“I wish I could.”
“Jack, it’s only that of a broken-hearted woman, her way of expressing it, and nothing else. Yet in spite of that she’s a household treasure. Things do themselves; there’s no lost energy and no lost time. If Perkins could be duplicated in sufficient quantities she’d revolutionize domestic life in England.”
“It’s a pity she’s never married and started a new breed.”
Edith decapitated a surviving thistle. “That kind doesn’t marry very often. They’re born into the world without any desire for marriage, and perhaps it’s just as well in this case. She’d be working for her husband and not for us. Marriage,” she added quizzically, “isn’t the solution for everything.”
“But why do you say she’s broken-hearted?”
“Because of a queer thing that happened last night. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but you’re so unusually sensible to-day that it doesn’t matter. I was lying half awake last night, and seemed to hear some one talking at a little distance with no attempt at concealment, and quite loud, so I wasn’t nervous. It was a woman’s voice. I got up and prowled about and found it came from Perkins’s room. She was talking in her sleep in a queer, flat tone, talking very fast, apparently arguing with some one, greatly excited and rather desperate.”
“What was she saying?” put in Derrick sharply.
“That’s the strange part of it; I couldn’t understand a word. It was all in some strange liquid sort of language, ending in ‘ong’ and ‘yang’ and ‘ing,’ and sounds like that. Three or four times she said, ‘Master, master.’ That must have meant Mr. Millicent, to whom she was so devoted. All of a sudden it stopped, as though her brain had come back from its travels, and I heard nothing more. This morning I looked at her very closely, but not a line of her face had changed, and her eyes were just the same as ever. She had evidently been dreaming about Mr. Millicent’s death, and, Jack, that’s the biggest thing in her life now. She was dour and silent before; Mrs. Millicent said so to-day; and one can imagine what a tragedy like that must mean to a queer locked-up nature like hers.”
“Can’t you remember any of the foreign words she used?” he asked casually.
She frowned a little, thinking hard. “There were two that came quite often, more than any others, one something like ‘rumah,’ ‘sambayüng,’ and the other like ‘santari.’ That’s as near as I can get to it. Why do you ask?”