Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (216 page)

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 came to know about anything 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-stony 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, anywhere 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 everything.”

“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 doorway of communication, into the drawing-room, unlocked the door leading into the passage — then, to the great disgust of the housekeeper, strolled to the fireplace, 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 maneuver, 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 unto 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 colour 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 anybody there, or if she had met anybody 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.