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

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 Guidebook 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 upstairs.

In the meantime 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 upstairs are hardly fit to sleep in. They were anything 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,”