Apostrophizing the monks in these terms, and evidently regretting that he had not lived himself in those good old times, the veteran led the way back through the rooms. On the return passage across ‘Freeze-your-Bones’, Magdalen preceded him. ‘She’s as straight as a poplar,’ mumbled old Mazey to himself, hobbling along after his youthful companion, and wagging his venerable head in cordial approval. ‘I never was particular what nation they belonged to – but I always did like ’em straight and fine grown, and I always shall like ’em straight and fine grown, to my dying day.’
‘Are there more rooms to see upstairs, on the second floor?’ asked Magdalen, when they had returned to the point from which they had started.
The naturally clear distinct tones of her voice, had hitherto reached the old sailor’s imperfect sense of hearing easily enough. Rather to her surprise, he became stone-deaf, on a sudden, to her last question.
‘Are you sure of your Pints of the Compass?’ he inquired. ‘If you’re not sure, put your back agin the wall, and we’ll go all over ’em again, my dear, beginning with the noathe.’
Magdalen assured him that she felt quite familiar, by this time, with all the points, the ‘noathe’ included – and then repeated her question in louder tones. The veteran obstinately matched her, by becoming deafer than ever.
‘Yes, my dear,’ he said; ‘you’re right; it is chilly in these passages; and unless I go back to my fire, my fire’ll go out – won’t it? If you don’t feel sure of your Pints of the Compass, come into me, and I’ll put you right again.’ He winked benevolently, whistled to the dogs, and hobbled off. Magdalen heard him chuckle over his own success in balking her curiosity on the subject of the second floor. ‘I know how to deal with ’em!’ said old Mazey to himself, in high triumph. ‘Tall and short, native and foreign, sweethearts and wives – I know how to deal with ’em!’
Left by herself, Magdalen exemplified the excellence of the old sailor’s method of treatment, in her particular case, by ascending the stairs immediately, to make her own observations on the second floor. The stone passage here was exactly similar – except that more doors opened out of it – to the passage on the first floor. She opened the two nearest doors, one after another, at a venture, and discovered that both rooms were bedchambers. The fear of being discovered by one of the women-servants, in a part of the house with which she had no concern, warned her not to push her investigations on the bedroom floor, too far at starting. She hurriedly walked down the passage to see where it ended; discovered that it came to its termination in a lumber-room, answering to the position of the vestibule downstairs; and retraced her steps immediately.
On her way back, she noticed an object which had previously escaped her attention. It was a low truckle-bed, placed parallel with the wall, and close to one of the doors, on the bedroom side. In spite of its strange and comfortless situation, the bed was apparently occupied at night, by a sleeper: the sheets were on it, and the end of a thick red fisherman’s cap, peeped out from under the pillow. She ventured on opening the door near which the bed was placed; and found herself, as she conjectured from certain signs and tokens, in the admiral’s sleeping chamber. A moment’s observation of the room was all she dared risk; and, softly closing the door again, she returned to the kitchen regions.
The truckle-bed, and the strange position in which it was placed, dwelt on her mind all through the afternoon. Who could possibly sleep in it? The remembrance of the red fisherman’s cap, and the knowledge she had already gained of Mazey’s dog-like fidelity to his master, helped her to guess that the old sailor might be the occupant of the truckle-bed. But why, with bedrooms enough and to spare, should he occupy that cold and comfortless situation at night? Why should he sleep on guard outside his master’s door? Was there some nocturnal danger in the house, of which the admiral was afraid? The question seemed absurd – and yet the position of the bed forced it irresistibly on her mind.
Stimulated by her own ungovernable curiosity on this subject, Magdalen ventured to question the housekeeper. She acknowledged having walked from end to end of the passage on the second floor, to see if it was as long as the passage on the first; and she mentioned having noticed with astonishment the position of the truckle-bed. Mrs Drake answered her implied inquiry shortly and sharply. ‘I don’t blame a young girl like you,’ said the old lady, ‘for being a little curious, when she first comes into such a strange house as this. But remember, for the future, that your business does not lie on the bedroom story. Mr Mazey sleeps on that bed you noticed. It is his habit at night, to sleep outside his master’s door.’ With that meagre explanation Mrs Drake’s lips closed, and opened no more.
