One of the 28th: A Tale of Waterloo

"Certainly your plan does appear feasible, Mrs. Conway," he said at length. "It does seem to me that if once installed in the way you propose at the Hall, and prepared to spend, as you say, months or even years in the search, it is possible and even probable that in the end you may light upon the spring that will open this mystery. You must be prepared to face much unpleasantness. You will have for all this time to associate with servants, to do menial work, to relinquish all the luxuries and appliances to which you have all your life been accustomed, and possibly to fail at last. Still, if you are prepared to face all this, there does appear to me to be a possibility of your enterprise being crowned with success."

"I have thought it all over, Mr. Tallboys, and am quite prepared to submit to all the sacrifices you mention, which, however, will scarcely be felt by me to be sacrifices, working, as I shall be, for the future of my son. And now, can I rely upon your assistance?"

"You shall have any assistance I can give, assuredly, Mrs. Conway. The matter is by no means a simple one, still I can see no reason why it should not be successfully carried out."

"It must take time, that I quite anticipate, Mr. Tallboys. Time, fortunately, is of no consequence."

"Well, Mrs. Conway," Mr. Tallboys said, after sitting for some minutes in thought, "it is a matter that will require careful thinking over. How long do you intend staying here?"

"Just as long as it is necessary," Mrs. Conway said, "a day or a month. I have not given my own name at the 'George,' but shall be known there as Mrs. Brown. As you saw, I sent my card in in an envelope, so that even your clerk should not be aware that Mrs. Conway was in Weymouth."

"But," the solicitor said suddenly, "surely the Miss Penfolds knew you in the old time?"

"Certainly, they did. But, to begin with, that is nearly twenty years ago; and, of course, I have changed very much since then."

"Not very much, Mrs. Conway," the lawyer said; "for I once had the pleasure of seeing you when I went to the Hall to see Mr. Penfold on business. I do not say that I should have known you anywhere, but having had your card I remembered you at once when you came into the room; and, indeed, if you will excuse my saying so, you might pass anywhere as thirty."

"So much the better for my purpose at present," Mrs. Conway replied. "Thirty will do very well for the age of a housemaid at the Hall. I should imagine the Miss Penfolds would prefer a woman of that age to a young girl; beside, you see, I must be an upper housemaid in order to have charge of the part of the house I want to examine. As to knowing me, in the first place the Miss Penfolds will not have the advantage of receiving my card, and, in the second place, it is not very difficult for a woman to alter her appearance so as to be unrecognizable by another who has not seen her for twenty years. My hair is a good deal darker now than it was then, and I wore it altogether differently. A little black dye on that and my eyebrows, a servant's cap and gown, will so alter me that you who see me now would hardly know me; certainly they will not do so. You need not trouble about that, Mr. Tallboys; I will answer for it that they shall not know me. It is possible, just possible, that Mr. and Mrs. Withers might know me if they saw me in church; but I shall, without letting them know my plans, guard against any indiscretion. Now, as we have quite settled the matter, Mr. Tallboys, I shall go back to the inn, and when you have thought the matter over and decided upon the best plan for carrying out my wishes, you will send a note to Mrs. Brown at the 'George,' making an appointment for me to meet you here."

Mr. Tallboys sat for some time in thought after Mrs. Conway had left him. It was certainly a daring scheme, requiring no little courage, resolution, and self-possession to carry out, but his client evidently possessed all these qualities. She had a clear head, and seemed to have grasped every point in the matter. There was really no reason why she should not succeed. There must be a spring somewhere, and if she was as patient as she declared herself to be, she would surely find it sooner or later; that is, if she could carry out her search without exciting suspicion.

The first difficulty was to get her settled at the Hall. What was the best way to set about that? It certainly was not as easy as she seemed to think, still there must be some way of managing it. At any rate he must act cautiously in the matter, and must not appear in it in any way personally. And so he sat thinking, until at last the clerk, who had been a good deal surprised at receiving no instruction from him as to several matters he had in hand, knocked at the door, and came in with a number of papers, and Mr. Tallboys was obliged to dismiss the matter from his mind for a time, and to attend to present business. The very next morning Mrs. Conway received the note, and again went to the office.

