heard Mr.

Treverton push aside his chair, and walk up and down, talking to

himself. Judging by the confused words that escaped him, Shrowl

concluded that his thoughts were still running on the "player-woman"

who had set his brother and himself at variance. He seemed to feel a

barbarous sense of relief in venting his dissatisfaction with himself,

after the news of Captain Treverton's death, on the memory of the

woman whom he hated so bitterly, and on the child whom she had left

behind her.

After a while the low rumbling tones of his voice ceased altogether.

Shrowl peeped through the key-hole, and saw that he was reading the

newspaper-slips which contained the account of the shipwreck and the

Memoir of his brother. The latter adverted to some of those family

particulars which the vicar of Long Beckley had mentioned to his

guest; and the writer of the Memoir concluded by expressing a hope

that the bereavement which Mr. and Mrs. Frankland had suffered would

not interfere with their project for repairing Porthgenna Tower, after

they had gone the length already of sending a builder to survey the

place. Something in the wording of that paragraph seemed to take Mr.

Treverton's memory back to his youth-time when the old family house

had been his home. He whispered a few words to himself which gloomily

referred to the days that were gone, rose from his chair impatiently,

threw both the newspaper-slips into the fire, watched them while they

were burning, and sighed when the black gossamer ashes floated upward

on the draught, and were lost in the chimney.

The sound of that sigh startled Shrowl as the sound of a pistol-shot

might have startled another man. His bull-terrier eyes opened wide in

astonishment, and he shook his head ominously as he walked away from

the door.

CHAPTER II.

WILL THEY COME?

The housekeeper at Porthgenna Tower had just completed the necessary

preparations for the reception of her master and mistress, at the time

mentioned in Mrs. Frankland's letter from St. Swithin's-on-Sea, when

she was startled by receiving a note sealed with black wax, and

surrounded by a thick mourning border. The note briefly communicated

the news of Captain Treverton's death, and informed her that the visit

of Mr. and Mrs. Frankland to Porthgenna was deferred for an indefinite

period.

By the same post the builder, who was superintending the renovation of

the west staircase, also received a letter, requesting him to send in

his account as soon as the repairs on which he was then engaged were

completed; and telling him that Mr. Frankland was unable, for the

present, to give any further attention to the project for making the

north rooms habitable. On the receipt of this communication, the

builder withdrew himself and his men as soon as the west stairs and

banisters had been made secure; and Porthgenna Tower was again left to

the care of the housekeeper and her servant, without master or

mistress, friends or strangers, to thread its solitary passages or

enliven its empty rooms.

From this time eight months passed away, and the housekeeper heard

nothing of her master and mistress, except through the medium of

paragraphs in the local newspaper, which dubiously referred to the

probability of their occupying the old house, and interesting

themselves in the affairs of their tenantry, at no very distant

period. Occasionally, too, when business took him to the post-town,

the steward collected reports about his employers among the old

friends and dependents of the Treverton family.

From these sources of information, the housekeeper was led to conclude

that Mr. and Mrs. Frankland had returned to Long Beckley, after

receiving the news of Captain Treverton's death, and had lived there

for some months in strict retirement. When they left that place, they

moved (if the newspaper report was to be credited) to the neighborhood

of London, and occupied the house of some friends who were traveling

on the Continent. Here they must have remained for some time, for the

new year came and brought no rumors of any change in their place of

abode. January and February passed without any news of them. Early in

March the steward had occasion to go to the post-town. When he

returned to Porthgenna, he came back with a new report relating to Mr.

and Mrs. Frankland, which excited the housekeeper's interest in an

extraordinary degree. In two different quarters, each highly

respectable, the steward had heard it facetiously announced that the

domestic responsibilities of his master and mistress were likely to be

increased by their having a nurse to engage and a crib to buy at the

end of the spring or the beginning of the summer. In plain English,

among the many babies who might be expected to make their appearance

in the world in the course of the next three months, there was one who

would inherit the name of Frankland, and who (if the infant luckily

turned out to be a boy) would cause a sensation throughout West

Cornwall as heir to the Porthgenna estate.

In the next month, the month of April, before the housekeeper and the

steward had done discussing their last and most important fragment of

news, the postman made his welcome appearance at Porthgenna Tower, and

brought another note from Mrs. Frankland. The housekeeper's face

brightened with unaccustomed pleasure and surprise as she read the

first line. The letter announced that the long-deferred visit of her

master and mistress to the old house would take place early in May,

and that they might be expected to arrive any day from the first to

the tenth of the month.

The reasons which had led the owners of Porthgenna to fix a period, at

last, for visiting their country seat, were connected with certain

particulars into which Mrs. Frankland had not thought it advisable to

enter in her letter. The plain facts of the case were, that a little

discussion had arisen between the husband and wife in relation to the

next place of residence which they should select, after the return

from the Continent of the friends whose house they were occupying. Mr.

Frankland had very reasonably suggested returning again to Long

Beckley--not only because all their oldest friends lived in the

neighborhood, but also (and circumstances made this an important

consideration) because the place had the advantage of possessing an

excellent resident medical man. Unfortunately this latter advantage,

so far from carrying any weight with it in Mrs. Frankland's

estimation, actually prejudiced her mind against the project of going

to Long Beckley. She had always, she acknowledged, felt an

unreasonable antipathy to the doctor there. He might be a very

skillful, an extremely polite, and an undeniably respectable man; but

she never had liked him, and never should, and she was resolved to

oppose the plan for living at Long Beckley, because the execution of

it would oblige her to commit herself to his care.

Two other places of residence were next suggested; but Mrs. Frankland

had the same objection to oppose to both--in each case the resident

doctor would be a stranger to her, and she did not like the notion of

being attended by a stranger. Finally, as she had all along

anticipated, the choice of the future abode was left entirely to her

own inclinations; and then, to the amazement of her husband and her

friends, she immediately decided on going to Porthgenna. She had

formed this strange project, and was now resolved on executing it,

partly because she was more curious than ever to see the place again;

partly because the doctor who had been with her mother in Mrs.

Treverton's last illness, and who had attended her through all her own

little maladies when she was a child, was still living and practicing

in the Porthgenna neighborhood. Her father and the doctor had been

old cronies, and had met for years at the same chess-board every

Saturday night. They had kept up their friendship, when circumstances

separated them, by exchanges of Christmas presents every year; and

when the sad news of the Captain's death had reached Cornwall, the

doctor had written a letter of sympathy and condolence to Rosamond,

speaking in such terms of his former friend and patron as she could

never forget. He must be a nice, fatherly old man now, the man of all

others who was fittest, on every account, to attend her. In short,

Mrs. Frankland was just as strongly prejudiced in favor of employing

the Porthgenna doctor as she was prejudiced against employing the Long

Beckley doctor; and she ended, as all young married women with

affectionate husbands may, and do end, whenever they please--by

carrying her own point, and having her own way.

On the first of May the west rooms were all ready for the reception of

the master and mistress of the house. The beds were aired, the carpets

cleaned, the sofas and chairs uncovered. The housekeeper put on her

satin gown and her garnet brooch; the maid followed suit, at a

respectful distance, in brown merino and a pink ribbon; and the

steward, determining not to be outdone by the women, arrayed himself

in a black brocaded waistcoat, which almost rivaled the gloom and

grandeur of the housekeeper's satin gown. The day wore on, evening

closed in, bed-time came, and there were no signs yet of Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland.

But the first was an early day on which to expect them. The steward

thought so, and the housekeeper added that it would be foolish to feel

disappointed, even if they did not arrive until the fifth. The fifth

came, and still nothing happened. The sixth, seventh, eighth, and

ninth followed, and no sound of the expected carriage-wheels came near

the lonely house.

On the tenth, and last day, the housekeeper, the steward, and the

maid, all three rose earlier than usual; all three opened and shut

doors, and went up and down stairs oftener than was needful; all three

looked out perpetually toward the moor and the high road, and thought

the view flatter and duller and emptier than ever it had appeared to

them before. The day waned, the sunset came; darkness changed the

perpetual looking-out of the housekeeper, the steward, and the maid

into perpetual listening; ten o'clock struck, and still there was

nothing to be heard when they went to the open window but the

wearisome beating of the surf on the sandy shore.

The housekeeper began to calculate the time that would be consumed on

the railway journey from London to Exeter, and on the posting journey

afterward through Cornwall to Porthgenna. When had Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland left Exeter?--that was the first question. And what delays

might they have encountered afterward in getting horses?--that was the

second. The housekeeper and the steward differed in debating these

points; but both agreed that it was necessary to sit up until

midnight, on the chance of the master and mistress arriving late. The

maid, hearing her sentence of banishment from bed for the next two

hours pronounced by the superior authorities, yawned and sighed

mournfully--was reproved by the steward--and was furnished by the

housekeeper with a book of hymns to read to keep up her spirits.

Twelve o'clock struck, and still the monotonous beating of the surf,

varied occasionally by those loud, mysterious, cracking noises which

make themselves heard at night in an old house, were the only audible

sounds. The steward was dozing; the maid was fast asleep under the

soothing influence of the hymns; the housekeeper was wide awake, with

her eyes fixed on the window, and her head shaking forebodingly from

time to time. At the last stroke of the clock she left her chair,

listened attentively, and still hearing nothing, shook the maid

irritably by the shoulder, and stamped on the floor to arouse the

steward.

"We may go to bed," she said. "They are not coming. This is the second

time they have disappointed us. The first time the Captain's death

stood in the way. What stops them now? Another death? I shouldn't

wonder if it was."

"Now I think of it, no more should I," said the steward, ominously

knitting his brows.

"Another death!" repeated the housekeeper, superstitiously. "If it

_is_ another death, I should take it, in their place, as a warning to

keep away from the house."

CHAPTER III.

MRS. JAZEPH.

If, instead of hazarding the guess that a second death stood in the

way of Mr. and Mrs. Frankland's arrival at Porthgenna, the housekeeper

had, by way of variety, surmised this time that a birth was the

obstacle which delayed them, she might have established her character

as a wise woman, by hitting at random on the actual truth. Her master

and mistress had started from London on the ninth of May, and had got

through the greater part of their railway journey, when they were

suddenly obliged to stop, on Mrs. Frankland's account, at the station

of a small town in Somersetshire. The little visitor, who was destined

to increase the domestic responsibilities of the young married couple,

had chosen to enter on the scene, in the character of a robust

boy-baby, a month earlier than he had been expected, and had modestly

preferred to make his first appearance in a small Somersetshire inn,

rather than wait to be ceremoniously welcomed to life in the great

house of Porthgenna, which he was one day to inherit.

Very few events had ever produced a greater sensation in the town of

West Winston than the one small event of the unexpected stoppage of

Mr. and Mrs. Frankland's journey at that place. Never since the last

election had the landlord and landlady of the Tiger's Head Hotel

bustled about their house in such a fever of excitement as possessed

them when Mr. Frankland's servant and Mrs. Frankland's maid drew up at

the door in a fly from the station, to announce that their master and

mistress were behind, and that the largest and quietest rooms in the

hotel were wanted immediately, under the most unexpected

circumstances. Never since he had triumphantly passed his examination

had young Mr. Orridge, the new doctor, who had started in life by

purchasing the West Winston practice, felt such a thrill of

pleasurable agitation pervade him from top to toe as when he heard

that the wife of a blind gentleman of great fortune had been taken

ill on the railway journey from London to Devonshire, and required

all that his skill and attention could do for her without a moment's

delay. Never since the last archery meeting and fancy fair had the

ladies of the town been favored with such an all-absorbing subject for

conversation as was now afforded to them by Mrs. Frankland's mishap.

Fabulous accounts of the wife's beauty and the husband's fortune

poured from the original source of the Tiger's Head, and trickled

through the highways and byways of the little town. There were a dozen

different reports, one more elaborately false than the other, about

Mr. Frankland's blindness, and the cause of it; about the lamentable

condition in which his wife had arrived at the hotel; and about the

painful sense of responsibility which had unnerved the inexperienced

Mr. Orridge from the first moment when he set eyes on his patient. It

was not till eight o'clock in the evening that the public mind was

relieved at last from all suspense by an announcement that the child

was born, and screaming lustily; that the mother was wonderfully well,

considering all things; and that Mr. Orridge had covered himself with

distinction by the skill, tenderness, and attention with which he had

performed his duties.

On the next day, and the next, and for a week after that, the accounts

were still favorable. But on the tenth day a catastrophe was reported.

The nurse who was in attendance on Mrs. Frankland had been suddenly

taken ill, and was rendered quite incapable of performing any further

service for at least a week to come, and perhaps for a much longer

period.

In a large town this misfortune might have been readily remedied, but

in a place like West Winston it was not so easy to supply the loss of

an experienced nurse at a few hours' notice. When Mr. Orridge was

consulted in the new emergency, he candidly acknowledged that he

required a little time for consideration before he could undertake to

find another professed nurse of sufficient character and experience to

wait on a lady like Mrs. Frankland. Mr. Frankland suggested

telegraphing to a medical friend in London for a nurse, but the doctor

was unwilling for many reasons to adopt that plan, except as a last

resource. It would take some time to find the right person, and to

send her to West Winston and, moreover, he would infinitely prefer

employing a woman with whose character and capacity he was himself

acquainted. He therefore proposed that Mrs. Frankland should be

trusted for a few hours to the care of her maid, under supervision of

the landlady of the Tiger's Head, while he made inquiries in the

neighborhood. If the inquiries produced no satisfactory result, he

should be ready, when he called in the evening, to adopt Mr.

Frankland's idea of telegraphing to London for a nurse.

On proceeding to make the investigation that he had proposed, Mr.

Orridge, although he spared no trouble, met with no success. He found

plenty of volunteers for the office of nurse, but they were all

loud-voiced, clumsy-handed, heavy-footed countrywomen, kind and

willing enough, but sadly awkward, blundering attendants to place at

the bedside of such a lady as Mrs. Frankland. The morning hours passed

away, and the afternoon came, and still Mr. Orridge had found no

substitute for the invalided nurse whom he could venture to engage.

At two o'clock he had half an hour's drive before him to a

country-house where he had a child-patient to see. "Perhaps I may

remember somebody who may do, on the way out or on the way back

again," thought Mr. Orridge, as he got into his gig. "I have some

hours at my disposal still, before the time comes for my evening visit

at the inn."

Puzzling his brains, with the best intention in the world, all along

the road to the country-house, Mr. Orridge reached his destination

without having arrived at any other conclusion than that he might just

as well state his difficulty to Mrs. Norbury, the lady whose child he

was about to prescribe for. He had called on her when he bought the

West Winston practice, and had found her one of those frank,

good-humored, middle-aged women who are generally designated by the

epithet "motherly." Her husband was a country squire, famous for his

old politics, his old stories, and his old wine. He had seconded his

wife's hearty reception of the new doctor, with all the usual jokes

about never giving him any employment, and never letting any bottles

into the house except the bottles that went down into the cellar. Mr.

Orridge had been amused by the husband and pleased with the wife; and

he thought it might be at least worth while, before he gave up all

hope of finding a fit nurse, to ask Mrs. Norbury, as an old resident

in the West Winston neighborhood, for a word of advice.

Accordingly, after seeing the child, and pronouncing that there were

no symptoms about the little patient which need cause the slightest

alarm to any body, Mr. Orridge paved the way for a statement of the

difficulty that beset him by asking Mrs. Norbury if she had heard of

the "interesting event" that had happened at the Tiger's Head.

"You mean," answered Mrs. Norbury, who was a downright woman, and a

resolute speaker of the plainest possible English--"You mean, have I

heard about that poor unfortunate lady who was taken ill on her

journey, and who had a child born at the inn? We have heard so much,

and no more--living as we do (thank Heaven!) out of reach of the West

Winston gossip. How is the lady? Who is she? Is the child well? Is she

tolerably comfortable? poor thing! Can I send her any thing, or do any

thing for her?"

"You would do a great thing for her, and render a great assistance to

me," said Mr. Orridge, "if you could tell me of any respectable woman

in this neighborhood who would be a proper nurse for her."

"You don't mean to say that the poor creature has not got a nurse!"

exclaimed Mrs. Norbury.

"She has had the best nurse in West Winston," replied Mr. Orridge.

"But, most unfortunately, the woman was taken ill this morning, and

was obliged to go home. I am now at my wit's end for somebody to

supply her place. Mrs. Frankland has been used to the luxury of being

well waited on; and where I am to find an attendant, who is likely to

satisfy her, is more than I can tell."

"Frankland, did you say her name was?" inquired Mrs. Norbury.

"Yes. She is, I understand, a daughter of that Captain Treverton who

was lost with his ship a year ago in the West Indies. Perhaps you may

remember the account of the disaster in the newspapers?"

"Of course I do! and I remember the Captain too. I was acquainted with

him when he was a young man, at Portsmouth. His daughter and I ought

not to be strangers, especially under such circumstances as the poor

thing is placed in now. I will call at the inn, Mr. Orridge, as soon

as you will allow me to introduce myself to her. But, in the mean

time, what is to be done in this difficulty about the nurse? Who is

with Mrs. Frankland now?"

"Her maid; but she is a very young woman, and doesn't understand

nursing duties. The landlady of the inn is ready to help when she can;

but then she has constant demands on her time and attention. I suppose

we shall have to telegraph to London and get somebody sent here by

railway."

"And that will take time, of course. And the new nurse may turn out to

be a drunkard or a thief, or both--when you have got her here," said

the outspoken Mrs. Norbury. "Dear, dear me! can't we do something

better than that? I am ready, I am sure, to take any trouble, or make

any sacrifice, if I can be of use to Mrs. Frankland. Do you know, Mr.

Orridge, I think it would be a good plan if we consulted my

housekeeper, Mrs. Jazeph. She is an odd woman, with an odd name, you

will say; but she has lived with me in this house more than five

years, and she may know of somebody in our neighborhood who might suit

you, though I don't." With those words, Mrs. Norbury rang the bell,

and ordered the servant who answered it to tell Mrs. Jazeph that she

was wanted up stairs immediately.

After the lapse of a minute or so a soft knock was heard at the door,

and the housekeeper entered the room.

Mr. Orridge looked at her, the moment she appeared, with an interest

and curiosity for which he was hardly able to account. He judged her,

at a rough guess, to be a woman of about fifty years of age. At the

first glance, his medical eye detected that some of the intricate

machinery of the nervous system had gone wrong with Mrs. Jazeph. He

noted the painful working of the muscles of her face, and the hectic

flush that flew into her cheeks when she entered the room and found a

visitor there. He observed a strangely scared look in her eyes, and

remarked that it did not leave them when the rest of her face became

gradually composed. "That woman has had some dreadful fright, some

great grief, or some wasting complaint," he thought to himself. "I

wonder which it is?"

"This is Mr. Orridge, the medical gentleman who has lately settled at

West Winston," said Mrs. Norbury, addressing the housekeeper. "He is

in attendance on a lady who was obliged to stop, on her journey

westward, at our station, and who is now staying at the Tiger's Head.

You have heard something about it, have you not, Mrs. Jazeph?"

Mrs. Jazeph, standing just inside the door, looked respectfully toward

the doctor, and answered in the affirmative. Although she only said

the two common words, "Yes, ma'am," in a quiet, uninterested way, Mr.

Orridge was struck by the sweetness and tenderness of her voice. If he

had not been looking at her, he would have supposed it to be the voice

of a young woman. His eyes remained fixed on her after she had spoken,

though he felt that they ought to have been looking toward her

mistress. He, the most unobservant of men in such things, found

himself noticing her dress, so that he remembered, long afterward, the

form of the spotless muslin cap that primly covered her smooth gray

hair, and the quiet brown color of the silk dress that fitted so

neatly and hung around her in such spare and disciplined folds. The

little confusion which she evidently felt at finding herself the

object of the doctor's attention did not betray her into the slightest

awkwardness of gesture or manner. If there can be such a thing,

physically speaking, as the grace of restraint, that was the grace

which seemed to govern Mrs. Jazeph's slightest movements; which led

her feet smoothly over the carpet, as she advanced when her mistress

next spoke to her; which governed the action of her wan right hand as

it rested lightly on a table by her side, while she stopped to hear

the next question that was addressed to her.

"Well," continued Mrs. Norbury, "this poor lady was just getting on

comfortably, when the nurse who was looking after her fell ill this

morning; and there she is now, in a strange place, with a first child,

and no proper attendance--no woman of age and experience to help her

as she ought to be helped. We want somebody fit to wait on a delicate

woman who has seen nothing of the rough side of humanity. Mr. Orridge

can find nobody at a day's notice, and I can tell him of nobody. Can

you help us, Mrs. Jazeph? Are there any women down in the village, or

among Mr. Norbury's tenants, who understand nursing, and have some

tact and tenderness to recommend them into the bargain?"

Mrs. Jazeph reflected for a little while, and then said, very

respectfully, but very briefly also, and still without any appearance

of interest in her manner, that she knew of no one whom she could

recommend.

"Don't make too sure of that till you have thought a little longer,"

said Mrs. Norbury. "I have a particular interest in serving this lady,

for Mr. Orridge told me just before you came in that she is the

daughter of Captain Treverton, whose shipwreck--"

The instant those words were spoken, Mrs. Jazeph turned round with a

start, and looked at the doctor. Apparently forgetting that her right

hand was on the table, she moved it so suddenly that it struck against

a bronze statuette of a dog placed on some writing materials. The

statuette fell to the ground, and Mrs. Jazeph stooped to pick it up

with a cry of alarm which seemed strangely exaggerated by comparison

with the trifling nature of the accident.

"Bless the woman! what is she frightened about?" exclaimed Mrs.

Norbury. "The dog is not hurt--put it back again! This is the first

time, Mrs. Jazeph, that I ever knew you do an awkward thing. You may

take that as a compliment, I think. Well, as I was saying, this lady

is the daughter of Captain Treverton, whose dreadful shipwreck we all

read about in the papers. I knew her father in my early days, and on

that account I am doubly anxious to be of service to her now. Do think

again. Is there nobody within reach who can be trusted to nurse her?"

The doctor, still watching Mrs. Jazeph with that secret medical

interest of his in her case, had seen her turn so deadly pale when she

started and looked toward him that he would not have been surprised if

she had fainted on the spot. He now observed that she changed color

again when her mistress left off speaking. The hectic red tinged her

cheeks once more with two bright spots. Her timid eyes wandered

uneasily about the room; and her fingers, as she clasped her hands

together, interlaced themselves mechanically. "That would be an

interesting case to treat," thought the doctor, following every

nervous movement of the housekeeper's hands with watchful eyes.

"Do think again," repeated Mrs. Norbury. "I am so anxious to help this

poor lady through her difficulty, if I can."

"I am very sorry," said Mrs. Jazeph, in faint, trembling tones, but

still always with the same sweetness in her voice--"very sorry that I

can think of no one who is fit; but--"

She stopped. No shy child on its first introduction to the society of

strangers could have looked more disconcerted than she looked now. Her

eyes were on the ground; her color was deepening; the fingers of her

clasped hands were working together faster and faster every moment.

"But what?" asked Mrs. Norbury.

"I was about to say, ma'am," answered Mrs. Jazeph, speaking with the

greatest difficulty and uneasiness, and never raising her eyes to her

mistress's face, "that, rather than this lady should want for a nurse,

I would--considering the interest, ma'am, which you take in her--I

would, if you thought you could spare me--"

"What, nurse her yourself!" exclaimed Mrs. Norbury. "Upon my word,

although you have got to it in rather a roundabout way, you have come

to the point at last, in a manner which does infinite credit to your

kindness of heart and your readiness to make yourself useful. As to

sparing you, of course I am not so selfish, under the circumstances,

as to think twice of the inconvenience of losing my housekeeper. But

the question is, are you competent as well as willing? Have you ever

had any practice in nursing?"

"Yes, ma'am," answered Mrs. Jazeph, still without raising her eyes

from the ground. "Shortly after my marriage" (the flush disappeared,

and her face turned pale again as she said those words), "I had some

practice in nursing, and continued it at intervals until the time of

my husband's death. I only presume to offer myself, Sir," she went on,

turning toward the doctor, and becoming more earnest and

self-possessed in her manner as she did so--"I only presume to offer

myself, with my mistress's permission, as a substitute for a nurse

until some better qualified person can be found."

"What do you say, Mr. Orridge?" asked Mrs. Norbury.

It had been the doctor's turn to start when he first heard Mrs. Jazeph

propose herself for the office of nurse. He hesitated before he

answered Mrs. Norbury's question, then said:

"I can have but one doubt about the propriety of thankfully accepting

Mrs. Jazeph's offer."

Mrs. Jazeph's timid eyes looked anxiously and perplexedly at him as

he spoke. Mrs. Norbury, in her downright, abrupt way, asked

immediately what the doubt was.

"I feel some uncertainty," replied Mr. Orridge, "as to whether Mrs.

Jazeph--she will pardon me, as a medical man, for mentioning it--as to

whether Mrs. Jazeph is strong enough, and has her nerves sufficiently

under control to perform the duties which she is so kindly ready to

undertake."

In spite of the politeness of the explanation, Mrs. Jazeph was

evidently disconcerted and distressed by it. A certain quiet,

uncomplaining sadness, which it was very touching to see, overspread

her face as she turned away, without another word, and walked slowly

to the door.

"Don't go yet!" cried Mrs. Norbury, kindly, "or, at least, if you do

go, come back again in five minutes. I am quite certain we shall have

something more to say to you then."

Mrs. Jazeph's eyes expressed her thanks in one grateful glance. They

looked so much brighter than usual while they rested on her mistress's

face, that Mrs. Norbury half doubted whether the tears were not just

rising in them at that moment. Before she could look again, Mrs.

Jazeph had courtesied to the doctor, and had noiselessly left the

room.

"Now we are alone, Mr. Orridge," said Mrs. Norbury, "I may tell you,

with all submission to your medical judgment, that you are a little

exaggerating Mrs. Jazeph's nervous infirmities. She looks poorly

enough, I own; but, after five years' experience of her, I can tell

you that she is stronger than she looks, and I honestly think you will

be doing good service to Mrs. Frankland if you try our volunteer

nurse, at least for a day or two. She is the gentlest, tenderest

creature I ever met with, and conscientious to a fault in the

performance of any duty that she undertakes. Don't be under any

delicacy about taking her away. I gave a dinner-party last week, and

shall not give another for some time to come. I never could have

spared my housekeeper more easily than I can spare her now."

"I am sure I may offer Mrs. Frankland's thanks to you as well as my

own," said Mr. Orridge. "After what you have said, it would be

ungracious and ungrateful in me not to follow your advice. But will

you excuse me if I ask one question? Did you ever hear that Mrs.

Jazeph was subject to fits of any kind?"

"Never."

"Not even to hysterical affections, now and then?"

"Never, since she has been in this house."

"You surprise me, there is something in her look and manner--"

"Yes, yes; every body remarks that at first; but it simply means that

she is in delicate health, and that she has not led a very happy life

(as I suspect) in her younger days. The lady from whom I had her (with

an excellent character) told me that she had married unhappily, when

she was in a sadly poor, unprotected state. She never says any thing

about her married troubles herself; but I believe her husband ill-used

her. However, it does not seem to me that this is our business. I can

only tell you again that she has been an excellent servant here for

the last five years, and that, in your place, poorly as she may look,

I should consider her as the best nurse that Mrs. Frankland could

possibly wish for, under the circumstances. There is no need for me to

say any more. Take Mrs. Jazeph, or telegraph to London for a

stranger--the decision of course rests with you."

Mr. Orridge thought he detected a slight tone of irritability in Mrs.

Norbury's last sentence. He was a prudent man; and he suppressed any

doubts he might still feel in reference to Mrs. Jazeph's physical

capacities for nursing, rather than risk offending the most important

lady in the neighborhood at the outset of his practice in West Winston

as a medical man.

"I can not hesitate a moment after what you have been good enough to

tell me," he said. "Pray believe that I gratefully accept your

kindness and your housekeeper's offer."

Mrs. Norbury rang the bell. It was answered on the instant by the

housekeeper herself.

The doctor wondered whether she had been listening outside the door,

and thought it rather strange, if she had, that she should be so

anxious to learn his decision.

"Mr. Orridge accepts your offer with thanks," said Mrs. Norbury,

beckoning to Mrs. Jazeph to advance into the room. "I have persuaded

him that you are not quite so weak and ill as you look."

A gleam of joyful surprise broke over the housekeeper's face. It

looked suddenly younger by years and years, as she smiled and

expressed her grateful sense of the trust that was about to be

reposed in her. For the first time, also, since the doctor had seen

her, she ventured on speaking before she was spoken to.

"When will my attendance be required, Sir?" she asked.

"As soon as possible," replied Mr. Orridge. How quickly and brightly

her dim eyes seemed to clear as she heard that answer! How much more

hasty than her usual movements was the movement with which she now

turned round and looked appealingly at her mistress!

"Go whenever Mr. Orridge wants you," said Mrs. Norbury. "I know your

accounts are always in order, and your keys always in their proper

places. You never make confusion and you never leave confusion. Go, by

all means, as soon as the doctor wants you."

"I suppose you have some preparations to make?" said Mr. Orridge.

"None, Sir, that need delay me more than half an hour," answered Mrs.

Jazeph.

"This evening will be early enough," said the doctor, taking his hat,

and bowing to Mrs. Norbury. "Come to the Tiger's Head, and ask for me.

I shall be there between seven and eight. Many thanks again, Mrs.

Norbury."

"My best wishes and compliments to your patient, doctor."

"At the Tiger's Head, between seven and eight this evening,"

reiterated Mr. Orridge, as the housekeeper opened the door for him.

"Between seven and eight, Sir," repeated the soft, sweet voice,

sounding younger than ever, now that there was an under-note of

pleasure running through its tones.

CHAPTER IV.

THE NEW NURSE.

As the clock struck seven, Mr. Orridge put on his hat to go to the

Tiger's Head. He had just opened his own door, when he was met on the

step by a messenger, who summoned him immediately to a case of sudden

illness in the poor quarter of the town. The inquiries he made

satisfied him that the appeal was really of an urgent nature, and that

there was no help for it but to delay his attendance for a little

while at the inn. On reaching the bedside of the patient, he

discovered symptoms in the case which rendered an immediate operation

necessary. The performance of this professional duty occupied some

time. It was a quarter to eight before he left his house, for the

second time, on his way to the Tiger's Head.

On entering the inn door, he was informed that the new nurse had

arrived as early as seven o'clock, and had been waiting for him in a

room by herself ever since. Having received no orders from Mr.

Orridge, the landlady had thought it safest not to introduce the

stranger to Mrs. Frankland before the doctor came.

"Did she ask to go up into Mrs. Frankland's room?" inquired Mr.

Orridge.

"Yes, Sir," replied the landlady. "And I thought she seemed rather put

out when I said that I must beg her to wait till you got here. Will

you step this way, and see her at once, Sir? She is in my parlor."

Mr. Orridge followed the landlady into a little room at the back of

the house, and found Mrs. Jazeph sitting alone in the corner farthest

from the window. He was rather surprised to see that she drew her veil

down the moment the door was opened.

"I am sorry you should have been kept waiting," he said; "but I was

called away to a patient. Besides, I told you between seven and eight,

if you remember; and it is not eight o'clock yet."

"I was very anxious to be in good time, Sir," said Mrs. Jazeph.

There was an accent of restraint in the quiet tones in which she spoke

which struck Mr. Orridge's ear, and a little perplexed him. She was,

apparently, not only afraid that her face might betray something, but

apprehensive also that her voice might tell him more than her words

expressed. What feeling was she anxious to conceal? Was it irritation

at having been kept waiting so long by herself in the landlady's room?

"If you will follow me," said Mr. Orridge, "I will take you to Mrs.

Frankland immediately."

Mrs. Jazeph rose slowly, and, when she was on her feet, rested her

hand for an instant on a table near her. That action, momentary as it

was, helped to confirm the doctor in his conviction of her physical

unfitness for the position which she had volunteered to occupy.

"You seem tired," he said, as he led the way out of the door. "Surely,

you did not walk all the way here?"

"No, Sir. My mistress was so kind as to let one of the servants drive

me in the pony-chaise." There was the same restraint in her voice as

she made that answer; and still she never attempted to lift her veil.

While ascending the inn stairs Mr. Orridge mentally resolved to watch

her first proceedings in Mrs. Frankland's room closely, and to send,

after all, for the London nurse, unless Mrs. Jazeph showed remarkable

aptitude in the performance of her new duties.

The room which Mrs. Frankland occupied was situated at the back of the

house, having been chosen in that position with the object of removing

her as much as possible from the bustle and noise about the inn door.

