“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?”