He had often heard of the climax of audacity; and here it was visibly embodied in one small, elderly individual, who did not rise quite five feet from the ground he stood on!
While the steward was swelling with a sense of injury too large for utterance, the housekeeper, followed by Sarah, was slowly ascending the stairs. Uncle Joseph, seeing them go up, hastened to join his niece, and Mr. Munder, after waiting a little while on the mat to recover himself, followed the audacious foreigner with the intention of watching his conduct narrowly, and chastising his insolence at the first opportunity with stinging words of rebuke.
The procession up the stairs thus formed was not, however, closed by the steward; it was further adorned and completed by Betsey, the servant-maid, who stole out of the kitchen to follow the strange visitors over the house, as closely as she could without attracting the notice of Mrs. Pentreath. Betsey had her share of natural human curiosity and love of change. No such event as the arrival of strangers had ever before enlivened the dreary monotony of Porthgenna Tower within her experience; and she was resolved not to stay alone in the kitchen while there was a chance of hearing a stray word of the conversation, or catching a chance glimpse of the proceedings among the company upstairs.
In the mean time the housekeeper had led the way as far as the first-floor landing, on either side of which the principal rooms in the west front were situated. Sharpened by fear and suspicion, Sarah's eyes immediately detected the repairs which had been effected in the banisters and stairs of the second flight.
"You have had workmen in the house?" she said quickly to Mrs. Pentreath.
"You mean on the stairs?" returned the housekeeper. "Yes, we have had workmen there."
"And nowhere else?"
"No. But they are wanted in other places badly enough. Even here, on the best side of the house, half the bedrooms upstairs are hardly fit to sleep in. They were anything but comfortable, as I have heard, even in the late Mrs. Treverton's time; and since she died--"
The housekeeper stopped with a frown and a look of surprise. The lady in the quiet dress, instead of sustaining the reputation for good manners which had been conferred on her in Mrs. Frankland's letter, was guilty of the unpardonable discourtesy of turning away from Mrs. Pentreath before she had done speaking. Determined not to allow herself to be impertinently silenced in that way, she coldly and distinctly repeated her last words-- "And since Mrs. Treverton died--"
She was interrupted for the second time. The strange lady, turning quickly round again, confronted her with a very pale face and a very eager look, and asked, in the most abrupt manner, an utterly irrelevant question:
"Tell me about that ghost story," she said. "Do they say it is the ghost of a man or of a woman?"
"I was speaking of the late Mrs. Treverton," said the housekeeper, in her severest tones of reproof; "and not of the ghost story about the north rooms. You would have known that, if you had done me the favor to listen to what I said."
"I beg your pardon; I beg your pardon a thousand times for seeming inattentive! It struck me just then--or, at least, I wanted to know--'
"If you came to know about anything so absurd," said Mrs. Pentreath, mollified by the evident sincerity of the apology that had been offered to her, "the ghost, according to the story, is the ghost of a woman."
The strange lady's face grew whiter than ever; and she turned away once more to the open window on the landing.
"How hot it is!" she said, putting her head out into the air.
"Hot, with a northeast wind!" exclaimed Mrs. Pentreath, in amazement.
Here Uncle Joseph came forward with a polite request to know when they were going to look over the rooms. For the last few minutes he had been asking all sorts of questions of Mr. Munder; and, having received no answers which were not of the shortest and most ungracious kind, had given up talking to the steward in despair.
Mrs. Pentreath prepared to lead the way into the breakfast-room, library, and drawing-room. All three communicated with each other, and each room had a second door opening on a long passage, the entrance to which was on the right-hand side of the first-floor landing. Before leading the way into these rooms, the housekeeper touched Sarah on the shoulder to intimate that it was time to be moving on.
"As for the ghost story," resumed Mrs. Pentreath, while she opened the breakfast-room door, "you must apply to the ignorant people who believe in it, if you want to hear it all told. Whether the ghost is an old ghost or a new ghost, and why she is supposed to walk, is more than I can tell you." In spite of the housekeeper's affectation of indifference toward the popular superstition, she had heard enough of the ghost-stony to frighten her, though she would not confess it. Inside the house, or outside the house, nobody much less willing to venture into the north rooms alone could in real truth have been found than Mrs. Pentreath herself.
While the housekeeper was drawing up the blinds in the breakfast-parlor, and while Mr. Munder was opening the door that led out of it into the library, Uncle Joseph stole to his niece's side, and spoke a few words of encouragement to her in his quaint, kindly way.
"Courage!" he whispered. "Keep your wits about you, Sarah, and catch your little opportunity whenever you can."
"My thoughts! My thoughts!" she answered in the same low key. "This house rouses them all against me. Oh, why did I ever venture into it again!"
"You had better look at the view from the window now," said Mrs. Pentreath, after she had drawn up the blind. "It is very much admired."
While affairs were in this stage of progress on the first floor of the house, Betsey, who had been hitherto stealing up by a stair at a time from the hall, and listening with all her ears in the intervals of the ascent, finding that no sound of voices now reached her, bethought herself of returning to the kitchen again, and of looking after the housekeeper's dinner, which was being kept warm by the fire. She descended to the lower regions, wondering what part of the house the strangers would want to see next, and puzzling her brains to find out some excuse for attaching herself to the exploring party.
After the view from the breakfast-room window had been duly contemplated, the library was next entered. In this room, Mrs. Pentreath, having some leisure to look about her, and employing that leisure in observing the conduct of the steward, arrived at the unpleasant conviction that Mr. Munder was by no means to be depended on to assist her in the important business of watching the proceedings of the two strangers. Doubly stimulated to assert his own dignity by the disrespectfully easy manner in which he had been treated by Uncle Joseph, the sole object of Mr. Munder's ambition seemed to be to divest himself as completely as possible of the character of guide, which the unscrupulous foreigner sought to confer on him. He sauntered heavily about the rooms, with the air of a casual visitor, staring out of window, peeping into books on tables, frowning at himself in the chimney-glasses--looking, in short, anywhere but where he ought to look. The housekeeper, exasperated by this affectation of indifference, whispered to him irritably to keep his eye on the foreigner, as it was quite as much as she could do to look after the lady in the quiet dress.
"Very good; very good," said Mr. Munder, with sulky carelessness. "And where are you going to next, ma'am, after we have been into the drawing-room? Back again, through the library, into the breakfast-room? or out at once into the passage? Be good enough to settle which, as you seem to be in the way of settling everything."
"Into the passage, to be sure," answered Mrs. Pentreath, "to show the next three rooms beyond these."
Mr. Munder sauntered out of the library, through the doorway of communication, into the drawing-room, unlocked the door leading into the passage--then, to the great disgust of the housekeeper, strolled to the fireplace, and looked at himself in the glass over it, just as attentively as he had looked at himself in the library mirror hardly a minute before.