Johnny Ludlow, Sixth Series. Henry Wood

assented 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 assured 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 asserts 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.”

      I could not resist the temptation of speaking to Matilda about this, an opportunity offering that same day. She came into the room with some letters just left by the postman.

      “I thought my mistress was here, sir,” she said, hesitating with the tray in her hand.

      “Miss Deveen will be here in a minute: you can leave the letters. So you are going to take flight, Matilda! I have heard all about it. What a silly thing you must be to put yourself into that wonderful tantrum!”

      “She broke into my box, and turned over its contents, and stole my letter to mock me,” retorted Matilda, her fever-lighted eyes taking a momentary fierceness. “Who, put in my place, would not have gone into a tantrum, sir?”

      “But she says she did not break into it.”

      “As surely as that is heaven’s sun above us, she did it, Mr. Johnny. She has been full of spite towards me for a long time, and she thought she would pay me out. I did but unlock the box, and slip the little paper of money in, and I locked it again instantly and brought the key away with me: I can never say anything truer than that, sir: to make a mistake about it is not possible.”

      No pen could convey the solemn earnestness with which she spoke. Somehow it impressed me. I hoped Hall would get served out.

      “Yes, the wrong has triumphed for once. As far as I can see, sir, it often does triumph. Miss Deveen thinks great things of Hall, but she is deceived in her; and I daresay she will find her out sometime. It was Hall who ought to have been turned away instead of me. Not that I would stay here longer if I could.”

      “But you like Miss Deveen?”

      “Very much indeed, sir; she is a good lady and a kind mistress. She spoke very well indeed of me to the new family where I am going, and I daresay I shall do well enough there.—Have you been to Saltwater lately, sir?” she added, abruptly.

      “Never since. Do you get news from the place?”

      She shook her head. “I have never heard a word from any soul in it. I have written to nobody, and nobody has written to me.”

      “And nothing more has come out about poor Jane Cross. It is still a mystery.”

      “And likely to be one,” she replied, in a low tone.

      “Perhaps so. Do you know what Owen the milkman thought?”

      She had spoken the last sentence or two with her eyes bent, fiddling with the silver waiter. Now they were raised quickly.

      “Owen thought that you could clear up the mystery if you liked, Matilda. At least, that you possessed some clue to it. He told me so.”

      “Owen as good as said the same to me before I left,” she replied, after a pause. “He is wrong, sir: but he must think it if he will. Is he—is he at Saltwater still?”

      “For all I know to the contrary. This letter, that the servants here got at, was one you were beginning to write to Owen. Did–”

      “I would rather not talk of that letter, Mr. Johnny: my private affairs concern myself only,” she interrupted—and went out of the room like a shot.

      Had anyone told me that during this short visit of mine in London I should come across the solution of the mystery of that tragedy enacted at No. 7, I might have been slow to credit it. Nevertheless, it was to be so.

      Have you ever noticed, in going through life, that events seem to carry a sequence in themselves almost as though they bore in their own hands the guiding thread that connects them from beginning to end? For a time this thread will seem to be lost; to lie dormant, as though it had snapped, and the course of affairs it was holding to have disappeared for good. But lo! up peeps a little end when least expected, and we catch hold of it, and soon it grows into a handful; and what we had thought lost is again full of activity and gradually works itself out. Not a single syllable, good or bad, had we heard of that calamity at Saltwater during the fourteen months which had passed since. The thread of it lay dormant. At Miss Deveen’s it began to steal up again: Matilda, and her passion, and the letter she had commenced to Thomas Owen were to the fore: and before that visit of mine came to an end, the thread had, strange to say, unwound itself.

      I was a favourite of Miss Deveen’s: you may have gathered that from past papers. One day, when she was going shopping, she asked me to accompany her and not Miss