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"As dark as your pocket, and the wind heading us again from the old quarter." On the next day old Mazey, like the dogs, was kept downstairs in disgrace. On the day after, like the dogs again, he was reinstated in his privileges; and another change was introduced in the after-dinner formula.
The under-house-maids declared they were all behindhand and had not a minute to spare they suggested, not too civilly, that old Mazey had nothing on earth to do, and that he knew the house as well, or better, than he knew his A B C. Magdalen took the hint, with a secret indignation and contempt which it cost her a hard struggle to conceal.
While this problem was occupying the admiral's attention, Magdalen at last found the chance of examining her master's private apartments. Mazey, under the influence of drink, had deserted his post, and, with a basket of keys in her hands, Magdalen crept into the room where the admiral kept his papers. Drawer after drawer she opened, but nowhere could she find the secret trust.
I kept watch for the first two hours, and then Mr. Mazey took my place. After having been some little time in my own room, it occurred to me that the old man was hard of hearing, and that if his eyes grew at all heavy in the night, his ears were not to be trusted to warn him if anything happened. I slipped on my clothes again, and went back to Mr. Mazey.
When he had smashed the tiny spars, and snapped asunder the delicate ropes then, and not till then, the veteran admitted facts as they were, on the authority of practical evidence. "Ay! ay!" he used to say confidentially to himself, "the women are right. Drunk again, Mazey drunk again!"
Every motive of which she was conscious was a motive which urged her to leave the house secretly while the chance was at her disposal. She looked out into the passage, and called softly to old Mazey to come back. "I accept your offer thankfully, Mr. Mazey," she said. "You don't know what hard measure you dealt out to me when you took that letter from my hand.
Magdalen followed in the direction of the quavering voice, and found herself in a little room looking out on the back yard. There sat old Mazey, with his spectacles low on his nose, and his knotty old hands blundering over the rigging of his model ship. There were Brutus and Cassius digesting before the fire again, and snoring as if they thoroughly enjoyed it.
"What! you have been upstairs, you young jade, have you?" said old Mazey, looking up from his mug with a leer. Magdalen smiled and nodded. "Come! come! tell me," she said, coaxingly. "Why do you sleep outside the admiral's door?" "Why do you part your hair in the middle, my dear?" asked old Mazey, with another leer. "I suppose, because I am accustomed to do it," answered Magdalen.
She yielded as submissively, she trembled as helplessly, as the weakest woman living. Old Mazey dropped her arm, and pointed with drunken solemnity to a chair in an inner corner of the room. She sat down, still without uttering a word. "Come and be locked up!" said old Mazey, wagging his venerable head with judicial severity.
"Put your back ag'in this wall," said old Mazey, pointing to the long wall pierced at irregular intervals with windows looking out over a courtyard and fish-pond which formed the right-hand side of the corridor, as Magdalen now stood. "Put your back here," said the veteran, "and look straight afore you. What do you see?" "The opposite wall of the passage," said Magdalen. "Ay! ay! what else?"
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