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

will change the arrangement, if you like⁠—but the house looks rather lonesome and dreary, just at first⁠—and my heart warms to the old nursery⁠—and I think we might at least try it, to begin with, don’t you, Lenny?”

Mr. Frankland was quite of his wife’s opinion, and was ready to accede to any domestic arrangements that she might think fit to make. While he was assuring her of this the tea came up, and the sight of it helped to restore Rosamond to her usual spirits. When the meal was over, she occupied herself in seeing the baby comfortably established for the night, in the room on the right hand which communicated with the day-nursery. That maternal duty performed, she came back to her husband in the drawing-room; and the conversation between them turned⁠—as it almost always turned now when they were alone⁠—on the two perplexing subjects of Mrs. Jazeph and the Myrtle Room.

“I wish it was not night,” said Rosamond. “I should like to begin exploring at once. Mind, Lenny, you must be with me in all my investigations. I lend you my eyes, and you give me your advice. You must never lose patience, and never tell me that you can be of no use. How I do wish we were starting on our voyage of discovery at this very moment! But we may make inquiries, at any rate,” she continued, ringing the bell. “Let us have the housekeeper and the steward up, and try if we can’t make them tell us something more than they told us in their letter.”

The bell was answered by Betsey. Rosamond desired that Mr. Munder and Mrs. Pentreath might be sent upstairs. Betsey having heard Mrs. Frankland express her intention of questioning the housekeeper and the steward, guessed why they were wanted, and smiled mysteriously.

“Did you see anything of those strange visitors who behaved so oddly?” asked Rosamond, detecting the smile. “Yes, I am sure you did. Tell us what you saw. We want to hear everything that happened⁠—everything, down to the smallest trifle.”

Appealed to in these direct terms, Betsey contrived, with much circumlocution and confusion, to relate what her own personal experience had been of the proceedings of Mrs. Jazeph and her foreign companion. When she had done, Rosamond stopped her on her way to the door by asking this question⁠—

“You say the lady was found lying in a fainting-fit at the top of the stairs. Have you any notion, Betsey, why she fainted?”

The servant hesitated.

“Come! come!” said Rosamond. “You have some notion, I can see. Tell us what it is.”

“I’m afraid you will be angry with me, ma’am,” said Betsey, expressing embarrassment by drawing lines slowly with her forefinger on a table at her side.

“Nonsense! I shall only be angry with you if you won’t speak. Why do you think the lady fainted?”

Betsey drew a very long line with her embarrassed forefinger, wiped it afterward on her apron, and answered⁠—

“I think she fainted, if you please, ma’am, because she see the ghost.”

“The ghost! What! is there a ghost in the house? Lenny, here is a romance that we never expected. What sort of ghost is it? Let us have the whole story.”

The whole story, as Betsey told it, was not of a nature to afford her hearers any extraordinary information, or to keep them very long in suspense. The ghost was a lady who had been at a remote period the wife of one of the owners of Porthgenna Tower, and who had been guilty of deceiving her husband in some way unknown. She had been condemned in consequence to walk about the north rooms as long as ever the walls of them held together. She had long, curling, light-brown hair, and very white teeth, and a dimple in each cheek, and was altogether “awful beautiful” to look at. Her approach was heralded to any mortal creature who was unfortunate enough to fall in her way by the blowing of a cold wind, and nobody who had once felt that wind had the slightest chance of ever feeling warm again. That was all Betsey knew about the ghost; and it was in her opinion enough to freeze a person’s blood only to think of it.

Rosamond smiled, then looked grave again. “I wish you could have told us a little more,” she said. “But, as you can not, we must try Mrs. Pentreath and Mr. Munder next. Send them up here, if you please, Betsey, as soon as you get downstairs.”

The examination of the housekeeper and the steward led to no result whatever. Nothing more than they had already communicated in their letter to Mrs. Frankland could be extracted from either of them. Mr. Munder’s dominant idea was that the foreigner had entered the doors of Porthgenna Tower with felonious ideas on the subject of the family plate. Mrs. Pentreath concurred in that opinion, and mentioned, in connection with it, her own private impression that the lady in the quiet dress was an unfortunate person who had escaped from a madhouse. As to giving a word of advice, or suggesting a plan for solving the mystery, neither the housekeeper nor the steward appeared to think that the rendering of any assistance of that sort lay at all within their province. They took their own practical view of the suspicious conduct of the two strangers, and no mortal power could persuade them to look an inch beyond it.

“Oh, the stupidity, the provoking, impenetrable, pretentious stupidity of respectable English servants!” exclaimed Rosamond, when she and her husband were alone again. “No help, Lenny, to be hoped for from either of those two people. We have nothing to trust to now but the examination of the house tomorrow; and that resource may fail us, like all the rest. What can Doctor Chennery be about? Why did we not hear from him before we left West Winston?”

“Patience, Rosamond, patience. We shall see what the post brings tomorrow.”

“Pray don’t talk about patience, dear! My stock of that virtue was never a very large one, and it was all