Johnny Ludlow Sixth Series Part 6

"Have you been ill, Matilda?"

"No, sir, not at all. I am quite well."

"You have grown very thin."

"It's the London air, sir. I think everybody must get thin who lives in it."

Very civilly and respectfully, but yet with an unmistakable air of reticence, spoke she. Somehow the girl was changed, and greatly changed.

Perhaps she had been grieving after Jane Cross? Perhaps the secret of what had happened (if in truth Matilda knew it) lay upon her with too heavy a weight?

"Do you find Matilda a good servant?" I asked of Miss Deveen, later, she and I being alone together.

"A very good servant, Johnny. But she is going to leave me."

"Is she? Why?"

Miss Deveen only nodded, in answer to the first query, pa.s.sing over the last. I supposed she did not wish to say.

"I think her so much altered."

"In what way, Johnny?"

"In looks: looks and manner. She is just a shadow. One might say she had pa.s.sed through a six months' fever. And what a curious light there is in her eyes!"

"She has always impressed me with the idea of having some great care upon her. None can mistake that she is a sorrowful woman. I hear that the other servants accuse her of having been 'crossed in love,'" added Miss Deveen, with a smile.

"She is thinner even than Miss Cattledon."

"And that, I daresay you think, need not be, Johnny! Miss Cattledon, by the way, is rather hard upon Matilda just now: calls her a 'demon.'"

"A demon! Why does she?"

"Well, I'll tell you. Though it is only a little domestic matter, one that perhaps you will hardly care to hear. You must know (to begin with) that Matilda has never made herself sociable with the other servants here; in return they have become somewhat prejudiced against her, and have been ready to play her tricks, tease her, and what not. But you must understand, Johnny, that I knew nothing of the state of affairs below; such matters rarely reach me. My cook, Hall, was especially at war with Matilda: in fact, I believe there was no love lost between the two. The girl's melancholy--for at times she does seem very melancholy--was openly put down by the rest to the a.s.sumption that she must have had some love affair in which the swain had played her false.

They were continually worrying her on this score, and it no doubt irritated Matilda; but she rarely retorted, preferring rather to leave them and take refuge in her room."

"Why could they not let her alone?"

"People can't let one another alone, as I believe, Johnny. If they did, the world would be pleasanter to live in than it is."

"And I suppose Matilda got tired at last, and gave warning?"

"No. Some two or three weeks ago it appears that, by some means or other, Hall obtained access to a small trunk; one that Matilda keeps her treasures in, and has cautiously kept locked. If I thought Hall had opened this trunk with a key of her own, as Matilda accuses her of doing, I would not keep the woman in my house another day. But she declares to me most earnestly--for I had her before me here to question her--that Matilda, called suddenly out of her chamber, left the trunk open there, and the letter, of which I am about to tell you, lying, also open, by its side. Hall says that she went into the room--it adjoins her own--for something she wanted, and that all she did--and she admits this much--was to pick up the letter, carry it downstairs, read it to the other servants, and make fun over it."

"What letter was it?"

"Strictly speaking, it was only part of a letter: one begun but not concluded. It was in Matilda's own hand, apparently written a long time ago, for the ink was pale and faded, and it began 'Dearest Thomas Owen.

The----'"

"Thomas Owen!" I exclaimed, starting in my chair. "Why, that is the milkman at Salt.w.a.ter."

"I'm sure I don't know who he is, Johnny, and I don't suppose it matters. Only a few lines followed, three or four, speaking of some private conversation that she had held with him on coming out of church the day before, and of some reproach that she had then made to him respecting Jane Cross. The words broke suddenly off there, as if the writer had been interrupted. But why Matilda did not complete the letter and send it, and why she should have kept it by her all this time, must be best known to herself."

"Jane Cross was her fellow-servant at Mr. Peahern's. She who was killed by falling down the staircase."

"Yes, poor thing, I remembered the name. But, to go on. In the evening, after the finding of this letter, I and Miss Cattledon were startled by a disturbance in the kitchen. Cries and screams, and loud, pa.s.sionate words. Miss Cattledon ran down; I stayed at the top of the stairs. She found Hall, Matilda, and one of the others there, Matilda in a perfect storm of fury, attacking Hall like a maniac. She tore handfuls out of her hair, she bit her thumb until her teeth met in it: Hall, though by far the bigger person of the two, and I should have thought the stronger, had no chance against her; she seemed to be as a very reed in her hands, pa.s.sion enduing Matilda with a strength perfectly unnatural.

