Free The Man of Gold by Evelyn Hervey Page B

you.’
    It was a look of real gratitude that he gave her as she turned to go.
    Yet it was as nothing compared to the flood of realisation which spread over his open round face some half an hour later when, with the difficult business of telling Louisa and Maria of their loss and indeed making them appreciate that it was a loss completed, she informed him of the great wealth that lay literally under his feet.
    ‘Miss Unwin, Harriet, how – how can I thank you? To know so much, to have found it out. To have kept the secret, to tell it to me now, now that it can mean so much to me. I do not know how to thank you enough. Yes. Yes, by Jove, I do. Ask me for something, Miss Unwin, Harriet. Ask. Please ask. Ask for anything. Help me to show how grateful I am, shall always be. Yes, ask. Ask. Please ask.’
    The wild tumbling of words might have made Miss Unwin laugh aloud had the circumstances been otherwise. But she thought of the old man lying dead in the room above them. She thought how only an hour or so before he had been alive, though ill indeed. And she thought, too, that Richard Partington had been calling her Harriet. This was something he ought not to have done. She must be, she could never be otherwise to him than, plain Miss Unwin, governess.
    Whatever, in the clash of wild emotions that were meeting in him at this moment, he might imagine.
    ‘Mr Partington,’ she said with haste, ‘I do not ask you to believe me about what I have told you. It is in truth almost unbelievable. But come with me now and I will show you where I saw that hidden store of gold, where Louisa and Maria led me to it. Your father has been in no condition to remove it since the time he learnt from me that his secret was known.’
    ‘Yes. Yes. Show me. Please. But – but of course I believe you. You are a person I should never disbelieve.’
    ‘Come with me, Mr Partington,’ Miss Unwin replied, forcing herself to be stern almost as a gaoler.
    She led Richard Partington at once and hastily down to the basement and, recognising instantly the thin flagstone which she had watched her two charges replace in the late hours of the night only a week earlier, she knelt to raise it up.
    But hardly had she done so when a voice came harshly cackling out from behind her.
    ‘Thief. Thief. Stop that. Stop. Taking a sick man’s gold. Stop it, you thieves.’
    It was Mrs Meggs.
    She stood there in the doorway from the kitchen a more than ever malevolent figure, the eyes in her dark brown face glittering with fury, the sole bristly white hair jutting from her chin seemingly more prominent than ever.
    Miss Unwin realised then that in all the turmoil of old Mr Partington’s death, in her trouble over telling the two girls, in the complications of explaining what had happened to Captain Fulcher and his sister, in seeing them leave, dinnerless, neither she nor Richard had thought to tell Mrs Meggs in the kitchen, busy over the last preparations for their scanty meal, what had happened.
    ‘Mrs Meggs,’ Richard said now, ‘I must tell you that your Master is no longer alive. He died, quite suddenly, an hour since.’
    ‘You lie, you lie!’ the old woman screamed out. ‘Youthink you can rob him and pretend to me he is no more.’
    ‘Mrs Meggs,’ Richard said, ‘I assure you I am speaking the simple truth. My father is dead. Doctor Sumsion was here and witnessed his end.’
    ‘Yet you come to rob him before his breath is cool,’ the old woman shouted back. ‘I called you thief, and thief you are. You and that precious hussy of yours.’
    Miss Unwin had not realised until this moment that the bad-tempered and mean-minded old housekeeper was quite as devoted to her employer, despite the way she had made sure he ate meat when all the rest of the household had vegetables only, despite the extra large cup she always gave him when it was time for tea. But now she saw the full extent of the link between the two aged and miserly people. And she saw something