The Man of Gold (6 page)

It is all that I have,’ he said, glancing up at her with patent slyness. Those few sovereigns stored away there. All that I have. It is best to keep them there in that fashion, you know. Banks are never to be trusted. Servants peep and peer into anybody’s bank book.’

Miss Unwin thought of the ‘servants’ in the house on the other side of the cobbled yard. Old Mrs Meggs, hardly able to read. Herself, perhaps. Though of course she was not a servant, the old man very likely considered her such. But she had been in the house only a few weeks, while that deep little pit of hidden sovereigns must have taken years to amass. Besides those in the other hiding-places elsewhere in the house which she was sure existed.

The thought of them must have manifested itself somehow in her expression. And the consumedly avaricious man looking up at her had at once seen that she had penetrated his next secret.

‘You know where they are?’ he barked out. ‘You have
poked and pried till you have found the others?’

‘No, sir. No. I would scorn to do anything of the sort. I have told you by what accident I came upon that one hiding-place. I have done nothing to seek out any more.’

Suddenly the little old man pushed himself to his feet, tumbling down from his high chair. His white skull of a face darkened to red anger such as Miss Unwin had not seen in all the time she had been in his house.

‘You lie!’ he screamed. ‘You lie. You lie.’

Then, as if even through his wild swirl of rage some old remnant of the caution with which up till now he had kept his fearful secret had returned, he dropped his voice to a fierce hoarse whisper and thrust himself forward nearer to her.

A wave of nauseating breath spumed out at her, and she saw, unpleasantly close, the line of yellowy irregular teeth, all loose in the oddly blue-looking gums.

She stepped back a pace.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I do not lie.’

She must have been able to convey in the words all the inner belief that they carried, because the old man slowly clambered back on to his chair.

‘There is very little there, there where you saw them,’ he said. ‘There is much less than it appears. The pit is shallow, very shallow. There cannot be more than fifty pounds there. Not even so much.’

Miss Unwin thought of the neat piles of softly glowing coins she had seen. The recess beneath the flagstone might not be all that deep but she had no doubt that each pile of sovereigns in it must contain fifty coins itself. And there had been too many piles to count before she had ordered the twins to slide back the stone that covered them.

But the old miser, she knew, needed to believe that his secret had not been wholly penetrated.

‘Yes, sir,’ she answered. ‘I am sure that the sum I believed I saw there may not be so very great. But
nevertheless I felt it my duty to tell you that the presence of even that much money in a place where it can be reached is known to your granddaughters. And to myself.’

The old man pushed his big hairless head forward half an inch.

‘Known,’ he said. ‘Known. Known to you, and to those children. Children will talk. Will talk. Will prattle. Cannot be silenced. ‘

‘Nevertheless, sir,’ Miss Unwin broke in on his almost incoherent muttering. ‘Nevertheless, I have spoken to the girls in a manner which I think they will not forget. I have told them that they should never have learnt what lies beneath that stone, that it is your particular secret for you to keep. I think they will not speak of it, to anyone, at any time.’

But even as she pronounced the words, which at the moment of utterance she believed to be entirely true, a thought rose up from some recess of her mind.

It presented itself as a picture. A curious picture. It showed two young girls, twins, dressed neatly but simply as she now saw to it that Louisa and Maria dressed, standing to either side of a person they should not have been associated with. The unmistakable roué, Captain Fulcher. Standing to either side of him, looking up laughingly, teasingly, and prattling away.

They had been doing, unusually for them, just what their grandfather had feared they might do at some future time, prattling and joking – and letting slip in all innocence something of the secret of his hoarded wealth.

Because there was a word that Miss Unwin heard in her mind to accompany this picture. There was innocent prattle in which the word ‘Gold’ had been said and repeated.

And the word had been said. Its speaking was not a fear for the future, but something done in the past and not to be undone. And it was, too, she thought, from the very
way it had been mentioned an old often repeated joke of the twins with which they had teased the Captain.