It was lighted by one window overlooking a few cottages, beyond which

spread the rich grazing grounds of West Somersetshire, bounded by a

long monotonous line of thickly wooded hills. The bed was of the

old-fashioned kind, with the customary four posts and the inevitable

damask curtains. It projected from the wall into the middle of the

room, in such a situation as to keep the door on the right hand of the

person occupying it, the window on the left, and the fire-place

opposite the foot of the bed. On the side of the bed nearest the

window the curtains were open, while at the foot, and on the side near

the door, they were closely drawn. By this arrangement the interior of

the bed was necessarily concealed from the view of any person on first

entering the room.

"How do you find yourself to-night, Mrs. Frankland?" asked Mr.

Orridge, reaching out his hand to undraw the curtains. "Do you think

you will be any the worse for a little freer circulation of air?"

"On the contrary, doctor, I shall be all the better," was the answer.

"But I am afraid--in case you have ever been disposed to consider me a

sensible woman--that my character will suffer a little in your

estimation when you see how I have been occupying myself for the last

hour."

Mr. Orridge smiled as he undrew the curtains, and laughed outright

when he looked at the mother and child.

Mrs. Frankland had been amusing herself, and gratifying her taste for

bright colors, by dressing out her baby with blue ribbons as he lay

asleep. He had a necklace, shoulder-knots, and bracelets, all of blue

ribbon; and, to complete the quaint finery of his costume, his

mother's smart little lace cap had been hitched comically on one side

of his head. Rosamond herself, as if determined to vie with the baby

in gayety of dress, wore a light pink jacket, ornamented down the

bosom and over the sleeves with bows of white satin ribbon. Laburnum

blossoms, gathered that morning, lay scattered about over the white

counterpane, intermixed with some flowers of the lily of the valley,

tied up into two nosegays with strips of cherry-colored ribbon. Over

this varied assemblage of colors, over the baby's smoothly rounded

cheeks and arms, over his mother's happy, youthful face, the tender

light of the May evening poured tranquil and warm. Thoroughly

appreciating the charm of the picture which he had disclosed on

undrawing the curtains, the doctor stood looking at it for a few

moments, quite forgetful of the errand that had brought him into the

room. He was only recalled to a remembrance of the new nurse by a

chance question which Mrs. Frankland addressed to him.

"I can't help it, doctor," said Rosamond, with a look of apology. "I

really can't help treating my baby, now I am a grown woman, just as I

used to treat my doll when I was a little girl. Did any body come into

the room with you? Lenny, are you there? Have you done dinner,

darling, and did you drink my health when you were left at dessert all

by yourself?"

"Mr. Frankland is still at dinner," said the doctor. "But I certainly

brought some one into the room with me. Where, in the name of wonder,

has she gone to?--Mrs. Jazeph!"

The housekeeper had slipped round to the part of the room between the

foot of the bed and the fire-place, where she was hidden by the

curtains that still remained drawn. When Mr. Orridge called to her,

instead of joining him where he stood, opposite the window, she

appeared at the other side of the bed, where the window was behind

her. Her shadow stole darkly over the bright picture which the doctor

had been admiring. It stretched obliquely across the counterpane, and

its dusky edges touched the figures of the mother and child.

"Gracious goodness! who are you?" exclaimed Rosamond. "A woman or a

ghost?"

Mrs. Jazeph's veil was up at last. Although her face was necessarily

in shadow in the position which she had chosen to occupy, the doctor

saw a change pass over it when Mrs. Frankland spoke. The lips dropped

and quivered a little; the marks of care and age about the mouth

deepened; and the eyebrows contracted suddenly. The eyes Mr. Orridge

could not see; they were cast down on the counterpane at the first

word that Rosamond uttered. Judging by the light of his medical

experience, the doctor concluded that she was suffering pain, and

trying to suppress any outward manifestation of it. "An affection of

the heart, most likely," he thought to himself. "She has concealed it

from her mistress, but she can't hide it from me."

"Who are you?" repeated Rosamond. "And what in the world do you stand

there for--between us and the sunlight?"

Mrs. Jazeph neither answered nor raised her eyes. She only moved back

timidly to the farthest corner of the window.

"Did you not get a message from me this afternoon?" asked the doctor,

appealing to Mrs. Frankland.

"To be sure I did," replied Rosamond. "A very kind, flattering message

about a new nurse."

"There she is," said Mr. Orridge, pointing across the bed to Mrs.

Jazeph.

"You don't say so!" exclaimed Rosamond. "But of course it must be. Who

else could have come in with you? I ought to have known that. Pray come

here--(what is her name, doctor? Joseph, did you say?--No?--Jazeph?)

--pray come nearer, Mrs. Jazeph, and let me apologize for speaking so

abruptly to you. I am more obliged than I can say for your kindness in

coming here, and for your mistress's good-nature in resigning you to

me. I hope I shall not give you much trouble, and I am sure you will

find the baby easy to manage. He is a perfect angel, and sleeps like a

dormouse. Dear me! now I look at you a little closer, I am afraid you

are in very delicate health yourself. Doctor, if Mrs. Jazeph would not

be offended with me, I should almost feel inclined to say that she

looks in want of nursing herself."

Mrs. Jazeph bent down over the laburnum blossoms on the bed, and

began hurriedly and confusedly to gather them together.

"I thought as you do, Mrs. Frankland," said Mr. Orridge. "But I have

been assured that Mrs. Jazeph's looks belie her, and that her

capabilities as a nurse quite equal her zeal."

"Are you going to make all that laburnum into a nosegay?" asked Mrs.

Frankland, noticing how the new nurse was occupying herself. "How

thoughtful of you! and how magnificent it will be! I am afraid you

will find the room very untidy. I will ring for my maid to set it to

rights."

"If you will allow me to put it in order, ma'am, I shall be very glad

to begin being of use to you in that way," said Mrs. Jazeph. When she

made the offer she looked up; and her eyes and Mrs. Frankland's met.

Rosamond instantly drew back on the pillow, and her color altered a

little.

"How strangely you look at me!" she said.

Mrs. Jazeph started at the words, as if something had struck her, and

moved away suddenly to the window.

"You are not offended with me, I hope?" said Rosamond, noticing the

action. "I have a sad habit of saying any thing that comes uppermost.

And I really thought you looked just now as if you saw something about

me that frightened or grieved you. Pray put the room in order, if you

are kindly willing to undertake the trouble. And never mind what I

say; you will soon get used to my ways--and we shall be as comfortable

and friendly--"

Just as Mrs. Frankland said the words "comfortable and friendly," the

new nurse left the window, and went back to the part of the room where

she was hidden from view, between the fire-place and the closed

curtains at the foot of the bed. Rosamond looked round to express her

surprise to the doctor, but he turned away at the same moment so as to

occupy a position which might enable him to observe what Mrs. Jazeph

was doing on the other side of the bed-curtains.

When he first caught sight of her, her hands were both raised to her

face. Before he could decide whether he had surprised her in the act

of clasping them over her eyes or not, they changed their position,

and were occupied in removing her bonnet. After she had placed this

part of her wearing apparel, and her shawl and gloves, on a chair in a

corner of the room, she went to the dressing-table, and began to

arrange the various useful and ornamental objects scattered about it.

She set them in order with remarkable dexterity and neatness, showing

a taste for arrangement, and a capacity for discriminating between

things that were likely to be wanted and things that were not, which

impressed Mr. Orridge very favorably. He particularly noticed the

carefulness with which she handled some bottles of physic, reading the

labels on each, and arranging the medicine that might be required at

night on one side of the table, and the medicine that might be

required in the day-time on the other. When she left the

dressing-table, and occupied herself in setting the furniture

straight, and in folding up articles of clothing that had been thrown

on one side, not the slightest movement of her thin, wasted hands

seemed ever to be made at hazard or in vain. Noiselessly, modestly,

observantly, she moved from side to side of the room, and neatness and

order followed her steps wherever she went. When Mr. Orridge resumed

his place at Mrs. Frankland's bedside, his mind was at ease on one

point at least--it was perfectly evident that the new nurse could be

depended on to make no mistakes.

"What an odd woman she is," whispered Rosamond.

"Odd, indeed," returned Mr. Orridge, "and desperately broken in

health, though she may not confess to it. However, she is wonderfully

neat-handed and careful, and there can be no harm in trying her for

one night--that is to say, unless you feel any objection."

"On the contrary," said Rosamond, "she rather interests me. There is

something in her face and manner--I can't say what--that makes me feel

curious to know more of her. I must get her to talk, and try if I

can't bring out all her peculiarities. Don't be afraid of my exciting

myself, and don't stop here in this dull room on my account. I would

much rather you went down stairs, and kept my husband company over his

wine. Do go and talk to him, and amuse him a little--he must be so

dull, poor fellow, while I am up here; and he likes you, Mr.

Orridge--he does, very much. Stop one moment, and just look at the

baby again. He doesn't take a dangerous quantity of sleep, does he?

And, Mr. Orridge, one word more: When you have done your wine, you

will promise to lend my husband the use of your eyes, and bring him up

stairs to wish me good-night, won't you?"

Willingly engaging to pay attention to Mrs. Frankland's request, Mr.

Orridge left the bedside.

As he opened the room door, he stopped to tell Mrs. Jazeph that he

should be down stairs if she wanted him, and that he would give her

any instructions of which she might stand in need later in the

evening, before he left the inn for the night. The new nurse, when he

passed by her, was kneeling over one of Mrs. Frankland's open trunks,

arranging some articles of clothing which had been rather carelessly

folded up. Just before he spoke to her, he observed that she had a

chemisette in her hand, the frill of which was laced through with

ribbon.

One end of this ribbon she appeared to him to be on the point of

drawing out, when the sound of his footsteps disturbed her. The moment

she became aware of his approach she dropped the chemisette suddenly

in the trunk, and covered it over with some handkerchiefs. Although

this proceeding on Mrs. Jazeph's part rather surprised the doctor, he

abstained from showing that he had noticed it. Her mistress had

vouched for her character, after five years' experience of it, and the

bit of ribbon was intrinsically worthless. On both accounts, it was

impossible to suspect her of attempting to steal it; and yet, as Mr.

Orridge could not help feeling when he had left the room, her conduct,

when he surprised her over the trunk, was exactly the conduct of a

person who is about to commit a theft.

"Pray don't trouble yourself about my luggage," said Rosamond,

remarking Mrs. Jazeph's occupation as soon as the doctor had gone.

"That is my idle maid's business, and you will only make her more

careless than ever if you do it for her. I am sure the room is

beautifully set in order. Come here and sit down and rest yourself.

You must be a very unselfish, kind-hearted woman to give yourself all

this trouble to serve a stranger. The doctor's message this afternoon

told me that your mistress was a friend of my poor, dear father's. I

suppose she must have known him before my time. Any way, I feel doubly

grateful to her for taking an interest in me for my father's sake. But

you can have no such feeling; you must have come here from pure

good-nature and anxiety to help others. Don't go away, there, to the

window. Come and sit down by me."

Mrs. Jazeph had risen from the trunk, and was approaching the

bedside--when she suddenly turned away in the direction of the

fire-place, just as Mrs. Frankland began to speak of her father.

"Come and sit here," reiterated Rosamond, getting impatient at

receiving no answer. "What in the world are you doing there at the

foot of the bed?"

The figure of the new nurse again interposed between the bed and the

fading evening light that glimmered through the window before there

was any reply.

"The evening is closing in," said Mrs. Jazeph, "and the window is not

quite shut. I was thinking of making it fast, and of drawing down the

blind--if you had no objection, ma'am?"

"Oh, not yet! not yet! Shut the window, if you please, in case the

baby should catch cold, but don't draw down the blind. Let me get my

peep at the view as long as there is any light left to see it by. That

long flat stretch of grazing-ground out there is just beginning, at

this dim time, to look a little like my childish recollections of a

Cornish moor. Do you know any thing about Cornwall, Mrs. Jazeph?"

"I have heard--" At those first three words of reply the nurse

stopped. She was just then engaged in shutting the window, and she

seemed to find some difficulty in closing the lock.

"What have you heard?" asked Rosamond.

"I have heard that Cornwall is a wild, dreary country," said Mrs.

Jazeph, still busying herself with the lock of the window, and, by

consequence, still keeping her back turned to Mrs. Frankland.

"Can't you shut the window, yet?" said Rosamond. "My maid always does

it quite easily. Leave it till she comes up--I am going to ring for

her directly. I want her to brush my hair and cool my face with a

little Eau de Cologne and water."

"I have shut it, ma'am," said Mrs. Jazeph, suddenly succeeding in

closing the lock. "And if you will allow me, I should be very glad to

make you comfortable for the night, and save you the trouble of

ringing for the maid."

Thinking the new nurse the oddest woman she had ever met with, Mrs.

Frankland accepted the offer. By the time Mrs. Jazeph had prepared the

Eau de Cologne and water, the twilight was falling softly over the

landscape outside, and the room was beginning to grow dark.

"Had you not better light a candle?" suggested Rosamond.

"I think not, ma'am," said Mrs. Jazeph, rather hastily. "I can see

quite well without."

She began to brush Mrs. Frankland's hair as she spoke; and, at the

same time, asked a question which referred to the few words that had

passed between them on the subject of Cornwall. Pleased to find that

the new nurse had grown familiar enough at last to speak before she

was spoken to, Rosamond desired nothing better than to talk about her

recollections of her native country. But, from some inexplicable

reason, Mrs. Jazeph's touch, light and tender as it was, had such a

strangely disconcerting effect on her, that she could not succeed, for

the moment, in collecting her thoughts so as to reply, except in the

briefest manner. The careful hands of the nurse lingered with a

stealthy gentleness among the locks of her hair; the pale, wasted face

of the new nurse approached, every now and then, more closely to her

own than appeared at all needful. A vague sensation of uneasiness,

which she could not trace to any particular part of her--which she

could hardly say that she really felt, in a bodily sense, at

all--seemed to be floating about her, to be hanging around and over

her, like the air she breathed. She could not move, though she wanted

to move in the bed; she could not turn her head so as to humor the

action of the brush; she could not look round; she could not break the

embarrassing silence which had been caused by her own short,

discouraging answer. At last the sense of oppression--whether fancied

or real--irritated her into snatching the brush out of Mrs. Jazeph's

hand. The instant she had done so, she felt ashamed of the

discourteous abruptness of the action, and confused at the alarm and

surprise which the manner of the nurse exhibited. With the strongest

sense of the absurdity of her own conduct, and yet without the least

power of controlling herself, she burst out laughing, and tossed the

brush away to the foot of the bed.

"Pray don't look surprised, Mrs. Jazeph," she said, still laughing

without knowing why, and without feeling in the slightest degree

amused. "I'm very rude and odd, I know. You have brushed my hair

delightfully; but--I can't tell how--it seemed, all the time, as if

you were brushing the strangest fancies into my head. I can't help

laughing at them--I can't indeed! Do you know, once or twice, I

absolutely fancied, when your face was closest to mine, that you

wanted to kiss me! Did you ever hear of any thing so ridiculous? I

declare I am more of a baby, in some things, than the little darling

here by my side!"

Mrs. Jazeph made no answer. She left the bed while Rosamond was

speaking, and came back, after an unaccountably long delay, with the

Eau de Cologne and water. As she held the basin while Mrs. Frankland

bathed her face, she kept away at arm's length, and came no nearer

when it was time to offer the towel. Rosamond began to be afraid that

she had seriously offended Mrs. Jazeph, and tried to soothe and

propitiate her by asking questions about the management of the baby.

There was a slight trembling in the sweet voice of the new nurse, but

not the faintest tone of sullenness or anger, as she simply and

quietly answered the inquiries addressed to her. By dint of keeping

the conversation still on the subject of the child, Mrs. Frankland

succeeded, little by little, in luring her back to the bedside--in

tempting her to bend down admiringly over the infant--in emboldening

her, at last, to kiss him tenderly on the cheek. One kiss was all that

she gave; and she turned away from the bed, after it, and sighed

heavily.

The sound of that sigh fell very sadly on Rosamond's heart. Up to this

time the baby's little span of life had always been associated with

smiling faces and pleasant words. It made her uneasy to think that any

one could caress him and sigh after it.

"I am sure you must be fond of children," she said, hesitating a

little from natural delicacy of feeling. "But will you excuse me for

noticing that it seems rather a mournful fondness? Pray--pray don't

answer my question if it gives you any pain--if you have any loss to

deplore; but--but I do so want to ask if you have ever had a child of

your own?"

Mrs. Jazeph was standing near a chair when that question was put. She

caught fast hold of the back of it, grasping it so firmly, or perhaps

leaning on it so heavily, that the woodwork cracked. Her head dropped

low on her bosom. She did not utter, or even attempt to utter, a

single word.

Fearing that she must have lost a child of her own, and dreading to

distress her unnecessarily by venturing to ask any more questions,

Rosamond said nothing, as she stooped over the baby to kiss him in her

turn. Her lips rested on his cheek a little above where Mrs. Jazeph's

lips had rested the moment before, and they touched a spot of wet on

his smooth warm skin. Fearing that some of the water in which she had

been bathing her face might have dropped on him, she passed her

fingers lightly over his head, neck, and bosom, and felt no other

spots of wet any where. The one drop that had fallen on him was the

drop that wetted the cheek which the new nurse had kissed.

The twilight faded over the landscape, the room grew darker and

darker; and still, though she was now sitting close to the table on

which the candles and matches were placed, Mrs. Jazeph made no attempt

to strike a light. Rosamond did not feel quite comfortable at the idea

of lying awake in the darkness, with nobody in the room but a person

who was as yet almost a total stranger; and she resolved to have the

candles lighted immediately.

"Mrs. Jazeph," she said, looking toward the gathering obscurity

outside the window, "I shall be much obliged to you, if you will light

the candles and pull down the blind. I can trace no more resemblances

out there, now, to a Cornish prospect; the view has gone altogether."

"Are you very fond of Cornwall, ma'am?" asked Mrs. Jazeph, rising, in

rather a dilatory manner, to light the candles.

"Indeed I am," said Rosamond. "I was born there; and my husband and I

were on our way to Cornwall when we were obliged to stop, on my

account, at this place. You are a long time getting the candles lit.

Can't you find the match-box?"

Mrs. Jazeph, with an awkwardness which was rather surprising in a

person who had shown so much neat-handedness in setting the room to

rights, broke the first match in attempting to light it, and let the

second go out the instant after the flame was kindled. At the third

attempt she was more successful; but she only lit one candle, and that

one she carried away from the table which Mrs. Frankland could see, to

the dressing-table, which was hidden from her by the curtains at the

foot of the bed.

"Why do you move the candle?" asked Rosamond.

"I thought it was best for your eyes, ma'am, not to have the light too

near them," replied Mrs. Jazeph; and then added hastily, as if she was

unwilling to give Mrs. Frankland time to make any objections--"And so

you were going to Cornwall, ma'am, when you stopped at this place? To

travel about there a little, I suppose?" After saying these words, she

took up the second candle, and passed out of sight as she carried it

to the dressing-table.

Rosamond thought that the nurse, in spite of her gentle looks and

manners, was a remarkably obstinate woman. But she was too

good-natured to care about asserting her right to have the candles

placed where she pleased; and when she answered Mrs. Jazeph's

question, she still spoke to her as cheerfully and familiarly as ever.

"Oh, dear no! Not to travel about," she said, "but to go straight to

the old country-house where I was born. It belongs to my husband now,

Mrs. Jazeph. I have not been near it since I was a little girl of five

years of age. Such a ruinous, rambling old place! You, who talk of the

dreariness and wildness of Cornwall, would be quite horrified at the

very idea of living in Porthgenna Tower."

The faintly rustling sound of Mrs. Jazeph's silk dress, as she moved

about the dressing-table, had been audible all the while Rosamond was

speaking. It ceased instantaneously when she said the words

"Porthgenna Tower;" and for one moment there was a dead silence in the

room.

"You, who have been living all your life, I suppose, in nicely

repaired houses, can not imagine what a place it is that we are going

to, when I am well enough to travel again," pursued Rosamond. "What do

you think, Mrs. Jazeph, of a house with one whole side of it that has

never been inhabited for sixty or seventy years past? You may get some

notion of the size of Porthgenna Tower from that. There is a west side

that we are to live in when we get there, and a north side, where the

empty old rooms are, which I hope we shall be able to repair. Only

think of the hosts of odd, old-fashioned things that we may find in

those uninhabited rooms! I mean to put on the cook's apron and the

gardener's gloves, and rummage all over them from top to bottom. How I

shall astonish the housekeeper, when I get to Porthgenna, and ask her

for the keys of the ghostly north rooms!"

A low cry, and a sound as if something had struck against the

dressing-table, followed Mrs. Frankland's last words. She started in

the bed, and asked eagerly what was the matter.

"Nothing," answered Mrs. Jazeph, speaking so constrainedly that her

voice dropped to a whisper. "Nothing, ma'am--nothing, I assure you. I

struck my side, by accident, against the table--pray don't be

alarmed!--it's not worth noticing."

"But you speak as if you were in pain," said Rosamond.

"No, no--not in pain. Not hurt--not hurt, indeed."

While Mrs. Jazeph was declaring that she was not hurt, the door of the

room was opened, and the doctor entered, leading in Mr. Frankland.

"We come early, Mrs. Frankland, but we are going to give you plenty of

time to compose yourself for the night," said Mr. Orridge. He paused,

and noticed that Rosamond's color was heightened. "I am afraid you

have been talking and exciting yourself a little too much," he went

on. "If you will excuse me for venturing on the suggestion, Mr.

Frankland, I think the sooner good-night is said the better. Where is

the nurse?"

Mrs. Jazeph sat down with her back to the lighted candle when she

heard herself asked for. Just before that, she had been looking at Mr.

Frankland with an eager, undisguised curiosity, which, if any one had

noticed it, must have appeared surprisingly out of character with her

usual modesty and refinement of manner.

"I am afraid the nurse has accidentally hurt her side more than she is

willing to confess," said Rosamond to the doctor, pointing with one

hand to the place in which Mrs. Jazeph was sitting, and raising the

other to her husband's neck as he stooped over her pillow.

Mr. Orridge, on inquiring what had happened, could not prevail on the

new nurse to acknowledge that the accident was of the slightest

consequence. He suspected, nevertheless, that she was suffering, or,

at least, that something had happened to discompose her; for he found

the greatest difficulty in fixing her attention, while he gave her a

few needful directions in case her services were required during the

night. All the time he was speaking, her eyes wandered away from him

to the part of the room where Mr. and Mrs. Frankland were talking

together. Mrs. Jazeph looked like the last person in the world who

would be guilty of an act of impertinent curiosity; and yet she openly

betrayed all the characteristics of an inquisitive woman while Mr.

Frankland was standing by his wife's pillow. The doctor was obliged to

assume his most peremptory manner before he could get her to attend to

him at all.

"And now, Mrs. Frankland," said Mr. Orridge, turning away from the

nurse, "as I have given Mrs. Jazeph all the directions she wants, I

shall set the example of leaving you in quiet by saying good-night."

Understanding the hint conveyed in these words, Mr. Frankland

attempted to say good-night too, but his wife kept tight hold of both

his hands, and declared that it was unreasonable to expect her to let

him go for another half-hour at least. Mr. Orridge shook his head, and

began to expatiate on the evils of over-excitement, and the blessings

of composure and sleep. His remonstrances, however, would have

produced very little effect, even if Rosamond had allowed him to

continue them, but for the interposition of the baby, who happened to

wake up at that moment, and who proved himself a powerful auxiliary on

the doctor's side, by absorbing all his mother's attention

immediately. Seizing his opportunity at the right moment, Mr. Orridge

quietly led Mr. Frankland out of the room, just as Rosamond was taking

the child up in her arms. He stopped before closing the door to

whisper one last word to Mrs. Jazeph.

"If Mrs. Frankland wants to talk, you must not encourage her," he

said. "As soon as she has quieted the baby, she ought to go to sleep.

There is a chair-bedstead in that corner, which you can open for

yourself when you want to lie down. Keep the candle where it is now,

behind the curtain. The less light Mrs. Frankland sees, the sooner she

will compose herself to sleep."

Mrs. Jazeph made no answer; she only looked at the doctor and

courtesied. That strangely scared expression in her eyes, which he had

noticed on first seeing her, was more painfully apparent than ever

when he left her alone for the night with the mother and child. "She

will never do," thought Mr. Orridge, as he led Mr. Frankland down the

inn stairs. "We shall have to send to London for a nurse, after all."

Feeling a little irritated by the summary manner in which her husband

had been taken away from her, Rosamond fretfully rejected the offers

of assistance which were made to her by Mrs. Jazeph as soon as the

doctor had left the room. The nurse said nothing when her services

were declined; and yet, judging by her conduct, she seemed anxious to

speak. Twice she advanced toward the bedside--opened her

lips--stopped--and retired confusedly, before she settled herself

finally in her former place by the dressing-table. Here she remained,

silent and out of sight, until the child had been quieted, and had

fallen asleep in his mother's arms, with one little pink, half-closed

hand resting on her bosom. Rosamond could not resist raising the hand

to her lips, though she risked waking him again by doing so. As she

kissed it, the sound of the kiss was followed by a faint, suppressed

sob, proceeding from the other side of the curtains at the lower end

of the bed.

"What is that?" she exclaimed.

"Nothing, ma'am," said Mrs. Jazeph, in the same constrained,

whispering tones in which she had answered Mrs. Frankland's former

question. "I think I was just falling asleep in the arm-chair here;

and I ought to have told you perhaps that, having had my troubles, and

being afflicted with a heart complaint, I have a habit of sighing in

my sleep. It means nothing, ma'am, and I hope you will be good enough

to excuse it."

Rosamond's generous instincts were aroused in a moment.

"Excuse it!" she said. "I hope I may do better than that, Mrs. Jazeph,

and be the means of relieving it. When Mr. Orridge comes to-morrow you

shall consult him, and I will take care that you want for nothing that

he may order. No! no! Don't thank me until I have been the means of

making you well--and keep where you are, if the arm-chair is

comfortable. The baby is asleep again; and I should like to have half

an hour's quiet before I change to the night side of the bed. Stop

where you are for the present: I will call as soon as I want you."

So far from exercising a soothing effect on Mrs. Jazeph, these kindly

meant words produced the precisely opposite result of making her

restless. She began to walk about the room, and confusedly attempted

to account for the change in her conduct by saying that she wished to

satisfy herself that all her arrangements were properly made for the

night. In a few minutes more she began, in defiance of the doctor's

prohibition, to tempt Mrs. Frankland into talking again, by asking

questions about Porthgenna Tower, and by referring to the chances for

and against its being chosen as a permanent residence by the young

married couple.

"Perhaps, ma'am," she said, speaking on a sudden, with an eagerness in

her voice which was curiously at variance with the apparent

indifference of her manner--"Perhaps when you see Porthgenna Tower you

may not like it so well as you think you will now. Who can tell that

you may not get tired and leave the place again after a few

days--especially if you go into the empty rooms? I should have

thought--if you will excuse my saying so, ma'am--I should have thought

that a lady like you would have liked to get as far away as possible

from dirt and dust, and disagreeable smells."

"I can face worse inconveniences than those, where my curiosity is

concerned," said Rosamond. "And I am more curious to see the

uninhabited rooms at Porthgenna than to see the Seven Wonders of the

World. Even if we don't settle altogether at the old house, I feel

certain that we shall stay there for some time."

At that answer, Mrs. Jazeph abruptly turned away, and asked no more

questions. She retired to a corner of the room near the door, where

the chair-bedstead stood which the doctor had pointed out to

her--occupied herself for a few minutes in making it ready for the

night--then left it as suddenly as she had approached it, and began to

walk up and down once more. This unaccountable restlessness, which had

already surprised Rosamond, now made her feel rather uneasy--especially

when she once or twice overheard Mrs. Jazeph talking to herself.

Judging by words and fragments of sentences that were audible now and

then, her mind was still running, with the most inexplicable

persistency, on the subject of Porthgenna Tower. As the minutes wore

on, and she continued to walk up and down, and still went on talking,

Rosamond's uneasiness began to strengthen into something like alarm.

She resolved to awaken Mrs. Jazeph, in the least offensive manner, to

a sense of the strangeness of her own conduct, by noticing that she

was talking, but by not appearing to understand that she was talking

to herself.

"What did you say?" asked Rosamond, putting the question at a moment

when the nurse's voice was most distinctly betraying her in the act of

thinking aloud.

Mrs. Jazeph stopped, and raised her head vacantly, as if she had been

awakened out of a heavy sleep.

"I thought you were saying something more about our old house,"

continued Rosamond. "I thought I heard you say that I ought not to go

to Porthgenna, or that you would not go there in my place, or

something of that sort."

Mrs. Jazeph blushed like a young girl. "I think you must have been

mistaken, ma'am," she said, and stooped over the chair-bedstead again.

Watching her anxiously, Rosamond saw that, while she was affecting to

arrange the bedstead, she was doing nothing whatever to prepare it for

being slept in. What did that mean? What did her whole conduct mean

for the last half-hour? As Mrs. Frankland asked herself those

questions, the thrill of a terrible suspicion turned her cold to the

very roots of her hair. It had never occurred to her before, but it

suddenly struck her now, with the force of positive conviction, that

the new nurse was not in her right senses.

All that was unaccountable in her behavior--her odd disappearances

behind the curtains at the foot of the bed; her lingering, stealthy,

over-familiar way of using the hair-brush; her silence at one time,

her talkativeness at another; her restlessness, her whispering to

herself, her affectation of being deeply engaged in doing something

which she was not doing at all--every one of her strange actions

(otherwise incomprehensible) became intelligible in a moment on that

one dreadful supposition that she was mad.

Terrified as she was, Rosamond kept her presence of mind. One of her

arms stole instinctively round the child; and she had half raised the

other to catch at the bell-rope hanging above her pillow, when she saw

Mrs. Jazeph turn and look at her.

A woman possessed only of ordinary nerve would, probably, at that

instant have pulled at the bell-rope in the unreasoning desperation of

sheer fright. Rosamond had courage enough to calculate consequences,

and to remember that Mrs. Jazeph would have time to lock the door,

before assistance could arrive, if she betrayed her suspicions by

ringing without first assigning some plausible reason for doing so.

She slowly closed her eyes as the nurse looked at her, partly to

convey the notion that she was composing herself to sleep--partly to

gain time to think of some safe excuse for summoning her maid. The

flurry of her spirits, however, interfered with the exercise of her

ingenuity. Minute after minute dragged on heavily, and still she could

think of no assignable reason for ringing the bell.

She was just doubting whether it would not be safest to send Mrs.

Jazeph out of the room, on some message to her husband, to lock the

door the moment she was alone, and then to ring--she was just doubting

whether she would boldly adopt this course of proceeding or not, when

she heard the rustle of the nurse's silk dress approaching the

bedside.

Her first impulse was to snatch at the bell-rope; but fear had

paralyzed her hand; she could not raise it from the pillow.

The rustling of the silk dress ceased. She half unclosed her eyes, and

saw that the nurse was stopping midway between the part of the room

from which she had advanced and the bedside. There was nothing wild or

angry in her look. The agitation which her face expressed was the

agitation of perplexity and alarm. She stood rapidly clasping and

unclasping her hands, the image of bewilderment and distress--stood so

for nearly a minute--then came forward a few steps more, and said

inquiringly, in a whisper:

"Not asleep? not quite asleep, yet?"

Rosamond tried to speak in answer, but the quick beating of her heart

seemed to rise up to her very lips, and to stifle the words on them.

The nurse came on, still with the same perplexity and distress in her

face, to within a foot of the bedside--knelt down by the pillow, and

looked earnestly at Rosamond--shuddered a little, and glanced all

round her, as if to make sure that the room was empty--bent

forward--hesitated--bent nearer, and whispered into her ear these

words:

"When you go to Porthgenna, _keep out of the Myrtle Room_!"

The hot breath of the woman, as she spoke, beat on Rosamond's cheek,

and seemed to fly in one fever-throb through every vein of her body.

The nervous shock of that unutterable sensation burst the bonds of the

terror that had hitherto held her motionless and speechless. She

started up in bed with a scream, caught hold of the bell-rope, and

pulled it violently.

"Oh, hush! hush!" cried Mrs. Jazeph, sinking back on her knees, and

beating her hands together despairingly with the helpless

gesticulation of a child.

Rosamond rang again and again. Hurrying footsteps and eager voices

were heard outside on the stairs. It was not ten o'clock yet--nobody

had retired for the night--and the violent ringing had already alarmed

the house.

The nurse rose to her feet, staggered back from the bedside, and

supported herself against the wall of the room, as the footsteps and

the voices reached the door. She said not another word. The hands that

she had been beating together so violently but an instant before hung

down nerveless at her side. The blank of a great agony spread over all

her face, and stilled it awfully.

The first person who entered the room was Mrs. Frankland's maid, and

the landlady followed her.

"Fetch Mr. Frankland," said Rosamond, faintly, addressing the

landlady. "I want to speak to him directly.--You," she continued,

beckoning to the maid, "sit by me here till your master comes. I have

been dreadfully frightened. Don't ask me questions; but stop here."

