“Why, where’s that bangle? I put it down just there, I remember most distinctly. Emily, it’s gone! Whatever’s this? I do believe—it’s that back-door key!”
It was, at any rate, a key; and bore a family likeness to the one which was attached to the chain which was about my waist. I stared, scarcely able to credit the evidence of my own senses. Between our going from that room and our returning to it a miracle had happened; a transformation had taken place; a bangle—and such a bangle! had become a key. Apparently the back-door key of Uncle Benjamin’s “P.S.!”
BOOK II.
84, CAMFORD STREET.
(THE FACTS OF THE CASE ACCORDING TO EMILY PURVIS.)
CHAPTER IX.
MAX LANDER.
Talk about romance! I never could have believed that after wishing for a thing your whole life long you could have had enough of it in so short a space of time. In the morning Pollie Blyth heard, for the very first time, that a fortune and a house had been left to her, and, before the night of that same day was over, she wished that it had not. And here had I been looking, ever since I was a teeny-weeny little thing, for a touch of romance to give existence a real live flavour, and then, when I got it, the best I could do was to wonder how I had been so silly as ever to have wanted it.
Poor Pollie! That first night in Camford Street she would go out. She said she must go and see her Tom. That he would be waiting, wondering what had become of her, and that nothing should keep her from him. Nothing did. I could not. And when I suggested that it might be as well for her to be a little careful what she did that very first night, she actually proposed that I should stop in that awful house by myself, and wait in it alone till she returned.
I would not have done such a thing for worlds, and she knew it. As a matter of fact I could not have said if I was more unwilling to leave the place, or to stay in it, even with her. The extraordinary conditions of her dreadful old uncle’s horrible will weighed on me much more than they seemed to do on her. I felt sure that something frightful would happen if they were not strictly observed. Nothing could be clearer than his repeated injunction not to be out after nine, and her appointment with Mr. Cooper was for half-past eight.
Cardew and Slaughter are supposed to close at eight, but she knew as well as I did what that really meant. It was a wonder if one of the assistants got out before nine. Mr. Cooper was in the heavy, and the gentlemen in that department were always last. If he appeared till after nine I should be surprised, and, if we were at the other end of London at that hour, with the uncle’s will staring us in the face, what would become of us? Being locked out of Cardew and Slaughter’s was nothing to what that would mean.
But Pollie would not listen to a word. She is as obstinate as obstinate when she likes, though she may not think it.