The Man of Gold (5 page)

But neither of them was to be seen on the ground floor.

Had they gone down to the basement? They must have done. But what could they have in mind? Visiting the larder to see if there was anything to eat there? Their dinner had been meagre enough, and perhaps they had reckoned that by now Mrs Meggs would be safely asleep. She hardly blamed the girls if this was their object, though she must not let them see that when she caught them.

She hurried on down the stone steps leading to the basement, blowing out her candle and taking more care now not to be heard. If the children were to be caught it was better to catch them fully in the act.

But when she did come across the twins, bending over something on the stone-flagged floor near the door to the back of the house, two thin white shapes in their bed-gowns, a guttering stub of candle illuminating them, she experienced a shock of utter surprise.

The children had managed to lever up a flagstone, apparently much thinner than its fellows, and had revealed a shallow sunken pit. And in the pit there gleamed pile upon pile of golden sovereigns.

For several long moments Miss Unwin, the cold of the basement flagstones striking her feet through the felt of her slippers, stood staring between the twins’ thin curved backs at the pit of glowing gold revealed by their candle stub.

So the girls had not been inventing when they had told her that their grandfather had heaps of gold and that they knew where it was. So in this chill and miserable house there was the wherewithal to lead lives of decent comfort, of luxury even.

But she could not go on standing there looking, and thinking.

‘Girls,’ she said sharply.

Louisa screamed. Maria gasped.

‘Well, what are you doing down here at this hour of the night?’

Neither replied.

‘Well?’

‘Please, Miss Unwin,’ the quieter Maria said at last. ‘Please, we didn’t mean any harm.’

‘Then why did you come creeping down here?’

Louisa scrambled to her feet and gave her a mutinous glare.

‘We were hungry,’ she said.

‘Hungry, indeed? And were you going to eat your grandfather’s coins?’

‘No, Miss,’ Maria said. ‘But we were going to take one, only one.’

To take one is almost as bad as taking a hundred. You
know they are not yours. You know that it is wrong to steal.’

‘But we were hungry, Miss,’ Louisa broke in. ‘I don’t mean just hungry tonight, though we were, but we’re hungry almost all the time.’

‘So what we were going to do,’ added Maria, ‘was to take just one of Grandpapa’s sovereigns, and then, as we go out for walks now that you’ve come to look after us. Miss, we were going to go into a sweetshop and buy some nice things.’

It was then, just before Miss Unwin was going to utter a second stern rebuke and to mention punishment, that Louisa added some words that kept her silent.

‘We’ve never been to a sweetshop, Miss.’

Miss Unwin’s heart melted. Her own earliest days had had no sweetshops in them. Indeed, one of her most vivid memories was of a little rich boy in a passing carriage throwing out a ‘gobstopper’, a big ball of layered sugars each in a different colour, and how she had rushed at it, picked it up all dust-covered from the road and had thrust it instantly into her mouth. In her mind now she tasted again the tongue-drying dust that had so quickly yielded to the unimagined delight of the sweet, sweet sugar.

But evidently Louisa and Maria had been deprived for all their lives of any such joy, and it was a joy that they were entitled to. It was a joy they were entitled to by those very piles of softly glowing sovereigns lying there under their eyes at this moment.

‘Put back that stone,’ she said with sharpness. ‘And if I ever suspect either of you of coming here again there will be the severest punishment. You understand?’

‘Yes, Miss.’

‘Yes, Miss Unwin.’

Two voices in hushed obedience, conscious of a note that they had not hitherto heard from her, a note of anger. Hastily between them the two slid and scraped the thin flagstone back into place again.

‘And now to bed with you both, at once.’

The scuttle of bare feet on the stone steps and two whiteclad figures disappearing, leaving their stub of candle guttering weirdly behind them. And Miss Unwin.

A Miss Unwin who was very thoughtful indeed.