Later in the day, Magdalen found an opportunity of applying to old Mazey himself. She discovered the veteran in high good humour, smoking his pipe, and warming a tin mug of ale at his own snug fire.
‘Mr Mazey,’ she asked boldly, ‘why do you put your bed in that cold passage?’
‘What! you have been upstairs, you young jade, have you?’ said old Mazey, looking up from his mug with a leer.
Magdalen smiled and nodded. ‘Come! come! tell me,’ she said, coaxingly. ‘Why do you sleep outside the admiral’s door?’
‘Why do you part your hair in the middle, my dear?’ asked old Mazey, with another leer.
‘I suppose, because I am accustomed to do it,’ answered Magdalen.
‘Ay! ay!’ said the veteran. ‘That’s why, is it? Well, my dear, the reason why you part your hair in the middle, is the reason why I sleep outside the admiral’s door. I know how to deal with ’em!’ chuckled old Mazey, lapsing into soliloquy, and stirring up his ale in high triumph. ‘Tall and short, native and foreign, sweethearts and wives – I know how to deal with ’em!’
Magdalen’s third, and last, attempt at solving the mystery of the truckle-bed, was made while she was waiting on the admiral at dinner. The old gentleman’s questions gave her an opportunity of referring to the subject, without any appearance of presumption or disrespect – but he proved to be quite as impenetrable, in his way, as old Mazey and Mrs Drake had been in theirs. ‘It doesn’t concern you, my dear,’ said the admiral, bluntly. ‘Don’t be curious. Look in your Old Testament when you go downstairs, and see what happened in the Garden of Eden through curiosity. Be a good girl – and don’t imitate your mother Eve.’
Late at night, as Magdalen passed the end of the second-floor passage, proceeding alone on her way up to her own room, she stopped and listened. A screen was placed at the entrance of the corridor, so as to hide it from the view of persons passing on the stairs. The snoring she heard on the other side of the screen, encouraged her to slip round it, and to advance a few steps. Shading the light of her candle with her hand, she ventured close to the admiral’s door, and saw to her surprise that the bed had been moved, since she had seen it in the daytime, so as to stand exactly across the door, and to bar the way entirely to any one who might attempt to enter the admiral’s room. After this discovery, old Mazey himself, snoring lustily, with the red fisherman’s cap pulled down to his eyebrows, and the blankets drawn up to his nose – became an object of secondary importance only, by comparison with his bed. That the veteran did actually sleep on guard before his master’s door – and that he and the admiral and the housekeeper were in the secret of this unaccountable proceeding – was now beyond all doubt.
‘A strange end,’ thought Magdalen, pondering over her discovery as she stole upstairs to her own sleeping-room – ‘a strange end to a strange day!’
Chapter Two
The first week passed, the second week passed, and Magdalen was, to all appearance, no nearer to the discovery of the Secret Trust, than on the day when she first entered on her service at St Crux.
But the fortnight, uneventful though it was, had not been a fortnight lost. Experience had already satisfied her on one important point – experience had shown that she could set the rooted distrust of the other servants safely at defiance. Time had accustomed the women t
o her presence in the house, without shaking the vague conviction which possessed them all alike, that the new comer was not one of themselves. All that Magdalen could do, in her own defence, was to keep the instinctive female suspicion of her, confined within those purely negative limits which it had occupied from the first – and this she accomplished.
