Determined to know the cause of Mrs. Packard’s anguish, if not of Nixon’s unprovoked anger against myself, I caught him back as he was passing me and peremptorily demanded:
“What message did you carry to Mrs. Packard to throw her into such a state as this? Answer! I am in this house to protect her against all such disturbances. What did you tell her?”
“Nothing.”
Sullenness itself in the tone.
“Nothing? and you were sent on an errand? Didn’t you fulfil it?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t tell her what you learned?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“She didn’t give me the chance.”
“Oh!”
“I know it sounds queer, Miss, but it’s true. She didn’t give me a chance to talk.”
He muttered the final sentence. Indeed, all that we had said until now had been in a subdued tone, but now my voice unconsciously rose.
“You found Mr. Steele?”
“No, Miss, he was not at home.”
“But they told you where to look for him?”
“No. His landlady thinks he is dead. He has queer spells, and some one had sent her word about a man, handsome like him, who was found dead at Hudson Three Corners last night. Mr. Steele told her he was going over to Hudson Three Corners. She has sent to see if the dead man is he.”
“The dead man!”
Who spoke? Not Mrs. Packard! Surely that voice was another’s. Yet we both looked up to see:
The sight which met our eyes was astonishing, appalling. She had let her baby slip to the floor and had advanced to the stairs, where she stood, clutching at the rail, looking down upon us, with a joy in her face matching the unholy elation we could still hear ringing in that word “dead.”
Such a look might have leaped to life in the eyes of the Medusa when she turned her beauty upon her foredoomed victims.
“Dead!” came again in ringing repetition from Mrs. Packard’s lips, every fiber in her tense form quivering and the gleam of hope shining brighter and brighter in her countenance. “No, not dead!” Then while Nixon trembled and succumbed inwardly to this spectacle of a gentle-hearted woman transformed by some secret and overwhelming emotion into an image of vindictive delight, her hands left the stair-rail and flew straight up over her head in the transcendent gesture which only the greatest crises in life call forth, and she exclaimed with awe-inspiring emphasis: “God could not have been so merciful!”
It is not often, perhaps it is only once in a lifetime, that it is given us to look straight into the innermost recesses of the human soul. Never before had such an opportunity come to me, and possibly never would it come again, yet my first conscious impulse was one of fright at the appalling self-revelation she had made, not only in my hearing, but in that of nearly her whole household. I could see, over her shoulders, Letty’s eyes staring wide in ingenuous dismay, while from the hall below rose the sound of hurrying feet as the girls came running in from the kitchen. Something must be done, and immediately, to recall her to herself, and, if possible, to reinstate her in the eyes of her servants.
Bounding upward to where ............