The maid stared at her mistress in amazement; then looked round with a

disparaging frown at the nurse. When the landlady left the room to

fetch Mr. Frankland, she had moved a little away from the wall, so as

to command a full view of the bed. Her eyes were fixed with a look of

breathless suspense, of devouring anxiety, on Rosamond's face. From

all her other features the expression seemed to be gone. She said

nothing, she noticed nothing. She did not start, she did not move

aside an inch, when the landlady returned, and led Mr. Frankland to

his wife.

"Lenny! don't let the new nurse stop here to-night--pray, pray don't!"

whispered Rosamond, eagerly catching her husband by the arm.

Warned by the trembling of her hand, Mr. Frankland laid his fingers

lightly on her temples and on her heart.

"Good Heavens, Rosamond! what has happened? I left you quiet and

comfortable, and now--"

"I've been frightened, dear--dreadfully frightened, by the new nurse.

Don't be hard on her, poor creature; she is not in her right senses--I

am certain she is not. Only get her away quietly--only send her back

at once to where she came from. I shall die of the fright, if she

stops here. She has been behaving so strangely--she has spoken such

words to me--Lenny! Lenny! don't let go of my hand. She came stealing

up to me so horribly, just where you are now; she knelt down at my

ear, and whispered--oh, such words!"

"Hush, hush, love!" said Mr. Frankland, getting seriously alarmed by

the violence of Rosamond's agitation. "Never mind repeating the words

now; wait till you are calmer--I beg and entreat of you, wait till you

are calmer. I will do every thing you wish, if you will only lie down

and be quiet, and try to compose yourself before you say another word.

It is quite enough for me to know that this woman has frightened you,

and that you wish her to be sent away with as little harshness as

possible. We will put off all further explanations till to-morrow

morning. I deeply regret now that I did not persist in carrying out my

own idea of sending for a proper nurse from London. Where is the

landlady?"

The landlady placed herself by Mr. Frankland's side.

"Is it late?" asked Leonard.

"Oh no, Sir; not ten o'clock yet."

"Order a fly to be brought to the door, then, as soon as possible, if

you please. Where is the nurse?"

"Standing behind you, Sir, near the wall," said the maid.

As Mr. Frankland turned in that direction, Rosamond whispered to him:

"Don't be hard on her, Lenny."

The maid, looking with contemptuous curiosity at Mrs. Jazeph, saw the

whole expression of her countenance alter, as those words were spoken.

The tears rose thick in her eyes, and flowed down her cheeks. The

deathly spell of stillness that had lain on her face was broken in an

instant. She drew back again, close to the wall, and leaned against it

as before. "Don't be hard on her!" the maid heard her repeat to

herself, in a low sobbing voice. "Don't be hard on her! Oh, my God!

she said that kindly--she said that kindly, at least!"

"I have no desire to speak to you, or to use you unkindly," said Mr.

Frankland, imperfectly hearing what she said. "I know nothing of what

has happened, and I make no accusations. I find Mrs. Frankland

violently agitated and frightened; I hear her connect that agitation

with you--not angrily, but compassionately--and, instead of speaking

harshly, I prefer leaving it to your own sense of what is right, to

decide whether your attendance here ought not to cease at once. I have

provided the proper means for your conveyance from this place; and I

would suggest that you should make our apologies to your mistress, and

say nothing more than that circumstances have happened which oblige us

to dispense with your services."

"You have been considerate toward me, Sir," said Mrs. Jazeph, speaking

quietly, and with a certain gentle dignity in her manner, "and I will

not prove myself unworthy of your forbearance by saying what I might

say in my own defense." She advanced into the middle of the room, and

stopped where she could see Rosamond plainly. Twice she attempted to

speak, and twice her voice failed her. At the third effort she

succeeded in controlling herself.

"Before I go, ma'am," she said, "I hope you will believe that I have

no bitter feeling against you for sending me away. I am not

angry--pray remember always that I was not angry, and that I never

complained."

There was such a forlornness in her face, such a sweet, sorrowful

resignation in every tone of her voice during the utterance of these

few words, that Rosamond's heart smote her.

"Why did you frighten me?" she asked, half relenting.

"Frighten you? How could I frighten you? Oh me! of all the people in

the world, how could _I_ frighten you?"

Mournfully saying those words, the nurse went to the chair on which

she had placed her bonnet and shawl, and put them on. The landlady and

the maid, watching her with curious eyes, detected that she was again

weeping bitterly, and noticed with astonishment, at the same time, how

neatly she put on her bonnet and shawl. The wasted hands were moving

mechanically, and were trembling while they moved,--and yet, slight

thing though it was, the inexorable instinct of propriety guided their

most trifling actions still.

On her way to the door, she stopped again at passing the bedside,

looked through her tears at Rosamond and the child, struggled a little

with herself, and then spoke her farewell words--

"God bless you, and keep you and your child happy and prosperous," she

said. "I am not angry at being sent away. If you ever think of me

again, after to-night, please to remember that I was not angry, and

that I never complained."

She stood for a moment longer, still weeping, and still looking

through her tears at the mother and child--then turned away and walked

to the door. Something in the last tones of her voice caused a silence

in the room. Of the four persons in it not one could utter a word, as

the nurse closed the door gently, and went out from them alone.

CHAPTER V.

A COUNCIL OF THREE.

On the morning after the departure of Mrs. Jazeph, the news that she

had been sent away from the Tiger's Head by Mr. Frankland's

directions, reached the doctor's residence from the inn just as he was

sitting down to breakfast. Finding that the report of the nurse's

dismissal was not accompanied by any satisfactory explanation of the

cause of it, Mr. Orridge refused to believe that her attendance on

Mrs. Frankland had really ceased. However, although he declined to

credit the news, he was so far disturbed by it that he finished his

breakfast in a hurry, and went to pay his morning visit at the Tiger's

Head nearly two hours before the time at which he usually attended on

his patient.

On his way to the inn, he was met and stopped by the one waiter

attached to the establishment. "I was just bringing you a message from

Mr. Frankland, Sir," said the man. "He wants to see you as soon as

possible."

"Is it true that Mrs. Frankland's nurse was sent away last night by

Mr. Frankland's order?" asked Mr. Orridge.

"Quite true, Sir," answered the waiter.

The doctor colored, and looked seriously discomposed. One of the most

precious things we have about us--especially if we happen to belong to

the medical profession--is our dignity. It struck Mr. Orridge that he

ought to have been consulted before a nurse of his recommending was

dismissed from her situation at a moment's notice. Was Mr. Frankland

presuming upon his position as a gentleman of fortune? The power of

wealth may do much with impunity, but it is not privileged to offer

any practical contradictions to a man's good opinion of himself. Never

had the doctor thought more disrespectfully of rank and riches; never

had he been conscious of reflecting on republican principles with such

absolute impartiality, as when he now followed the waiter in sullen

silence to Mr. Frankland's room.

"Who is that?" asked Leonard, when he heard the door open.

"Mr. Orridge, Sir," said the waiter.

"Good-morning," said Mr. Orridge, with self-asserting abruptness and

familiarity.

Mr. Frankland was sitting in an arm-chair, with his legs crossed. Mr.

Orridge carefully selected another arm-chair, and crossed his legs on

the model of Mr. Frankland's the moment he sat down. Mr. Frankland's

hands were in the pockets of his dressing-gown. Mr. Orridge had no

pockets, except in his coat-tails, which he could not conveniently get

at; but he put his thumbs into the arm-holes of his waistcoat, and

asserted himself against the easy insolence of wealth in that way. It

made no difference to him--so curiously narrow is the range of a man's

perceptions when he is insisting on his own importance--that Mr.

Frankland was blind, and consequently incapable of being impressed by

the independence of his bearing. Mr. Orridge's own dignity was

vindicated in Mr. Orridge's own presence, and that was enough.

"I am glad you have come so early, doctor," said Mr. Frankland. "A

very unpleasant thing happened here last night. I was obliged to send

the new nurse away at a moment's notice."

"Were you, indeed!" said Mr. Orridge, defensively matching Mr.

Frankland's composure by an assumption of the completest indifference.

"Aha! were you indeed?"

"If there had been time to send and consult you, of course I should

have been only too glad to have done so," continued Leonard; "but it

was impossible to hesitate. We were all alarmed by a loud ringing of

my wife's bell; I was taken up to her room, and found her in a

condition of the most violent agitation and alarm. She told me she had

been dreadfully frightened by the new nurse; declared her conviction

that the woman was not in her right senses; and entreated that I would

get her out of the house with as little delay and as little harshness

as possible. Under these circumstances, what could I do? I may seem to

have been wanting in consideration toward you, in proceeding on my own

sole responsibility; but Mrs. Frankland was in such a state of

excitement that I could not tell what might be the consequence of

opposing her, or of venturing on any delays; and after the difficulty

had been got over, she would not hear of your being disturbed by a

summons to the inn. I am sure you will understand this explanation,

doctor, in the spirit in which I offer it."

Mr. Orridge began to look a little confused. His solid substructure of

independence was softening and sinking from under him. He suddenly

found himself thinking of the cultivated manners of the wealthy

classes; his thumbs slipped mechanically out of the arm-holes of his

waistcoat; and, before he well knew what he was about, he was

stammering his way through all the choicest intricacies of a

complimentary and respectful reply.

"You will naturally be anxious to know what the new nurse said or did

to frighten my wife so," pursued Mr. Frankland. "I can tell you

nothing in detail; for Mrs. Frankland was in such a state of nervous

dread last night that I was really afraid of asking for any

explanations; and I have purposely waited to make inquiries this

morning until you could come here and accompany me up stairs. You

kindly took so much trouble to secure this unlucky woman's attendance,

that you have a right to hear all that can be alleged against her, now

she has been sent away. Considering all things, Mrs. Frankland is not

so ill this morning as I was afraid she would be. She expects to see

you with me; and, if you will kindly give me your arm, we will go up

to her immediately."

On entering Mrs. Frankland's room, the doctor saw at a glance that

she had been altered for the worse by the events of the past evening.

He remarked that the smile with which she greeted her husband was the

faintest and saddest he had seen on her face. Her eyes looked dim and

weary, her skin was dry, her pulse was irregular. It was plain that

she had passed a wakeful night, and that her mind was not at ease. She

dismissed the inquiries of her medical attendant as briefly as

possible, and led the conversation immediately, of her own accord, to

the subject of Mrs. Jazeph.

"I suppose you have heard what has happened," she said, addressing Mr.

Orridge. "I can't tell you how grieved I am about it. My conduct must

look in your eyes, as well as in the eyes of the poor unfortunate

nurse, the conduct of a capricious, unfeeling woman. I am ready to cry

with sorrow and vexation when I remember how thoughtless I was, and

how little courage I showed. Oh, Lenny, it is dreadful to hurt the

feelings of any body, but to have pained that unhappy, helpless woman

as we pained her, to have made her cry so bitterly, to have caused her

such humiliation and wretchedness--"

"My dear Rosamond," interposed Mr. Frankland, "you are lamenting

effects, and forgetting causes altogether. Remember what a state of

terror I found you in--there must have been some reason for that.

Remember, too, how strong your conviction was that the nurse was out

of her senses. Surely you have not altered your opinion on that point

already?"

"It is that very opinion, love, that has been perplexing and worrying

me all night. I can't alter it; I feel more certain than ever that

there must be something wrong with the poor creature's intellect--and

yet, when I remember how good-naturedly she came here to help me, and

how anxious she seemed to make herself useful, I can't help feeling

ashamed of my suspicions; I can't help reproaching myself for having

been the cause of her dismissal last night. Mr. Orridge, did you

notice any thing in Mrs. Jazeph's face or manner which might lead you

to doubt whether her intellects were quite as sound as they ought to

be?"

"Certainly not, Mrs. Frankland, or I should never have brought her

here. I should not have been astonished to hear that she was suddenly

taken ill, or that she had been seized with a fit, or that some

slight accident, which would have frightened nobody else, had

seriously frightened her; but to be told that there is any thing

approaching to derangement in her faculties, does, I own, fairly

surprise me."

"Can I have been mistaken!" exclaimed Rosamond, looking confusedly and

self-distrustfully from Mr. Orridge to her husband. "Lenny! Lenny! if

I have been mistaken, I shall never forgive myself."

"Suppose you tell us, my dear, what led you to suspect that she was

mad?" suggested Mr. Frankland.

Rosamond hesitated. "Things that are great in one's own mind," she

said, "seem to get so little when they are put into words. I almost

despair of making you understand what good reason I had to be

frightened--and then, I am afraid, in trying to do justice to myself,

that I may not do justice to the nurse."

"Tell your own story, my love, in your own way, and you will be sure

to tell it properly," said Mr. Frankland.

"And pray remember," added Mr. Orridge, "that I attach no real

importance to my opinion of Mrs. Jazeph. I have not had time enough to

form it. Your opportunities of observing her have been far more

numerous than mine."

Thus encouraged, Rosamond plainly and simply related all that had

happened in her room on the previous evening, up to the time when she

had closed her eyes and had heard the nurse approaching her bedside.

Before repeating the extraordinary words that Mrs. Jazeph had

whispered in her ear, she made a pause, and looked earnestly in her

husband's face.

"Why do you stop?" asked Mr. Frankland.

"I feel nervous and flurried still, Lenny, when I think of the words

the nurse said to me, just before I rang the bell."

"What did she say? Was it something you would rather not repeat?"

"No! no! I am most anxious to repeat it, and to hear what you think it

means. As I have just told you, Lenny, we had been talking of

Porthgenna, and of my project of exploring the north rooms as soon as

I got there; and she had been asking many questions about the old

house; appearing, I must say, to be unaccountably interested in it,

considering she was a stranger."

"Yes?"

"Well, when she came to the bedside, she knelt down close at my ear,

and whispered all on a sudden--'When you go to Porthgenna, keep out of

the Myrtle Room!'"

Mr. Frankland started. "Is there such a room at Porthgenna?" he asked,

eagerly.

"I never heard of it," said Rosamond.

"Are you sure of that?" inquired Mr. Orridge. Up to this moment the

doctor had privately suspected that Mrs. Frankland must have fallen

asleep soon after he left her the evening before; and that the

narrative which she was now relating, with the sincerest conviction of

its reality, was actually derived from nothing but a series of vivid

impressions produced by a dream.

"I am certain I never heard of such a room," said Rosamond. "I left

Porthgenna at five years old; and I had never heard of it then. My

father often talked of the house in after-years; but I am certain that

he never spoke of any of the rooms by any particular names; and I can

say the same of your father, Lenny, whenever I was in his company

after he had bought the place. Besides, don't you remember, when the

builder we sent down to survey the house wrote you that letter, he

complained that there were no names of the rooms on the different keys

to guide him in opening the doors, and that he could get no

information from any body at Porthgenna on the subject? How could I

ever have heard of the Myrtle Room? Who was there to tell me?"

Mr. Orridge began to look perplexed; it seemed by no means so certain

that Mrs. Frankland had been dreaming, after all.

"I have thought of nothing else," said Rosamond to her husband, in

low, whispering tones. "I can't get those mysterious words off my

mind. Feel my heart, Lenny--it is beating quicker than usual only with

saying them over to you. They are such very strange, startling words.

What do you think they mean?"

"Who is the woman who spoke them?--that is the most important

question," said Mr. Frankland.

"But why did she say the words to _me_? That is what I want to

know--that is what I must know, if I am ever to feel easy in my mind

again!"

"Gently, Mrs. Frankland, gently!" said Mr. Orridge. "For your child's

sake, as well as for your own, pray try to be calm, and to look at

this very mysterious event as composedly as you can. If any exertions

of mine can throw light upon this strange woman and her still stranger

conduct, I will not spare them. I am going to-day to her mistress's

house to see one of the children; and, depend upon it, I will manage

in some way to make Mrs. Jazeph explain herself. Her mistress shall

hear every word that you have told me; and I can assure you she is

just the sort of downright, resolute woman who will insist on having

the whole mystery instantly cleared up."

Rosamond's weary eyes brightened at the doctor's proposal. "Oh, go at

once, Mr. Orridge!" she exclaimed--"go at once!"

"I have a great deal of medical work to do in the town first," said

the doctor, smiling at Mrs. Frankland's impatience.

"Begin it, then, without losing another instant," said Rosamond. "The

baby is quite well, and I am quite well--we need not detain you a

moment. And, Mr. Orridge, pray be as gentle and considerate as

possible with the poor woman; and tell her that I never should have

thought of sending her away if I had not been too frightened to know

what I was about. And say how sorry I am this morning, and say--"

"My dear, if Mrs. Jazeph is really not in her right senses, what would

be the use of overwhelming her with all these excuses?" interposed Mr.

Frankland. "It will be more to the purpose if Mr. Orridge will kindly

explain and apologize for us to her mistress."

"Go! Don't stop to talk--pray go at once!" cried Rosamond, as the

doctor attempted to reply to Mr. Frankland.

"Don't be afraid; no time shall be lost," said Mr. Orridge, opening

the door. "But remember, Mrs. Frankland, I shall expect you to reward

your embassador, when he returns from his mission, by showing him that

you are a little more quiet and composed than I find you this

morning." With that parting hint, the doctor took his leave.

"'When you go to Porthgenna, keep out of the Myrtle Room,'" repeated

Mr. Frankland, thoughtfully. "Those are very strange words, Rosamond.

Who can this woman really be? She is a perfect stranger to both of us;

we are brought into contact with her by the merest accident; and we

find that she knows something about our own house of which we were

both perfectly ignorant until she chose to speak!"

"But the warning, Lenny--the warning, so pointedly and mysteriously

addressed to me? Oh, if I could only go to sleep at once, and not wake

again till the doctor comes back!"

"My love, try not to count too certainly on our being enlightened,

even then. The woman may refuse to explain herself to any body."

"Don't even hint at such a disappointment as that, Lenny--or I shall

be wanting to get up, and go and question her myself!"

"Even if you could get up and question her, Rosamond, you might find

it impossible to make her answer. She may be afraid of certain

consequences which we can not foresee; and, in that case, I can only

repeat that it is more than probable she will explain nothing--or,

perhaps, still more likely that she will coolly deny her own words

altogether."

"Then, Lenny, we will put them to the proof for ourselves."

"And how can we do that?"

"By continuing our journey to Porthgenna the moment I am allowed to

travel, and by leaving no stone unturned when we get there until we

have discovered whether there is or is not any room in the old house

that ever was known, at any time of its existence, by the name of the

Myrtle Room."

"And suppose it should turn out that there is such a room?" asked Mr.

Frankland, beginning to feel the influence of his wife's enthusiasm.

"If it does turn out so," said Rosamond, her voice rising, and her

face lighting up with its accustomed vivacity, "how can you doubt what

will happen next? Am I not a woman? And have I not been forbidden to

enter the Myrtle Room? Lenny! Lenny! Do you know so little of my half

of humanity as to doubt what I should do the moment the room was

discovered? My darling, as a matter of course, I should walk into it

immediately."

CHAPTER VI.

ANOTHER SURPRISE.

With all the haste he could make, it was one o'clock in the afternoon

before Mr. Orridge's professional avocations allowed him to set forth

in his gig for Mrs. Norbury's house. He drove there with such

good-will that he accomplished the half-hour's journey in twenty

minutes. The footman having heard the rapid approach of the gig,

opened the hall door the instant the horse was pulled up before it,

and confronted the doctor with a smile of malicious satisfaction.

"Well," said Mr. Orridge, bustling into the hall, "you were all rather

surprised last night when the housekeeper came back, I suppose?"

"Yes, Sir, we certainly were surprised when she came back last night,"

answered the footman; "but we were still more surprised when she went

away again this morning."

"Went away! You don't mean to say she is gone?"

"Yes, I do, Sir--she has lost her place, and gone for good." The

footman smiled again, as he made that reply; and the housemaid, who

happened to be on her way down stairs while he was speaking, and to

hear what he said, smiled too. Mrs. Jazeph had evidently been no

favorite in the servants' hall.

Amazement prevented Mr. Orridge from uttering another word. Hearing no

more questions asked, the footman threw open the door of the

breakfast-parlor, and the doctor followed him into the room. Mrs.

Norbury was sitting near the window in a rigidly upright attitude,

inflexibly watching the proceedings of her invalid child over a basin

of beef-tea.

"I know what you are going to talk about before you open your lips,"

said the outspoken lady. "But just look to the child first, and say

what you have to say on that subject, if you please, before you enter

on any other."

The child was examined, was pronounced to be improving rapidly, and

was carried away by the nurse to lie down and rest a little. As soon

as the door of the room had closed, Mrs. Norbury abruptly addressed

the doctor, interrupting him, for the second time, just as he was

about to speak.

"Now, Mr. Orridge," she said, "I want to tell you something at the

outset. I am a remarkably just woman, and I have no quarrel with

_you_. You are the cause of my having been treated with the most

audacious insolence by three people--but you are the innocent cause,

and, therefore, I don't blame you."

"I am really at a loss," Mr. Orridge began--"quite at a loss, I assure

you--"

"To know what I mean?" said Mrs. Norbury. "I will soon tell you. Were

you not the original cause of my sending my housekeeper to nurse Mrs.

Frankland?"

"Yes." Mr. Orridge could not hesitate to acknowledge that.

"Well," pursued Mrs. Norbury, "and the consequence of my sending her

is, as I said before, that I am treated with unparalleled insolence by

no less than three people. Mrs. Frankland takes an insolent whim into

her head, and affects to be frightened by my housekeeper. Mr.

Frankland shows an insolent readiness to humor that whim, and hands me

back my housekeeper as if she was a bad shilling; and last, and worst

of all, my housekeeper herself insults me to my face as soon as she

comes back--insults me, Mr. Orridge, to that degree that I give her

twelve hours' notice to leave the place. Don't begin to defend

yourself! I know all about it; I know you had nothing to do with

sending her back; I never said you had. All the mischief you have done

is innocent mischief. I don't blame you, remember that--whatever you

do, Mr. Orridge, remember that!"

"I had no idea of defending myself," said the doctor, "for I have no

reason to do so. But you surprise me beyond all power of expression

when you tell me that Mrs. Jazeph treated you with incivility."

"Incivility!" exclaimed Mrs. Norbury. "Don't talk about

incivility--it's not the word. Impudence is the word--brazen

impudence. The only charitable thing to say of Mrs. Jazeph is that she

is not right in her head. I never noticed any thing odd about her

myself; but the servants used to laugh at her for being as timid in

the dark as a child, and for often running away to her candle in her

own room when they declined to light the lamps before the night had

fairly set in. I never troubled my head about this before; but I

thought of it last night, I can tell you, when I found her looking me

fiercely in the face, and contradicting me flatly the moment I spoke

to her."

"I should have thought she was the very last woman in the world to

misbehave herself in that way," answered the doctor.

"Very well. Now hear what happened when she came back last night,"

said Mrs. Norbury. "She got here just as we were going up stairs to

bed. Of course, I was astonished; and, of course, I called her into

the drawing-room for an explanation. There was nothing very unnatural

in that course of proceeding, I suppose? Well, I noticed that her eyes

were swollen and red, and that her looks were remarkably wild and

queer; but I said nothing, and waited for the explanation. All that

she had to tell me was that something she had unintentionally said or

done had frightened Mrs. Frankland, and that Mrs. Frankland's husband

had sent her away on the spot. I disbelieved this at first--and very

naturally, I think--but she persisted in the story, and answered all

my questions by declaring that she could tell me nothing more. 'So

then,' I said, 'I am to believe that, after I have inconvenienced

myself by sparing you, and after you have inconvenienced yourself by

undertaking the business of nurse, I am to be insulted, and you are to

be insulted, by your being sent away from Mrs. Frankland on the very

day when you get to her, because she chooses to take a whim into her

head?' 'I never accused Mrs. Frankland of taking a whim into her

head,' said Mrs. Jazeph, and stares me straight in the face, with such

a look as I never saw in her eyes before, after all my five years'

experience of her. 'What do you mean?' I asked, giving her back her

look, I can promise you. 'Are you base enough to take the treatment

you have received in the light of a favor?' 'I am just enough,' said

Mrs. Jazeph, as sharp as lightning, and still with that same stare

straight at me--'I am just enough not to blame Mrs. Frankland.' 'Oh,

you are, are you?' I said. 'Then all I can tell you is, that I feel

this insult, if you don't; and that I consider Mrs. Frankland's

conduct to be the conduct of an ill-bred, impudent, capricious,

unfeeling woman.' Mrs. Jazeph takes a step up to me--takes a step, I

give you my word of honor--and says distinctly, in so many words,

'Mrs. Frankland is neither ill-bred, impudent, capricious, nor

unfeeling.' 'Do you mean to contradict me, Mrs. Jazeph?' I asked. 'I

mean to defend Mrs. Frankland from unjust imputations,' says she.

Those were her words, Mr. Orridge--on my honor, as a gentlewoman,

those were exactly her words."

The doctor's face expressed the blankest astonishment. Mrs. Norbury

went on--

"I was in a towering passion--I don't mind confessing that, Mr.

Orridge--but I kept it down. 'Mrs. Jazeph,' I said, 'this is language

that I am not accustomed to, and that I certainly never expected to

hear from your lips. Why you should take it on yourself to defend Mrs.

Frankland for treating us both with contempt, and to contradict me for

resenting it, I neither know nor care to know. But I must tell you, in

plain words, that I will be spoken to by every person in my

employment, from my housekeeper to my scullery-maid, with respect. I

would have given warning on the spot to any other servant in this

house who had behaved to me as you have behaved.' She tried to

interrupt me there, but I would not allow her. 'No,' I said, 'you are

not to speak to me just yet; you are to hear me out. Any other

servant, I tell you again, should have left this place to-morrow

morning; but I will be more than just to _you_. I will give you the

benefit of your five years' good conduct in my service. I will leave

you the rest of the night to get cool, and to reflect on what has

passed between us; and I will not expect you to make the proper

apologies to me until the morning.' You see, Mr. Orridge, I was

determined to act justly and kindly; I was ready to make

allowances--and what do you think she said in return? 'I am willing to

make any apologies, ma'am, for offending you,' she said, 'without the

delay of a single minute; but, whether it is to-night, or whether it

is to-morrow morning, I can not stand by silent when I hear Mrs.

Frankland charged with acting unkindly, uncivilly, or improperly

toward me or toward any one.' 'Do you tell me that deliberately, Mrs.

Jazeph?' I asked. 'I tell it you sincerely, ma'am,' she answered; 'and

I am very sorry to be obliged to do so.' 'Pray don't trouble yourself

to be sorry,' I said, 'for you may consider yourself no longer in my

service. I will order the steward to pay you the usual month's wages

instead of the month's warning the first thing to-morrow; and I beg

that you will leave the house as soon as you conveniently can

afterward.' 'I will leave to-morrow, ma'am,' says she, 'but without

troubling the steward. I beg respectfully, and with many thanks for

your past kindness, to decline taking a month's money which I have not

earned by a month's service.' And thereupon she courtesies and goes

out. That is, word for word, what passed between us, Mr. Orridge.

Explain the woman's conduct in your own way, if you can. I say that it

is utterly incomprehensible, unless you agree with me that she was not

in her right senses when she came back to this house last night."

The doctor began to think, after what he had just heard, that Mrs.

Frankland's suspicions in relation to the new nurse were not quite so

unfounded as he had been at first disposed to consider them. He wisely

refrained, however, from complicating matters by giving utterance to

what he thought; and, after answering Mrs. Norbury in a few vaguely

polite words, endeavored to soothe her irritation against Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland by assuring her that he came as the bearer of apologies from

both husband and wife, for the apparent want of courtesy and

consideration in their conduct which circumstances had made

inevitable. The offended lady, however, absolutely refused to be

propitiated. She rose up, and waved her hand with an air of great

dignity.

"I can not hear a word more from you, Mr. Orridge," she said; "I can

not receive any apologies which are made indirectly. If Mr. Frankland

chooses to call, and if Mrs. Frankland condescends to write to me, I

am willing to think no more of the matter. Under any other

circumstances, I must be allowed to keep my present opinions both of

the lady and the gentleman. Don't say another word, and be so kind as

to excuse me if I leave you, and go up to the nursery to see how the

child is getting on. I am delighted to hear that you think her so much

better. Pray call again to-morrow or next day, if you conveniently

can. Good-morning!"

Half amused at Mrs. Norbury, half displeased at the curt tone she

adopted toward him, Mr. Orridge remained for a minute or two alone in

the breakfast-parlor, feeling rather undecided about what he should do

next. He was, by this time, almost as much interested in solving the

mystery of Mrs. Jazeph's extraordinary conduct as Mrs. Frankland

herself; and he felt unwilling, on all accounts, to go back to the

Tiger's Head, and merely repeat what Mrs. Norbury had told him,

without being able to complete the narrative by informing Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland of the direction that the housekeeper had taken on leaving

her situation. After some pondering, he determined to question the

footman, under the pretense of desiring to know if his gig was at the

door. The man having answered the bell, and having reported the gig to

be ready, Mr. Orridge, while crossing the hall, asked him carelessly

if he knew at what time in the morning Mrs. Jazeph had left her place.

"About ten o'clock, Sir," answered the footman. "When the carrier came

by from the village, on his way to the station for the eleven o'clock

train."

"Oh! I suppose he took her boxes?" said Mr. Orridge.

"And he took her, too, Sir," said the man, with a grin. "She had to

ride, for once in her life, at any rate, in a carrier's cart."

On getting back to West Winston, the doctor stopped at the station to

collect further particulars, before he returned to the Tiger's Head.

No trains, either up or down, happened to be due just at that time.

The station-master was reading the newspaper, and the porter was

gardening on the slope of the embankment.

"Is the train at eleven in the morning an up-train or a down-train?"

asked Mr. Orridge, addressing the porter.

"A down-train."

"Did many people go by it?"

The porter repeated the names of some of the inhabitants of West

Winston.

"Were there no passengers but passengers from the town?" inquired the

doctor.

"Yes, Sir. I think there was one stranger--a lady."

"Did the station-master issue the tickets for that train?"

"Yes, Sir."

Mr. Orridge went on to the station-master.

"Do you remember giving a ticket this morning, by the eleven o'clock

down-train, to a lady traveling alone?"

The station-master pondered. "I have issued tickets, up and down, to

half-a-dozen ladies to-day," he answered, doubtfully.

"Yes, but I am speaking only of the eleven o'clock train," said Mr.

Orridge. "Try if you can't remember?"

"Remember? Stop! I do remember; I know who you mean. A lady who seemed

rather flurried, and who put a question to me that I am not often

asked at this station. She had her veil down, I recollect, and she got

here for the eleven o'clock train. Crouch, the carrier, brought her

trunk into the office."

"That is the woman. Where did she take her ticket for?"

"For Exeter."

"You said she asked you a question?"

"Yes: a question about what coaches met the rail at Exeter to take

travelers into Cornwall. I told her we were rather too far off here to

have the correct time-table, and recommended her to apply for

information to the Devonshire people when she got to the end of her

journey. She seemed a timid, helpless kind of woman to travel alone.

Any thing wrong in connection with her, Sir?"

"Oh, no! nothing," said Mr. Orridge, leaving the station-master and

hastening back to his gig again.

When he drew up, a few minutes afterward, at the door of the Tiger's

Head, he jumped out of his vehicle with the confident air of a man who

has done all that could be expected of him. It was easy to face Mrs.

Frankland with the unsatisfactory news of Mrs. Jazeph's departure, now

that he could add, on the best authority, the important supplementary

information that she had gone to Cornwall.

BOOK IV.

CHAPTER I.

A PLOT AGAINST THE SECRET.

Toward the close of the evening, on the day after Mr. Orridge's

interview with Mrs. Norbury, the Druid fast coach, running through

Cornwall as far as Truro, set down three inside passengers at the door

of the booking-office on arriving at its destination. Two of these

passengers were an old gentleman and his daughter; the third was Mrs.

Jazeph.

The father and daughter collected their luggage and entered the hotel;

the outside passengers branched off in different directions with as

little delay as possible; Mrs. Jazeph alone stood irresolute on the

pavement, and seemed uncertain what she should do next. When the

coachman good-naturedly endeavored to assist her in arriving at a

decision of some kind, by asking whether he could do any thing to help

her, she started, and looked at him suspiciously; then, appearing to

recollect herself, thanked him for his kindness, and inquired, with a

confusion of words and a hesitation of manner which appeared very

extraordinary in the coachman's eyes, whether she might be allowed to

leave her trunk at the booking-office for a little while, until she

could return and call for it again.

Receiving permission to leave her trunk as long as she pleased, she

crossed over the principal street of the town, ascended the pavement

on the opposite side, and walked down the first turning she came to.