The girls’ discovery, she realised, put her in a very difficult situation. It must be her duty to tell the guardian of this hidden gold that his secret had been discovered. She owed him that, beyond doubt. But she owed something, too, to Maria and Louisa, cruelly deprived as she now doubly knew them to be. Nor did she look forward to telling old Mr Partington what she nevertheless knew that she must. For someone who had hoarded all that wealth away to learn that its hiding-place was known might be an almost mortal blow. The giver of that blow was likely to receive a hard return, and the two innocents who had first made the discovery were likely to pay dear for it as well.

Yet next day, as soon as she had the least opportunity, she went to see the hoarder of those golden yellow sovereigns. She had decided before she fell asleep between the once-again cold sheets of her bed the night before that there would be no chance of finding old Mr Partington alone in the house itself. He was accustomed not to return in the evening from the pin works till shortly before the dinner hour. Once back, he spent the time in the dining room where there was a fire, the one which after that first day in the bitterly cold schoolroom she herself had insisted on having in the little parlour for the girls’ lessons having been scrupulously raked out by Mrs Meggs as soon as the lessons were over.

After their scanty dinner Mr Partington always sat on with his son in the dining room until the hour for tea. Then, once he had swallowed his extra large cup of Mrs Meggs’s extraordinarily weak brew, he went up to bed. In the mornings there was breakfast hurriedly eaten in the chill dining room and promptly afterwards out he would
go to immure himself in the works.

But Miss Unwin had gathered from Richard Partington that at the works his father spent all day in his own room. Richard himself, he had told her with that rueful smile of his, had a desk just outside its door with a high stool not very different from those of the clerks nearby busy copying letters and bills and keeping the ledgers up to date.

So, if old Mr Partington was to be bearded at all, in his room at the pin works it would have to be.

Miss Unwin gave him precisely one hour after the start of his day to read the letters that had come in by the post and to dictate his answers. Then she set off in her turn having given strict instructions to Louisa and Maria about the column in Butter’s
Spelling
that they were to get by heart in her absence.

She hoped that absence would not be long.

All she envisaged was going to the works, sending in to Mr Partington to say she had something serious to inform him of, making her confession and leaving at once. And she thought of what she would have to say as, somehow, a confession. Her own confession. Not a confession made by her on the part of Mr Partington’s granddaughters. She knew that the old man would feel it was deeply wrong of her, a stranger, to have learnt his secret. However much care she might take in the telling to make it clear that she had been in no way to blame for knowing that secret, the old miser would hate her for her knowledge.

Because his secret was, she realised with new force, a terribly shameful one.

Yet let him understand that she knew of it she must. It was her plain duty, whatever wrath it brought down on her head.

But, crossing the cobbled yard that separated the house from the works, it was all she could do to force herself to put one foot in front of the other.

She entered the tall red-brick factory through a narrow
door of heavy wood which opened with a groan as she gave it a tentative push. Inside, her ears were at once assaulted by the frenzied clatter of iron upon iron. In front of her, extending over the whole ground floor of the building, were the machines that pressed and twisted and forced together the little pins which had made Mr Partington his great fortune. His great fortune that, Miss Unwin now knew, must have almost all been converted into golden sovereigns and buried in the pit beneath the thin flagstone in the basement of the house. Buried there or, she suspected, in various other places in the house as well.

She was about to approach one of the operatives, head bent over his machine, ceaselessly watching its clattering cranks and moving wheels and from time to time pulling one of its long wooden-handled levers, when she noticed a flight of open wooden stairs leading to a large platform at first-floor level. Looking up, she saw that on the platform there were the ranged desks of the clerks, with other studiously bent heads at work.

She climbed up.

At the top, the clerk whose desk was nearest the stairs looked up from his laborious copying as her shadow fell across his page.

‘Can I help you, madam?’ he asked.

‘Yes, my name is Miss Unwin and I have come to see Mr Partington on a most urgent matter,’ she answered, feeling that unless she stated with as much force as she could that her business was pressing she would not be allowed to hinder the pin-works owner’s steady acquisition of yet more and more gold sovereigns to add to his hoard.

