Maria was silent for a minute. “They look into everything, you say?” she asked.
“Look into everything!” echoed Charlotte. “I should think they do! That would be little. They take everything.”
Maria left the room and came back with a parcel in her hand. It was a very small trunk—dolls’ trunks they are sometimes called—covered with red morocco leather, with a miniature lock.
“I would save this,” she said in a whisper, “if you would be so kind as to take care of it for me. I should not like them to look into it. It cannot be any fraud,” she added, in a sort of apology for what she was doing. “The things inside would not sell for sixpence, so I do not think even Mr. Godolphin would be angry with me.”
Charlotte nodded, took up her dress, and contrived to thrust the trunk into a huge pocket under her crinoline. There was another on the other side. “I put them on on purpose,” she said, alluding to the pockets. “I thought you might think better of it by this evening. But this is nothing, Mrs. George Godolphin. You may as well give me something else. They’ll be in to-morrow morning for certain.”
Maria replied that she had nothing else to give, and Charlotte rose, saying she should come or send for Meta again on the morrow. As she went out, and proceeded up Crosse Street on her way home, she tossed her head with a laugh.
“I thought she’d come to! As if she wouldn’t like to save her jewels, as other people do! She’s only rather more sly over it—saying what she has given me would not fetch sixpence! You may tell that to the geese, Mrs. George Godolphin! I should like to see what’s inside. I think I will.”
And Charlotte put her wish into action. Upon reaching Lady Godolphin’s Folly, she flung off her bonnet and mantle, gathered together all the small keys in the house, and had little difficulty in opening the simple lock. The contents were exposed to view. A lock of hair of each of her children who had died, wrapped in separate pieces of paper, with the age of the child and the date of its death written respectively outside. A golden lock of Meta’s; a fair curl of George’s; half a dozen of his letters to her, written in the short time that intervened between their engagement and their marriage, and a sort of memorandum of their engagement. “I was this day engaged to George Godolphin. I pray God to render me worthy of him! to be to him a loving and dutiful wife.”
Charlotte’s eyes opened to their utmost width, but there was nothing else to see; nothing except the printed paper with which the trunk was lined. “Is she a fool, that Maria Godolphin?” ejaculated Charlotte. Certainly that was not the class of things Mrs. Pain would have saved from bankruptcy. And she solaced her feelings by reading Mr. George’s love-letters.
No, Maria was not a fool. Better that she had come under that denomination just now, for she would have felt her position less keenly. Charlotte perhaps might have found it difficult to believe that Maria Godolphin was one of those who are sensitively intellectual, to a degree that Mistress Charlotte herself could form little notion of.