On entering the by-street to which the turning led, she glanced back,

satisfied herself that nobody was following or watching her, hastened

on a few yards, and stopped again at a small shop devoted to the sale

of book-cases, cabinets, work-boxes, and writing-desks. After first

looking up at the letters painted over the door--BUSCHMANN,

CABINET-MAKER, &C.--she peered in at the shop window. A middle-aged

man, with a cheerful face, sat behind the counter, polishing a

rosewood bracket, and nodding briskly at regular intervals, as if he

were humming a tune and keeping time to it with his head. Seeing no

customers in the shop, Mrs. Jazeph opened the door and walked in.

As soon as she was inside, she became aware that the cheerful man

behind the counter was keeping time, not to a tune of his own humming,

but to a tune played by a musical box. The clear ringing notes came

from a parlor behind the shop, and the air the box was playing was the

lovely "Batti, Batti," of Mozart.

"Is Mr. Buschmann at home?" asked Mrs. Jazeph.

"Yes, ma'am," said the cheerful man, pointing with a smile toward the

door that led into the parlor. "The music answers for him. Whenever

Mr. Buschmann's box is playing, Mr. Buschmann himself is not far off

from it. Did you wish to see him, ma'am?"

"If there is nobody with him."

"Oh, no, he is quite alone. Shall I give any name?"

Mrs. Jazeph opened her lips to answer, hesitated, and said nothing.

The shopman, with a quicker delicacy of perception than might have

been expected from him, judging by outward appearances, did not repeat

the question, but opened the door at once, and admitted the visitor to

the presence of Mr. Buschmann.

The shop parlor was a very small room, with an old three-cornered look

about it, with a bright green paper on the walls, with a large dried

fish in a glass case over the fire-place, with two meerschaum pipes

hanging together on the wall opposite, and a neat round table placed

as accurately as possible in the middle of the floor. On the table

were tea-things, bread, butter, a pot of jam, and a musical box in a

quaint, old-fashioned case; and by the side of the table sat a little,

rosy-faced, white-haired, simple-looking old man, who started up, when

the door was opened, with an appearance of extreme confusion, and

touched the top of the musical box so that it might cease playing when

it came to the end of the air.

"A lady to speak with you, Sir," said the cheerful shopman. "That is

Mr. Buschmann, ma'am," he added in a lower tone, seeing Mrs. Jazeph

stop in apparent uncertainty on entering the parlor.

"Will you please to take a seat, ma'am?" said Mr. Buschmann, when the

shopman had closed the door and gone back to his counter. "Excuse the

music; it will stop directly." He spoke these words in a foreign

accent, but with perfect fluency.

Mrs. Jazeph looked at him earnestly while he was addressing her, and

advanced a step or two before she said any thing. "Am I so changed?"

she asked softly. "So sadly, sadly changed, Uncle Joseph?"

"Gott im Himmel! it's her voice--it's Sarah Leeson!" cried the old

man, running up to his visitor as nimbly as if he was a boy again,

taking both her hands, and kissing her with an odd, brisk tenderness

on the cheek. Although his niece was not at all above the average

height of women, Uncle Joseph was so short that he had to raise

himself on tiptoe to perform the ceremony of embracing her.

"To think of Sarah coming at last!" he said, pressing her into a

chair. "After all these years and years, to think of Sarah Leeson

coming to see Uncle Joseph again!"

"Sarah still, but not Sarah Leeson," said Mrs. Jazeph, pressing her

thin, trembling hands firmly together, and looking down on the floor

while she spoke.

"Ah! married?" said Mr. Buschmann, gayly. "Married, of course. Tell me

all about your husband, Sarah."

"He is dead. Dead and forgiven." She murmured the last three words in

a whisper to herself.

"Ah! I am so sorry for you! I spoke too suddenly, did I not, my

child?" said the old man. "Never mind! No, no; I don't mean that--I

mean let us talk of something else. You will have a bit of bread and

jam, won't you, Sarah?--ravishing raspberry jam that melts in your

mouth. Some tea, then? So, so, she will have some tea, to be sure. And

we won't talk of our troubles--at least, not just yet. You look very

pale, Sarah--very much older than you ought to look--no, I don't mean

that either; I don't mean to be rude. It was your voice I knew you by,

my child--your voice that your poor Uncle Max always said would have

made your fortune if you would only have learned to sing. Here's his

pretty music box going still. Don't look so downhearted--don't, pray.

Do listen a little to the music: you remember the box?--my brother

Max's box? Why, how you look! Have you forgotten the box that the

divine Mozart gave to my brother with his own hand, when Max was a

boy in the music school at Vienna? Listen! I have set it going again.

It's a song they call 'Batti, Batti;' it's a song in an opera of

Mozart's. Ah! beautiful! beautiful! Your Uncle Max said that all music

was comprehended in that one song. I know nothing about music, but I

have my heart and my ears, and they tell me that Max was right."

Speaking these words with abundant gesticulation and amazing

volubility, Mr. Buschmann poured out a cup of tea for his niece,

stirred it carefully, and, patting her on the shoulder, begged that

she would make him happy by drinking it all up directly. As he came

close to her to press this request, he discovered that the tears were

in her eyes, and that she was trying to take her handkerchief from her

pocket without being observed.

"Don't mind me," she said, seeing the old man's face sadden as he

looked at her; "and don't think me forgetful or ungrateful, Uncle

Joseph. I remember the box--I remember every thing that you used to

take an interest in, when I was younger and happier than I am now.

When I last saw you, I came to you in trouble; and I come to you in

trouble once more. It seems neglectful in me never to have written to

you for so many years past; but my life has been a very sad one, and I

thought I had no right to lay the burden of my sorrow on other

shoulders than my own."

Uncle Joseph shook his head at these last words, and touched the stop

of the musical box. "Mozart shall wait a little," he said, gravely,

"till I have told you something. Sarah, hear what I say, and drink

your tea, and own to me whether I speak the truth or not. What did I,

Joseph Buschmann, tell you, when you first came to me in trouble,

fourteen, fifteen, ah more! sixteen years ago, in this town, and in

this same house? I said then, what I say again now: 'Sarah's sorrow is

my sorrow, and Sarah's joy is my joy;' and if any man asks me reasons

for that, I have three to give him."

He stopped to stir up his niece's tea for the second time, and to draw

her attention to it by tapping with the spoon on the edge of the cup.

"Three reasons," he resumed. "First, you are my sister's child--some

of her flesh and blood, and some of mine, therefore, also. Second, my

sister, my brother, and lastly me myself, we owe to your good English

father--all. A little word that means much, and may be said again and

again--all. Your father's friends cry, Fie! Agatha Buschmann is poor!

Agatha Buschmann is foreign! But your father loves the poor German

girl, and he marries her in spite of their Fie, Fie. Your father's

friends cry Fie! again; Agatha Buschmann has a musician brother, who

gabbles to us about Mozart, and who can not make to his porridge salt.

Your father says, Good! I like his gabble; I like his playing; I shall

get him people to teach; and while I have pinches of salt in my

kitchen, he to his porridge shall have pinches of salt too. Your

father's friends cry Fie! for the third time. Agatha Buschmann has

another brother, a little Stupid-Head, who to the other's gabble can

only listen and say Amen. Send him trotting; for the love of Heaven,

shut up all the doors and send Stupid-Head trotting, at least. Your

father says, No! Stupid-Head has his wits in his hands; he can cut and

carve and polish; help him a little at the starting, and after he

shall help himself. They are all gone now but me! Your father, your

mother, and Uncle Max--they are all gone. Stupid-Head alone remains to

remember and to be grateful--to take Sarah's sorrow for his sorrow,

and Sarah's joy for his joy."

He stopped again to blow a speck of dust off the musical box. His

niece endeavored to speak, but he held up his hand, and shook his

forefinger at her warningly.

"No," he said. "It is yet my business to talk, and your business to

drink tea. Have I not my third reason still? Ah! you look away from

me; you know my third reason before I say a word. When I, in my turn,

marry, and my wife dies, and leaves me alone with little Joseph, and

when the boy falls sick, who comes then, so quiet, so pretty, so neat,

with the bright young eyes, and the hands so tender and light? Who

helps me with little Joseph by night and by day? Who makes a pillow

for him on her arm when his head is weary? Who holds this box

patiently at his ear?--yes! this box, that the hand of Mozart has

touched--who holds it closer, closer always, when little Joseph's

sense grows dull, and he moans for the friendly music that he has

known from a baby, the friendly music that he can now so hardly,

hardly hear? Who kneels down by Uncle Joseph when his heart is

breaking, and says, 'Oh, hush! hush! The boy is gone where the better

music plays, where the sickness shall never waste or the sorrow touch

him more?' Who? Ah, Sarah! you can not forget those days; you can not

forget the Long Ago! When the trouble is bitter, and the burden is

heavy, it is cruelty to Uncle Joseph to keep away; it is kindness to

him to come here."

The recollections that the old man had called up found their way

tenderly to Sarah's heart. She could not answer him; she could only

hold out her hand. Uncle Joseph bent down, with a quaint, affectionate

gallantry, and kissed it; then stepped back again to his place by the

musical box. "Come!" he said, patting it cheerfully, "we will say no

more for a while. Mozart's box, Max's box, little Joseph's box, you

shall talk to us again!"

Having put the tiny machinery in motion, he sat down by the table, and

remained silent until the air had been played over twice. Then

observing that his niece seemed calmer, he spoke to her once more.

"You are in trouble, Sarah," he said, quietly. "You tell me that, and

I see it is true in your face. Are you grieving for your husband?"

"I grieve that I ever met him," she answered. "I grieve that I ever

married him. Now that he is dead, I can not grieve--I can only forgive

him."

"Forgive him? How you look, Sarah, when you say that! Tell me--"

"Uncle Joseph! I have told you that my husband is dead, and that I

have forgiven him."

"You have forgiven him? He was hard and cruel with you, then? I see; I

see. That is the end, Sarah--but the beginning? Is the beginning that

you loved him?"

Her pale cheeks flushed; and she turned her head aside. "It is hard

and humbling to confess it," she murmured, without raising her eyes;

"but you force the truth from me, uncle. I had no love to give to my

husband--no love to give to any man."

"And yet you married him! Wait! it is not for me to blame. It is for

me to find out, not the bad, but the good. Yes, yes; I shall say to

myself, she married him when she was poor and helpless; she married

him when she should have come to Uncle Joseph instead. I shall say

that to myself, and I shall pity, but I shall ask no more."

Sarah half reached her hand out to the old man again--then suddenly

pushed her chair back, and changed the position in which she was

sitting. "It is true that I was poor," she said, looking about her in

confusion, and speaking with difficulty. "But you are so kind and so

good, I can not accept the excuse that your forbearance makes for me.

I did not marry him because I was poor, but--" She stopped, clasped

her hands together, and pushed her chair back still farther from the

table.

"So! so!" said the old man, noticing her confusion. "We will talk

about it no more."

"I had no excuse of love; I had no excuse of poverty," she said, with

a sudden burst of bitterness and despair. "Uncle Joseph, I married him

because I was too weak to persist in saying No! The curse of weakness

and fear has followed me all the days of my life! I said No to him

once. I said No to him twice. Oh, uncle, if I could only have said it

for the third time! But he followed me, he frightened me, he took away

from me all the little will of my own that I had. He made me speak as

he wished me to speak, and go where he wished me to go. No, no,

no--don't come to me, uncle; don't say any thing. He is gone; he is

dead--I have got my release; I have given my pardon! Oh, if I could

only go away and hide somewhere! All people's eyes seem to look

through me; all people's words seem to threaten me. My heart has been

weary ever since I was a young woman; and all these long, long years

it has never got any rest. Hush! the man in the shop--I forgot the man

in the shop. He will hear us; let us talk in a whisper. What made me

break out so? I'm always wrong. Oh me! I'm wrong when I speak; I'm

wrong when I say nothing; wherever I go and whatever I do, I'm not

like other people. I seem never to have grown up in my mind since I

was a little child. Hark! the man in the shop is moving--has he heard

me? Oh, Uncle Joseph! do you think he has heard me?"

Looking hardly less startled than his niece, Uncle Joseph assured her

that the door was solid, that the man's place in the shop was at some

distance from it, and that it was impossible, even if he heard voices

in the parlor, that he could also distinguish any words that were

spoken in it.

"You are sure of that?" she whispered, hurriedly. "Yes, yes, you are

sure of that, or you would not have told me so, would you? We may go

on talking now. Not about my married life: that is buried and past.

Say that I had some years of sorrow and suffering, which I

deserved--say that I had other years of quiet, when I was living in

service with masters and mistresses who were often kind to me when my

fellow-servants were not--say just that much about my life, and it is

saying enough. The trouble that I am in now, the trouble that brings

me to you, goes back further than the years we have been talking

about--goes back, back, back, Uncle Joseph, to the distant day when we

last met."

"Goes back all through the sixteen years!" exclaimed the old man,

incredulously. "Goes back, Sarah, even to the Long Ago!"

"Even to that time. Uncle, you remember where I was living, and what

had happened to me, when--"

"When you came here in secret? When you asked me to hide you? That was

the same week, Sarah, when your mistress died; your mistress who lived

away west in the old house. You were frightened, then--pale and

frightened as I see you now."

"As every one sees me! People are always staring at me; always

thinking that I am nervous, always pitying me for being ill."

Saying these words with a sudden fretfulness, she lifted the tea-cup

by her side to her lips, drained it of its contents at a draught, and

pushed it across the table to be filled again. "I have come all over

thirsty and hot," she whispered. "More tea, Uncle Joseph--more tea."

"It is cold," said the old man. "Wait till I ask for hot water."

"No!" she exclaimed, stopping him as he was about to rise. "Give it me

cold; I like it cold. Let nobody else come in--I can't speak if any

body else comes in." She drew her chair close to her uncle's, and went

on: "You have not forgotten how frightened I was in that by-gone

time--do you remember why I was frightened?"

"You were afraid of being followed--that was it, Sarah. I grow old,

but my memory keeps young. You were afraid of your master, afraid of

his sending servants after you. You had run away; you had spoken no

word to any body; and you spoke little--ah, very, very little--even to

Uncle Joseph--even to me."

"I told you," said Sarah, dropping her voice to so faint a whisper

that the old man could barely hear her--"I told you that my mistress

had left me a Secret on her death-bed--a Secret in a letter, which I

was to give to my master. I told you I had hidden the letter, because

I could not bring myself to deliver it, because I would rather die a

thousand times over than be questioned about what I knew of it. I told

you so much, I know. Did I tell you no more? Did I not say that my

mistress made me take an oath on the Bible?--Uncle! are there candles

in the room? Are there candles we can light without disturbing any

body, without calling any body in here?"

"There are candles and a match-box in my cupboard," answered Uncle

Joseph. "But look out of window, Sarah. It is only twilight--it is not

dark yet."

"Not outside; but it is dark here."

"Where?"

"In that corner. Let us have candles. I don't like the darkness when

it gathers in corners and creeps along walls."

Uncle Joseph looked all round the room inquiringly; and smiled to

himself as he took two candles from the cupboard and lighted them.

"You are like the children," he said, playfully, while he pulled down

the window-blind. "You are afraid of the dark."

Sarah did not appear to hear him. Her eyes were fixed on the corner of

the room which she had pointed out the moment before. When he resumed

his place by her side, she never looked round, but laid her hand on

his arm, and said to him suddenly--

"Uncle! Do you believe that the dead can come back to this world, and

follow the living every where, and see what they do in it?"

The old man started. "Sarah!" he said, "why do you talk so? Why do you

ask me such a question?"

"Are there lonely hours," she went on, still never looking away from

the corner, still not seeming to hear him, "when you are sometimes

frightened without knowing why--frightened all over in an instant,

from head to foot? Tell me, uncle, have you ever felt the cold steal

round and round the roots of your hair, and crawl bit by bit down your

back? I have felt that even in the summer. I have been out of doors,

alone on a wide heath, in the heat and brightness of noon, and have

felt as if chilly fingers were touching me--chilly, damp, softly

creeping fingers. It says in the New Testament that the dead came once

out of their graves, and went into the holy city. The dead! Have they

rested, rested always, rested forever, since that time?"

Uncle Joseph's simple nature recoiled in bewilderment from the dark

and daring speculations to which his niece's questions led. Without

saying a word, he tried to draw away the arm which she still held; but

the only result of the effort was to make her tighten her grasp, and

bend forward in her chair so as to look closer still into the corner

of the room.

"My mistress was dying," she said--"my mistress was very near her

grave, when she made me take my oath on the Bible. She made me swear

never to destroy the letter; and I did not destroy it. She made me

swear not to take it away with me, if I left the house; and I did not

take it away. She would have made me swear, for the third time, to

give it to my master, but death was too quick for her--death stopped

her from fastening that third oath on my conscience. But she

threatened me, uncle, with the dead dampness on her forehead, and the

dead whiteness on her cheeks--she threatened to come to me from the

other world if I thwarted her--and I _have_ thwarted her!"

She stopped, suddenly removed her hand from the old man's arm, and

made a strange gesture with it toward the part of the room on which

her eyes remained fixed. "Rest, mistress, rest," she whispered under

her breath. "Is my master alive now? Rest, till the drowned rise. Tell

him the Secret when the sea gives up her dead."

"Sarah! Sarah! you are changed--you are ill--you frighten me!" cried

Uncle Joseph, starting to his feet.

[Illustration: "WITHOUT SAYING A WORD, HE TRIED TO DRAW AWAY THE ARM

SHE STILL HELD."]

She turned round slowly, and looked at him with eyes void of all

expression, with eyes that seemed to be staring through him vacantly

at something beyond.

"Gott im Himmel! what does she see?" He looked round as the

exclamation escaped him. "Sarah! what is it! Are you faint? Are you

ill? Are you dreaming with your eyes open?"

He took her by both arms and shook her. At the instant when she felt

the touch of his hands, she started violently and trembled all over.

Their natural expression flew back into her eyes with the rapidity of

a flash of light. Without saying a word, she hastily resumed her seat

and began stirring the cold tea round and round in her cup, round and

round so fast that the liquid overflowed into the saucer.

"Come! she gets more like herself," said Uncle Joseph, watching her.

"More like myself?" she repeated, vacantly.

"So! so!" said the old man, trying to soothe her. "You are ill--what

the English call out of sort. They are good doctors here. Wait till

to-morrow, you shall have the best."

"I want no doctors. Don't speak of doctors. I can't bear them; they

look at me with such curious eyes; they are always prying into me, as

if they wanted to find out something. What have we been stopping for?

I had so much to say; and we seem to have been stopping just when we

ought to have been going on. I am in grief and terror, Uncle Joseph;

in grief and terror again about the Secret--"

"No more of that!" pleaded the old man. "No more to-night at least!"

"Why not?"

"Because you will be ill again with talking about it. You will be

looking into that corner, and dreaming with your eyes open. You are

too ill--yes, yes, Sarah; you are too ill."

"I'm not ill! Oh, why does every body keep telling me that I am ill?

Let me talk about it, uncle. I have come to talk about it; I can't

rest till I have told you."

She spoke with a changing color and an embarrassed manner, now

apparently conscious for the first time that she had allowed words and

actions to escape her which it would have been more prudent to have

restrained.

"Don't notice me again," she said, with her soft voice, and her

gentle, pleading manner. "Don't notice me if I talk or look as I

ought not. I lose myself sometimes, without knowing it; and I suppose

I lost myself just now. It means nothing, Uncle Joseph--nothing,

indeed."

Endeavoring thus to re-assure the old man, she again altered the

position of her chair, so as to place her back toward the part of the

room to which her face had been hitherto turned.

"Well, well, it is good to hear that," said Uncle Joseph; "but speak

no more about the past time, for fear you should lose yourself again.

Let us hear about what is now. Yes, yes, give me my way. Leave the

Long Ago to me, and take you the present time. I can go back through

the sixteen years as well as you. Ah! you doubt it? Hear me tell you

what happened when we last met--hear me prove myself in three words:

You leave your place at the old house--you run away here--you stop in

hiding with me, while your master and his servants are hunting after

you--you start off, when your road is clear, to work for your living,

as far away from Cornwall as you can get--I beg and pray you to stop

with me, but you are afraid of your master, and away you go. There!

that is the whole story of your trouble the last time you came to this

house. Leave it so; and tell me what is the cause of your trouble

now."

"The past cause of my trouble, Uncle Joseph, and the present cause of

my trouble are the same. The Secret--"

"What! you will go back to that!"

"I must go back to it."

"And why?"

"Because the Secret is written in a letter--"

"Yes; and what of that?"

"And the letter is in danger of being discovered. It is, uncle--it is!

Sixteen years it has lain hidden--and now, after all that long time,

the dreadful chance of its being dragged to light has come like a

judgment. The one person in all the world who ought never to set eyes

on that letter is the very person who is most likely to find it!"

"So! so! Are you very certain, Sarah? How do you know it?"

"I know it from her own lips. Chance brought us together--"

"Us? us? What do you mean by us?"

"I mean--uncle, you remember that Captain Treverton was my master when

I lived at Porthgenna Tower?"

"I had forgotten his name. But no matter--go on."

"When I left my place, Miss Treverton was a little girl of five years

old. She is a married woman now--so beautiful, so clever, such a

sweet, youthful, happy face! And she has a child as lovely as herself.

Oh, uncle, if you could see her! I would give so much if you could

only see her!"

Uncle Joseph kissed his hand and shrugged his shoulders; expressing by

the first action homage to the lady's beauty, and by the second

resignation under the misfortune of not being able to see her. "Well,

well," he said, philosophically, "put this shining woman by, and let

us go on."

"Her name is Frankland now," said Sarah. "A prettier name than

Treverton--a much prettier name, I think. Her husband is fond of

her--I am sure he is. How can he have any heart at all, and not be

fond of her?"

"So! so!" exclaimed Uncle Joseph, looking very much perplexed. "Good,

if he is fond of her--very good. But what labyrinth are we getting

into now? Wherefore all this about a husband and a wife? My word of

honor, Sarah, but your explanation explains nothing--it only softens

my brains."

"I must speak of her and of Mr. Frankland, uncle. Porthgenna Tower

belongs to her husband now, and they are both going to live there."

"Ah! we are getting back into the straight road at last."

"They are going to live in the very house that holds the Secret; they

are going to repair that very part of it where the letter is hidden.

She will go into the old rooms--I heard her say so; she will search

about in them to amuse her curiosity; workmen will clear them out, and

she will stand by in her idle hours, looking on."

"But she suspects nothing of the Secret?"

"God forbid she ever should!"

"And there are many rooms in the house? And the letter in which the

Secret is written is hidden in one of the many? Why should she hit on

that one?"

"Because I always say the wrong thing! because I always get frightened

and lose myself at the wrong time! The letter is hidden in a room

called the Myrtle Room, and I was foolish enough, weak enough, crazed

enough, to warn her against going into it."

"Ah, Sarah! Sarah! that was a mistake, indeed."

"I can't tell what possessed me--I seemed to lose my senses when I

heard her talking so innocently of amusing herself by searching

through the old rooms, and when I thought of what she might find

there. It was getting on toward night, too; the horrible twilight was

gathering in the corners and creeping along the walls. I longed to

light the candles, and yet I did not dare, for fear she should see the

truth in my face. And when I did light them it was worse. Oh, I don't

know how I did it! I don't know why I did it! I could have torn my

tongue out for saying the words, and still I said them. Other people

can think for the best; other people can act for the best; other

people have had a heavy weight laid on their minds, and have not

dropped under it as I have. Help me, uncle, for the sake of old times

when we were happy--help me with a word of advice."

"I will help you; I live to help you, Sarah! No, no, no--you must not

look so forlorn; you must not look at me with those crying eyes. Come!

I will advise this minute--but say in what; only say in what."

"Have I not told you?"

"No; you have not told me a word yet."

"I will tell you now."

She paused, looked away distrustfully toward the door leading into the

shop, listened a little, and resumed: "I am not at the end of my

journey yet, Uncle Joseph--I am here on my way to Porthgenna Tower--on

my way to the Myrtle Room--on my way, step by step, to the place where

the letter lies hid. I dare not destroy it; I dare not remove it; but

run what risk I may, I must take it out of the Myrtle Room."

Uncle Joseph said nothing, but he shook his head despondingly.

"I must," she repeated; "before Mrs. Frankland gets to Porthgenna, I

must take that letter out of the Myrtle Room. There are places in the

old house where I may hide it again--places that she would never think

of--places that she would never notice. Only let me get it out of the

one room that she is sure to search in, and I know where to hide it

from her and from every one forever."

Uncle Joseph reflected, and shook his head again--then said: "One

word, Sarah; does Mrs. Frankland know which is the Myrtle Room?"

"I did my best to destroy all trace of that name when I hid the

letter; I hope and believe she does not. But she may find

out--remember the words I was crazed enough to speak; they will set

her seeking for the Myrtle Room; they are sure to do that."

"And if she finds it? And if she finds the letter?"

"It will cause misery to innocent people; it will bring death to _me_.

Don't push your chair from me, uncle! It is not shameful death I speak

of. The worst injury I have done is injury to myself; the worst death

I have to fear is the death that releases a worn-out spirit and cures

a broken heart."

"Enough--enough so," said the old man. "I ask for no secret, Sarah,

that is not yours to give. It is all dark to me--very dark, very

confused. I look away from it; I look only toward you. Not with doubt,

my child, but with pity, and with sorrow, too--sorrow that ever you

went near that house of Porthgenna--sorrow that you are now going to

it again."

"I have no choice, uncle, but to go. If every step on the road to

Porthgenna took me nearer and nearer to my death, I must still tread

it. Knowing what I know, I can't rest, I can't sleep--my very breath

won't come freely--till I have got that letter out of the Myrtle Room.

How to do it--oh, Uncle Joseph, how to do it, without being suspected,

without being discovered by any body--that is what I would almost give

my life to know! You are a man; you are older and wiser than I am; no

living creature ever asked you for help in vain--help _me_ now! my

only friend in all the world, help me a little with a word of advice!"

Uncle Joseph rose from his chair, and folded his arms resolutely, and

looked his niece full in the face.

"You will go?" he said. "Cost what it may, you will go? Say, for the

last time, Sarah, is it yes or no?"

"Yes! For the last time, I say Yes."

"Good. And you will go soon?"

"I must go to-morrow. I dare not waste a single day; hours even may be

precious for any thing I can tell."

"You promise me, my child, that the hiding of this Secret does good,

and that the finding of it will do harm?"

"If it was the last word I had to speak in this world, I would say

Yes!"

"You promise me, also, that you want nothing but to take the letter

out of the Myrtle Room, and put it away somewhere else?"

"Nothing but that."

"And it is yours to take and yours to put? No person has a better

right to touch it than you?"

"Now that my master is dead, no person."

"Good. You have given me my resolution. I have done. Sit you there,

Sarah; and wonder, if you like, but say nothing." With these words,

Uncle Joseph stepped lightly to the door leading into the shop, opened

it, and called to the man behind the counter.

"Samuel, my friend," he said. "To-morrow I go a little ways into the

country with my niece, who is this lady here. You keep shop and take

orders, and be just as careful as you always are, till I get back. If

any body comes and asks for Mr. Buschmann, say he has gone a little

ways into the country, and will be back in a few days. That is all.

Shut up the shop, Samuel, my friend, for the night; and go to your

supper. I wish you good appetite, nice victuals, and sound sleep."

Before Samuel could thank his master, the door was shut again. Before

Sarah could say a word, Uncle Joseph's hand was on her lips, and Uncle

Joseph's handkerchief was wiping away the tears that were now falling

fast from her eyes.

"I will have no more talking, and no more crying," said the old man.

"I am a German, and I glory in the obstinacy of six Englishmen, all

rolled into one. To-night you sleep here, to-morrow we talk again of

all this. You want me to help you with a word of advice. I will help

you with myself, which is better than advice, and I say no more till I

fetch my pipe down from the wall there, and ask him to make me think.

I smoke and think to-night--I talk and do to-morrow. And you, you go

up to bed; you take Uncle Max's music box in your hand, and you let

Mozart sing the cradle song before you go to sleep. Yes, yes, my

child, there is always comfort in Mozart--better comfort than in

crying. What is there to cry about, or to thank about? Is it so great

a wonder that I will not let my sister's child go alone to make a

venture in the dark? I said Sarah's sorrow was my sorrow, and Sarah's

joy my joy; and now, if there is no way of escape--if it must indeed

be done--I also say: Sarah's risk to-morrow is Uncle Joseph's risk

to-morrow, too! Good-night, my child--good-night."

CHAPTER II.

OUTSIDE THE HOUSE.

The next morning wrought no change in the resolution at which Uncle

Joseph had arrived overnight. Out of the amazement and confusion

produced in his mind by his niece's avowal of the object that had

brought her to Cornwall, he had contrived to extract one clear and

definite conclusion--that she was obstinately bent on placing herself

in a situation of uncertainty, if not of absolute peril. Once

persuaded of this, his kindly instincts all sprang into action, his

natural firmness on the side of self sacrifice asserted itself, and

his determination not to let Sarah proceed on her journey alone,

followed as a matter of course.

Strong in the self-denying generosity of his purpose--though strong in

nothing else--when he and his niece met in the morning, and when Sarah

spoke self-reproachfully of the sacrifice that he was making, of the

serious hazards to which he was exposing himself for her sake, he

refused to listen to her just as obstinately as he had refused the

previous night. There was no need, he said, to speak another word on

that subject. If she had abandoned her intention of going to

Porthgenna, she had only to say so. If she had not, it was mere waste

of breath to talk any more, for he was deaf in both ears to every

thing in the shape of a remonstrance that she could possibly address

to him. Having expressed himself in these uncompromising terms, Uncle

Joseph abruptly dismissed the subject, and tried to turn the

conversation to a cheerful every-day topic by asking his niece how she

had passed the night.

"I was too anxious to sleep," she answered. "I can't fight with my

fears and misgivings as some people can. All night long they keep me

waking and thinking as if it was day."

"Thinking about what?" asked Uncle Joseph. "About the letter that is

hidden? about the house of Porthgenna? about the Myrtle Room?"

"About how to get into the Myrtle Room," she said. "The more I try to

plan and ponder, and settle beforehand what I shall do, the more

confused and helpless I seem to be. All last night, uncle, I was

trying to think of some excuse for getting inside the doors of

Porthgenna Tower--and yet, if I was standing on the house-step at this

moment, I should not know what to say when the servant and I first

came face to face. How are we to persuade them to let us in? How am I

to slip out of sight, even if we do get in? Can't you tell me?--you

will try, Uncle Joseph--I am sure you will try. Only help me so far,

and I think I can answer for the rest. If they keep the keys where

they used to keep them in my time, ten minutes to myself is all I

should want--ten minutes, only ten short minutes, to make the end of

my life easier to me than the beginning has been; to help me to grow

old quietly and resignedly, if it is God's will that I should live out

my years. Oh, how happy people must be who have all the courage they

want; who are quick and clever, and have their wits about them! You

are readier than I am, uncle; you said last night that you would think

about how to advise me for the best--what did your thoughts end in?

You will make me so much easier if you will only tell me that."

Uncle Joseph nodded assentingly, assumed a look of the profoundest

gravity, and slowly laid his forefinger along the side of his nose.

"What did I promise you last night?" he said. "Was it not to take my

pipe, and ask him to make me think? Good, I smoke three pipes, and

think three thoughts. My first thought is--Wait! My second thought is

again--Wait! My third thought is yet once more--Wait! You say you will

be easy, Sarah, if I tell you the end of all my thoughts. Good, I have

told you. There is the end--you are easy--it is all light."

"Wait?" repeated Sarah, with a look of bewilderment which suggested

any thing rather than a mind at ease. "I am afraid, uncle, I don't

quite understand. Wait for what? Wait till when?"

"Wait till we arrive at the house, to be sure! Wait till we are got

outside the door; then is time enough to think how we are to get in,"

said Uncle Joseph, with an air of conviction. "You understand now?"

"Yes--at least I understand better than I did. But there is still

another difficulty left. Uncle! I must tell you more than I intended

ever to tell any body--I must tell you that the letter is locked up."

"Locked up in a room?"

"Worse than that--locked up in something inside the room. The key that

opens the door--even if I get it--the key that opens the door of the

room is not all I want. There is another key besides that, a little

key--" She stopped, with a confused, startled look.

"A little key that you have lost?" asked Uncle Joseph.

"I threw it down the well in the village on the morning when I made my

escape from Porthgenna. Oh, if I had only kept it about me! If it had

only crossed my mind that I might want it again!"

"Well, well; there is no help for that now. Tell me, Sarah, what the

something is which the letter is hidden in."

"I am afraid of the very walls hearing me."

"What nonsense! Come! whisper it to me."

She looked all round her distrustfully, and then whispered into the

old man's ear. He listened eagerly, and laughed when she was silent

again. "Bah!" he cried. "If that is all, make yourself happy. As you

wicked English people say, it is as easy as lying. Why, my child, you

can burst him open for yourself."

"Burst it open? How?"