‘I will see if he is disengaged,’ the clerk said.

Miss Unwin inclined her head in acknowledgement.

The man went over to a partitioned-off part of the high, busy platform. Presumably behind it sat old Mr Partington.

Miss Unwin noticed then, with a certain relief, that Richard Partington’s somewhat larger high desk just outside the door of his father’s room was unoccupied. No doubt it was Richard’s duty sometimes to go about here and there seeing to business for the firm. She had not liked the idea of having to visit his father without telling him why she was entering the sanctum. But, had he questioned her or even raised an interrogative eyebrow, she would have been duty-bound to keep from him this secret of his father’s.

Just as she was duty-bound now, in one moment, more, to tell the aged miser that she knew it.

The Master will see you,’ the clerk said, returning.

Miss Unwin realised from the very way the clerk declined to look her full in the face that the old man inside had expressed, doubtless in highly vigorous terms, anger at anyone daring to break in on his business day. But he had said that he would see her. Curiosity, she knew, was a powerful force and she had counted on it.

She walked through the ranks of clerks’ desks. Not a head was lifted from the work in front of them. But one by one the scratching pens slowed in their tasks.

She knocked at the closed door of Mr Partington’s room.

‘Come in,’ she heard the old man bark drily.

She turned the wooden doorknob, pushed open the door and entered.

Her employer was sitting behind a dusty leather-topped desk, evidently on a chair specially raised higher than usual from the ground since his smallness of stature was no longer apparent. But the size of his large head was even more evident than usual. And the two extra large ears projecting from its fleshlessness seemed prepared more than ever to sift out the last shade of meaning, the least hesitation, in what she might have to say.

‘Well?’

There was no help for it now. No beating about the bush
would be possible. Not the quickest exchange of preliminary civilities.

She took a breath.

‘Mr Partington,’ she said, ‘I have to tell you that your granddaughters have discovered –’

She faltered then. But faltered only for an instant.

‘Have discovered what it is that lies beneath the flagstone near the basement door in the house.’

It was said. It was done. The words had been spoken. The knowledge that the old miser’s secret was a secret no more had been revealed.

Miss Unwin waited for the thunderbolt to descend.

Her words were received in silence.

She brought herself at last to lift up her gaze, which as she had spoken the unsayable thing she had not been able to raise higher than the paper-strewn surface of the desk in front of the old man. She looked now full and fair at the large white-domed head.

It seemed as if it had been in an instant turned to true stone. The eyelids above the cold eyes did not so much as blink. The lips, pale almost as the skin surrounding them, did not quiver. It was hard to detect any breath issuing from the tense nostrils.

Then, at last, there was a movement, a little forward jerk of that over-large head.

Miss Unwin was positively relieved to find that she had not in truth struck her employer dead.

‘Gold.’

The word now came out from between the hardly parted lips. It was only the one short syllable. But in it there was a world of desolation.

Miss Unwin began a rapid jabber of explanation, telling once again how she had heard mysterious noises in the house as she had lain in bed the night before, how she had tracked them down, what she had seen, what the twins had said by way of explanation.

And all the while, as she poured out the history which
she had gone over and over in her mind till she knew it as well as she knew the list of the names of the Kings and Queens of England, she was thinking.

What had made him do it? How could he over years and years have stored away coin after coin in that way? How could he have deprived his two little grandchildren of all that they might have had, even down to their never having so much as visited a sweetshop? How could he have deprived his own son of even the trifling amount of a cab fare so that he had been overcome with embarrassment in front of a prospective governess? How could he have deprived himself of food, warmth, clothes?

As she came towards the end of her recital she saw that into the old man’s eyes there was creeping again his look of habitual cunning. She welcomed it even. It was better far than the look of stony death that had greeted her first words.

When at last she had come to a breathless end the miser spoke.