“One thing’s certain, this door’s not protected with sheet iron, or any pretty stuff of that kind. If it’s not unlocked it won’t be long before I’m through it, anyhow. Do you hear, you daughter of the gods?”
Smash, crash went the fists again.
I did not know what to say, still less what to do. It was useless proffering advice. She never was amenable to that. I was sure she would resent it hotly then. Yet what she proposed to gain by going on was beyond my comprehension.
It was becoming pretty plain to me that whatever object her Uncle Benjamin had in view when he made his will it was not his niece’s benefit. It seemed as if he had died as he had lived, true to the character which Pollie gave of him. I was beginning to think that he had meant to use her as a catspaw, though why, or in what way, I confess I did not understand. That the house was not a good house I was sure; that it harboured some dreadful characters I felt convinced; perhaps coiners, or forgers, or abandoned creatures of some kind. Pollie might be meant to serve as a sort of cover. Her occupation of the place might be intended to avert suspicion. People seeing her going in and out, and being aware she lived there, would think there was nothing strange about the house. It need not be generally known that she had only access to a part of it. The prohibition against allowing anybody but another girl to cross the threshold was evidently meant as a precaution against allowing that fact to become discovered. Oh yes! nothing could be plainer than that, so far from Pollie’s being the lucky heritor of a handsome fortune, she was only the tool of her wicked old uncle; and that, consciously or unconsciously, as such she was to hide from the world some one or other of his nefarious schemes which had to be kept hidden even after he was in his grave.
As such thoughts kept chasing each other through my brain I could keep them to myself no longer.
“Pollie, do you know what I should do if I were you?”
“Break open the door with a chair, or the leg of the bedstead, my dear?”
“I should leave the house this moment.”
“Would you indeed? And then?”
“I should go straight to Mr. Paine, and I should renounce the fortune which your wicked old uncle has pretended to leave you, and refuse to fall into the trap which he had laid.”