Uncle Joseph went to the window-seat, which was made on the

old-fashioned plan, to serve the purpose of a chest as well as a seat.

He opened the lid, searched among some tools which lay in the

receptacle beneath, and took out a chisel. "See," he said,

demonstrating on the top of the window-seat the use to which the tool

was to be put. "You push him in so--crick! Then you pull him up

so--crack! It is the business of one little moment--crick! crack!--and

the lock is done for. Take the chisel yourself, wrap him up in a bit

of that stout paper there, and put him in your pocket. What are you

waiting for? Do you want me to show you again, or do you think you can

do it now for yourself?"

"I should like you to show me again, Uncle Joseph, but not now--not

till we have got to the end of our journey."

"Good. Then I may finish my packing up, and go ask about the coach.

First and foremost, Mozart must put on his great coat, and travel with

us." He took up the musical box, and placed it carefully in a leather

case, which he slung by a strap over one shoulder. "Next, there is my

pipe, the tobacco to feed him with, and the matches to set him alight.

Last, here is my old German knapsack, which I pack last night. See!

here is shirt, night-cap, comb, pocket-handkerchief, sock. Say I am an

emperor, and what do I want more than that? Good. I have Mozart, I

have the pipe, I have the knapsack. I have--stop! stop; there is the

old leather purse; he must not be forgotten. Look! here he is. Listen!

Ting, ting, ting! He jingles; he has in his inside money. Aha, my

friend, my good Leather, you shall be lighter and leaner before you

come home again. So, so--it is all complete; we are ready for the

march now, from our tops to our toes. Good-by, Sarah, my child, for a

little half-hour; you shall wait here and amuse yourself while I go

ask for the coach."

When Uncle Joseph came back, he brought his niece information that a

coach would pass through Truro in an hour's time, which would set them

down at a stage not more than five or six miles distant from the

regular post-town of Porthgenna. The only direct conveyance to the

post-town was a night-coach which carried the letter-bags, and which

stopped to change horses at Truro at the very inconvenient hour of two

o'clock in the morning. Being of opinion that to travel at bed-time

was to make a toil of a pleasure, Uncle Joseph recommended taking

places in the day-coach, and hiring any conveyance that could be

afterward obtained to carry his niece and himself on to the post-town.

By this arrangement they would not only secure their own comfort, but

gain the additional advantage of losing as little time as possible at

Truro before proceeding on their journey to Porthgenna.

The plan thus proposed was the plan followed. When the coach stopped

to change horses, Uncle Joseph and his niece were waiting to take

their places by it. They found all the inside seats but one

disengaged, were set down two hours afterward at the stage that was

nearest to the destination for which they were bound, hired a

pony-chaise there, and reached the post-town between one and two

o'clock in the afternoon.

Dismissing their conveyance at the inn, from motives of caution which

were urged by Sarah, they set forth to walk across the moor to

Porthgenna. On their way out of the town they met the postman

returning from his morning's delivery of letters in the surrounding

district. His bag had been much heavier and his walk much longer that

morning than usual. Among the extra letters that had taken him out of

his ordinary course was one addressed to the housekeeper at Porthgenna

Tower, which he had delivered early in the morning, when he first

started on his rounds.

Throughout the whole journey, Uncle Joseph had not made a single

reference to the object for which it had been undertaken. Possessing a

child's simplicity of nature, he was also endowed with a child's

elasticity of disposition. The doubts and forebodings which troubled

his niece's spirit, and kept her silent and thoughtful and sad, cast

no darkening shadow over the natural sunshine of his mind. If he had

really been traveling for pleasure alone, he could not have enjoyed

more thoroughly than he did the different sights and events of the

journey. All the happiness which the passing minute had to give him he

took as readily and gratefully as if there was no uncertainty in the

future, no doubt, difficulty, or danger lying in wait for him at the

journey's end. Before he had been half an hour in the coach he had

begun to tell the third inside passenger--a rigid old lady, who stared

at him in speechless amazement--the whole history of the musical box,

ending the narrative by setting it playing, in defiance of all the

noise that the rolling wheels could make. When they left the coach, he

was just as sociable afterward with the driver of the chaise, vaunting

the superiority of German beer over Cornish cider, and making his

remarks upon the objects which they passed on the road with the

pleasantest familiarity, and the heartiest enjoyment of his own jokes.

It was not till he and Sarah were well out of the little town, and

away by themselves on the great moor which stretched beyond it, that

his manner altered, and his talk ceased altogether. After walking on

in silence for some little time, with his niece's arm in his, he

suddenly stopped, looked her earnestly and kindly in the face, and

laid his hand on hers.

"There is yet one thing more I want to ask you, my child," he said.

"The journey has put it out of my head, but it has been in my heart

all the time. When we leave this place of Porthgenna, and get back to

my house, you will not go away? you will not leave Uncle Joseph again?

Are you in service still, Sarah? Are you not your own master yet?"

"I was in service a few days since," she answered; "but I am free now.

I have lost my place."

"Aha! You have lost your place; and why?"

"Because I would not hear an innocent person unjustly blamed.

Because--"

She checked herself. But the few words she had said were spoken with

such a suddenly heightened color, and with such an extraordinary

emphasis and resolution of tone, that the old man opened his eyes as

widely as possible, and looked at his niece in undisguised

astonishment.

"So! so! so!" he exclaimed. "What! You have had a quarrel, Sarah!"

"Hush! Don't ask me any more questions now!" she pleaded earnestly. "I

am too anxious and too frightened to answer. Uncle! this is Porthgenna

Moor--this is the road I passed over, sixteen years ago, when I ran

away to you. Oh! let us get on, pray let us get on! I can't think of

any thing now but the house we are so near, and the risk we are going

to run."

They went on quickly, in silence. Half an hour's rapid walking brought

them to the highest elevation on the moor, and gave the whole western

prospect grandly to their view.

There, below them, was the dark, lonesome, spacious structure of

Porthgenna Tower, with the sunlight already stealing round toward the

windows of the west front! There was the path winding away to it

gracefully over the brown moor, in curves of dazzling white! There,

lower down, was the solitary old church, with the peaceful

burial-ground nestling by its side! There, lower still, were the

little scattered roofs of the fishermen's cottages! And there, beyond

all, was the changeless glory of the sea, with its old seething lines

of white foam, with the old winding margin of its yellow shores!

Sixteen long years--such years of sorrow, such years of suffering,

such years of change, counted by the pulses of the living heart!--had

passed over the dead tranquillity of Porthgenna, and had altered it as

little as if they had all been contained within the lapse of a single

day!

The moments when the spirit within us is most deeply stirred are

almost invariably the moments also when its outward manifestations are

hardest to detect. Our own thoughts rise above us; our own feelings

lie deeper than we can reach. How seldom words can help us, when their

help is most wanted! How often our tears are dried up when we most

long for them to relieve us! Was there ever a strong emotion in this

world that could adequately express its own strength? What third

person, brought face to face with the old man and his niece, as they

now stood together on the moor, would have suspected, to look at them,

that the one was contemplating the landscape with nothing more than a

stranger's curiosity, and that the other was viewing it through the

recollections of half a lifetime? The eyes of both were dry, the

tongues of both were silent, the faces of both were set with equal

attention toward the prospect. Even between themselves there was no

real sympathy, no intelligible appeal from one spirit to the other.

The old man's quiet admiration of the view was not more briefly and

readily expressed, when they moved forward and spoke to each other,

than the customary phrases of assent by which his niece replied to the

little that he said. How many moments there are in this mortal life,

when, with all our boasted powers of speech, the words of our

vocabulary treacherously fade out, and the page presents nothing to us

but the sight of a perfect blank!

Slowly descending the slope of the moor, the uncle and niece drew

nearer and nearer to Porthgenna Tower. They were within a quarter of

an hour's walk of the house when Sarah stopped at a place where a

second path intersected the main foot-track which they had hitherto

been following. On the left hand, as they now stood, the cross-path

ran on until it was lost to the eye in the expanse of the moor. On the

right hand it led straight to the church.

"What do we stop for now?" asked Uncle Joseph, looking first in one

direction and then in the other.

"Would you mind waiting for me here a little while, uncle? I can't

pass the church path--" (she paused, in some trouble how to express

herself)--"without wishing (as I don't know what may happen after we

get to the house), without wishing to see--to look at something--" She

stopped again, and turned her face wistfully toward the church. The

tears, which had never wetted her eyes at the first view of

Porthgenna, were beginning to rise in them now.

Uncle Joseph's natural delicacy warned him that it would be best to

abstain from asking her for any explanations.

"Go you where you like, to see what you like," he said, patting her on

the shoulder. "I shall stop here to make myself happy with my pipe;

and Mozart shall come out of his cage, and sing a little in this fine

fresh air." He unslung the leather case from his shoulder while he

spoke, took out the musical box, and set it ringing its tiny peal to

the second of the two airs which it was constructed to play--the

minuet in Don Giovanni. Sarah left him looking about carefully, not

for a seat for himself, but for a smooth bit of rock to place the box

upon. When he had found this, he lit his pipe, and sat down to his

music and his smoking, like an epicure to a good dinner. "Aha!" he

exclaimed to himself, looking round as composedly at the wild prospect

on all sides of him as if he was still in his own little parlor at

Truro--"Aha! Here is a fine big music-room, my friend Mozart, for you

to sing in! Ouf! there is wind enough in this place to blow your

pretty dance-tune out to sea, and give the sailor-people a taste of it

as they roll about in their ships."

[Illustration: "SHE SIGHED HEAVILY AS SHE FOLLOWED THE LETTERS OF THE

INSCRIPTION MECHANICALLY, ONE BY ONE, WITH HER FINGER."]

Meanwhile Sarah walked on rapidly toward the church, and entered the

inclosure of the little burial-ground. Toward that same part of it to

which she had directed her steps on the morning of her mistress's

death, she now turned her face again, after a lapse of sixteen years.

Here, at least, the march of time had left its palpable track--its

foot-prints whose marks were graves. How many a little spot of ground,

empty when she last saw it, had its mound and its head-stone now! The

one grave that she had come to see--the grave which had stood apart in

the by-gone days, had companion graves on the right hand and on the

left. She could not have singled it out but for the weather stains on

the head-stone, which told of storm and rain over it, that had not

passed over the rest. The mound was still kept in shape; but the

grass grew long, and waved a dreary welcome to her as the wind swept

through it. She knelt down by the stone, and tried to read the

inscription. The black paint which had once made the carved words

distinct was all flayed off from them now. To any other eyes but hers

the very name of the dead man would have been hard to trace. She

sighed heavily as she followed the letters of the inscription

mechanically, one by one, with her finger:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY

OF

HUGH POLWHEAL,

AGED 26 YEARS.

HE MET WITH HIS DEATH

THROUGH THE FALL OF A ROCK

IN

PORTHGENNA MINE,

DECEMBER 17TH, 1823.

Her hand lingered over the letters after it had followed them to the

last line, and she bent forward and pressed her lips on the stone.

"Better so!" she said to herself, as she rose from her knees, and

looked down at the inscription for the last time. "Better it should

fade out so! Fewer strangers' eyes will see it; fewer strangers' feet

will follow where mine have been--he will lie all the quieter in the

place of his rest!"

She brushed the tears from her eyes, and gathered a few blades of

grass from the grave--then left the church-yard. Outside the hedge

that surrounded the inclosure she stopped for a moment, and drew from

the bosom of her dress the little book of Wesley's Hymns which she had

taken with her from the desk in her bedroom on the morning of her

flight from Porthgenna. The withered remains of the grass that she had

plucked from the grave sixteen years ago lay between the pages still.

She added to them the fresh fragments that she had just gathered,

replaced the book in the bosom of her dress, and hastened back over

the moor to the spot where the old man was waiting for her.

She found him packing up the musical box again in its leather case.

"A good wind," he said, holding up the palm of his hand to the fresh

breeze that was sweeping over the moor--"A very good wind, indeed, if

you take him by himself--but a bitter bad wind if you take him with

Mozart. He blows off the tune as if it was the hat on my head. You

come back, my child, just at the nick of time--just when my pipe is

done, and Mozart is ready to travel along the road once more. Ah, have

you got the crying look in your eyes again, Sarah? What have you met

with to make you cry? So! so! I see--the fewer questions I ask just

now, the better you will like me. Good. I have done. No! I have a last

question yet. What are we standing here for? why do we not go on?"

"Yes, yes; you are right, Uncle Joseph; let us go on at once. I shall

lose all the little courage I have if we stay here much longer looking

at the house."

They proceeded down the path without another moment of delay. When

they had reached the end of it, they stood opposite the eastern

boundary wall of Porthgenna Tower. The principal entrance to the

house, which had been very rarely used of late years, was in the west

front, and was approached by a terrace road that overlooked the sea.

The smaller entrance, which was generally used, was situated on the

south side of the building, and led through the servants' offices to

the great hall and the west staircase. Sarah's old experience of

Porthgenna guided her instinctively toward this part of the house. She

led her companion on until they gained the southern angle of the east

wall--then stopped and looked about her. Since they had passed the

postman and had entered on the moor, they had not set eyes on a living

creature; and still, though they were now under the very walls of

Porthgenna, neither man, woman, nor child--not even a domestic

animal--appeared in view.

"It is very lonely here," said Sarah, looking round her distrustfully;

"much lonelier than it used to be."

"Is it only to tell me what I can see for myself that you are stopping

now?" asked Uncle Joseph, whose inveterate cheerfulness would have

been proof against the solitude of Sahara itself.

"No, no!" she answered, in a quick, anxious whisper. "But the bell we

must ring at is so close--only round there--I should like to know

what we are to say when we come face to face with the servant. You

told me it was time enough to think about that when we were at the

door. Uncle! we are all but at the door now. What shall we do?"

"The first thing to do," said Uncle Joseph, shrugging his shoulders,

"is surely to ring."

"Yes--but when the servant comes, what are we to say?"

"Say?" repeated Uncle Joseph, knitting his eyebrows quite fiercely

with the effort of thinking, and rapping his forehead with his

forefinger just under his hat--"Say? Stop, stop, stop, stop! Ah, I

have got it! I know! Make yourself quite easy, Sarah. The moment the

door is opened, all the speaking to the servant shall be done by me."

"Oh, how you relieve me! What shall you say?"

"Say? This--'How do you do? We have come to see the house.'"

When he had disclosed that remarkable expedient for effecting an

entrance into Porthgenna Tower, he spread out both his hands

interrogatively, drew back several paces from his niece, and looked at

her with the serenely self-satisfied air of a man who has leaped, at

one mental bound, from a doubt to a discovery. Sarah gazed at him in

astonishment. The expression of absolute conviction on his face

staggered her. The poorest of all the poor excuses for gaining

admission into the house which she herself had thought of, and had

rejected, during the previous night, seemed like the very perfection

of artifice by comparison with such a childishly simple expedient as

that suggested by Uncle Joseph. And yet there he stood, apparently

quite convinced that he had hit on the means of smoothing away all

obstacles at once. Not knowing what to say, not believing sufficiently

in the validity of her own doubts to venture on openly expressing an

opinion either one way or the other, she took the last refuge that was

now left open to her--she endeavored to gain time.

"It is very, very good of you, uncle, to take all the difficulty of

speaking to the servant on your own shoulders," she said; the hidden

despondency at her heart expressing itself, in spite of her, in the

faintness of her voice and the forlorn perplexity of her eyes. "But

would you mind waiting a little before we ring at the door, and

walking up and down for a few minutes by the side of this wall, where

nobody is likely to see us? I want to get a little more time to

prepare myself for the trial that I have to go through; and--and in

case the servant makes any difficulties about letting us in--I mean

difficulties that we can not just now anticipate--would it not be as

well to think of something else to say at the door? Perhaps, if you

were to consider again--"

"There is not the least need," interposed Uncle Joseph. "I have only

to speak to the servant, and--crick! crack!--you will see that we

shall get in. But I will walk up and down as long as you please. There

is no reason, because I have done all my thinking in one moment, that

you should have done all your thinking in one moment too. No, no,

no--no reason at all." Saying those words with a patronizing air and a

self-satisfied smile, which would have been irresistibly comical under

any less critical circumstances, the old man again offered his arm to

his niece, and led her back over the broken ground that lay under the

eastern wall of Porthgenna Tower.

* * * * *

While Sarah was waiting in doubt outside the walls, it happened, by a

curious coincidence, that another person, vested with the highest

domestic authority, was also waiting in doubt inside the walls. This

person was no other than the housekeeper of Porthgenna Tower; and the

cause of her perplexity was nothing less than the letter which had

been delivered by the postman that very morning.

It was a letter from Mrs. Frankland, which had been written after she

had held a long conversation with her husband and Mr. Orridge, on

receiving the last fragments of information which the doctor was able

to communicate in reference to Mrs. Jazeph.

The housekeeper had read the letter through over and over again, and

was more puzzled and astonished by it at every fresh reading. She was

now waiting for the return of the steward, Mr. Munder, from his

occupations out of doors, with the intention of taking his opinion on

the singular communication which she had received from her mistress.

While Sarah and her uncle were still walking up and down outside the

eastern wall, Mr. Munder entered the housekeeper's room. He was one of

those tall, grave, benevolent-looking men, with a conical head, a deep

voice, a slow step, and a heavy manner, who passively contrive to get

a great reputation for wisdom without the trouble of saying or doing

any thing to deserve it. All round the Porthgenna neighborhood the

steward was popularly spoken of as a remarkably sound, sensible man;

and the housekeeper, although a sharp woman in other matters, in this

one respect shared to a large extent in the general delusion.

"Good-morning, Mrs. Pentreath," said Mr. Munder. "Any news to-day?"

What a weight and importance his deep voice and his impressively slow

method of using it, gave to those two insignificant sentences!

"News, Mr. Munder, that will astonish you," replied the housekeeper.

"I have received a letter this morning from Mrs. Frankland, which is,

without any exception, the most mystifying thing of the sort I ever

met with. I am told to communicate the letter to you; and I have been

waiting the whole morning to hear your opinion of it. Pray sit down,

and give me all your attention--for I do positively assure you that

the letter requires it."

Mr. Munder sat down, and became the picture of attention

immediately--not of ordinary attention, which can be wearied, but of

judicial attention, which knows no fatigue, and is superior alike to

the power of dullness and the power of time. The housekeeper, without

wasting the precious minutes--Mr. Munder's minutes, which ranked next

on the scale of importance to a prime minister's!--opened her

mistress's letter, and, resisting the natural temptation to make a few

more prefatory remarks on it, immediately favored the steward with the

first paragraph, in the following terms:

"MRS. PENTREATH,--You must be tired of receiving letters

from me, fixing a day for the arrival of Mr. Frankland and

myself. On this, the third occasion of my writing to you

about our plans, it will be best, I think, to make no third

appointment, but merely to say that we shall leave West

Winston for Porthgenna the moment I can get the doctor's

permission to travel."

"So far," remarked Mrs. Pentreath, placing the letter on her lap, and

smoothing it out rather irritably while she spoke--"so far, there is

nothing of much consequence. The letter certainly seems to me

(between ourselves) to be written in rather poor language--too much

like common talking to come up to my idea of what a lady's style of

composition ought to be--but that is a matter of opinion. I can't say,

and I should be the last person to wish to say, that the beginning of

Mrs. Frankland's letter is not, upon the whole, perfectly clear. It is

the middle and the end that I wish to consult you about, Mr. Munder."

"Just so," said Mr. Munder. Only two words, but more meaning in them

than two hundred in the mouth of an ordinary man! The housekeeper

cleared her throat with extraordinary loudness and elaboration, and

read on thus:

"My principal object in writing these lines is to request,

by Mr. Frankland's desire, that you and Mr. Munder will

endeavor to ascertain, as privately as possible, whether a

person now traveling in Cornwall--in whom we happen to be

much interested--has been yet seen in the neighborhood of

Porthgenna. The person in question is known to us by the

name of Mrs. Jazeph. She is an elderly woman, of quiet,

lady-like manners, looking nervous and in delicate health.

She dresses, according to our experience of her, with

extreme propriety and neatness, and in dark colors. Her

eyes have a singular expression of timidity, her voice is

particularly soft and low, and her manner is frequently

marked by extreme hesitation. I am thus particular in

describing her, in case she should not be traveling under

the name by which we know her.

"For reasons which it is not necessary to state, both my

husband and myself think it probable that, at some former

period of her life, Mrs. Jazeph may have been connected

with the Porthgenna neighborhood. Whether this be the fact

or no, it is indisputably certain that she is familiar with

the interior of Porthgenna Tower, and that she has an

interest of some kind, quite incomprehensible to us, in the

house. Coupling these facts with the knowledge we have of

her being now in Cornwall, we think it just within the

range of possibility that you or Mr. Munder, or some other

person in our employment, may meet with her; and we are

particularly anxious, if she should by any chance ask to

see the house, not only that you should show her over it

with perfect readiness and civility, but also that you

should take private and particular notice of her conduct

from the time when she enters the building to the time when

she leaves it. Do not let her out of your sight for a

moment; and, if possible, pray get some trustworthy person

to follow her unperceived, and ascertain where she goes to

after she has quitted the house. It is of the most vital

importance that these instructions (strange as they may

seem to you) should be implicitly obeyed to the very

letter.

"I have only room and time to add that we know nothing to

the discredit of this person, and that we particularly

desire you will manage matters with sufficient discretion

(in case you meet with her) to prevent her from having any

suspicion that you are acting under orders, or that you

have any especial interest in watching her movements. You

will be good enough to communicate this letter to the

steward, and you are at liberty to repeat the instructions

in it to any other trustworthy person, if necessary.

"Yours truly,

"ROSAMOND FRANKLAND.

"P.S.--I have left my room, and the baby is getting on

charmingly."

"There!" said the housekeeper. "Who is to make head or tail of that, I

should like to know! Did you ever, in all your experience, Mr. Munder,

meet with such a letter before? Here is a very heavy responsibility

laid on our shoulders, without one word of explanation. I have been

puzzling my brains about what their interest in this mysterious woman

can be the whole morning; and the more I think, the less comes of it.

What is your opinion, Mr. Munder? We ought to do something

immediately. Is there any course in particular which you feel disposed

to point out?"

Mr. Munder coughed dubiously, crossed his right leg over his left, put

his head critically on one side, coughed for the second time, and

looked at the housekeeper. If it had belonged to any other man in the

world, Mrs. Pentreath would have considered that the face which now

confronted hers expressed nothing but the most profound and vacant

bewilderment. But it was Mr. Munder's face, and it was only to be

looked at with sentiments of respectful expectation.

"I rather think--" began Mr. Munder.

"Yes?" said the housekeeper, eagerly.

Before another word could be spoken, the maid-servant entered the room

to lay the cloth for Mrs. Pentreath's dinner.

"There, there! never mind now, Betsey," said the housekeeper,

impatiently. "Don't lay the cloth till I ring for you. Mr. Munder and

I have something very important to talk about, and we can't be

interrupted just yet."

She had hardly said the word, before an interruption of the most

unexpected kind happened. The door-bell rang. This was a very unusual

occurrence at Porthgenna Tower. The few persons who had any occasion

to come to the house on domestic business always entered by a small

side gate, which was left on the latch in the day-time.

"Who in the world can that be!" exclaimed Mrs. Pentreath, hastening to

the window, which commanded a side view of the lower door steps.

The first object that met her eye when she looked out was a lady

standing on the lowest step--a lady dressed very neatly in quiet, dark

colors.

"Good Heavens, Mr. Munder!" cried the housekeeper, hurrying back to

the table, and snatching up Mrs. Frankland's letter, which she had

left on it. "There is a stranger waiting at the door at this very

moment! a lady! or, at least, a woman--and dressed neatly, dressed in

dark colors! You might knock me down, Mr. Munder, with a feather!

Stop, Betsey--stop where you are!"

"I was only going, ma'am, to answer the door," said Betsey, in

amazement.

"Stop where you are," reiterated Mrs. Pentreath, composing herself by

a great effort. "I happen to have certain reasons, on this particular

occasion, for descending out of my own place and putting myself into

yours. Stand out of the way, you staring fool! I am going up stairs to

answer that ring at the door myself."

CHAPTER III.

INSIDE THE HOUSE.

Mrs. Pentreath's surprise at seeing a lady through the window, was

doubled by her amazement at seeing a gentleman when she opened the

door. Waiting close to the bell-handle, after he had rung, instead of

rejoining his niece on the step, Uncle Joseph stood near enough to the

house to be out of the range of view from Mrs. Pentreath's window. To

the housekeeper's excited imagination, he appeared on the threshold

with the suddenness of an apparition--the apparition of a little

rosy-faced old gentleman, smiling, bowing, and taking off his hat with

a superb flourish of politeness, which had something quite superhuman

in the sweep and the dexterity of it.

"How do you do? We have come to see the house," said Uncle Joseph,

trying his infallible expedient for gaining admission the instant the

door was open.

Mrs. Pentreath was struck speechless. Who was this familiar old

gentleman with the foreign accent and the fantastic bow? and what did

he mean by talking to her as if she was his intimate friend? Mrs.

Frankland's letter said not so much, from beginning to end, as one

word about him.

"How do you do? We have come to see the house," repeated Uncle Joseph,

giving his irresistible form of salutation the benefit of a second

trial.

"So you said just now, Sir," remarked Mrs. Pentreath, recovering

self-possession enough to use her tongue in her own defense. "Does the

lady," she continued, looking down over the old man's shoulder at the

step on which his niece was standing--"does the lady wish to see the

house too?"

Sarah's gently spoken reply in the affirmative, short as it was,

convinced the housekeeper that the woman described in Mrs. Frankland's

letter really and truly stood before her. Besides the neat, quiet

dress, there was now the softly toned voice, and, when she looked up

for a moment, there were the timid eyes also to identify her by! In

relation to this one of the two strangers, Mrs. Pentreath, however

agitated and surprised she might be, could no longer feel any

uncertainty about the course she ought to adopt. But in relation to

the other visitor, the incomprehensible old foreigner, she was beset

by the most bewildering doubts. Would it be safest to hold to the

letter of Mrs. Frankland's instructions, and ask him to wait outside

while the lady was being shown over the house? or would it be best to

act on her own responsibility, and to risk giving him admission as

well as his companion? This was a difficult point to decide, and

therefore one which it was necessary to submit to the superior

sagacity of Mr. Munder.

"Will you step in for a moment, and wait here while I speak to the

steward?" said Mrs. Pentreath, pointedly neglecting to notice the

familiar old foreigner, and addressing herself straight through him to

the lady on the steps below.

"Thank you very much," said Uncle Joseph, smiling and bowing,

impervious to rebuke. "What did I tell you?" he whispered triumphantly

to his niece, as she passed him on her way into the house.

Mrs. Pentreath's first impulse was to go down stairs at once, and

speak to Mr. Munder. But a timely recollection of that part of Mrs.

Frankland's letter which enjoined her not to lose sight of the lady in

the quiet dress, brought her to a stand-still the next moment. She was

the more easily recalled to a remembrance of this particular

injunction by a curious alteration in the conduct of the lady herself,

who seemed to lose all her diffidence, and to become surprisingly

impatient to lead the way into the interior of the house, the moment

she had stepped across the threshold.

"Betsey!" cried Mrs. Pentreath, cautiously calling to the servant

after she had only retired a few paces from the visitors--"Betsey! ask

Mr. Munder to be so kind as to step this way."

Mr. Munder presented himself with great deliberation, and with a

certain lowering dignity in his face. He had been accustomed to be

treated with deference, and he was not pleased with the housekeeper

for unceremoniously leaving him the moment she heard the ring at the

bell, without giving him time to pronounce an opinion on Mrs.

Frankland's letter. Accordingly, when Mrs. Pentreath, in a high state

of excitement, drew him aside out of hearing, and confided to him, in

a whisper, the astounding intelligence that the lady in whom Mr. and

Mrs. Frankland were so mysteriously interested was, at that moment,

actually standing before him in the house, he received her

communication with an air of the most provoking indifference. It was

worse still when she proceeded to state her difficulties--warily

keeping her eye on the two strangers all the while. Appeal as

respectfully as she might to Mr. Munder's superior wisdom for

guidance, he persisted in listening with a disparaging frown, and

ended by irritably contradicting her when she ventured to add, in

conclusion, that her own ideas inclined her to assume no

responsibility, and to beg the foreign gentleman to wait outside while

the lady, in conformity with Mrs. Frankland's instructions, was being

shown over the house.

"Such may be your opinion, ma'am," said Mr. Munder, severely. "It is

not mine."

The housekeeper looked aghast. "Perhaps," she suggested,

deferentially, "you think that the foreign old gentleman would be

likely to insist on going over the house with the lady?"

"Of course I think so," said Mr. Munder. (He had thought nothing of

the sort; his only idea just then being the idea of asserting his own

supremacy by setting himself steadily in opposition to any

preconceived arrangements of Mrs. Pentreath.)

"Then you would take the responsibility of showing them both over the

house, seeing that they have both come to the door together?" asked

the housekeeper.

"Of course I would," answered the steward, with the promptitude of

resolution which distinguishes all superior men.

"Well, Mr. Munder, I am always glad to be guided by your opinion, and

I will be guided by it now," said Mrs. Pentreath. "But, as there will

be two people to look after--for I would not trust the foreigner out

of sight on any consideration whatever--I must really beg you to share

the trouble of showing them over the house along with me. I am so

excited and nervous that I don't feel as if I had all my wits about

me--I never was placed in such a position as this before--I am in the

midst of mysteries that I don't understand--and, in short, if I can't

count on your assistance, I won't answer for it that I shall not make

some mistake. I should be very sorry to make a mistake, not only on my

own account, but--" Here the housekeeper stopped, and looked hard at

Mr. Munder.

"Go on, ma'am," said Mr. Munder, with cruel composure.

"Not only on my own account," resumed Mrs. Pentreath, demurely, "but

on yours; for Mrs. Frankland's letter certainly casts the

responsibility of conducting this delicate business on your shoulders

as well as on mine."

Mr. Munder recoiled a few steps, turned red, opened his lips

indignantly, hesitated, and closed them again. He was fairly caught in

a trap of his own setting. He could not retreat from the

responsibility of directing the housekeeper's conduct, the moment

after he had voluntarily assumed it; and he could not deny that Mrs.

Frankland's letter positively and repeatedly referred to him by name.

There was only one way of getting out of the difficulty with dignity,

and Mr. Munder unblushingly took that way the moment he had recovered

self-possession enough to collect himself for the effort.

"I am perfectly amazed, Mrs. Pentreath," he began, with the gravest

dignity. "Yes, I repeat, I am perfectly amazed that you should think

me capable of leaving you to go over the house alone, under such

remarkable circumstances as those we are now placed in. No, ma'am!

whatever my other faults may be, shrinking from my share of

responsibility is not one of them. I don't require to be reminded of

Mrs. Frankland's letter; and--no!--I don't require any apologies. I am

quite ready, ma'am--quite ready to show the way up stairs whenever you

are."

"The sooner the better, Mr. Munder--for there is that audacious old

foreigner actually chattering to Betsey now, as if he had known her

all his life!"

The assertion was quite true. Uncle Joseph was exercising his gift of

familiarity on the maid-servant (who had lingered to stare at the

strangers, instead of going back to the kitchen), just as he had

already exercised it on the old lady passenger in the stage-coach, and

on the driver of the pony-chaise which took his niece and himself to

the post-town of Porthgenna. While the housekeeper and the steward

were holding their private conference, he was keeping Betsey in

ecstasies of suppressed giggling by the odd questions that he asked

about the house, and about how she got on with her work in it. His

inquiries had naturally led from the south side of the building, by

which he and his companion had entered, to the west side, which they

were shortly to explore; and thence round to the north side, which was

forbidden ground to every body in the house. When Mrs. Pentreath came

forward with the steward, she overheard this exchange of question and

answer passing between the foreigner and the maid:

"But tell me, Betzee, my dear," said Uncle Joseph. "Why does nobody

ever go into these mouldy old rooms?"

"Because there's a ghost in them," answered Betsey, with a burst of

laughter, as if a series of haunted rooms and a series of excellent

jokes meant precisely the same thing.

"Hold your tongue directly, and go back to the kitchen," cried Mrs.

Pentreath, indignantly. "The ignorant people about here," she

continued, still pointedly overlooking Uncle Joseph, and addressing

herself only to Sarah, "tell absurd stories about some old rooms on

the unrepaired side of the house, which have not been inhabited for

more than half a century past--absurd stories about a ghost; and my

servant is foolish enough to believe them."

"No, I'm not," said Betsey, retiring, under protest, to the lower

regions. "I don't believe a word about the ghost--at least not in the

day-time." Adding that important saving clause in a whisper, Betsey

unwillingly withdrew from the scene.

