“No, darling; stay at home—guard him,” she whispered.
Pilot understood, and turned away. Sylvia found herself on the high-road. As she approached the gate, and as she spoke to Pilot, eager eyes watched her over the wire screen which protected the lower part of Mr. Leeson’s sitting-room.
“What can all this mean?” he said to himself. “There is a mystery about Sylvia. Sometimes I feel that there is a mystery about this house. Sylvia used to be a shocking cook; now the most dainty chef who has ever condescended to cook meals for my pampered palate can scarcely excel her. She confessed that she did not get the recipe from the gipsy; the gipsies had left the common, so she could not get what I gave her a shilling to obtain. Or, did I give her the shilling? I think not—I hope not. Oh, good gracious! if I did, and she lost it! I did not; I must have it here.”
He fumbled anxiously in his waistcoat pocket.
“Yes, yes,” he said, with a sigh of relief. “I put it here for her, but she did not need it. Thank goodness, it is safe!”
He looked at it affectionately, replaced it in its harbor of refuge, and thought on.
“Now, who gave her those rich and extravagant clothes? Can she possibly have been ransacking her mother’s trunks? I was under the impression that I had sold all my poor wife’s things, but it is possible I may have overlooked something. I will go and have a look now in the attics. I had her trunks conveyed there. I will go and have a look.”
When Mr. Leeson was engaged in what he was pleased to call a voyage of discovery, he, as a rule, stepped on tiptoe. As he wore, for purposes of economy, felt slippers when in the house, his steps made no noise. Now, it so happened that when Jasper arrived at The Priory she brought not only her own luggage, which was pretty considerable, but two or three boxes of Evelyn’s finery. These trunks having filled up Jasper’s bedroom and the kitchens to an unnecessary extent, she and Sylvia had contrived to drag them up to the attics in a distant part of the house without Mr. Leeson hearing. The trunks, therefore, mostly empty, which had contained the late Mrs. Leeson’s wardrobe and Evelyn’s trunks were now all together, in what was known as the back attic—that attic which stood, with Sylvia’s room between, exactly over the kitchen.
Mr. Leeson knew, as he imagined, every corner of the house. He was well aware of the room where his wife’s trunks were kept, and he went there now, determined, as he expressed it, to ferret out the mystery which was unsettling his life.
He reached the attic in question, and stared about him. There were the trunks which he remembered so well. Many marks of travel were on them—names of foreign hotels, names of distant places. Here was a trophy of a good time at Florence; here a remembrance of a delightful fortnight at Rome; here, again, of a week in Cairo; here, yet more, of a never-to-be-forgotten visit to Constantinople. He stared at the hall-marks of his past life as he gazed at his wife’s trunks, and for a time memory overpowered the lonely man, and he stood with his hands clasped and his head slightly bent, thinking—thinking of the days that were no more. No remorse, it is true, seized his conscience. He did not recognize how, step by step, the demon of his life had gained more and more power over him; how the trunks became too shabby for use, but the desire for money prevented his buying new ones. Those labels were old, and the places he and his wife had visited were much changed, and the hotels where they had stayed had many of them ceased to exist, but the labels put on by the hall porters remained on the trunks and bore witness against Mr. Leeson. He turned quickly from the sight.