The Captain had been embarrassed by the laughing attack made on him. It had been plain to Miss Unwin the one time she had witnessed it that he was not a person used to children. He had no knowledge of the way to talk to the young. Indeed, she had said to herself at the time, the sort of people Captain Fulcher knows how to talk to are low jockeys and stableboys, the hangers-on at the racecourses from whom he hopes to gather information that may win him the bets he almost always speaks of as having lost.

But nonetheless he must have heard what the twins had prattled to him about. Have heard more than once indeed giggling boasts that if he had lost money at the racecourse they knew where there were piles and piles of gold to make him happy again. No doubt he had paid scarcely any attention to the hornet-like buzzings of the two children. He had plainly been relieved on the occasion Miss Unwin remembered when she had told the girls that they must not annoy a visitor and had whisked them away.

But still that word ‘gold’ had been spoken in his presence. Was it possible that he had later wondered whether the twins’ childish boasts concealed truth? Could he have asked them just where the gold they had laughingly spoken of was to be found? Or had he even made a point of listening at other times to the two of them talking together, have picked up some little hint passed from one to the other?

Did he, too, know Mr Partington’s secret?

Was this the reason that he had thought it worthwhile to make his attempt, at once seen to be hopeless, to borrow from his aged cousin in order to pay off the moneylender, Mr Davis? Or, worse, far worse, was this the reason why no more had been heard of the plump Mr Davis? When the moneylender had burst in on them he had spoken of bills already a week overdue. But after that, so far as she
herself knew, he had no longer been pressing. Was it possible that Captain Fulcher had ‘borrowed’ what he needed from one of Mr Partington’s hoards? And what if the old man should discover that he had?

She dared not suggest to him now that the Captain, too, might know his secret. He had taken the news that she and the twins had learnt it badly enough. To find that a man like Jack Fulcher had some idea of the existence of all that gold might be the death of him indeed.

‘Well, sir,’ she said, wondering how long she had stood in front of him lost in these thoughts. ‘Well, sir, I have told you what I have learnt, as I thought my duty. May I add just this? That I trust you will see to it that the money there, such as it is, is removed to another place which neither myself nor Maria nor Louisa know of, and that I shall do my best to forget that I ever saw what I did.’

This last, however, was a promise she knew she could hardly keep. The sight of those piles and piles of sovereigns glinting in the flickering light from the girls’ stub of candle was not something she could easily banish from her mind.

But she would try to act as if she had. That at least she could do.

The old man made no reply.

She turned to go.

Her hand was on the wooden knob of the door when from behind her she heard a croak of sound, hardly a spoken word. She looked back.

‘Miss.’

That was what the old miser had forced from between those loose and yellowy teeth.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘There is something I – Something I wish to say.’

The words were whispered, hoarsely whispered and hardly audible. Little though she liked doing it, Miss Unwin took a chair and placed it up close to Mr Partington’s desk. She sat and leant forward till she was in
a position to hear clearly what it was the old miser might have to say – and to receive in its full unpleasantness the whiff of his breath from those dark blue gums.

She listened intently.

‘How did it come about? How? How did it happen?’

With a lurch of dismay she realised that, far from herself coming to the miser with a confession for which he would dart his fiercest anger at her, she was on the point of hearing a confession from him.

It could be nothing else. The words whispered in foul breath across the scuffed leather of the desk were searching, self-searching.

Every question that she had asked herself about the old man must be echoing now in his own head. How had he brought himself to deprive his own son of even a shilling to pay a governess’s cab fare? How could he keep his grandchildren in such unnecessary penury that they had never in the nine years of their existence so much as entered a sweetshop? How could he half-starve himself and his dependants in the way that he did?

Would she hear the answers to those questions now?

Miss Unwin made herself sit as still as she might wish of any of her pupils on their best behaviour and waited to hear what the old miser would have to say. She feared she was going to have to listen to an account she would rather not have to hear. During every meeting with her employer in the days to come she would have the knowledge of his utmost weakness in her mind. And he would have the knowledge that she knew in his.