Mrs. Pentreath observed, with some surprise, that the mysterious lady

in the quiet dress turned very pale at the mention of the ghost story,

and made no remark on it whatever. While she was still wondering what

this meant, Mr. Munder emerged into dignified prominence, and loftily

addressed himself, not to Uncle Joseph, and not to Sarah, but to the

empty air between them.

"If you wish to see the house," he said, "you will have the goodness

to follow me."

With those words, Mr. Munder turned solemnly into the passage that led

to the foot of the west staircase, walking with that peculiar, slow

strut in which all serious-minded English people indulge when they go

out to take a little exercise on Sunday. The housekeeper, adapting her

pace with feminine pliancy to the pace of the steward, walked the

national Sabbatarian Polonaise by his side, as if she was out with him

for a mouthful of fresh air between the services.

"As I am a living sinner, this going over the house is like going to a

funeral!" whispered Uncle Joseph to his niece. He drew her arm into

his, and felt, as he did so, that she was trembling.

"What is the matter?" he asked, under his breath.

"Uncle! there is something unnatural about the readiness of these

people to show us over the house," was the faintly whispered answer.

"What were they talking about just now, out of our hearing? Why did

that woman keep her eyes fixed so constantly on me?"

Before the old man could answer, the housekeeper looked round, and

begged, with the severest emphasis, that they would be good enough to

follow. In less than another minute they were all standing at the foot

of the west staircase.

"Aha!" cried Uncle Joseph, as easy and talkative as ever, even in the

presence of Mr. Munder himself. "A fine big house, and a very good

staircase."

"We are not accustomed to hear either the house or the staircase

spoken of in these terms, Sir," said Mr. Munder, resolving to nip the

foreigner's familiarity in the bud. "The Guide to West Cornwall, which

you would have done well to make yourself acquainted with before you

came here, describes Porthgenna Tower as a Mansion, and uses the word

Spacious in speaking of the west staircase. I regret to find, Sir,

that you have not consulted the Guide-book to West Cornwall."

"And why?" rejoined the unabashed German. "What do I want with a book,

when I have got you for my guide? Ah, dear Sir, but you are not just

to yourself! Is not a living guide like you, who talks and walks

about, better for me than dead leaves of print and paper? Ah, no, no!

I shall not hear another word--I shall not hear you do any more

injustice to yourself." Here Uncle Joseph made another fantastic bow,

looked up smiling into the steward's face, and shook his head several

times with an air of friendly reproach.

Mr. Munder felt paralyzed. He could not have been treated with more

ease and indifferent familiarity if this obscure foreign stranger had

been an English duke. He had often heard of the climax of audacity;

and here it was visibly embodied in one small, elderly individual, who

did not rise quite five feet from the ground he stood on!

While the steward was swelling with a sense of injury too large for

utterance, the housekeeper, followed by Sarah, was slowly ascending

the stairs. Uncle Joseph, seeing them go up, hastened to join his

niece, and Mr. Munder, after waiting a little while on the mat to

recover himself, followed the audacious foreigner with the intention

of watching his conduct narrowly, and chastising his insolence at the

first opportunity with stinging words of rebuke.

The procession up the stairs thus formed was not, however, closed by

the steward; it was further adorned and completed by Betsey, the

servant-maid, who stole out of the kitchen to follow the strange

visitors over the house, as closely as she could without attracting

the notice of Mrs. Pentreath. Betsey had her share of natural human

curiosity and love of change. No such event as the arrival of

strangers had ever before enlivened the dreary monotony of Porthgenna

Tower within her experience; and she was resolved not to stay alone in

the kitchen while there was a chance of hearing a stray word of the

conversation, or catching a chance glimpse of the proceedings among

the company up stairs.

In the mean time the housekeeper had led the way as far as the

first-floor landing, on either side of which the principal rooms in

the west front were situated. Sharpened by fear and suspicion, Sarah's

eyes immediately detected the repairs which had been effected in the

banisters and stairs of the second flight.

"You have had workmen in the house?" she said quickly to Mrs.

Pentreath.

"You mean on the stairs?" returned the housekeeper. "Yes, we have had

workmen there."

"And nowhere else?"

"No. But they are wanted in other places badly enough. Even here, on

the best side of the house, half the bedrooms up stairs are hardly fit

to sleep in. They were any thing but comfortable, as I have heard,

even in the late Mrs. Treverton's time; and since she died--"

The housekeeper stopped with a frown and a look of surprise. The lady

in the quiet dress, instead of sustaining the reputation for good

manners which had been conferred on her in Mrs. Frankland's letter,

was guilty of the unpardonable discourtesy of turning away from Mrs.

Pentreath before she had done speaking. Determined not to allow

herself to be impertinently silenced in that way, she coldly and

distinctly repeated her last words--

"And since Mrs. Treverton died--"

She was interrupted for the second time. The strange lady, turning

quickly round again, confronted her with a very pale face and a very

eager look, and asked, in the most abrupt manner, an utterly

irrelevant question:

"Tell me about that ghost story," she said. "Do they say it is the

ghost of a man or of a woman?"

"I was speaking of the late Mrs. Treverton," said the housekeeper, in

her severest tones of reproof, "and not of the ghost story about the

north rooms. You would have known that, if you had done me the favor

to listen to what _I_ said."

"I beg your pardon; I beg your pardon a thousand times for seeming

inattentive! It struck me just then--or, at least, I wanted to know--"

"If you care to know about any thing so absurd," said Mrs. Pentreath,

mollified by the evident sincerity of the apology that had been

offered to her, "the ghost, according to the story, is the ghost of a

woman."

The strange lady's face grew whiter than ever; and she turned away

once more to the open window on the landing.

"How hot it is!" she said, putting her head out into the air.

"Hot, with a northeast wind!" exclaimed Mrs. Pentreath, in amazement.

Here Uncle Joseph came forward with a polite request to know when they

were going to look over the rooms. For the last few minutes he had

been asking all sorts of questions of Mr. Munder; and, having received

no answers which were not of the shortest and most ungracious kind,

had given up talking to the steward in despair.

Mrs. Pentreath prepared to lead the way into the breakfast-room,

library, and drawing-room. All three communicated with each other,

and each room had a second door opening on a long passage, the

entrance to which was on the right-hand side of the first-floor

landing. Before leading the way into these rooms, the housekeeper

touched Sarah on the shoulder to intimate that it was time to be

moving on.

"As for the ghost story," resumed Mrs. Pentreath, while she opened the

breakfast-room door, "you must apply to the ignorant people who

believe in it, if you want to hear it all told. Whether the ghost is

an old ghost or a new ghost, and why she is supposed to walk, is more

than I can tell you." In spite of the housekeeper's affectation of

indifference toward the popular superstition, she had heard enough of

the ghost-story to frighten her, though she would not confess it.

Inside the house, or outside the house, nobody much less willing to

venture into the north rooms alone could in real truth have been found

than Mrs. Pentreath herself.

While the housekeeper was drawing up the blinds in the

breakfast-parlor, and while Mr. Munder was opening the door that led

out of it into the library, Uncle Joseph stole to his niece's side,

and spoke a few words of encouragement to her in his quaint, kindly

way.

"Courage!" he whispered. "Keep your wits about you, Sarah, and catch

your little opportunity whenever you can."

"My thoughts! My thoughts!" she answered in the same low key. "This

house rouses them all against me. Oh, why did I ever venture into it

again!"

"You had better look at the view from the window now," said Mrs.

Pentreath, after she had drawn up the blind. "It is very much

admired."

While affairs were in this stage of progress on the first floor of the

house, Betsey, who had been hitherto stealing up by a stair at a time

from the hall, and listening with all her ears in the intervals of the

ascent, finding that no sound of voices now reached her, bethought

herself of returning to the kitchen again, and of looking after the

housekeeper's dinner, which was being kept warm by the fire. She

descended to the lower regions, wondering what part of the house the

strangers would want to see next, and puzzling her brains to find out

some excuse for attaching herself to the exploring party.

After the view from the breakfast-room window had been duly

contemplated, the library was next entered. In this room, Mrs.

Pentreath, having some leisure to look about her, and employing that

leisure in observing the conduct of the steward, arrived at the

unpleasant conviction that Mr. Munder was by no means to be depended

on to assist her in the important business of watching the proceedings

of the two strangers. Doubly stimulated to assert his own dignity by

the disrespectfully easy manner in which he had been treated by Uncle

Joseph, the sole object of Mr. Munder's ambition seemed to be to

divest himself as completely as possible of the character of guide,

which the unscrupulous foreigner sought to confer on him. He sauntered

heavily about the rooms, with the air of a casual visitor, staring out

of window, peeping into books on tables, frowning at himself in the

chimney-glasses--looking, in short, any where but where he ought to

look. The housekeeper, exasperated by this affectation of

indifference, whispered to him irritably to keep his eye on the

foreigner, as it was quite as much as she could do to look after the

lady in the quiet dress.

"Very good; very good," said Mr. Munder, with sulky carelessness. "And

where are you going to next, ma'am, after we have been into the

drawing-room? Back again, through the library, into the

breakfast-room? or out at once into the passage? Be good enough to

settle which, as you seem to be in the way of settling every thing."

"Into the passage, to be sure," answered Mrs. Pentreath, "to show the

next three rooms beyond these."

Mr. Munder sauntered out of the library, through the door-way of

communication, into the drawing-room, unlocked the door leading into

the passage--then, to the great disgust of the housekeeper, strolled

to the fire-place, and looked at himself in the glass over it, just as

attentively as he had looked at himself in the library mirror hardly a

minute before.

"This is the west drawing-room," said Mrs. Pentreath, calling to the

visitors. "The carving of the stone chimney-piece," she added, with

the mischievous intention of bringing them into the closest proximity

to the steward, "is considered the finest thing in the whole

apartment."

Driven from the looking-glass by this manoeuvre, Mr. Munder

provokingly sauntered to the window and looked out. Sarah, still pale

and silent--but with a certain unwonted resolution just gathering, as

it were, in the lines about her lips--stopped thoughtfully by the

chimney-piece when the housekeeper pointed it out to her. Uncle

Joseph, looking all round the room in his discursive manner, spied, in

the farthest corner of it from the door that led into the passage, a

beautiful maple-wood table and cabinet, of a very peculiar pattern.

His workmanlike enthusiasm was instantly aroused, and he darted across

the room to examine the make of the cabinet closely. The table beneath

projected a little way in front of it, and, of all the objects in the

world, what should he see reposing on the flat space of the projection

but a magnificent musical box at least three times the size of his

own!

"Aïe! Aïe!! Aïe!!!" cried Uncle Joseph, in an ascending scale of

admiration, which ended at the very top of his voice. "Open him! set

him going! let me hear what he plays!" He stopped for want of words to

express his impatience, and drummed with both hands on the lid of the

musical box in a burst of uncontrollable enthusiasm.

"Mr. Munder!" exclaimed the housekeeper, hurrying across the room in

great indignation. "Why don't you look? why don't you stop him? He's

breaking open the musical box. Be quiet, Sir! How dare you touch me?"

"Set him going! set him going!" reiterated Uncle Joseph, dropping Mrs.

Pentreath's arm, which he had seized in his agitation. "Look here!

this by my side is a music box too! Set him going! Does he play

Mozart? He is three times bigger than ever I saw! See! see! this box

of mine--this tiny bit of box that looks nothing by the side of

yours--it was given to my own brother by the king of all

music-composers that ever lived, by the divine Mozart himself. Set the

big box going, and you shall hear the little baby-box pipe after! Ah,

dear and good madam, if you love me--"

"Sir!!!" exclaimed the housekeeper, reddening with virtuous

indignation to the very roots of her hair.

"What do you mean, Sir, by addressing such outrageous language as that

to a respectable female?" inquired Mr. Munder, approaching to the

rescue. "Do you think we want your foreign noises, and your foreign

morals, and your foreign profanity here? Yes, Sir! profanity. Any man

who calls any human individual, whether musical or otherwise,

'divine,' is a profane man. Who are you, you extremely audacious

person? Are you an infidel?"

Before Uncle Joseph could say a word in vindication of his principles,

before Mr. Munder could relieve himself of any more indignation, they

were both startled into momentary silence by an exclamation of alarm

from the housekeeper.

"Where is she?" cried Mrs. Pentreath, standing in the middle of the

drawing-room, and looking with bewildered eyes all around her.

The lady in the quiet dress had vanished.

She was not in the library, not in the breakfast-room, not in the

passage outside. After searching in those three places, the

housekeeper came back to Mr. Munder with a look of downright terror in

her face, and stood staring at him for a moment perfectly helpless and

perfectly silent. As soon as she recovered herself she turned fiercely

on Uncle Joseph.

"Where is she? I insist on knowing what has become of her! You

cunning, wicked, impudent old man! where is she?" cried Mrs.

Pentreath, with no color in her cheeks and no mercy in her eyes.

"I suppose she is looking about the house by herself," said Uncle

Joseph. "We shall find her surely as we take our walks through the

other rooms." Simple as he was, the old man had, nevertheless,

acuteness enough to perceive that he had accidentally rendered the

very service to his niece of which she stood in need. If he had been

the most artful of mankind, he could have devised no better means of

diverting Mrs. Pentreath's attention from Sarah to himself than the

very means which he had just used in perfect innocence, at the very

moment when his thoughts were farthest away from the real object with

which he and his niece had entered the house. "So! so!" thought Uncle

Joseph to himself, "while these two angry people were scolding me for

nothing, Sarah has slipped away to the room where the letter is. Good!

I have only to wait till she comes back, and to let the two angry

people go on scolding me as long as they please."

"What are we to do? Mr. Munder! what on earth are we to do?" asked the

housekeeper. "We can't waste the precious minutes staring at each

other here. This woman must be found. Stop! she asked questions about

the stairs--she looked up at the second floor the moment we got on the

landing. Mr. Munder! wait here, and don't let that foreigner out of

your sight for a moment. Wait here while I run up and look into the

second-floor passage. All the bedroom doors are locked--I defy her to

hide herself if she has gone up there." With those words, the

housekeeper ran out of the drawing-room, and breathlessly ascended the

second flight of stairs.

While Mrs. Pentreath was searching on the west side of the house,

Sarah was hurrying, at the top of her speed, along the lonely passages

that led to the north rooms.

Terrified into decisive action by the desperate nature of the

situation, she had slipped out of the drawing-room into the passage

the instant she saw Mrs. Pentreath's back turned on her. Without

stopping to think, without attempting to compose herself, she ran down

the stairs of the first floor, and made straight for the housekeeper's

room. She had no excuses ready, if she had found any body there, or if

she had met any body on the way. She had formed no plan where to seek

for them next, if the keys of the north rooms were not hanging in the

place where she still expected to find them. Her mind was lost in

confusion, her temples throbbed as if they would burst with the heat

at her brain. The one blind, wild, headlong purpose of getting into

the Myrtle Room drove her on, gave unnatural swiftness to her

trembling feet, unnatural strength to her shaking hands, unnatural

courage to her sinking heart.

She ran into the housekeeper's room, without even the ordinary caution

of waiting for a moment to listen outside the door. No one was there.

One glance at the well-remembered nail in the wall showed her the keys

still hanging to it in a bunch, as they had hung in the long-past

time. She had them in her possession in a moment; and was away again,

along the solitary passages that led to the north rooms, threading

their turnings and windings as if she had left them but the day

before; never pausing to listen or to look behind her, never

slackening her speed till she was at the top of the back staircase,

and had her hand on the locked door that led into the north hall.

As she turned over the bunch to find the first key that was required,

she discovered--what her hurry had hitherto prevented her from

noticing--the numbered labels which the builder had methodically

attached to all the keys when he had been sent to Porthgenna by Mr.

Frankland to survey the house. At the first sight of them, her

searching hands paused in their work instantaneously, and she shivered

all over, as if a sudden chill had struck her.

If she had been less violently agitated, the discovery of the new

labels and the suspicions to which the sight of them instantly gave

rise would, in all probability, have checked her further progress. But

the confusion of her mind was now too great to allow her to piece

together even the veriest fragments of thoughts. Vaguely conscious of

a new terror, of a sharpened distrust that doubled and trebled the

headlong impatience which had driven her on thus far, she desperately

resumed her search through the bunch of keys.

One of them had no label; it was larger than the rest--it was the key

that fitted the door of communication before which she stood. She

turned it in the rusty lock with a strength which, at any other time,

she would have been utterly incapable of exerting; she opened the door

with a blow of her hand, which burst it away at one stroke from the

jambs to which it stuck. Panting for breath, she flew across the

forsaken north hall, without stopping for one second to push the door

to behind her. The creeping creatures, the noisome house-reptiles that

possessed the place, crawled away, shadow-like, on either side of her

toward the walls. She never noticed them, never turned away for them.

Across the hall, and up the stairs at the end of it, she ran, till she

gained the open landing at the top--and there she suddenly checked

herself in front of the first door.

The first door of the long range of rooms that opened on the landing;

the door that fronted the topmost of the flight of stairs. She

stopped; she looked at it--it was not the door she had come to open;

and yet she could not tear herself away from it. Scrawled on the panel

in white chalk was the figure--"I." And when she looked down at the

bunch of keys in her hands, there was the figure "I." on a label,

answering to it.

She tried to think, to follow out any one of all the thronging

suspicions that beset her to the conclusion at which it might point.

The effort was useless; her mind was gone; her bodily senses of seeing

and hearing--senses which had now become painfully and incomprehensibly

sharpened--seemed to be the sole relics of intelligence that she had

left to guide her. She put her hand over her eyes, and waited a little

so, and then went on slowly along the landing, looking at the doors.

No. "II.," No. "III.," No. "IV.," traced on the panels in the same

white chalk, and answering to the numbered labels on the keys, the

figures on which were written in ink. No. "IV." the middle room of the

first floor range of eight. She stopped there again, trembling from

head to foot. It was the door of the Myrtle Room.

Did the chalked numbers stop there? She looked on down the landing.

No. The four doors remaining were regularly numbered on to "VIII."

She came back again to the door of the Myrtle Room, sought out the key

labeled with the figure "IV."--hesitated--and looked back

distrustfully over the deserted hall.

The canvases of the old family pictures, which she had seen bulging

out of their frames in the past time when she hid the letter, had, for

the most part, rotted away from them now, and lay in great black

ragged strips on the floor of the hall. Islands and continents of damp

spread like the map of some strange region over the lofty vaulted

ceiling. Cobwebs, heavy with dust, hung down in festoons from broken

cornices. Dirt stains lay on the stone pavement, like gross

reflections of the damp stains on the ceiling. The broad flight of

stairs leading up to the open landing before the rooms of the first

floor had sunk down bodily toward one side. The banisters which

protected the outer edge of the landing were broken away into ragged

gaps. The light of day was stained, the air of heaven was stilled, the

sounds of earth were silenced in the north hall.

Silenced? Were _all_ sounds silenced? Or was there something stirring

that just touched the sense of hearing, that just deepened the dismal

stillness, and no more?

Sarah listened, keeping her face still set toward the hall--listened,

and heard a faint sound behind her. Was it outside the door on which

her back was turned? Or was it inside--in the Myrtle Room?

Inside. With the first conviction of that, all thought, all sensation

left her. She forgot the suspicious numbering of the doors; she became

insensible to the lapse of time, unconscious of the risk of discovery.

All exercise of her other faculties was now merged in the exercise of

the one faculty of listening.

It was a still, faint, stealthily rustling sound; and it moved to and

fro at intervals, to and fro softly, now at one end, now at the other

of the Myrtle Room. There were moments when it grew suddenly

distinct--other moments when it died away in gradations too light to

follow. Sometimes it seemed to sweep over the floor at a

bound--sometimes it crept with slow, continuous rustlings that just

wavered on the verge of absolute silence.

Her feet still rooted to the spot on which she stood, Sarah turned her

head slowly, inch by inch, toward the door of the Myrtle Room. A

moment before, while she was as yet unconscious of the faint sound

moving to and fro within it, she had been drawing her breath heavily

and quickly. She might have been dead now, her bosom was so still, her

breathing so noiseless. The same mysterious change came over her face

which had altered it when the darkness began to gather in the little

parlor at Truro. The same fearful look of inquiry which she had then

fixed on the vacant corner of the room was in her eyes now, as they

slowly turned on the door.

"Mistress!" she whispered. "Am I too late? _Are you there before me?_"

The stealthily rustling sound inside paused--renewed itself--died away

again faintly; away at the lower end of the room.

Her eyes still remained fixed on the Myrtle Room, strained, and opened

wider and wider--opened as if they would look through the very door

itself--opened as if they were watching for the opaque wood to turn

transparent, and show what was behind it.

"Over the lonesome floor, over the lonesome floor--how light it

moves!" she whispered again. "Mistress! does the black dress I made

for you rustle no louder than that?"

The sound stopped again--then suddenly advanced at one stealthy sweep

close to the inside of the door.

If she could have moved at that moment; if she could have looked down

to the line of open space between the bottom of the door and the

flooring below, when the faintly rustling sound came nearest to her,

she might have seen the insignificant cause that produced it lying

self-betrayed under the door, partly outside, partly inside, in the

shape of a fragment of faded red paper from the wall of the Myrtle

Room. Time and damp had loosened the paper all round the apartment.

Two or three yards of it had been torn off by the builder while he was

examining the walls--sometimes in large pieces, sometimes in small

pieces, just as it happened to come away--and had been thrown down by

him on the bare, boarded floor, to become the sport of the wind,

whenever it happened to blow through the broken panes of glass in the

window. If she had only moved! If she had only looked down for one

little second of time!

She was past moving and past looking: the paroxysm of superstitious

horror that possessed her held her still in every limb and every

feature. She never started, she uttered no cry, when the rustling

noise came nearest. The one outward sign which showed how the terror

of its approach shook her to the very soul expressed itself only in

the changed action of her right hand, in which she still held the

keys. At the instant when the wind wafted the fragment of paper

closest to the door, her fingers lost their power of contraction, and

became as nerveless and helpless as if she had fainted. The heavy

bunch of keys slipped from her suddenly loosened grasp, dropped at her

side on the outer edge of the landing, rolled off through a gap in the

broken banister, and fell on the stone pavement below, with a crash

which made the sleeping echoes shriek again, as if they were sentient

beings writhing under the torture of sound!

The crash of the falling keys, ringing and ringing again through the

stillness, woke her, as it were, to instant consciousness of present

events and present perils. She started, staggered backward, and raised

both her hands wildly to her head--paused so for a few seconds--then

made for the top of the stairs with the purpose of descending into the

hall to recover the keys.

Before she had advanced three paces the shrill sound of a woman's

scream came from the door of communication at the opposite end of the

hall. The scream was twice repeated at a greater distance off, and was

followed by a confused noise of rapidly advancing voices and

footsteps.

She staggered desperately a few paces farther, and reached the first

of the row of doors that opened on the landing. There nature sank

exhausted: her knees gave way under her--her breath, her sight, her

hearing all seemed to fail her together at the same instant--and she

dropped down senseless on the floor at the head of the stairs.

CHAPTER IV.

MR. MUNDER ON THE SEAT OF JUDGMENT.

The murmuring voices and the hurrying footsteps came nearer and

nearer, then stopped altogether. After an interval of silence, one

voice called out loudly, "Sarah! Sarah! where are you?" and the next

instant Uncle Joseph appeared alone in the door-way that led into the

north hall, looking eagerly all round him.

At first the prostrate figure on the landing at the head of the stairs

escaped his view. But the second time he looked in that direction the

dark dress, and the arm that lay just over the edge of the top stair,

caught his eye. With a loud cry of terror and recognition, he flew

across the hall and ascended the stairs. Just as he was kneeling by

Sarah's side, and raising her head on his arm, the steward, the

housekeeper, and the maid, all three crowded together after him into

the door-way.

"Water!" shouted the old man, gesticulating at them wildly with his

disengaged hand. "She is here--she has fallen down--she is in a faint!

Water! water!"

Mr. Munder looked at Mrs. Pentreath, Mrs. Pentreath looked at Betsey,

Betsey looked at the ground. All three stood stock-still; all three

seemed equally incapable of walking across the hall. If the science of

physiognomy be not an entire delusion, the cause of this amazing

unanimity was legibly written in their faces; in other words, they all

three looked equally afraid of the ghost.

"Water, I say! Water!" reiterated Uncle Joseph, shaking his fist at

them. "She is in a faint! Are you three at the door there, and not one

heart of mercy among you? Water! water! water! Must I scream myself

into fits before I can make you hear?"

"I'll get the water, ma'am," said Betsey, "if you or Mr. Munder will

please to take it from here to the top of the stairs."

She ran to the kitchen, and came back with a glass of water, which she

offered, with a respectful courtesy, first to the housekeeper, and

then to the steward.

"How dare you ask us to carry things for you?" said Mrs. Pentreath,

backing out of the door-way.

"Yes! how dare you ask us?" added Mr. Munder, backing after Mrs.

Pentreath.

"Water!" shouted the old man for the third time. He drew his niece

backward a little, so that she could be supported against the wall

behind her. "Water! or I trample down this dungeon of a place about

your ears!" he shouted, stamping with impatience and rage.

"If you please, Sir, are you sure it's really the lady who is up

there?" asked Betsey, advancing a few paces tremulously with the glass

of water.

"Am I sure?" exclaimed Uncle Joseph, descending the stairs to meet

her. "What fool's question is this? Who should it be?"

"The ghost, Sir," said Betsey, advancing more and more slowly. "The

ghost of the north rooms."

Uncle Joseph met her a few yards in advance of the foot of the stairs,

took the glass of water from her with a gesture of contempt, and

hastened back to his niece. As Betsey turned to effect her retreat,

the bunch of keys lying on the pavement below the landing caught her

eye. After a little hesitation she mustered courage enough to pick

them up, and then ran with them out of the hall as fast as her feet

could carry her.

Meanwhile Uncle Joseph was moistening his niece's lips with the water,

and sprinkling it over her forehead. After a while her breath began to

come and go slowly, in faint sighs, the muscles of her face moved a

little, and she feebly opened her eyes. They fixed affrightedly on the

old man, without any expression of recognition. He made her drink a

little water, and spoke to her gently, and so brought her back at last

to herself. Her first words were, "Don't leave me." Her first action,

when she was able to move, was the action of crouching closer to him.

"No fear, my child," he said, soothingly; "I will keep by you. Tell

me, Sarah, what has made you faint? What has frightened you so?"

"Oh, don't ask me! For God's sake, don't ask me!"

"There, there! I shall say nothing, then. Another mouthful of water? A

little mouthful more?"

"Help me up, uncle; help me to try if I can stand."

"Not yet--not quite yet; patience for a little longer."

"Oh, help me! help me! I want to get away from the sight of those

doors. If I can only go as far as the bottom of the stairs I shall be

better."

"So, so," said Uncle Joseph, assisting her to rise. "Wait now, and

feel your feet on the ground. Lean on me, lean hard, lean heavy.

Though I am only a light and a little man, I am solid as a rock. Have

you been into the room?" he added, in a whisper. "Have you got the

letter?"

She sighed bitterly, and laid her head on his shoulder with a weary

despair.

"Why, Sarah! Sarah!" he exclaimed. "Have you been all this time away,

and not got into the room yet?"

She raised her head as suddenly as she had laid it down, shuddered,

and tried feebly to draw him toward the stairs. "I shall never see the

Myrtle Room again--never, never, never more!" she said. "Let us go; I

can walk; I am strong now. Uncle Joseph, if you love me, take me away

from this house; away any where, so long as we are in the free air and

the daylight again; any where, so long as we are out of sight of

Porthgenna Tower."

Elevating his eyebrows in astonishment, but considerately refraining

from asking any more questions, Uncle Joseph assisted his niece to

descend the stairs. She was still so weak that she was obliged to

pause on gaining the bottom of them to recover her strength. Seeing

this, and feeling, as he led her afterward across the hall, that she

leaned more and more heavily on his arm at every fresh step, the old

man, on arriving within speaking distance of Mr. Munder and Mrs.

Pentreath, asked the housekeeper if she possessed any restorative

drops which she would allow him to administer to his niece.

Mrs. Pentreath's reply in the affirmative, though not very graciously

spoken, was accompanied by an alacrity of action which showed that she

was heartily rejoiced to take the first fair excuse for returning to

the inhabited quarter of the house. Muttering something about showing

the way to the place where the medicine-chest was kept, she

immediately retraced her steps along the passage to her own room;

while Uncle Joseph, disregarding all Sarah's whispered assurances that

she was well enough to depart without another moment of delay,

followed her silently, leading his niece.

Mr. Munder, shaking his head, and looking woefully disconcerted,

waited behind to lock the door of communication. When he had done

this, and had given the keys to Betsey to carry back to their

appointed place, he, in his turn, retired from the scene at a pace

indecorously approaching to something like a run. On getting well away

from the north hall, however, he regained his self-possession

wonderfully. He abruptly slackened his pace, collected his scattered

wits, and reflected a little, apparently with perfect satisfaction to

himself; for when he entered the housekeeper's room he had quite

recovered his usual complacent solemnity of look and manner. Like the

vast majority of densely stupid men, he felt intense pleasure in

hearing himself talk, and he now discerned such an opportunity of

indulging in that luxury, after the events that had just happened in

the house, as he seldom enjoyed. There is only one kind of speaker who

is quite certain never to break down under any stress of

circumstances--the man whose capability of talking does not include

any dangerous underlying capacity for knowing what he means. Among

this favored order of natural orators, Mr. Munder occupied a prominent

rank--and he was now vindictively resolved to exercise his abilities

on the two strangers, under pretense of asking for an explanation of

their conduct, before he could suffer them to quit the house.

On entering the room, he found Uncle Joseph seated with his niece at

the lower end of it, engaged in dropping some sal volatile into a

glass of water. At the upper end stood the housekeeper with an open

medicine-chest on the table before her. To this part of the room Mr.

Munder slowly advanced, with a portentous countenance; drew an

arm-chair up to the table; sat himself down in it, with extreme

deliberation and care in the matter of settling his coat-tails; and

immediately became, to all outward appearance, the model of a Lord

Chief Justice in plain clothes.

Mrs. Pentreath, conscious from these preparations that something

extraordinary was about to happen, seated herself a little behind the

steward. Betsey restored the keys to their place on the nail in the

wall, and was about to retire modestly to her proper kitchen sphere,

when she was stopped by Mr. Munder.

"Wait, if you please," said the steward; "I shall have occasion to

call on you presently, young woman, to make a plain statement."

Obedient Betsey waited near the door, terrified by the idea that she

must have done something wrong, and that the steward was armed with

inscrutable legal power to try, sentence, and punish her for the

offense on the spot.

"Now, Sir," said Mr. Munder, addressing Uncle Joseph as if he was the

Speaker of the House of Commons, "if you have done with that sal

volatile, and if the person by your side has sufficiently recovered

her senses to listen, I should wish to say a word or two to both of

you."

At this exordium, Sarah tried affrightedly to rise from her chair; but

her uncle caught her by the hand, and pressed her back in it.

"Wait and rest," he whispered. "I shall take all the scolding on my

own shoulder, and do all the talking with my own tongue. As soon as

you are fit to walk again, I promise you this: whether the big man has

said his word or two, or has not said it, we will quietly get up and

go our ways out of the house."

"Up to the present moment," said Mr. Munder, "I have refrained from

expressing an opinion. The time has now come when, holding a position

of trust as I do in this establishment, and being accountable, and

indeed responsible, as I am, for what takes place in it, and feeling,

as I must, that things can not be allowed or even permitted to rest as

they are--it is my duty to say that I think your conduct is very

extraordinary." Directing this forcible conclusion to his sentence

straight at Sarah, Mr. Munder leaned back in his chair, quite full of

words, and quite empty of meaning, to collect himself comfortably for

his next effort.

"My only desire," he resumed, with a plaintive impartiality, "is to

act fairly by all parties. I don't wish to frighten any body, or to

startle any body, or even to terrify any body. I wish to unravel, or,

if you please, to make out, what I may term, with perfect

propriety--events. And when I have done that, I should wish to put it

to you, ma'am, and to you, Sir, whether--I say, I should wish to put

it to you both, calmly, and impartially, and politely, and plainly,

and smoothly--and when I say smoothly, I mean quietly--whether you are

not both of you bound to explain yourselves."

Mr. Munder paused, to let that last irresistible appeal work its way

to the consciences of the persons whom he addressed. The housekeeper

took advantage of the silence to cough, as congregations cough just

before the sermon, apparently on the principle of getting rid of

bodily infirmities beforehand, in order to give the mind free play for

undisturbed intellectual enjoyment. Betsey, following Mrs. Pentreath's

lead, indulged in a cough on her own account--of the faint,

distrustful sort. Uncle Joseph sat perfectly easy and undismayed,

still holding his niece's hand in his, and giving it a little squeeze,

from time to time, when the steward's oratory became particularly

involved and impressive. Sarah never moved, never looked up, never

lost the expression of terrified restraint which had taken possession

of her face from the first moment when she entered the housekeeper's

room.

