No Name, Wilkie Collins [reading the story of the TXT] 📗

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 anyone 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!”

II

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 as 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 to her presence in the house, without shaking the vague conviction which possessed them all alike, that the newcomer was not one of themselves. All that Magdalen could do in her own defense 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 parlormaid 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 whisperings 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 favor, 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 honorable and prosperous retirement, in her native place. The paragraph in the Swiss newspaper described the fulfillment of this laudable project. Mrs. Lecount had not only established herself at Zurich, 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 Zurich 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. Zurich 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 lighted 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