Day after day, the women watched her, with the untiring vigilance of malice and distrust; and day after day, not the vestige of a discovery rewarded them for their pains. Silently, intelligently and industriously – with an ever-present remembrance of herself and her place – the new parlour-maid did her work. Her only intervals of rest and relaxation were the intervals passed occasionally, in the day, with old Mazey and the dogs, and the precious interval of the night, during which she was secure from observation in the solitude of her room. Thanks to the superfluity of bedchambers at St Crux, each one of the servants had the choice, if she pleased, of sleeping in a room of her own. Alone in the night, Magdalen might dare to be herself again – might dream of the past, and wake from the dream, encountering no curious eyes to notice that she was in tears – might ponder over the future, and be roused by no whispering in corners, which tainted her with the suspicion of ‘having something on her mind’.
Satisfied, thus far, of the perfect security of her position in the house, she profited next by a second chance in her favour, which – before the fortnight was at an end – relieved her mind of all doubt on the formidable subject of Mrs Lecount.
Partly from the accidental gossip of the women, at the table in the servants’ hall – partly from a marked paragraph in a Swiss newspaper, which she had found one morning lying open on the admiral’s easy-chair – she gained the welcome assurance that no danger was to be dreaded, this time, from the housekeeper’s presence on the scene. Mrs Lecount had, as it appeared, passed a week or more at St Crux, after the date of her master’s death, and had then left England, to live on the interest of her legacy, in honourable and prosperous retirement, in her native place. The paragraph in the Swiss newspaper described the fulfilment of this laudable project. Mrs Lecount had not only established herself at Zürich, but (wisely mindful of the uncertainty of life) had also settled the charitable uses to which her fortune was to be applied after her death. One half of it was to go to the founding of a ‘Lecompte Scholarship’, for poor students, in the University of Geneva. The other half was to be employed by the municipal authorities of Zürich, in the maintenance and education of a certain number of orphan girls, natives of the city, who were to be trained for domestic service in later life. The Swiss journalist adverted to these philanthropic bequests in terms of extravagant eulogy. Zürich was congratulated on the possession of a Paragon of public virtue; and William Tell, in the character of benefactor to Switzerland, was compared disadvantageously with Mrs Lecount.
The third week began; and Magdalen was now at liberty to take her first step forward on the way to the discovery of the Secret Trust.
She ascertained, from old Mazey, that it was his master’s custom, during the winter and spring months, to occupy the rooms in the north wing; and during the summer and autumn, to cross the Arctic passage of ‘Freeze-your-Bones’, and live in the eastward apartments which looked out on the garden. While the Banqueting-Hall remained – owing to the admiral’s inadequate pecuniary resources – in its damp and dismantled state, and while the interior of St Crux was thus comfortlessly divided into two separate residences, no more convenient arrangement than this could well have been devised. Now and then (as Magdalen understood from her informant) there were days, both in winter and summer, when the admiral became anxious about the condition of the rooms which he was not occupying at the time; and when he insisted on investigating the state of the furniture, the pictures and the books with his own eyes. On these occasions – in summer as in winter – a blazing fire was kindled for some days previously, in the large grate, and the charcoal was lit in the tripod pan, to keep the Banqueting-Hall as warm as circumstances would admit. As soon as the old gentleman’s anxieties were set at rest, the rooms were shut up again; and ‘Freeze-your-Bones’ was once more abandoned for weeks and weeks together to damp, desolation and decay. The last of these temporary migrations had taken place only a few days since; the admiral had satisfied himself that the rooms in the east wing were none the worse for the absence of their master – and he might now be safely reckoned on as settled in the north wing for weeks, and perhaps, if the season was cold, for months to come.
Trifling as they might be in themselves, these particulars were of serious importance to Magdalen – for they helped her to fix the limits of the field of search. Assuming that the admiral was likely to keep all his important documents within easy reach of his own hand, she might now feel certain that the Secret Trust was secured in one or other of the rooms in the north wing.
In which room? That question was not easy to answer.