"Now what are the facts, and circumstances, and events?" proceeded Mr.

Munder, leaning back in his chair, in calm enjoyment of the sound of

his own voice. "You, ma'am, and you, Sir, ring at the bell of the door

of this Mansion" (here he looked hard at Uncle Joseph, as much as to

say, "I don't give up that point about the house being a Mansion, you

see, even on the judgment-seat")--"you are let in, or, rather,

admitted. You, Sir, assert that you wish to inspect the Mansion (you

say 'see the house,' but, being a foreigner, we are not surprised at

your making a little mistake of that sort); you, ma'am, coincide, and

even agree, in that request. What follows? You are shown over the

Mansion. It is not usual to show strangers over it, but we happen to

have certain reasons--"

Sarah started. "What reasons?" she asked, looking up quickly.

Uncle Joseph felt her hand turn cold, and tremble in his. "Hush!

hush!" he said, "leave the talking to me."

At the same moment Mrs. Pentreath pulled Mr. Munder warily by the

coat-tail, and whispered to him to be careful. "Mrs. Frankland's

letter," she said in his ear, "tells us particularly not to let it be

suspected that we are acting under orders."

"Don't you fancy, Mrs. Pentreath, that I forget what I ought to

remember," rejoined Mr. Munder--who had forgotten, nevertheless. "And

don't you imagine that I was going to commit myself" (the very thing

which he had just been on the point of doing). "Leave this business in

my hands, if you will be so good.--What reasons did you say, ma'am?"

he added aloud, addressing himself to Sarah. "Never you mind about

reasons; we have not got to do with them now; we have got to do with

facts, and circumstances, and events. I was observing, or remarking,

that you, Sir, and you, ma'am, were shown over this Mansion. You were

conducted, and indeed led, up the west staircase--the Spacious west

staircase, Sir! You were shown with politeness, and even with

courtesy, through the breakfast-room, the library, and the

drawing-room. In that drawing-room, you, Sir, indulge in outrageous,

and, I will add, in violent language. In that drawing-room, you,

ma'am, disappear, or, rather, go altogether out of sight. Such conduct

as this, so highly unparalleled, so entirely unprecedented, and so

very unusual, causes Mrs. Pentreath and myself to feel--" Here Mr.

Munder stopped, at a loss for a word for the first time.

"Astonished," suggested Mrs. Pentreath after a long interval of

silence.

"No, ma'am!" retorted Mr. Munder. "Nothing of the sort. We were not at

all astonished; we were--surprised. And what followed and succeeded

that? What did you and I hear, Sir, on the first floor?" (looking

sternly at Uncle Joseph). "And what did you hear, Mrs. Pentreath,

while you were searching for the missing and absent party on the

second floor? What?"

Thus personally appealed to, the housekeeper answered briefly--"A

scream."

"No! no! no!" said Mr. Munder, fretfully tapping his hand on the

table. "A screech, Mrs. Pentreath--a screech. And what is the meaning,

purport, and upshot of that screech?--Young woman!" (here Mr. Munder

turned suddenly on Betsey) "we have now traced these extraordinary

facts and circumstances as far as you. Have the goodness to step

forward, and tell us, in the presence of these two parties, how you

came to utter, or give, what Mrs. Pentreath calls a scream, but what I

call a screech. A plain statement will do, my good girl--quite a plain

statement, if you please. And, young woman, one word more--speak up.

You understand me? Speak up!"

Covered with confusion by the public and solemn nature of this appeal,

Betsey, on starting with her statement, unconsciously followed the

oratorical example of no less a person than Mr. Munder himself; that

is to say, she spoke on the principle of drowning the smallest

possible infusion of ideas in the largest possible dilution of words.

Extricated from the mesh of verbal entanglement in which she contrived

to involve it, her statement may be not unfairly represented as simply

consisting of the following facts:

First, Betsey had to relate that she happened to be just taking the

lid off a saucepan, on the kitchen fire, when she heard, in the

neighborhood of the housekeeper's room, a sound of hurried footsteps

(vernacularly termed by the witness a "scurrying of somebody's feet").

Secondly, Betsey, on leaving the kitchen to ascertain what the sound

meant, heard the footsteps retreating rapidly along the passage which

led to the north side of the house, and, stimulated by curiosity,

followed the sound of them for a certain distance. Thirdly, at a sharp

turn in the passage, Betsey stopped short, despairing of overtaking

the person whose footsteps she heard, and feeling also a sense of

dread (termed by the witness, "creeping of the flesh") at the idea of

venturing alone, even in broad daylight, into the ghostly quarter of

the house. Fourthly, while still hesitating at the turn in the

passage, Betsey heard "the lock of a door go," and, stimulated afresh

by curiosity, advanced a few steps farther--then stopped again,

debating within herself the difficult and dreadful question, whether

it is the usual custom of ghosts, when passing from one place to

another, to unlock any closed door which may happen to be in their

way, or to save trouble by simply passing through it. Fifthly, after

long deliberation, and many false starts--forward toward the north

hall and backward toward the kitchen--Betsey decided that it was the

immemorial custom of all ghosts to pass through doors, and not unlock

them. Sixthly, fortified by this conviction, Betsey went on boldly

close to the door, when she suddenly heard a loud report, as of some

heavy body falling (graphically termed by the witness a "banging

scrash"). Seventhly, the noise frightened Betsey out of her wits,

brought her heart up into her mouth, and took away her breath.

Eighthly, and lastly, on recovering breath enough to scream (or

screech), Betsey did, with might and main, scream (or screech),

running back toward the kitchen as fast as her legs would carry her,

with all her hair "standing up on end," and all her flesh "in a crawl"

from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet.

"Just so! just so!" said Mr. Munder, when the statement came to a

close--as if the sight of a young woman with all her hair standing on

end and all her flesh in a crawl were an ordinary result of his

experience of female humanity--"Just so! You may stand back, my good

girl--you may stand back.--There is nothing to smile at, Sir," he

continued, sternly addressing Uncle Joseph, who had been excessively

amused by Betsey's manner of delivering her evidence. "You would be

doing better to carry, or rather transport, your mind back to what

followed and succeeded the young woman's screech. What did we all do,

Sir? We rushed to the spot, and we ran to the place. And what did we

all see, Sir?--We saw _you_, ma'am, lying horizontally prostrate, on

the top of the landing of the first of the flight of the north stairs;

and we saw those keys, now hanging up yonder, abstracted and

purloined, and, as it were, snatched from their place in this room,

and lying horizontally prostrate likewise on the floor of the

hall.--There are the facts, the circumstances, and the events, laid,

or rather placed, before you. What have you got to say to them? I call

upon you both solemnly, and, I will add, seriously! In my own name, in

the name of Mrs. Pentreath, in the name of our employers, in the name

of decency, in the name of wonder--what do you mean by it?"

With that conclusion, Mr. Munder struck his fist on the table, and

waited, with a glare of merciless expectation, for any thing in the

shape of an answer, an explanation, or a defense which the culprits at

the bottom of the room might be disposed to offer.

"Tell him any thing," whispered Sarah to the old man. "Any thing to

keep him quiet; any thing to make him let us go! After what I have

suffered, these people will drive me mad!"

Never very quick at inventing an excuse, and perfectly ignorant

besides of what had really happened to his niece while she was alone

in the north hall, Uncle Joseph, with the best will in the world to

prove himself equal to the emergency, felt considerable difficulty in

deciding what he should say or do. Determined, however, at all

hazards, to spare Sarah any useless suffering, and to remove her from

the house as speedily as possible, he rose to take the responsibility

of speaking on himself, looking hard, before he opened his lips, at

Mr. Munder, who immediately leaned forward on the table with his hand

to his ear. Uncle Joseph acknowledged this polite act of attention

with one of his fantastic bows; and then replied to the whole of the

steward's long harangue in these six unanswerable words:

"I wish you good-day, Sir!"

"How dare you wish me any thing of the sort!" cried Mr. Munder,

jumping out of his chair in violent indignation. "How dare you trifle

with a serious subject and a serious question in that way? Wish me

good-day, indeed! Do you suppose I am going to let you out of this

house without hearing some explanation of the abstracting and

purloining and snatching of the keys of the north rooms?"

"Ah! it is that you want to know?" said Uncle Joseph, stimulated to

plunge headlong into an excuse by the increasing agitation and terror

of his niece. "See, now! I shall explain. What was it, dear and good

Sir, that we said when we were first let in? This--'We have come to

see the house.' Now there is a north side to the house, and a west

side to the house. Good! That is two sides; and I and my niece are two

people; and we divide ourselves in two, to see the two sides. I am the

half that goes west, with you and the dear and good lady behind there.

My niece here is the other half that goes north, all by herself, and

drops the keys, and falls into a faint, because in that old part of

the house it is what you call musty-fusty, and there is smells of

tombs and spiders, and that is all the explanation, and quite enough,

too. I wish you good-day, Sir."

"Damme! if ever I met with the like of you before!" roared Mr. Munder,

entirely forgetting his dignity, his respectability, and his long

words in the exasperation of the moment. "You are going to have it all

your own way, are you, Mr. Foreigner? You will walk out of this place

when you please, will you, Mr. Foreigner? We will see what the justice

of the peace for this district has to say to that," cried Mr. Munder,

recovering his solemn manner and his lofty phraseology. "Property in

this house is confided to my care; and unless I hear some satisfactory

explanation of the purloining of those keys hanging up there, Sir, on

that wall, Sir, before your eyes, Sir--I shall consider it my duty to

detain you, and the person with you, until I can get legal advice, and

lawful advice, and magisterial advice. Do you hear that, Sir?"

Uncle Joseph's ruddy cheeks suddenly deepened in color, and his face

assumed an expression which made the housekeeper rather uneasy, and

which had an irresistibly cooling effect on the heat of Mr. Munder's

anger.

"You will keep us here? _You?_" said the old man, speaking very

quietly, and looking very steadily at the steward. "Now, see. I take

this lady (courage, my child, courage! there is nothing to tremble

for)--I take this lady with me; I throw that door open, so! I stand

and wait before it; and I say to you, 'Shut that door against us, if

you dare.'"

At this defiance, Mr. Munder advanced a few steps, and then stopped.

If Uncle Joseph's steady look at him had wavered for an instant, he

would have closed the door.

"I say again," repeated the old man, "shut it against us, if you dare.

The laws and customs of your country, Sir, have made me an Englishman.

If you can talk into one ear of a magistrate, I can talk into the

other. If he must listen to you, a citizen of this country, he must

listen to me, a citizen of this country also. Say the word, if you

please. Do you accuse? or do you threaten? or do you shut the door?"

Before Mr. Munder could reply to any one of these three direct

questions, the housekeeper begged him to return to his chair and to

speak to her. As he resumed his place, she whispered to him, in

warning tones, "Remember Mrs. Frankland's letter!"

At the same moment, Uncle Joseph, considering that he had waited long

enough, took a step forward to the door. He was prevented from

advancing any farther by his niece, who caught him suddenly by the

arm, and said in his ear, "Look! they are whispering about us again!"

"Well!" said Mr. Munder, replying to the housekeeper. "I do remember

Mrs. Frankland's letter, ma'am; and what then?"

"Hush! not so loud," whispered Mrs. Pentreath. "I don't presume, Mr.

Munder, to differ in opinion with you; but I want to ask one or two

questions. Do you think we have any charge that a magistrate would

listen to, to bring against these people?"

Mr. Munder looked puzzled, and seemed, for once in a way, to be at a

loss for an answer.

"Does what you remember of Mrs. Frankland's letter," pursued the

housekeeper, "incline you to think that she would be pleased at a

public exposure of what has happened in the house? She tells us to

take _private_ notice of that woman's conduct, and to follow her

_unperceived_ when she goes away. I don't venture on the liberty of

advising you, Mr. Munder, but, as far as regards myself, I wash my

hands of all responsibility, if we do any thing but follow Mrs.

Frankland's instructions (as she herself tells us) to the letter."

Mr. Munder hesitated. Uncle Joseph, who had paused for a minute when

Sarah directed his attention to the whispering at the upper end of the

room, now drew her on slowly with him to the door. "Betzee, my dear,"

he said, addressing the maid, with perfect coolness and composure, "we

are strangers here; will you be so kind to us as to show the way out?"

Betsey looked at the housekeeper, who motioned to her to appeal for

orders to the steward. Mr. Munder was sorely tempted, for the sake of

his own importance, to insist on instantly carrying out the violent

measures to which he had threatened to have recourse; but Mrs.

Pentreath's objections made him pause in spite of himself.

"Betzee, my dear," repeated Uncle Joseph, "has all this talking been

too much for your ears? has it made you deaf?"

"Wait!" cried Mr. Munder, impatiently. "I insist on your waiting,

Sir!"

"You insist? Well, well, because you are an uncivil man is no reason

why I should be an uncivil man too. We will wait a little, Sir, if you

have any thing more to say." Making that concession to the claims of

politeness, Uncle Joseph walked gently backward and forward with his

niece in the passage outside the door. "Sarah, my child, I have

frightened the man of the big words," he whispered. "Try not to

tremble so much; we shall soon be out in the fresh air again."

In the mean time, Mr. Munder continued his whispered conversation with

the housekeeper, making a desperate effort, in the midst of his

perplexities, to maintain his customary air of patronage and his

customary assumption of superiority. "There is a great deal of truth,

ma'am," he softly began--"a great deal of truth, certainly, in what

you say. But you are talking of the woman, while I am talking of the

man. Do you mean to tell me that I am to let him go, after what has

happened, without at least insisting on his giving me his name and

address?"

"Do you put trust enough in the foreigner to believe that he would

give you his right name and address if you asked him?" inquired Mrs.

Pentreath. "With submission to your better judgment, I must confess

that I don't. But supposing you were to detain him and charge him

before the magistrate--and how you are to do that, the magistrate's

house being, I suppose, about a couple of hours' walk from here, is

more than I can tell--you must surely risk offending Mrs. Frankland by

detaining the woman and charging the woman as well; for after all, Mr.

Munder, though I believe the foreigner to be capable of any thing, it

was the woman that took the keys, was it not?"

"Quite so! quite so!" said Mr. Munder, whose sleepy eyes were now

opened to this plain and straightforward view of the case for the

first time. "I was, oddly enough, putting that point to myself, Mrs.

Pentreath, just before you happened to speak of it. Just so! just so!"

"I can't help thinking," continued the housekeeper, in a mysterious

whisper, "that the best plan, and the plan most in accordance with our

instructions, is to let them both go, as if we did not care to demean

ourselves by any more quarreling or arguing with them, and to have

them followed to the next place they stop at. The gardener's boy,

Jacob, is weeding the broad walk in the west garden this afternoon.

These people have not seen him about the premises, and need not see

him, if they are let out again by the south door. Jacob is a sharp

lad, as you know; and, if he was properly instructed, I really don't

see--"

"It is a most singular circumstance, Mrs. Pentreath," interposed Mr.

Munder, with the gravity of consummate assurance; "but when I first

sat down to this table, that idea about Jacob occurred to me. What

with the effort of speaking, and the heat of argument, I got led away

from it in the most unaccountable manner--"

Here Uncle Joseph, whose stock of patience and politeness was getting

exhausted, put his head into the room again.

"I shall have one last word to address to you, Sir, in a moment," said

Mr. Munder, before the old man could speak. "Don't you suppose that

your blustering and your bullying has had any effect on me. It may do

with foreigners, Sir; but it won't do with Englishmen, I can tell

you."

Uncle Joseph shrugged his shoulders, smiled, and rejoined his niece in

the passage outside. While the housekeeper and the steward had been

conferring together, Sarah had been trying hard to persuade her uncle

to profit by her knowledge of the passages that led to the south door,

and to slip away unperceived. But the old man steadily refused to be

guided by her advice. "I will not go out of a place guiltily," he

said, "when I have done no harm. Nothing shall persuade me to put

myself, or to put you, in the wrong. I am not a man of much wits; but

let my conscience guide me, and so long I shall go right. They let us

in here, Sarah, of their own accord; and they shall let us out of

their own accord also."

"Mr. Munder! Mr. Munder!" whispered the housekeeper, interfering to

stop a fresh explosion of the steward's indignation, which threatened

to break out at the contempt implied by the shrugging of Uncle

Joseph's shoulders, "while you are speaking to that audacious man,

shall I slip into the garden and give Jacob his instructions?"

Mr. Munder paused before answering--tried hard to see a more dignified

way out of the dilemma in which he had placed himself than the way

suggested by the housekeeper--failed entirely to discern any thing of

the sort--swallowed his indignation at one heroic gulp--and replied

emphatically in two words: "Go, ma'am."

"What does that mean? what has she gone that way for?" said Sarah to

her uncle, in a quick, suspicious whisper, as the housekeeper brushed

hastily by them on her way to the west garden.

Before there was time to answer the question, it was followed by

another, put by Mr. Munder.

"Now, Sir!" said the steward, standing in the door-way, with his hands

under his coat-tails and his head very high in the air. "Now, Sir, and

now, ma'am, for my last words. Am I to have a proper explanation of

the abstracting and purloining of those keys, or am I not?"

"Certainly, Sir, you are to have the explanation," replied Uncle

Joseph. "It is, if you please, the same explanation that I had the

honor of giving to you a little while ago. Do you wish to hear it

again? It is all the explanation we have got about us."

"Oh! it is, is it?" said Mr. Munder. "Then all I have to say to both

of you is--leave the house directly! Directly!" he added, in his most

coarsely offensive tones, taking refuge in the insolence of authority,

from the dim consciousness of the absurdity of his own position, which

would force itself on him even while he spoke. "Yes, Sir!" he

continued, growing more and more angry at the composure with which

Uncle Joseph listened to him--"Yes, Sir! you may bow and scrape, and

jabber your broken English somewhere else. I won't put up with you

here. I have reflected with myself, and reasoned with myself, and

asked myself calmly--as Englishmen always do--if it is any use making

you of importance, and I have come to a conclusion, and that

conclusion is--no, it isn't! Don't you go away with a notion that your

blusterings and bullyings have had any effect on me. (Show them out,

Betsey!) I consider you beneath--aye, and below!--my notice. Language

fails, Sir, to express my contempt. Leave the house!"

"And I, Sir," returned the object of all this withering derision,

with the most exasperating politeness, "I shall say, for having your

contempt, what I could by no means have said for having your respect,

which is, briefly--thank you. I, the small foreigner, take the

contempt of you, the big Englishman, as the greatest compliment that

can be paid from a man of your composition to a man of mine." With

that, Uncle Joseph made a last fantastic bow, took his niece's arm,

and followed Betsey along the passages that led to the south door,

leaving Mr. Munder to compose a fit retort at his leisure.

Ten minutes later the housekeeper returned breathless to her room, and

found the steward walking backward and forward in a high state of

irritation.

"Pray make your mind easy, Mr. Munder," she said. "They are both clear

of the house at last, and Jacob has got them well in view on the path

over the moor."

CHAPTER V.

MOZART PLAYS FAREWELL.

Excepting that he took leave of Betsey, the servant-maid, with great

cordiality, Uncle Joseph spoke not another word, after his parting

reply to Mr. Munder, until he and his niece were alone again under the

east wall of Porthgenna Tower. There he paused, looked up at the

house, then at his companion, then back at the house once more, and at

last opened his lips to speak.

"I am sorry, my child," he said--"I am sorry from my heart. This has

been what you call in England a bad job."

Thinking that he referred to the scene which had just passed in the

housekeeper's room, Sarah asked his pardon for having been the

innocent means of bringing him into angry collision with such a person

as Mr. Munder.

"No! no! no!" he cried. "I was not thinking of the man of the big body

and the big words. He made me angry, it is not to be denied; but that

is all over and gone now. I put him and his big words away from me, as

I kick this stone, here, from the pathway into the road. It is not of

your Munders, or your housekeepers, or your Betzees, that I now

speak--it is of something that is nearer to you and nearer to me also,

because I make of your interest my own interest too. I shall tell you

what it is while we walk on--for I see in your face, Sarah, that you

are restless and in fear so long as we stop in the neighborhood of

this dungeon-house. Come! I am ready for the march. There is the path.

Let us go back by it, and pick up our little baggages at the inn where

we left them, on the other side of this windy wilderness of a place."

"Yes, yes, uncle! Let us lose no time; let us walk fast. Don't be

afraid of tiring me; I am much stronger now."

They turned into the same path by which they had approached Porthgenna

Tower in the afternoon. By the time they had walked over a little more

than the first hundred yards of their journey, Jacob, the gardener's

boy, stole out from behind the ruinous inclosure at the north side of

the house with his hoe in his hand. The sun had just set, but there

was a fine light still over the wide, open surface of the moor; and

Jacob paused to let the old man and his niece get farther away from

the building before he followed them. The housekeeper's instructions

had directed him just to keep them in sight, and no more; and, if he

happened to observe that they stopped and turned round to look behind

them, he was to stop, too, and pretend to be digging with his hoe, as

if he was at work on the moorland. Stimulated by the promise of a

sixpence, if he was careful to do exactly as he had been told, Jacob

kept his instructions in his memory, and kept his eye on the two

strangers, and promised as fairly to earn the reward in prospect for

him as a boy could.

"And now, my child, I shall tell you what it is I am sorry for,"

resumed Uncle Joseph, as they proceeded along the path. "I am sorry

that we have come out upon this journey, and run our little risk, and

had our little scolding, and gained nothing. The word you said in my

ear, Sarah, when I was getting you out of the faint (and you should

have come out of it sooner, if the muddle-headed people of the

dungeon-house had been quicker with the water)--the word you said in

my ear was not much, but it was enough to tell me that we have taken

this journey in vain. I may hold my tongue, I may make my best face at

it, I may be content to walk blindfolded with a mystery that lets no

peep of daylight into my eyes--but it is not the less true that the

one thing your heart was most set on doing, when we started on this

journey, is the one thing also that you have not done. I know that,

if I know nothing else; and I say again, it is a bad job--yes, yes,

upon my life and faith, there is no disguise to put upon it; it is, in

your plainest English, a very bad job."

As he concluded the expression of his sympathy in these quaint terms,

the dread and distrust, the watchful terror, that marred the natural

softness of Sarah's eyes, disappeared in an expression of sorrowful

tenderness, which seemed to give back to them all their beauty.

"Don't be sorry for me, uncle," she said, stopping, and gently

brushing away with her hand some specks of dust that lay on the collar

of his coat. "I have suffered so much and suffered so long, that the

heaviest disappointments pass lightly over me now."

"I won't hear you say it!" cried Uncle Joseph. "You give me shocks I

can't bear when you talk to me in this way. You shall have no more

disappointments--no, you shall not! I, Joseph Buschmann, the

Obstinate, the Pig-headed, I say it!"

"The day when I shall have no more disappointments, uncle, is not far

off now. Let me wait a little longer, and endure a little longer: I

have learned to be patient, and to hope for nothing. Fearing and

failing, fearing and failing--that has been my life ever since I was a

young woman--the life I have become used to by this time. If you are

surprised, as I know you must be, at my not possessing myself of the

letter, when I had the keys of the Myrtle Room in my hand, and when no

one was near to stop me, remember the history of my life, and take

that as an explanation. Fearing and failing, fearing and failing--if I

told you all the truth, I could tell no more than that. Let us walk

on, uncle."

The resignation in her voice and manner while she spoke was the

resignation of despair. It gave her an unnatural self-possession,

which altered her, in the eyes of Uncle Joseph, almost past

recognition. He looked at her in undisguised alarm.

"No!" he said, "we will not walk on; we will walk back to the

dungeon-house; we will make another plan; we will try to get at this

devil's imp of a letter in some other way. I care for no Munders, no

housekeepers, no Betzees--I! I care for nothing but the getting you

the one thing you want, and the taking you home again as easy in your

mind as I am myself. Come! let us go back."

"It is too late to go back."

"How too late? Ah, dismal, dingy, dungeon-house of the devil, how I

hate you!" cried Uncle Joseph, looking back over the prospect, and

shaking both his fists at Porthgenna Tower.

"It is too late, uncle," she repeated. "Too late, because the

opportunity is lost; too late, because if I could bring it back, I

dare not go near the Myrtle Room again. My last hope was to change the

hiding-place of the letter--and that last hope I have given up. I have

only one object in life left now; you may help me in it; but I can not

tell you how unless you come on with me at once--unless you say

nothing more about going back to Porthgenna Tower."

Uncle Joseph began to expostulate. His niece stopped him in the middle

of a sentence, by touching him on the shoulder and pointing to a

particular spot on the darkening slope of the moor below them.

"Look!" she said, "there is somebody on the path behind us. Is it a

boy or a man?"

Uncle Joseph looked through the fading light, and saw a figure at some

little distance. It seemed like the figure of a boy, and he was

apparently engaged in digging on the moor.

"Let us turn round, and go on at once," pleaded Sarah, before the old

man could answer her. "I can't say what I want to say to you, uncle,

until we are safe under shelter at the inn."

They went on until they reached the highest ground on the moor. There

they stopped, and looked back again. The rest of their way lay down

hill; and the spot on which they stood was the last point from which a

view could be obtained of Porthgenna Tower.

"We have lost sight of the boy," said Uncle Joseph, looking over the

ground below them.

Sarah's younger and sharper eyes bore witness to the truth of her

uncle's words--the view over the moor was lonely now, in every

direction, as far as she could see. Before going on again, she moved a

little away from the old man, and looked at the tower of the ancient

house, rising heavy and black in the dim light, with the dark sea

background stretching behind it like a wall. "Never again!" she

whispered to herself. "Never, never, never again!" Her eyes wandered

away to the church, and to the cemetery inclosure by its side, barely

distinguishable now in the shadows of the coming night. "Wait for me a

little longer," she said, looking toward the burial-ground with

straining eyes, and pressing her hand on her bosom over the place

where the book of Hymns lay hid. "My wanderings are nearly at an end;

the day for my coming home again is not far off!"

The tears filled her eyes and shut out the view. She rejoined her

uncle, and, taking his arm again, drew him rapidly a few steps along

the downward path--then checked herself, as if struck by a sudden

suspicion, and walked back a few paces to the highest ridge of the

ground. "I am not sure," she said, replying to her companion's look of

surprise--"I am not sure whether we have seen the last yet of that boy

who was differing on the moor."

As the words passed her lips, a figure stole out from behind one of

the large fragments of granite rock which were scattered over the

waste on all sides of them. It was once more the figure of the boy,

and again he began to dig, without the slightest apparent reason, on

the barren ground at his feet.

"Yes, yes, I see," said Uncle Joseph, as his niece eagerly directed

his attention to the suspicious figure. "It is the same boy, and he is

digging still--and, if you please, what of that?"

Sarah did not attempt to answer. "Let us get on," she said, hurriedly.

"Let us get on as fast as we can to the inn."

They turned again, and took the downward path before them. In less

than a minute they had lost sight of Porthgenna Tower, of the old

church, and of the whole of the western view. Still, though there was

now nothing but the blank darkening moorland to look back at, Sarah

persisted in stopping at frequent intervals, as long as there was any

light left, to glance behind her. She made no remark, she offered no

excuse for thus delaying the journey back to the inn. It was only when

they arrived within sight of the lights of the post-town that she

ceased looking back, and that she spoke to her companion. The few

words she addressed to him amounted to nothing more than a request

that he would ask for a private sitting-room as soon as they reached

their place of sojourn for the night.

They ordered beds at the inn, and were shown into the best parlor to

wait for supper. The moment they were alone, Sarah drew a chair close

to the old man's side, and whispered these words in his ear--

"Uncle! we have been followed every step of the way from Porthgenna

Tower to this place."

"So! so! And how do you know that?" inquired Uncle Joseph.

"Hush! Somebody may be listening at the door, somebody may be creeping

under the window. You noticed that boy who was digging on the moor?--"

"Bah! Why, Sarah! do you frighten yourself, do you try to frighten me

about a boy?"

"Oh, not so loud! not so loud! They have laid a trap for us. Uncle! I

suspected it when we first entered the doors of Porthgenna Tower; I am

sure of it now. What did all that whispering mean between the

housekeeper and the steward when we first got into the hall? I watched

their faces, and I know they were talking about us. They were not half

surprised enough at seeing us, not half surprised enough at hearing

what we wanted. Don't laugh at me, uncle! There is real danger: it is

no fancy of mine. The keys--come closer--the keys of the north rooms

have got new labels on them; the doors have all been numbered. Think

of that! Think of the whispering when we came in, and the whispering

afterward, in the housekeeper's room, when you got up to go away. You

noticed the sudden change in that man's behavior after the housekeeper

spoke to him--you must have noticed it? They let us in too easily, and

they let us out too easily. No, no! I am not deluding myself. There

was some secret motive for letting us into the house, and some secret

motive for letting us out again. That boy on the moor betrays it, if

nothing else does. I saw him following us all the way here, as plainly

as I see you. I am not frightened without reason, this time. As surely

as we two are together in this room, there is a trap laid for us by

the people at Porthgenna Tower!"

"A trap? What trap? And how? and why? and wherefore?" inquired Uncle

Joseph, expressing bewilderment by waving both his hands rapidly to

and fro close before his eyes.

"They want to make me speak, they want to follow me, they want to

find out where I go, they want to ask me questions," she answered,

trembling violently. "Uncle! you remember what I told you of those

crazed words I said to Mrs. Frankland--I ought to have cut my tongue

out rather than have spoken them! They have done dreadful mischief--I

am certain of it--dreadful mischief already. I have made myself

suspected! I shall be questioned, if Mrs. Frankland finds me out

again. She will try to find me out--we shall be inquired after

here--we must destroy all trace of where we go to next--we must make

sure that the people at this inn can answer no questions--oh, Uncle

Joseph! whatever we do, let us make sure of that!"

"Good," said the old man, nodding his head with a perfectly

self-satisfied air. "Be quite easy, my child, and leave it to me to

make sure. When you are gone to bed, I shall send for the landlord,

and I shall say, 'Get us a little carriage, if you please, Sir, to

take us back again to-morrow to the coach for Truro.'"

"No, no, no! we must not hire a carriage here."

"And I say, yes, yes, yes! We will hire a carriage here, because I

will, first of all, make sure with the landlord. Listen. I shall say

to him, 'If there come after us people with inquisitive looks in their

eyes and uncomfortable questions in their mouths--if you please, Sir,

hold your tongue.' Then I shall wink my eye, I shall lay my finger,

so, to the side of my nose, I shall give one little laugh that means

much--and, crick! crack! I have made sure of the landlord! and there

is an end of it!"

"We must not trust the landlord, uncle--we must not trust any body.

When we leave this place to-morrow, we must leave it on foot, and take

care no living soul follows us. Look! here is a map of West Cornwall

hanging up on the wall, with roads and cross-roads all marked on it.

We may find out beforehand what direction we ought to walk in. A

night's rest will give me all the strength I want; and we have no

luggage that we can not carry. You have nothing but your knapsack, and

I have nothing but the little carpet-bag you lent me. We can walk six,

seven, even ten miles, with resting by the way. Come here and look at

the map--pray, pray come and look at the map!"

Protesting against the abandonment of his own project, which he

declared, and sincerely believed, to be perfectly adapted to meet the

emergency in which they were placed, Uncle Joseph joined his niece in

examining the map. A little beyond the post-town, a cross-road was

marked, running northward at right angles with the highway that led to

Truro, and conducting to another road, which looked large enough to be

a coach-road, and which led through a town of sufficient importance to

have its name printed in capital letters. On discovering this, Sarah

proposed that they should follow the cross-road (which did not appear

on the map to be more than five or six miles long) on foot, abstaining

from taking any conveyance until they had arrived at the town marked

in capital letters. By pursuing this course, they would destroy all

trace of their progress after leaving the post-town--unless, indeed,

they were followed on foot from this place, as they had been followed

over the moor. In the event of any fresh difficulty of that sort

occurring, Sarah had no better remedy to propose than lingering on the

road till after nightfall, and leaving it to the darkness to baffle

the vigilance of any person who might be watching in the distance to

see where they went.

Uncle Joseph shrugged his shoulders resignedly when his niece gave her

reasons for wishing to continue the journey on foot. "There is much

tramping through dust, and much looking behind us, and much spying and

peeping and suspecting and roundabout walking in all this," he said.

"It is by no means so easy, my child, as making sure of the landlord,

and sitting at our ease on the cushions of the stage-coach. But if you

will have it so, so shall it be. What you please, Sarah; what you

please--that is all the opinion of my own that I allow myself to have

till we are back again at Truro, and are rested for good and all at

the end of our journey."

"At the end of _your_ journey, uncle: I dare not say at the end of

_mine_."

Those few words changed the old man's face in an instant. His eyes

fixed reproachfully on his niece, his ruddy cheeks lost their color,

his restless hands dropped suddenly to his sides. "Sarah!" he said, in

a low, quiet tone, which seemed to have no relation to the voice in

which he spoke on ordinary occasions--"Sarah! have you the heart to

leave me again?"