George, who had been out on an errand, came in at the moment, and by his help the women were parted. Cattledon maintains that Matilda, during the scene, was nothing less than a demon; quite mad. When it was over, the girl fell on the floor utterly exhausted, and lay like a dead thing, every bit of strength, almost of life, gone out of her."

"I never could have believed it of Matilda."

"Nor I, Johnny. I grant that the girl had just cause to be angry. How should we like to have our private places rifled, and their contents exhibited to and mocked at by the world; contents which to us seem sacred? But to have put herself into that wild rage was both unseemly and unaccountable. Her state then, and her state immediately afterwards, made me think--I speak it with all reverence, Johnny--of the poor people in holy writ from whom the evil spirits were cast out."

"Ay. It seems to be just such a case, Miss Deveen."

"Hall's thumb was so much injured that a doctor had to come daily to it for nine or ten days," continued Miss Deveen. "Of course, after this climax, I could not retain Matilda in my service; neither would she have remained in it. She indulged a feeling of the most bitter hatred to the women servants, to Hall especially--she had not much liked them before, as you may readily guess--and she said that nothing would induce her to remain with them, even had I been willing to keep her. So she has obtained a situation with some acquaintances of mine who live in this neighbourhood, and goes to it next week. That is why Matilda leaves me, Johnny."

In my heart I could not help being sorry for her, and said so. She looked so truly, terribly unhappy!

"I am very sorry for her," a.s.sented Miss Deveen. "And had I known the others were making her life here uncomfortable, I should have taken means to stop their pastime. Of the actual facts, with regard to the letter, I cannot be at any certainty--I mean in my own mind. Hall is a respectable servant, and I have never had cause to think her untruthful during the three years she has lived with me: and she most positively holds to it that the little trunk was standing open on the table and the letter lying open beside it. Allowing that it was so, she had, of course, no right to touch either trunk or letter, still less to take the letter downstairs and exhibit it to the others, and I don't defend her conduct: but yet it is different from having rifled the lock of the trunk and taken the letter out."

"And Matilda accuses her of doing that?"

"Yes: and, on her side, holds to it just as positively. What Matilda tells me is this: On that day it chanced that Miss Cattledon had paid the women servants their quarter's wages. Matilda carried hers to her chamber, took this said little trunk out of her large box, where she keeps it, unlocked it and put the money into it. She disturbed nothing in the trunk; she says she had wrapped the sovereigns in a bit of paper, and she just slipped them inside, touching nothing else. She was shutting down the lid when she heard herself called to by me on the landing below. She waited to lock the box but not to put it up, leaving it standing on the table. I quite well remembered calling to the girl, having heard her run upstairs. I wanted her in my room."

Miss Deveen paused a minute, apparently thinking.

"Matilda has a.s.sured me again and again that she is quite sure she locked the little trunk, that there can be no mistake on that point.

Moreover, she a.s.serts that the letter in question was lying at the bottom of the trunk beneath other things, and that she had not taken it out or touched it for months and months."

"And when she went upstairs again--did she find the little trunk open or shut?"

"She says she found it shut: shut and locked just as she had left it; and she replaced it in her large box, unconscious that any one had been to it."

"Was she long in your room, Miss Deveen?"

"Yes, Johnny, the best part of an hour. I wanted a little sewing done in a hurry, and told her to sit down there and then and do it. It was during this time that the cook, going upstairs herself, saw the trunk, and took the opportunity to do what she did do."

"I think I should feel inclined to believe Matilda. Her tale sounds the more probable."

"I don't know that, Johnny. I can hardly believe that a respectable woman, as Hall undoubtedly is, would deliberately unlock a fellow-servant's box with a false key. Whence did she get the key to do it? Had she previously provided herself with one? The lock is of the most simple description, for I have seen the trunk since, and Hall might possess a key that would readily fit it: but if so, as the woman herself says, how could she know it? In short, Johnny, it is one woman's word against another's: and, until this happened, I had deemed each of them to be equally credible."

To be sure there was reason in that. I sat thinking.

"Were it proved to have been as Matilda says, still I could not keep her," resumed Miss Deveen. "Mine is a peaceable, well-ordered household, and I should not like to know that one, subject to insane fits of temper, was a member of it. Though Hall in that case would get her discharge also."

"Do the people where Matilda is going know why she leaves?"

"Mrs. and Miss Soames. Yes. I told them all about it. But I told them at the same time, what I had then learnt--that Matilda's temper had doubtlessly been much tried here. It would not be tried in their house, they believed, and took her readily. She is an excellent servant, Johnny, let who will get her."