Magdalen’s face was very white now, and her eyes like burning coals as she questioned Hester. At the mention of Roger a sudden suspicion had flashed upon her, making her grow faint and cold as she grasped the high post of the bedstead and asked, “How she could get it when she did not know what it was, nor where it was.”
The sound of her voice roused the old woman a little, but she soon relapsed into her dreamy, talkative mood, and insisted that Mrs. Walter Scott was in the garret and Magdalen must “head her off.”
“I’ll go,” Magdalen said at last, taking the candle which Hester always used for going about the house. “Hush!” she continued, as Hester began to grow very restless; “I’m going to the garret. Be quiet till I come back.”
“I will, yes,” was Hester’s reply, her eyes wide open now, and staring wildly at Magdalen, whose dress she tried to clutch with her hand as she whispered, “The loose board, way down under the eaves. You must get on your knees. Bring it to me, and never tell.”
The house was very quiet, for the family had long since retired, and the pale spring moonlight came struggling through the windows, and lighting up the halls through which Magdalen went on her strange errand to the garret. The stairs which led to it were away from the main portion of the building, and she felt a thrill of something like fear as she passed into the dark, narrow hall, and paused a moment by the door of the stairway. What should she find,—was Mrs. Walter Scott there, as Hester had averred; and if so, what was she doing, and what excuse could Magdalen make for being there herself?
“I’ll wait, and let matters take their course,” she thought; and then summoning all her courage, she opened the door, and began the ascent of the steep narrow way, every stair of which creaked with her tread, for Magdalen did not try to be cautious. “If any one is there, they shall know I am coming,” she thought; and she held her candle high above her head, so that its light might shine to the farthest crevice of the garret and give warning of her approach.
But there was no one there, and only the accumulated rubbish of the house met her view, as she came fully into the garret and cast her eyes from corner to corner and beam to beam. Through the dingy window at the north the moon was looking in, and lighting up that end of the garret with a weird, ghostly kind of light, which made Magdalen shiver more than utter darkness would have done. She knew she was alone; there was no sign of life around her, except the huge rat, which, frightened at this unlooked-for visitation, sprang from Magdalen knew not where, and running past her disappeared in a hole low down under the eaves, reminding Magdalen of what Hester had said of “the loose plank under the rafters where you have to stoop.”
At sight of the rat Magdalen had uttered a cry, which she quickly suppressed, and then stood watching the frightened animal, until it disappeared from sight.
“There can be no harm in seeing if there is a loose board there,” Magdalen thought; and setting her candle upon a little table she groped her way after the rat, bumping her head once as old Hester had bumped hers; and then crouching down upon her knees, she examined the floor in that part of the garret, growing faint and cold and frightened when she found that far back under the roof there was a board, shorter than the others, which looked as if it might with a little trouble be lifted from its place.
It fitted perfectly, and, but for what old Hester had said, might never have been discovered to be loose and capable of being moved from its position. Magdalen was not quite sure, even now, that she could raise it, and if she could, did she wish to, and for what reason? “Was there anything hidden under it, and if so, was it—?”