Of the four inhabitable rooms which were all at the admiral’s disposal during the day – that is to say, of the dining-room, the library, the morning-room and the drawing-room opening out of the vestibule – the library appeared to be the apartment in which, if he had a preference, he passed the greater part of his time. There was a table in this room, with drawers that locked; there was a magnificent Italian cabinet with doors that locked; there were five cupboards under the book-cases, every one of which locked. There were receptacles similarly secured, in the other rooms; and in all or any of these, papers might be kept.
She had answered the bell, and had seen him locking and unlocking, now in one room now in another – but oftenest in the library. She had noticed occasionally that his expression was fretful and impatient, when he looked round at her from an open cabinet or cupboard, and gave his orders; and she inferred that something in connection with his papers and possessions – it might, or might not, be the Secret Trust – irritated and annoyed him from time to time. She had heard him, more than once, lock something up in one of the rooms – come out, and go into another room – wait there a few minutes – then return to the first room, with his keys in his hand – and sharply turn the locks, and turn them again. This fidgety anxiety about his keys and his cupboards might be the result of the inbred restlessness of his disposition, aggravated in a naturally active man, by the aimless indolence of a life in retirement – a life drifting backwards and forwards among trifles, with no regular employment to steady it at any given hour of the day. On the other hand, it was just as probable that these comings and goings, these lockings and unlockings, might be attributable to the existence of some private responsibility, which had unexpectedly intruded itself into the old man’s easy existence, and which tormented him with a sense of oppression, new to the experience of his later years. Either one of these interpretations might explain his conduct as reasonably and as probably as the other. Which was the right interpretation of the two, it was, in Magdalen’s position, impossible to say.
The one certain discovery at which she arrived, was made in her first day’s observation of him. The admiral was a rigidly careful man with his keys.
All the smaller keys he kept on a ring, in the breast-pocket of his coat. The larger, he locked up together; generally, but not always, in one of the drawers of the library table. Sometimes, he left them secured in this way at night; sometimes, he took them up to the bedroom with him in a little basket. He had no regular times for leaving them, or for taking them away with him; he had no discoverable reason for now securing them in the library-table drawer, and now again locking them up in some other place. The inveterate wilfulness and caprice of his proceedings, in these particulars, defied every effort to reduce them to a system, and baffled all attempts at calculating on them beforehand.
The hope of gaining positive information to act on, by laying artful snares for him which he might fall into in his talk, proved, from the outset, to be utterly futile.
In Magdalen’s situation, all experiments of this sort would have been in the last degree difficult an
d dangerous, with any man. With the admiral, they were simply impossible. His tendency to veer about from one subject to another; his habit of keeping his tongue perpetually going, so long as there was anybody, no matter whom, within reach of the sound of his voice; his comical want of all dignity and reserve with his servants, promised, in appearance, much; and performed, in reality – nothing. No matter how diffidently, or how respectfully, Magdalen might presume on her master’s example, and on her master’s evident liking for her – the old man instantly discovered the advance she was making from her proper position, and instantly put her back in it again, with a quaint good humour which inflicted no pain, but with a blunt straightforwardness of purpose which permitted no escape. Contradictory as it may sound, Admiral Bartram was too familiar to be approached; he kept the distance between himself and his servant more effectually than if he had been the proudest man in England. The systematic reserve of a superior towards an inferior, may be occasionally overcome – the systematic familiarity, never.
Slowly the time dragged on. The fourth week came; and Magdalen had made no new discoveries. The prospect was depressing in the last degree. Even in the apparently hopeless event of her devising a means of getting at the admiral’s keys, she could not count on retaining possession of them unsuspected more than a few hours – hours which might be utterly wasted through her not knowing in what direction to begin the search. The Trust might be locked up in any one of some twenty receptacles for papers, situated in four different rooms. And which room was the likeliest to look in, which receptacle was the most promising to begin with, which position among other heaps of papers the one paper needful might be expected to occupy, was more than she could say. Hemmed in by immeasurable uncertainties on every side – condemned, as it were, to wander blindfold on the very brink of success – she waited for the chance that never came, for the event that never happened, with a patience which was sinking already into the patience of despair.