"Have I the courage to stay in Cornwall? That is the question to ask

me, uncle. If I had only my own heart to consult, oh! how gladly I

should live under your roof--live under it, if you would let me, to my

dying day! But my lot is not cast for such rest and such happiness as

that. The fear that I have of being questioned by Mrs. Frankland

drives me away from Porthgenna, away from Cornwall, away from you.

Even my dread of the letter being found is hardly so great now as my

dread of being traced and questioned. I have said what I ought not to

have said already. If I find myself in Mrs. Frankland's presence

again, there is nothing that she might not draw out of me. Oh, my God!

to think of that kind-hearted, lovely young woman, who brings

happiness with her wherever she goes, bringing terror to _me_! Terror

when her pitying eyes look at me; terror when her kind voice speaks to

me; terror when her tender hand touches mine! Uncle! when Mrs.

Frankland comes to Porthgenna, the very children will crowd about

her--every creature in that poor village will be drawn toward the

light of her beauty and her goodness, as if it was the sunshine of

Heaven itself; and I--I, of all living beings--must shun her as if she

was a pestilence! The day when she comes into Cornwall is the day when

I must go out of it--the day when we two must say farewell. Don't,

don't add to my wretchedness by asking me if I have the heart to leave

you! For my dead mother's sake, Uncle Joseph, believe that I am

grateful, believe that it is not my own will that takes me away when I

leave you again." She sank down on a sofa near her, laid her head,

with one long, deep sigh, wearily on the pillow, and spoke no more.

The tears gathered thick in Uncle Joseph's eyes as he sat down by her

side. He took one of her hands, and patted and stroked it as though he

were soothing a little child. "I will bear it as well as I can,

Sarah," he whispered, faintly, "and I will say no more. You will write

to me sometimes, when I am left all alone? You will give a little time

to Uncle Joseph, for the poor dead mother's sake?"

She turned toward him suddenly, and threw both her arms round his neck

with a passionate energy that was strangely at variance with her

naturally quiet self-repressed character. "I will write often, dear; I

will write always," she whispered, with her head on his bosom. "If I

am ever in any trouble or danger, you shall know it." She stopped

confusedly, as if the freedom of her own words and actions terrified

her, unclasped her arms, and, turning away abruptly from the old man,

hid her face in her hands. The tyranny of the restraint that governed

her whole life was all expressed--how sadly, how eloquently!--in that

one little action.

Uncle Joseph rose from the sofa, and walked gently backward and

forward in the room, looking anxiously at his niece, but not speaking

to her. After a while the servant came in to prepare the table for

supper. It was a welcome interruption, for it obliged Sarah to make an

effort to recover her self-possession. After the meal was over, the

uncle and niece separated at once for the night, without venturing to

exchange another word on the subject of their approaching separation.

When they met the next morning, the old man had not recovered his

spirits. Although he tried to speak as cheerfully as usual, there was

something strangely subdued and quiet about him in voice, look, and

manner. Sarah's heart smote her as she saw how sadly he was altered by

the prospect of their parting. She said a few words of consolation and

hope; but he only waved his hand negatively, in his quaint foreign

manner, and hastened out of the room to find the landlord and ask for

the bill.

Soon after breakfast, to the surprise of the people at the inn, they

set forth to continue their journey on foot, Uncle Joseph carrying his

knapsack on his back, and his niece's carpet-bag in his hand. When

they arrived at the turning that led into the cross-road, they both

stopped and looked back. This time they saw nothing to alarm them.

There was no living creature visible on the broad highway over which

they had been walking for the last quarter of an hour after leaving

the inn.

"The way is clear," said Uncle Joseph, as they turned into the

cross-road. "Whatever might have happened yesterday, there is nobody

following us now."

"Nobody that we can see," answered Sarah. "But I distrust the very

stones by the road-side. Let us look back often, uncle, before we

allow ourselves to feel secure. The more I think of it, the more I

dread the snare that is laid for us by those people at Porthgenna

Tower."

"You say _us_, Sarah. Why should they lay a snare for _me_?"

"Because they have seen you in my company. You will be safer from them

when we are parted; and that is another reason, Uncle Joseph, why we

should bear the misfortune of our separation as patiently as we can."

"Are you going far, very far away, Sarah, when you leave me?"

"I dare not stop on my journey till I can feel that I am lost in the

great world of London. Don't look at me so sadly! I shall never forget

my promise; I shall never forget to write. I have friends--not friends

like you, but still friends--to whom I can go. I can feel safe from

discovery nowhere but in London. My danger is great--it is, it is,

indeed! I know, from what I have seen at Porthgenna, that Mrs.

Frankland has an interest already in finding me out; and I am certain

that this interest will be increased tenfold when she hears (as she is

sure to hear) of what happened yesterday in the house. If they

_should_ trace you to Truro, oh, be careful, uncle! be careful how you

deal with them; be careful how you answer their questions!"

"I will answer nothing, my child. But tell me--for I want to know all

the little chances that there are of your coming back--tell me, if

Mrs. Frankland finds the letter, what shall you do then?"

At that question, Sarah's hand, which had been resting languidly on

her uncle's arm while they walked together, closed on it suddenly.

"Even if Mrs. Frankland gets into the Myrtle Room," she said, stopping

and looking affrightedly about her while she replied, "she may not

find the letter. It is folded up so small; it is hidden in such an

unlikely place."

"But if she does find it?"

"If she does, there will be more reason than ever for my being miles

and miles away."

As she gave that answer, she raised both her hands to her heart, and

pressed them firmly over it. A slight distortion passed rapidly across

her features; her eyes closed; her face flushed all over--then turned

paler again than ever. She drew out her pocket-handkerchief, and

passed it several times over her face, on which the perspiration had

gathered thickly. The old man, who had looked behind him when his

niece stopped, under the impression that she had just seen somebody

following them, observed this latter action, and asked if she felt too

hot. She shook her head, and took his arm again to go on, breathing,

as he fancied, with some difficulty. He proposed that they should sit

down by the road-side and rest a little; but she only answered, "Not

yet." So they went on for another half-hour; then turned to look

behind them again, and, still seeing nobody, sat down for a little

while to rest on a bank by the way-side.

After stopping twice more at convenient resting-places, they reached

the end of the cross-road. On the highway to which it led them they

were overtaken by a man driving an empty cart, who offered to give

them a lift as far as the next town. They accepted the proposal

gratefully; and, arriving at the town, after a drive of half an hour,

were set down at the door of the principal inn. Finding on inquiry at

this place that they were too late for the coach, they took a private

conveyance, which brought them to Truro late in the afternoon.

Throughout the whole of the journey, from the time when they left the

post-town of Porthgenna to the time when they stopped, by Sarah's

desire, at the coach-office in Truro, they had seen nothing to excite

the smallest suspicion that their movements were being observed. None

of the people whom they saw in the inhabited places, or whom they

passed on the road, appeared to take more than the most casual notice

of them.

It was five o'clock when they entered the office at Truro to ask about

conveyances running in the direction of Exeter. They were informed

that a coach would start in an hour's time, and that another coach

would pass through Truro at eight o'clock the next morning.

"You will not go to-night?" pleaded Uncle Joseph. "You will wait, my

child, and rest with me till to-morrow?"

"I had better go, uncle, while I have some little resolution left,"

was the sad answer.

"But you are so pale, so tired, so weak."

"I shall never be stronger than I am now. Don't set my own heart

against me! It is hard enough to go without that."

Uncle Joseph sighed, and said no more. He led the way across the road

and down the by-street to his house. The cheerful man in the shop was

polishing a piece of wood behind the counter, sitting in the same

position in which Sarah had seen him when she first looked through the

window on her arrival at Truro. He had good news for his master of

orders received, but Uncle Joseph listened absently to all that his

shopman said, and hastened into the little back parlor without the

faintest reflection of its customary smile on his face. "If I had no

shop and no orders, I might go away with you, Sarah," he said when he

and his niece were alone. "Aïe! Aïe! the setting out on this journey

has been the only happy part of it. Sit down and rest, my child. I

must put my best face upon it, and get you some tea."

When the tea-tray had been placed on the table, he left the room, and

returned, after an absence of some little time, with a basket in his

hand. When the porter came to carry the luggage to the coach-office,

he would not allow the basket to be taken away at the same time, but

sat down and placed it between his feet while he occupied himself in

pouring out a cup of tea for his niece.

The musical box still hung at his side in its traveling-case of

leather. As soon as he had poured out the cup of tea, he unbuckled the

strap, removed the covering from the box, and placed it on the table

near him. His eyes wandered hesitatingly toward Sarah, as he did this;

he leaned forward, his lips trembling a little, his hand trifling

uneasily with the empty leather case that now lay on his knees, and

said to her in low, unsteady tones--

"You will hear a little farewell song of Mozart? It may be a long

time, Sarah, before he can play to you again. A little farewell song,

my child, before you go?"

His hand stole up gently from the leather case to the table, and set

the box playing the same air that Sarah had heard on the evening when

she entered the parlor, after her journey from Somersetshire, and

found him sitting alone listening to the music. What depths of sorrow

there were now in those few simple notes! What mournful memories of

past times gathered and swelled in the heart at the bidding of that

one little plaintive melody! Sarah could not summon the courage to

lift her eyes to the old man's face--they might have betrayed to him

that she was thinking of the days when the box that he treasured so

dearly played the air they were listening to now by the bedside of his

dying child.

The stop had not been set, and the melody, after it had come to an

end, began again. But now, after the first few bars, the notes

succeeded one another more and more slowly--the air grew less and less

recognizable--dropped at last to three notes, following each other at

long intervals--then ceased altogether. The chain that governed the

action of the machinery had all run out; Mozart's farewell song was

silenced on a sudden, like a voice that had broken down.

The old man started, looked earnestly at his niece, and threw the

leather case over the box as if he desired to shut out the sight of

it. "The music stopped so," he whispered to himself, in his own

language, "when little Joseph died! Don't go!" he added quickly, in

English, almost before Sarah had time to feel surprised at the

singular change that had taken place in his voice and manner. "Don't

go! Think better of it, and stop with me."

"I have no choice, uncle, but to leave you--indeed, indeed I have not!

You don't think me ungrateful? Comfort me at the last moment by

telling me that!"

He pressed her hand in silence, and kissed her on both cheeks. "My

heart is very heavy for you, Sarah," he said. "The fear has come to me

that it is not for your own good that you are going away from Uncle

Joseph now!"

"I have no choice," she sadly repeated--"no choice but to leave you."

"It is time, then, to get the parting over." The cloud of doubt and

fear that had altered his face, from the moment when the music came to

its untimely end, seemed to darken, when he had said those words. He

took up the basket which he had kept so carefully at his feet, and led

the way out in silence.

They were barely in time; the driver was mounting to his seat when

they got to the coach-office. "God preserve you, my child, and send

you back to me soon, safe and well. Take the basket on your lap; there

are some little things in it for your journey." His voice faltered at

the last word, and Sarah felt his lips pressed on her hand. The next

instant the door was closed, and she saw him dimly through her tears

standing among the idlers on the pavement, who were waiting to see the

coach drive off.

By the time they were a little way out of the town she was able to

dry her eyes and look into the basket. It contained a pot of jam and a

horn spoon, a small inlaid work-box from the stock in the shop, a

piece of foreign-looking cheese, a French roll, and a little paper

packet of money, with the words "Don't be angry" written on it, in

Uncle Joseph's hand. Sarah closed the cover of the basket again, and

drew down her veil. She had not felt the sorrow of the parting in all

its bitterness until that moment. Oh, how hard it was to be banished

from the sheltering home which was offered to her by the one friend

she had left in the world!

While that thought was in her mind, the old man was just closing the

door of his lonely parlor. His eyes wandered to the tea-tray on the

table and to Sarah's empty cup, and he whispered to himself in his own

language again--

"The music stopped so when little Joseph died!"

Book V.

CHAPTER I.

AN OLD FRIEND AND A NEW SCHEME.

In declaring, positively, that the boy whom she had seen digging on

the moor had followed her uncle and herself to the post-town of

Porthgenna, Sarah had asserted the literal truth. Jacob had tracked

them to the inn, had waited a little while about the door, to

ascertain if there was any likelihood of their continuing their

journey that evening, and had then returned to Porthgenna Tower to

make his report, and to claim his promised reward.

The same night, the housekeeper and the steward devoted themselves to

the joint production of a letter to Mrs. Frankland, informing her of

all that had taken place, from the time when the visitors first made

their appearance, to the time when the gardener's boy had followed

them to the door of the inn. The composition was plentifully garnished

throughout with the flowers of Mr. Munder's rhetoric, and was, by a

necessary consequence, inordinately long as a narrative, and

hopelessly confused as a statement of facts.

It is unnecessary to say that the letter, with all its faults and

absurdities, was read by Mrs. Frankland with the deepest interest. Her

husband and Mr. Orridge, to both of whom she communicated its

contents, were as much amazed and perplexed by it as she was herself.

Although the discovery of Mrs. Jazeph's departure for Cornwall had led

them to consider it within the range of possibility that she might

appear at Porthgenna, and although the housekeeper had been written to

by Rosamond under the influence of that idea, neither she nor her

husband were quite prepared for such a speedy confirmation of their

suspicions as they had now received. Their astonishment, however, on

first ascertaining the general purport of the letter, was as nothing

compared with their astonishment when they came to those particular

passages in it which referred to Uncle Joseph. The fresh element of

complication imparted to the thickening mystery of Mrs. Jazeph and the

Myrtle Room, by the entrance of the foreign stranger on the scene, and

by his intimate connection with the extraordinary proceedings that had

taken place in the house, fairly baffled them all. The letter was read

again and again; was critically dissected paragraph by paragraph; was

carefully annotated by the doctor, for the purpose of extricating all

the facts that it contained from the mass of unmeaning words in which

Mr. Munder had artfully and lengthily involved them; and was finally

pronounced, after all the pains that had been taken to render it

intelligible, to be the most mysterious and bewildering document that

mortal pen had ever produced.

The first practical suggestion, after the letter had been laid aside

in despair, emanated from Rosamond. She proposed that her husband and

herself (the baby included, as a matter of course) should start at

once for Porthgenna, to question the servants minutely about the

proceedings of Mrs. Jazeph and the foreign stranger who had

accompanied her, and to examine the premises on the north side of the

house, with a view to discovering a clew to the locality of the Myrtle

Room, while events were still fresh in the memories of witnesses. The

plan thus advocated, however excellent in itself, was opposed by Mr.

Orridge on medical grounds. Mrs. Frankland had caught cold by exposing

herself too carelessly to the air, on first leaving her room, and the

doctor refused to grant her permission to travel for at least a week

to come, if not for a longer period.

The next proposal came from Mr. Frankland. He declared it to be

perfectly clear to his mind that the only chance of penetrating the

mystery of the Myrtle Room rested entirely on the discovery of some

means of communicating with Mrs. Jazeph. He suggested that they should

not trouble themselves to think of any thing unconnected with the

accomplishment of this purpose; and he proposed that the servant then

in attendance on him at West Winston--a man who had been in his

employment for many years, and whose zeal, activity, and intelligence

could be thoroughly depended on--should be sent to Porthgenna

forthwith, to start the necessary inquiries, and to examine the

premises carefully on the north side of the house.

This advice was immediately acted on. At an hour's notice the servant

started for Cornwall, thoroughly instructed as to what he was to do,

and well supplied with money, in case he found it necessary to employ

many persons in making the proposed inquiries. In due course of time

he sent a report of his proceedings to his master. It proved to be of

a most discouraging nature.

All trace of Mrs. Jazeph and her companion had been lost at the

post-town of Porthgenna. Investigations had been made in every

direction, but no reliable information had been obtained. People in

totally different parts of the country declared readily enough that

they had seen two persons answering to the description of the lady in

the dark dress and the old foreigner; but when they were called upon

to state the direction in which the two strangers were traveling, the

answers received turned out to be of the most puzzling and

contradictory kind. No pains had been spared, no necessary expenditure

of money had been grudged; but, so far, no results of the slightest

value had been obtained. Whether the lady and the foreigner had gone

east, west, north, or south, was more than Mr. Frankland's servant, at

the present stage of the proceedings, could take it on himself to say.

The report of the examination of the north rooms was not more

satisfactory. Here, again, nothing of any importance could be

discovered. The servant had ascertained that there were twenty-two

rooms on the uninhabited side of the house--six on the ground-floor

opening into the deserted garden, eight on the first floor, and eight

above that, on the second story. He had examined all the doors

carefully from top to bottom, and had come to the conclusion that none

of them had been opened. The evidence afforded by the lady's own

actions led to nothing. She had, if the testimony of the servant could

be trusted, dropped the keys on the floor of the hall. She was found,

as the housekeeper and the steward asserted, lying, in a fainting

condition, at the top of the landing of the first flight of stairs.

The door opposite to her, in this position, showed no more traces of

having been recently opened than any of the other doors of the other

twenty-one rooms. Whether the room to which she wished to gain access

was one of the eight on the first floor, or whether she had fainted

on her way up to the higher range of eight rooms on the second floor,

it was impossible to determine.

The only conclusions that could be fairly drawn from the events that

had taken place in the house were two in number. First, it might be

taken for granted that the lady had been disturbed before she had been

able to use the keys to gain admission to the Myrtle Room. Secondly,

it might be assumed, from the position in which she was found on the

stairs, and from the evidence relating to the dropping of the keys,

that the Myrtle Room was not on the ground-floor, but was one of the

sixteen rooms situated on the first and second stories. Beyond this

the writer of the report had nothing further to mention, except that

he had ventured to decide on waiting at Porthgenna, in the event of

his master having any further instructions to communicate.

What was to be done next? That was necessarily the first question

suggested by the servant's announcement of the unsuccessful result of

his inquiries at Porthgenna. How it was to be answered was not very

easy to discover. Mrs. Frankland had nothing to suggest, Mr. Frankland

had nothing to suggest, the doctor had nothing to suggest. The more

industriously they all three hunted through their minds for a new

idea, the less chance there seemed to be of their succeeding in

finding one. At last, Rosamond proposed, in despair, that they should

seek the advice of some fourth person who could be depended on; and

asked her husband's permission to write a confidential statement of

their difficulties to the vicar of Long Beckley. Doctor Chennery was

their oldest friend and adviser; he had known them both as children;

he was well acquainted with the history of their families; he felt a

fatherly interest in their fortunes; and he possessed that invaluable

quality of plain, clear-headed common-sense which marked him out as

the very man who would be most likely, as well as most willing, to

help them.

Mr. Frankland readily agreed to his wife's suggestion; and Rosamond

wrote immediately to Doctor Chennery, informing him of every thing

that had happened since Mrs. Jazeph's first introduction to her, and

asking him for his opinion on the course of proceeding which it would

be best for her husband and herself to adopt in the difficulty in

which they were now placed. By return of post an answer was received,

which amply justified Rosamond's reliance on her old friend. Doctor

Chennery not only sympathized heartily with the eager curiosity which

Mrs. Jazeph's language and conduct had excited in the mind of his

correspondent, but he had also a plan of his own to propose for

ascertaining the position of the Myrtle Room.

The vicar prefaced his suggestion by expressing a strong opinion

against instituting any further search after Mrs. Jazeph. Judging by

the circumstances, as they were related to him, he considered that it

would be the merest waste of time to attempt to find her out.

Accordingly he passed from that part of the subject at once, and

devoted himself to the consideration of the more important

question--How Mr. and Mrs. Frankland were to proceed in the endeavor

to discover for themselves the mystery of the Myrtle Room?

On this point Doctor Chennery entertained a conviction of the

strongest kind, and he warned Rosamond beforehand that she must expect

to be very much surprised when he came to the statement of it. Taking

it for granted that she and her husband could not hope to find out

where the room was, unless they were assisted by some one better

acquainted than themselves with the old local arrangements of the

interior of Porthgenna Tower, the vicar declared it to be his opinion

that there was only one individual living who could afford them the

information they wanted, and that this person was no other than

Rosamond's own cross-grained relative, Andrew Treverton.

This startling opinion Doctor Chennery supported by two reasons. In

the first place, Andrew was the only surviving member of the elder

generation who had lived at Porthgenna Tower in the by-gone days when

all traditions connected with the north rooms were still fresh in the

memories of the inhabitants of the house. The people who lived in it

now were strangers, who had been placed in their situations by Mr.

Frankland's father; and the servants employed in former days by

Captain Treverton were dead or dispersed. The one available person,

therefore, whose recollections were likely to be of any service to Mr.

and Mrs. Frankland, was indisputably the brother of the old owner of

Porthgenna Tower.

In the second place, there was the chance, even if Andrew Treverton's

memory was not to be trusted, that he might possess written or

printed information relating to the locality of the Myrtle Room. By

his father's will--which had been made when Andrew was a young man

just going to college, and which had not been altered at the period of

his departure from England, or at any after-time--he had inherited the

choice old collection of books in the library at Porthgenna. Supposing

that he still preserved these heir-looms, it was highly probable that

there might exist among them some plan, or some description of the

house as it was in the olden time, which would supply all the

information that was wanted. Here, then, was another valid reason for

believing that if a clew to the position of the Myrtle Room existed

any where, Andrew Treverton was the man to lay his hand on it.

Assuming it, therefore, to be proved that the surly old misanthrope

was the only person who could be profitably applied to for the

requisite information, the next question was, How to communicate with

him? The vicar understood perfectly that after Andrew's inexcusably

heartless conduct toward her father and mother, it was quite

impossible for Rosamond to address any direct application to him. The

obstacle, however, might be surmounted by making the necessary

communication proceed from Doctor Chennery. Heartily as the vicar

disliked Andrew Treverton personally, and strongly as he disapproved

of the old misanthrope's principles, he was willing to set aside his

own antipathies and objections to serve the interests of his young

friends; and he expressed his perfect readiness to write and recall

himself to Andrew's recollection, and to ask, as if it was a matter of

antiquarian curiosity, for information on the subject of the north

side of Porthgenna Tower--including, of course, a special request to

be made acquainted with the names by which the rooms had been

individually known in former days.

In making this offer, the vicar frankly acknowledged that he thought

the chances were very much against his receiving any answer at all to

his application, no matter how carefully he might word it, with a view

to humoring Andrew's churlish peculiarities. However, considering

that, in the present posture of affairs, a forlorn hope was better

than no hope at all, he thought it was at least worth while to make

the attempt on the plan which he had just suggested. If Mr. and Mrs.

Frankland could devise any better means of opening communications

with Andrew Treverton, or if they had discovered any new method of

their own for obtaining the information of which they stood in need,

Doctor Chennery was perfectly ready to set aside his own opinions and

to defer to theirs.

A very brief consideration of the vicar's friendly letter convinced

Rosamond and her husband that they had no choice but gratefully to

accept the offer which it contained. The chances were certainly

against the success of the proposed application; but were they more

unfavorable than the chances against the success of any unaided

investigations at Porthgenna? There was, at least, a faint hope of

Doctor Chennery's request for information producing some results; but

there seemed no hope at all of penetrating a mystery connected with

one room only, by dint of wandering, in perfect ignorance of what to

search for, through two ranges of rooms which reached the number of

sixteen. Influenced by these considerations, Rosamond wrote back to

the vicar to thank him for his kindness, and to beg that he would

communicate with Andrew Treverton, as he had proposed, without a

moment's delay.

Doctor Chennery immediately occupied himself in the composition of the

important letter, taking care to make the application on purely

antiquarian grounds, and accounting for his assumed curiosity on the

subject of the interior of Porthgenna Tower by referring to his former

knowledge of the Treverton family, and to his natural interest in the

old house with which their name and fortunes had been so closely

connected. After appealing to Andrew's early recollections for the

information that he wanted, he ventured a step farther, and alluded to

the library of old books, mentioning his own idea that there might be

found among them some plan or verbal description of the house, which

might prove to be of the greatest service, in the event of Mr.

Treverton's memory not having preserved all particulars in connection

with the names and positions of the north rooms. In conclusion, he

took the liberty of mentioning that the loan of any document of the

kind to which he had alluded, or the permission to have extracts made

from it, would be thankfully acknowledged as a great favor conferred;

and he added, in a postscript, that, in order to save Mr. Treverton

all trouble, a messenger would call for any answer he might be

disposed to give the day after the delivery of the letter. Having

completed the application in these terms, the vicar inclosed it under

cover to his man of business in London, with directions that it was to

be delivered by a trustworthy person, and that the messenger was to

call again the next morning to know if there was any answer.

Three days after this letter had been dispatched to its

destination--at which time no tidings of any sort had been received

from Doctor Chennery--Rosamond at last obtained her medical

attendant's permission to travel. Taking leave of Mr. Orridge, with

many promises to let him know what progress they made toward

discovering the Myrtle Room, Mr. and Mrs. Frankland turned their backs

on West Winston, and for the third time started on the journey to

Porthgenna Tower.

CHAPTER II.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END.

It was baking-day in the establishment of Mr. Andrew Treverton when

the messenger intrusted with Doctor Chennery's letter found his way to

the garden door of the cottage at Bayswater. After he had rung three

times, he heard a gruff voice, on the other side of the wall, roaring

at him to let the bell alone, and asking who he was, and what the

devil he wanted.

"A letter for Mr. Treverton," said the messenger, nervously backing

away from the door while he spoke.

"Chuck it over the wall, then, and be off with you!" answered the

gruff voice.

The messenger obeyed both injunctions. He was a meek, modest, elderly

man; and when Nature mixed up the ingredients of his disposition, the

capability of resenting injuries was not among them.

The man with the gruff voice--or, to put it in plainer terms, the man

Shrowl--picked up the letter, weighed it in his hand, looked at the

address on it with an expression of contemptuous curiosity in his

bull-terrier eyes, put it in his waistcoat pocket, and walked around

lazily to the kitchen entrance of the cottage.

In the apartment which would probably have been called the pantry, if

the house had belonged to civilized tenants, a hand-mill had been set

up; and, at the moment when Shrowl made his way to this room, Mr.

Treverton was engaged in asserting his independence of all the millers

in England by grinding his own corn. He paused irritably in turning

the handle of the mill when his servant appeared at the door.

"What do you come here for?" he asked. "When the flour's ready, I'll

call for you. Don't let's look at each other oftener than we can help!

I never set eyes on you, Shrowl, but I ask myself whether, in the

whole range of creation, there is any animal as ugly as man? I saw a

cat this morning on the garden wall, and there wasn't a single point

in which you would bear comparison with him. The cat's eyes were

clear--yours are muddy. The cat's nose was straight--yours is crooked.

The cat's whiskers were clean--yours are dirty. The cat's coat fitted

him--yours hangs about you like a sack. I tell you again, Shrowl, the

species to which you (and I) belong is the ugliest on the whole face

of creation. Don't let us revolt each other by keeping in company any

longer. Go away, you last, worst, infirmest freak of Nature--go away!"

Shrowl listened to this complimentary address with an aspect of surly

serenity. When it had come to an end, he took the letter from his

waistcoat pocket, without condescending to make any reply. He was, by

this time, too thoroughly conscious of his own power over his master

to attach the smallest importance to any thing Mr. Treverton might say

to him.

"Now you've done your talking, suppose you take a look at that," said

Shrowl, dropping the letter carelessly on a deal table by his master's

side. "It isn't often that people trouble themselves to send letters

to you--is it? I wonder whether your niece has took a fancy to write

to you? It was put in the papers the other day that she'd got a son

and heir. Open the letter, and see if it's an invitation to the

christening. The company would be sure to want your smiling face at

the table to make 'em jolly. Just let me take a grind at the mill,

while you go out and get a silver mug. The son and heir expects a mug

you know, and his nurse expects half a guinea, and his mamma expects

all your fortune. What a pleasure to make the three innocent creeturs

happy! It's shocking to see you pulling wry faces, like that, over the

letter. Lord! lord! where can all your natural affection have gone

to?--"

"If I only knew where to lay my hand on a gag, I'd cram it into your

infernal mouth!" cried Mr. Treverton. "How dare you talk to me about

my niece? You wretch! you know I hate her for her mother's sake. What

do you mean by harping perpetually on my fortune? Sooner than leave it

to the play-actress's child, I'd even leave it to you; and sooner than

leave it to you, I would take every farthing of it out in a boat, and

bury it forever at the bottom of the sea!" Venting his dissatisfaction

in these strong terms, Mr. Treverton snatched up Doctor Chennery's

letter, and tore it open in a humor which by no means promised

favorably for the success of the vicar's application.

He read the letter with an ominous scowl on his face, which grew

darker and darker as he got nearer and nearer to the end. When he came

to the signature his humor changed, and he laughed sardonically.

"Faithfully yours, Robert Chennery," he repeated to himself. "Yes!

faithfully mine, if I humor your whim. And what if I don't, parson?"

He paused, and looked at the letter again, the scowl re-appearing on

his face as he did so. "There's a lie of some kind lurking about under

these lines of fair writing," he muttered suspiciously. "_I_ am not

one of his congregation: the law gives him no privilege of imposing on

_me_. What does he mean by making the attempt?" He stopped again,

reflected a little, looked up suddenly at Shrowl, and said to him,

"Have you lit the oven fire yet?"

"No, I hav'n't," answered Shrowl.

Mr. Treverton examined the letter for the third time--hesitated--then

slowly tore it in half, and tossed the two pieces over contemptuously

to his servant.

"Light the fire at once," he said. "And, if you want paper, there it

is for you. Stop!" he added, after Shrowl had picked up the torn

letter. "If any body comes here to-morrow morning to ask for an

answer, tell them I gave you the letter to light the fire with, and

say that's the answer." With those words Mr. Treverton returned to the

mill, and began to grind at it again, with a grin of malicious

satisfaction on his haggard face.

Shrowl withdrew into the kitchen, closed the door, and, placing the

torn pieces of the letter together on the dresser, applied himself,

with the coolest deliberation, to the business of reading it. When he

had gone slowly and carefully through it, from the address at the

beginning to the name at the end, he scratched reflectively for a

little while at his ragged beard, then folded the letter up carefully

and put it in his pocket.

"I'll have another look at it later in the day," he thought to

himself, tearing off a piece of an old newspaper to light the fire

with. "It strikes me, just at present, that there may be better things

done with this letter than burning it."

Resolutely abstaining from taking the letter out of his pocket again

until all the duties of the household for that day had been duly

performed, Shrowl lit the fire, occupied the morning in making and

baking the bread, and patiently took his turn afterward at digging in

the kitchen garden. It was four o'clock in the afternoon before he

felt himself at liberty to think of his private affairs, and to

venture on retiring into solitude with the object of secretly looking

over the letter once more.

A second perusal of Doctor Chennery's unlucky application to Mr.

Treverton helped to confirm Shrowl in his resolution not to destroy

the letter. With great pains and perseverance, and much incidental

scratching at his beard, he contrived to make himself master of three

distinct points in it, which stood out, in his estimation, as

possessing prominent and serious importance.

The first point which he contrived to establish clearly in his mind

was that the person who signed the name of Robert Chennery was

desirous of examining a plan, or printed account, of the north side of

the interior of a certain old house in Cornwall, called Porthgenna

Tower. The second point appeared to resolve itself into this, that

Robert Chennery believed some such plan or printed account might be

found among the collection of books belonging to Mr. Treverton. The

third point was that this same Robert Chennery would receive the loan

of the plan or printed account as one of the greatest favors that

could be conferred on him. Meditating on the latter fact, with an eye

exclusively fixed on the contemplation of his own interests, Shrowl

arrived at the conclusion that it might be well worth his while, in a

pecuniary point of view, to try if he could not privately place

himself in a position to oblige Robert Chennery by searching in secret

among his master's books. "It might be worth a five-pound note to me,

if I managed it well," thought Shrowl, putting the letter back in his

pocket again, and ascending the stairs thoughtfully to the

lumber-rooms at the top of the house.

These rooms were two in number, were entirely unfurnished, and were

littered all over with the rare collection of books which had once

adorned the library at Porthgenna Tower. Covered with dust, and

scattered in all directions and positions over the floor, lay hundreds

and hundreds of volumes, cast out of their packing-cases as coals are

cast out of their sacks into a cellar. Ancient books, which students

would have treasured as priceless, lay in chaotic equality of neglect

side by side with modern publications whose chief merit was the beauty

of the binding by which they were inclosed. Into this wilderness of

scattered volumes Shrowl now wandered, fortified by the supreme

self-possession of ignorance, to search resolutely for one particular

book, with no other light to direct him than the faint glimmer of the

two guiding words--Porthgenna Tower. Having got them firmly fixed in

his mind, his next object was to search until he found them printed on

the first page of any one of the hundreds of volumes that lay around

him. This was, for the time being, emphatically his business in life,

and there he now stood, in the largest of the two attics, doggedly

prepared to do it.

He cleared away space enough with his feet to enable him to sit down