“May I say a word?” Mrs. Mosey inquired. She entered the room—pale and trembling. Seeing that ominous change, Emily dropped back into her chair.
“Dead?” she said faintly.
Mrs. Mosey looked at her in vacant surprise.
“I wish to say, miss, that your aunt has frightened me.”
Even that vague allusion was enough for Emily.
“You need say no more,” she replied. “I know but too well how my aunt’s mind is affected by the fever.”
Confused and frightened as she was, Mrs. Mosey still found relief in her customary flow of words.
“Many and many a person have I nursed in fever,” she announced. “Many and many a person have I heard say strange things. Never yet, miss, in all my experience—!”
“Don’t tell me of it!” Emily interposed.
“Oh, but I must tell you! In your own interests, Miss Emily—in your own interests. I won’t be inhuman enough to leave you alone in the house to-night; but if this delirium goes on, I must ask you to get another nurse. Shocking suspicions are lying in wait for me in that bedroom, as it were. I can’t resist them as I ought, if I go back again, and hear your aunt saying what she has been saying for the last half hour and more. Mrs. Ellmother has expected impossibilities of me; and Mrs. Ellmother must take the consequences. I don’t say she didn’t warn me—speaking, you will please to understand, in the strictest confidence. ‘Elizabeth,’ she says, ‘you know how wildly people talk in Miss Letitia’s present condition. Pay no heed to it,’ she says. ‘Let it go in at one ear and out at the other,’ she says. ‘If Miss Emily asks questions—you know nothing about it. If she’s frightened—you know nothing about it. If she bursts into fits of crying that are dreadful to see, pity her, poor thing, but take no notice.’ All very well, and sounds like speaking out, doesn’t it? Nothing of the sort! Mrs. Ellmother warns me to expect this, that, and the other. But there is one horrid thing (which I heard, mind, over and over again at your aunt’s bedside) that she does not prepare me for; and that horrid thing is—Murder!”
At that last word, Mrs. Mosey dropped her voice to a whisper—and waited to see what effect she had produced.
Sorely tried already by the cruel perplexities of her position, Emily’s courage failed to resist the first sensation of horror, aroused in her by the climax of the nurse’s hysterical narrative. Encouraged by her silence, Mrs. Mosey went on. She lifted one hand with theatrical solemnity—and luxuriously terrified herself with her own horrors.
“An inn, Miss Emily; a lonely inn, somewhere in the country; and a comfortless room at the inn, with a makeshift bed at one end of it, and a makeshift bed at the other—I give you my word of honor, that was how your aunt put it. She spoke of two men next; two men asleep (you understand) in the two beds. I think she called them ‘gentlemen’; but I can’t be sure, and I wouldn’t deceive you—you know I wouldn’t deceive you, for the world. Miss Letitia muttered and mumbled, poor soul. I own I was getting tired of listening—when she burst out plain again, in that one horrid word—Oh, miss, don’t be impatient! don’t interrupt me!”
Emily did interrupt, nevertheless. In some degree at least she had recovered herself. “No more of it!” she said—“I won’t hear a word more.”
But Mrs. Mosey was too resolutely bent on asserting her own importance, by making the most of the alarm that she had suffered, to be repressed by any ordinary method of remonstrance. Without paying the slightest attention to what Emily had said, she went on again more loudly and more excitably than ever.
“Listen, miss—listen! The dreadful part of it is to come; you haven’t heard about the two gentlemen yet. One of them was murdered—what do you think of that!—and the other (I heard your aunt say it, in so many words) committed the crime. Did Miss Letitia fancy she was addressing a lot of people when you were nursing her? She called out, like a person making public proclamation, when I was in her room. ‘Whoever you are, good people’ (she says), ‘a hundred pounds reward, if you find the runaway............