“I don’t see any game,” cried Janet, with indignation, “and if you are playing one you ought to be ashamed of yourself; and, at all events, I will not be in your confidence!”
“Hush!” he said, “don’t be so fiery. If you get up and leave me you will make everybody ask why, and we don’t want to raise any talk, do we? Look there, Miss Summerhayes—for I must talk of something—look at that man Vicars. What a hang-dog face he has! Like a man that is up to some mischief, don’t you think?”
“I don’t like Vicars,” said Janet, hastily; “he would like to be insolent, if he dared.”
“Insolent, the beast! You have only to give Dolff a hint,” said Meredith, with a laugh, “and he’ll soon put a stop to that. I should like, all the same, to know a little what’s Vicars’s mission in this house. Oh, I know he’s an old servant, and all that. I have my little curiosities, Miss Summerhayes; haven’t you? There are some things I should like to know.”
“I thought you must know everything,” said Janet; “you are such a very old friend.”
Now Janet was bursting with desire to communicate to somebody her own wonderings and the things she had seen, or had imagined herself to see. She was held back by many things—by regard for the law which forbids you to talk to strangers of things you have observed in the house in which you live: and also by a principle of honor, which is but feeble in such matters in most bosoms, and by a lingering sense of loyalty towards Gussy, whose property this man was—and by a general prejudice against making mischief. But, on the other hand, she was impelled to speak by her own curiosity and conviction that there was something to find out, and eagerness to communicate her discoveries. And then Meredith was not a stranger; and if there was anything to find out he had a right to know it; and, of course, as Gussy’s husband he would know everything. Janet’s heart began to beat with excitement. Should she tell him? She wanted so much to do it that she scarcely knew how to keep in the words.
“I am an old friend,” said Meredith. “I have known them all my life; therefore I have a kind of right, don’t you think, to want to know? And I am one of the very few men who come familiarly about the house, so if there was any way in which that fellow Vicars was taking them in, or playing upon them, I am just the person who ought to be told, for I could take steps to put them on their guard.”
It was on this argument, which seemed so unanswerable, and especially applicable if Meredith became, as Janet assured herself was inevitable, the son of the house, that at last she spoke. After all, it did not seem as if she had very much to tell. She confided to him her suspicions that Vicars had somebody shut up in the wing whom no one knew about, and that she herself had seen—she was certain she had seen—a face pressed against the window-panes, visible between the branches of the ivy; and how, just below the same window, there had been the other day that little shower of scraps of paper, which looked as if they had been thrown out.
Meredith listened with the greatest eagerness. He leaned his elbow on his knee, and his head in his hand, looking up into her face, and shielding her thus from observation in her dark corner, so that even Gussy, passing by at a little distance on the arm of her partner, could not make out who the lady was to whom he was talking, though the sight increased almost beyond bearing the agitation in her mind. Meredith’s eyes on Janet’s face, so near, and the manner in which he surrounded her, shutting off the world, confused her and gave her a vague sort of guilt; but, after all, how could she have helped it? She could not have refused to dance with him. She could not refuse to sit down to talk, to sit out the Lancers which was then being played, and which Gussy was going in dutifully with her partner to dance. Any other girl whom he had asked would have done that, and how could Janet refuse? But there was no doubt that she felt a pang as Gussy, in her pale dress which did not become her, and with a look in her eyes dimly divined by this little interloper, passed into the bright room beyond to perform her duty dance.
Janet went on with her revelations after this episode. She had seen Vicars crossing the hall with a heavy tray covered with dainties very late one night, after everybody was in bed. She had seen the door in the hall, which was said to lead to the wing which was believed to be permanently shut up, open to him——