"Do you know, Mrs. Conway," he began, as soon as his client entered, "the more I think over the matter, the more I feel that it is extremely difficult to manage it from here. I should have to engage some one to go over in the first place. He would have to stay in the village some time before he could make the acquaintance of the servants at the Hall. He would have to get very intimate with them before he could venture to broach such a thing for if he made a mistake, and the woman told her mistress that some one had been trying to persuade her to leave in order to introduce another into the place, their suspicions would be so aroused that the scheme would become hopeless."

"Yes, I see the difficulty, Mr. Tallboys; for I thought it over in every way before I came to you. Beside I don't like the thought of this intermediate. No doubt you would choose a trustworthy man. Still I don't like the thought of any one knowing the secret, especially as the plan may take so long working out."

"What I have been thinking, Mrs. Conway is this. No doubt the servants at the Hall have taken sides on this matter. Of course from our searches there they know that Mr. Penfold's will is missing, and that it is because it is missing that the Miss Penfolds are now mistresses there. Without knowing anything myself about the feelings of the servants there, beyond what would probably be the case from the difference of character between Mr. Penfold and his sisters, I should imagine that they were fond of him, for he was the kindest and most easy-going of masters, and not very fond of his sisters, who are, as I have always observed in the course of my professional visits there, the reverse of agreeable.

"If this is the case, not improbably there may be one or other of these women with whom you might open direct negotiations. What has struck me is this. The men who were over there with me of course slept and took their meals in the village; still, going about as they did in the house, no doubt they talked with the servants. The Miss Penfolds were away, and I dare say the women had plenty of time to gossip; and it is probable the men gathered from their talk something of their sentiments toward the Miss Penfolds and their brother, and which side they would be likely to go with. I might ask the foreman about it."

"I think the idea is a capital one, Mr. Tallboys; but there is one detail I think might be improved. I imagine that if instead of asking the foreman you choose the youngest and best-looking of the men, provided he is unmarried, you are more likely to get at the women's sentiments."

Mr. Tallboys laughed. "No doubt you are right, Mrs. Conway. That shall be done. I must get the foreman first, though, for I don't know the names or addresses of the other men. I shall tell him frankly that I want to find out the opinions of the servants at the Hall about the missing will, ask him which of his men was the most given to gossip with them, and tell him to send him here to me at ten o'clock to-morrow morning; then when you see him and hear what he has to say, you can judge for yourself how far you care to trust him in the matter, or whether to trust him at all. Perhaps you will come here a few minutes before ten, and then I can tell you what the foreman has said first."

Accordingly at a quarter to ten the next day Mrs. Conway was again at the office.

"I think, Mrs. Conway, that things are going even better than we hoped. The foreman said that from what little talk he had with the servants, he thought they had all been attached to Mr. Penfold, and that his sisters were by no means popular among them. He said very often one or other of them would come into the room where they were working and make suggestions, and hunt about themselves to see if they could find anything. But the best part of it is that one of the carpenters, a steady fellow of twenty-five, took up, as he calls it, with the upper housemaid, and he believes there is a talk about their being married some day. If this is so it would be the very thing for you. You could help him to get married, and the girl could help you to get her place."

"The very thing," Mrs. Conway said. "Nothing could have turned out better."

In a few minutes the young carpenter arrived. He was a pleasant-looking young fellow, and Mrs. Conway was not surprised at the impression he had made upon the housemaid at the Hall.

"Sit down, Johnson," Mr. Tallboys began. "You know what I asked you to come here for?"

"Mr. Peters told me that it was something to do with that job we had at the Miss Penfolds', sir."

"Yes, that is it, Johnson. You know we were looking for a missing will there?"

"Yes, sir; so I understood."

"Now, what we wanted to ask you specially, Johnson, was whether you can tell us what the servants at the Hall thought about it?"

The young carpenter turned rather red in the face, and twisted his cap about in his fingers.

"Well, sir, I don't know that I can say much about that. I don't think most of them was overfond of the Miss Penfolds, and wouldn't have been sorry if the will had been found that would have given them another master or mistress."

