The Dead Secret, Wilkie Collins [best historical biographies .TXT] 📗

endeavored to assist her in arriving at a decision of some kind, by asking whether he could do anything 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 bookcases, cabinets, work-boxes, and writing-desks. After first looking up at the letters painted over the door⁠—Buschmann, Cabinetmaker, &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 fireplace, 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 anything. “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