WHEN the two months had passed we returned to Darrock Hall.
Nobody there had received any news in our absence of the whereabouts of my master and his yacht.
Six more weary weeks elapsed, and in that time but one event happened at the Hall to vary the dismal monotony of the lives we now led in the solitary place.One morning Josephine came down after dressing my mistress with her face downright livid to look at, except on one check, where there was a mark as red as burning fire.I was in the kitchen at the time, and I asked what was the matter.
"The matter!" says she, in her shrill voice and her half-foreign English."Use your own eyes, if you please, and look at this cheek of mine.What! have you lived so long a time with your mistress, and don't you know the mark of her hand yet?"I was at a loss to understand what she meant, but she soon explained herself.My mistress, whose temper had been sadly altered for the worse by the trials and humiliations she had gone through, had got up that morning more out of humor than usual, and, in answer to her maid's inquiry as to how she had passed the night, had begun talking about her weary, miserable life in an unusually fretful and desperate way.Josephine, in trying to cheer her spirits, had ventured, most improperly, on ****** a light, jesting reference to Mr.Meeke, which had so enraged my mistress that she turned round sharp on the half-breed and gave her--to use the common phrase--a smart box on the ear.Josephine confessed that, the moment after she had done this, her better sense appeared to tell her that she had taken a most improper way of resenting undue familiarity.She had immediately expressed her regret for having forgotten herself, and had proved the sincerity of it by a gift of half a dozen cambric handkerchiefs, presented as a peace-offering on the spot.After that I thought it impossible that Josephine could bear any malice against a mistress whom she had served ever since she had been a girl, and I said as much to her when she had done telling me what had happened upstairs.
"I! Malice!" cries Miss Josephine, in her hard, sharp, snappish way."And why, and wherefore, if you please? If my mistress smacks my cheek with one hand, she gives me handkerchiefs to wipe it with the other.My good mistress, my kind mistress, my pretty mistress! I, the servant, bear malice against her, the mistress!
Ah! you bad man, even to think of such a thing! Ah! fie, fie! Iam quite ashamed of you!"
She gave me one look--the wickedest look I ever saw, and burst out laughing--the harshest laugh I ever heard from a woman's lips.Turning away from me directly after, she said no more, and never referred to the subject again on any subsequent occasion.
From that time, however, I noticed an alteration in Miss Josephine; not in her way of doing her work, for she was just as sharp and careful about it as ever, but in her manners and habits.She grew amazingly quiet, and passed almost all her leisure time alone.I could bring no charge against her which authorized me to speak a word of warning; but, for all that, Icould not help feeling that if I had been in my mistress's place, I would have followed up the present of the cambric handkerchiefs by paying her a month's wages in advance, and sending her away from the house the same evening.
With the exception of this little domestic matter, which appeared trifling enough at the time, hut which led to very serious consequences afterward, nothing happened at all out of the ordinary way during the six weary weeks to which I have referred.
At the beginning of the seventh week, however, an event occurred at last.
One morning the postman brought a letter to the Hall addressed to my mistress.I took it upstairs, and looked at the direction as Iput it on the salver.The handwriting was not my master's; was not, as it appeared to me, the handwriting of any well-educated person.The outside of the letter was also very dirty, and the seal a common office-seal of the usual lattice-work pattern.
"This must be a begging-letter," I thought to myself as I entered the breakfast- room and advanced with it to my mistress.
She held up her hand before she opened it as a sign to me that she had some order to give, and that I was not to leave the room till I had received it.Then she broke the seal and began to read the letter.
Her eyes had hardly been on it a moment before her face turned as pale as death, and the paper began to tremble in her fingers.She read on to the end, and suddenly turned from pale to scarlet, started out of her chair, crumpled the letter up violently in her hand, and took several turns backward and forward in the room, without seeming to notice me as I stood by the door."You villain! you villain! you villain!" I heard her whisper to herself many times over, in a quick, hissing, fierce way.Then she stopped, and said on a sudden, "Can it be true?" Then she looked up, and, seeing me standing at the door, started as if Ihad been a stranger, changed color again, and told me, in a stifled voice, to leave her and come back again in half an hour.
I obeyed, feeling certain that she must have received some very bad news of her husband, and wondering, anxiously enough, what it might be.
When I returned to the breakfast-room her face was as much discomposed as ever.Without speaking a word she handed me two sealed letters: one, a note to be left for Mr.Meeke at the parsonage; the other, a letter marked "Immediate," and addressed to her solicitor in London, who was also, I should add, her nearest living relative.
I left one of these letters and posted the other.When I came back I heard that my mistress had taken to her room.She remained there for four days, keeping her new sorrow, whatever it was, strictly to herself.On the fifth day the lawyer from London arrived at the Hall.My mistress went down to him in the library, and was shut up there with him for nearly two hours.At the end of that time the bell rang for me.
"Sit down, William," said my mistress, when I came into the room.