"Just so, Johnson, that is what I thought was likely. Now, the point I want to know, Johnson, and this lady here is, I may tell you, interested in the matter of this will being found, is as to whether there is in your opinion any one of the maids at the Hall who could be trusted to aid us in this business? Of course we should make it worth her while to do so."

Again the young carpenter colored, and fidgeted on his chair, examining his cap intently.

"I suppose it would depend on what you wanted her to do," he said at last. "The Hall is a good service, though they don't like the mistresses, and of course none of them would like to do anything that might risk their place."

"That's natural enough, Johnson. But, you see, we could perhaps more than make up to her for that risk."

"Well, I don't know, sir," the man said after another pause. "It isn't only the place; but, you see, a young woman wouldn't like to risk getting into a row like and being turned away in disgrace, or perhaps even worse. I don't know what you want, you see, sir?"

Mr. Tallboys looked at Mrs. Conway, and his eyes expressed the question, How far shall we go? She replied by taking the matter in her own hands.

"We can trust you, can't we, whether you agree to help us or not?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said more decidedly than he had hitherto spoken. "You can trust me. If you tell me what you want, I will tell you straight whether I can do anything. If I don't like it, the matter shan't go beyond me."

"Very well, then, I will tell you exactly what we want. We believe that the will is still there, and we believe that if some one in the house were to make a thorough search it might be found. It is right that it should be found, and that the property should go to those to whom Mr. Penfold left it, and who are now being kept out of it by the Miss Penfolds. I am very much interested in the matter, because it is my son who is being cheated out of his rights; and I have made up my mind to find the will. Now, what I want to know is, do you think that one of the housemaids would be willing to give up her place and introduce me as her successor, if I gave her twenty-five pounds? That would be a nice little sum, you know, to begin housekeeping with."

Mrs. Conway saw at once by the expression of the young carpenter's face that she had secured him as an ally.

"I think that might be managed, ma'am," he said in a tone that showed her he was endeavoring to hide his gladness. "Yes, I think that could be managed. There is certainly a young woman at the Hall—" and he stopped.

Mrs. Conway helped him. "I may tell you, Mr. Johnson, that the foreman hinted to Mr. Tallboys that he thought you and the upper housemaid were likely one of these days to come together, and that is principally why we spoke to you instead of to one of the others who were there. We thought, you see, that she might probably be leaving her place one of these days, and that perhaps this twenty-five pounds might enable you and her to marry earlier than you otherwise would have done. In that case, you see, it would suit us all. You and she would, moreover, have the satisfaction of knowing that you were aiding to right a great wrong, and to restore to those who have been defrauded the property Mr. Penfold intended for them. What do you say?"

"Well, ma'am, I think that, as you say, it would be doing the right thing; and I don't deny that Martha and I have agreed to wait a year or two, till we could save up enough between us for me to start on my own account; for as long as I am a journeyman, and liable to lose my work any day, I would not ask her to come to me. But what with what we have laid by, and this money you offer, I think we might very well venture," and his radiant face showed the happiness the prospect caused him.

"Very well, then. We may consider that as settled," Mrs. Conway said. "What I want is for you to tell your Martha that she is to give notice to leave at once, and that if she has an opportunity she is to mention to Miss Penfold that she has a friend who is out of place at present, and whom she is sure will suit. Of course as she will say that she is going to leave to be married, Miss Penfold cannot be vexed with her, as she might be otherwise, and may take her friend on her recommendation."

"But suppose she shouldn't, ma'am," and the young carpenter's face fell considerably at the thought, "where would Martha be then?"

"I shall pay the money, of course," Mrs. Conway said, "whether I get the place through her or not. I should think that Miss Penfold will very likely be glad to be saved the trouble of looking for another servant. But, if not, I must try some other way to get the place."

"What name am I to say her friend has?"

"Let me think. Ann Sibthorpe."

"But suppose she asks about where her friend has been in service, ma'am, and about her character?"

"We will settle that afterward. The first thing to do is for you to go over and see her, and ask her if she is willing to leave and do this."

"I think I can answer for that, ma'am," the young carpenter said with a quiet smile.