Read Complete Works of Wilkie Collins Online
Authors: Wilkie Collins
The doctor began to think, after what he had just heard, that Mrs. Frankland’s suspicions in relation to the new nurse were not quite so unfounded as he had been at first disposed to consider them. He wisely refrained, however, from complicating matters by giving utterance to what he thought; and, after answering Mrs. Norbury in a few vaguely polite words, endeavored to soothe her irritation against Mr. and Mrs. Frankland by assuring her that he came as the bearer of apologies from both husband and wife, for the apparent want of courtesy and consideration in their conduct which circumstances had made inevitable. The offended lady, however, absolutely refused to be propitiated. She rose up, and waved her hand with an air of great dignity.
“I cannot hear a word more from you, Mr. Orridge,” she said; “I cannot receive any apologies which are made indirectly. If Mr. Frankland chooses to call, and if Mrs. Frankland condescends to write to me, I am willing to think no more of the matter. Under any other circumstances, I must be allowed to keep my present opinions both of the lady and the gentleman. Don’t say another word, and be so kind as to excuse me if I leave you, and go up to the nursery to see how the child is getting on. I am delighted to hear that you think her so much better. Pray call again to-morrow or next day, if you conveniently can. Good-morning!”
Half amused at Mrs. Norbury, half displeased at the curt tone she adopted toward him, Mr. Orridge remained for a minute or two alone in the breakfast-parlor, feeling rather undecided about what he should do next. He was, by this time, almost as much interested in solving the mystery of Mrs. Jazeph’s extraordinary conduct as Mrs. Frankland herself; and he felt unwilling, on all accounts, to go back to the Tiger’s Head, and merely repeat what Mrs. Norbury had told him, without being able to complete the narrative by informing Mr. and Mrs. Frankland of the direction that the housekeeper had taken on leaving her situation. After some pondering, he determined to question the footman, under the pretense of desiring to know if his gig was at the door. The man having answered the bell, and having reported the gig to be ready, Mr. Orridge, while crossing the hall, asked him carelessly if he knew at what time in the morning Mrs. Jazeph had left her place.
“About ten o’clock, Sir,” answered the footman. “When the carrier came by from the village, on his way to the station for the eleven o’clock train.”
“Oh! I suppose he took her boxes?” said Mr. Orridge.
“And he took her, too, Sir,” said the man, with a grin. “She had to ride, for once in her life, at any rate, in a carrier’s cart.”
On getting back to West Winston, the doctor stopped at the station to collect further particulars, before he returned to the Tiger’s Head. No trains, either up or down, happened to be due just at that time. The station-master was reading the newspaper, and the porter was gardening on the slope of the embankment.
“Is the train at eleven in the morning an up-train or a down-train?” asked Mr. Orridge, addressing the porter.
“A down-train.”
“Did many people go by it?”
The porter repeated the names of some of the inhabitants of West Winston.
“Were there no passengers but passengers from the town?” inquired the doctor.
“Yes, Sir. I think there was one stranger — a lady.”
“Did the station-master issue the tickets for that train?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Mr. Orridge went on to the station-master.
“Do you remember giving a ticket this morning, by the eleven o’clock down-train, to a lady traveling alone?”
The station-master pondered. “I have issued tickets, up and down, to half-a-dozen ladies to-day,” he answered, doubtfully.
“Yes, but I am speaking only of the eleven o’clock train,” said Mr. Orridge. “Try if you can’t remember?”
“Remember? Stop! I do remember; I know who you mean. A lady who seemed rather flurried, and who put a question to me that I am not often asked at this station. She had her veil down, I recollect, and she got here for the eleven o’clock train. Crouch, the carrier, brought her trunk into the office.”
“That is the woman. Where did she take her ticket for?”
“For Exeter.”
“You said she asked you a question?”
“Yes: a question about what coaches met the rail at Exeter to take travelers into Cornwall. I told her we were rather too far off here to have the correct time-table, and recommended her to apply for information to the Devonshire people when she got to the end of her journey. She seemed a timid, helpless kind of woman to travel alone. Anything wrong in connection with her, Sir?”
“Oh, no! nothing,” said Mr. Orridge, leaving the stationmaster and hastening back to his gig again.
When he drew up, a few minutes afterward, at the door of the Tiger’s Head, he jumped out of his vehicle with the confident air of a man who has done all that could be expected of him. It was easy to face Mrs. Frankland with the unsatisfactory news of Mrs. Jazeph’s departure, now that he could add, on the best authority, the important supplementary information that she had gone to Cornwall.
A PLOT AGAINST THE SECRET.
TOWARD the close of the evening, on the day after Mr. Orridge’s interview with Mrs. Norbury, the Druid fast coach, running through Cornwall as far as Truro, set down three inside passengers at the door of the booking-office on arriving at its destination. Two of these passengers were an old gentleman and his daughter; the third was Mrs. Jazeph.
The father and daughter collected their luggage and entered the hotel; the outside passengers branched off in different directions with as little delay as possible; Mrs. Jazeph alone stood irresolute on the pavement, and seemed uncertain what she should do next. When the coachman good-naturedly 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 book-cases, cabinets, work-boxes, and writing-desks. After first looking up at the letters painted over the door — BUSCHMANN, CABINET-MAKER, &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 repent 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 opera of Mozart’s. Ah! beautiful! beautiful! Your Uncle Max said that all music was comprehended in that one song. I know nothing about music, but I have my heart and my ears, and they tell me that Max was right.”
Speaking these words with abundant gesticulation and amazing volubility, Mr. Buschmann poured out a cup of tea for his niece, stirred it carefully, and, patting her on the shoulder, begged that she would make him happy by drinking it all up directly. As he came close to her to press this request, he discovered that the tears were in her eyes, and that she was trying to take her handkerchief from her pocket without being observed.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, seeing the old man’s face sadden as he looked at her; “and don’t think me forgetful or ungrateful, Uncle Joseph. I remember the box — I remember everything that you used to take an interest in, when I was younger and happier than I am now. When I last saw you, I came to you in trouble; and I come to you in trouble once more. It seems neglectful in me never to have written to you for so many years past; but my life has been a very sad one, and I thought I had no right to lay the burden of my sorrow on other shoulders than my own.”