But there was no escaping. The old man had embarked on his confession and all she could do was to hear him out as self-effacingly as possible.

‘How did it happen? How did I come to this? I was a happy man once. Yes, I see you shake your head in disbelief.’

Miss Unwin had not moved so much as a muscle.

‘I see you shake your head in disbelief, but once, years ago, many years ago, I was as happy a man as you could find in all London, a carefree happy fellow. And in the full first flush of delightful married life.’

The old man fell silent.

Miss Unwin sat on, unmoving as a painted picture. She had learnt in bitterness in her earliest workhouse days the value of sitting so still that watchful eyes passed on over her, and she had lost nothing of the trick.

But she thought. She realised that never once in the weeks she had spent as governess of Richard Partington’s children had she asked herself what Richard’s own mother had been like. Old Mr Partington, that grotesque figure with the short, wasted body and the huge looming
head, had seemed to her somehow a creature who had always existed in the form that she daily saw him. Despite the evidence of his son, hale and hearty, she had not once wondered how Richard had come into the world.

And now, with absolute unexpectedness, she was being given an account of the long ago marriage that had produced, not another monster, but a son of charm and modesty.

‘She died,’ the old miser suddenly resumed, in his dreadful breathy whisper. ‘She had carried to full time our first-born, the babe I knew would be my son. And within a day of his birth she lay dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.’

Abruptly under the mask of her stillness Miss Unwin felt her heart bound in sympathy. In sympathy for the impossibly mean man who had systematically made her life a shiveringly cold and hungry torment ever since she had entered his house. In sympathy for the man who had not only made her life so chill and drab but had made the lives of her two young charges, those creatures endowed with hope and liveliness, equally chill, equally drab. But the thought that not only had his loved wife died in giving birth to his only son but that that son’s wife had in turn died in giving birth to the twins struck at her now till she felt the tears ready to gush.

Yet she held them back. She knew she must. Soon the old man who was recalling his early misery to her would regret with redoubled sharpness that he had ever spoken. Now all she could do to make him doubt at any future time just how much he had bared his soul was to sit and will herself into immobility, into nothingness.

‘Yes,’ the old miser went on. ‘Yes, the wife of my delight died. And, if you will believe me, until that day I had not thought of a future at all. Young, foolish as I was I had lived as if nothing would ever change. As if happiness was a thing that lasted. As if it was not such as to be blasted to mere shards in a moment.’

Miss Unwin sat and listened and willed herself yet more into immobility.

‘But I came away from that death bed with my lesson learnt,’ the old man continued. That much I will say for myself. I did not take long to learn that hard, hard lesson. And I resolved at that hour, at that very minute, that what I could do to protect myself from such another blow I would do. Yes, illness could strike at me. The cholera. The influenza. But from all which prudence could save me I would be saved. And you know, do you not, what is the one thing that can protect? The one thing?’

Till then he had been communing not with any person in that cramped room but with a ghostly confessor, perhaps in his mind. But at this question he turned to Miss Unwin, statue-still on the chair beside his desk, and put the words to her with entire directness.

She knew then that she had to answer. She had to acknowledge that she herself was indeed present. Was present to be remembered ever afterwards.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. ‘I suppose I do know what it is that you will believe will protect you from such troubles as we can be protected from. It is gold, is it not? The gold you have stored away?’

The old man looked at her, his eyes once again taking on their look of malevolent cunning.

‘You know where it is,’ he said softly. ‘You know.’

Miss Unwin felt herself in danger then. In danger as surely as if at the Zoological Gardens she had stepped somehow into a cage of snakes.

‘Sir,’ she said, ‘it is true that I did by a fearful mischance come upon some of the gold you feel to be so necessary to you. But I have asked you to move that wealth to some other place of concealment, and I know that you will do so and that I shall no longer have the least inkling of your secret.’