The effect which habit produces upon a coarse nature, was repulsively visible here. The woman stood within a narrow path, over which the dead-house flung its repulsive shadow. On the other side the moonbeams fell, grim and ghastly, revealing double rows of rough pine coffins, lifted endwise, and arranged in hideous proximity, so far as the dim light would permit her to see.
Thus between these hollow receptacles prepared for the dead, and death itself, the woman walked, the moonlight revealing the suggestive horror on one hand, while a dense shadow and a thick wall of stone shut out the real horror close by.
But what cared the hospital nurse for this? The coffins on her right, so glistening and ghastly, were nothing but a heap of pine boards fashioned in a fantastic shape to her. The building simply a grim pile of stone, which cast a convenient shadow for her to walk in. She rather resented the closeness of the atmosphere, but scorned to walk faster, and cast it off with a sort of defiant toss of the head, muttering that “she could stand anything, and wasn’t to be frightened by shadows, not she!”
Thus picking her steps leisurely, she went down this valley of death; and secure of not being discovered from the hospital windows, passed through a gate, in the wall near the water, which had most conveniently been left unlocked by the porter.
Once free of the hospital walls, Jane Kelly moved on with more resolution. An omnibus stood at its station on one of the avenues. She entered it, and seating herself in an extreme corner, subsided, to all appearances, into a state of passive indifference.
The omnibus heaved and rumbled on its way, receiving here and there a woman of the lower classes, or a half intoxicated man passing home to his family after a primary meeting or a reunion in some corner grocery.
The hospital nurse got out where Nassau Street verges from Chatham, and disappeared after walking half a dozen blocks down one of the cross streets. We find her again threading her way up through the darkness of a large building, divided into offices and rooms of various sizes, mostly untenanted at that hour of the night. The passages were profoundly dark; the staircase narrow, winding in and out with no regard to architectural rules; in some places considerably out of repair, while in others bits of coal and peanut husks crunched underfoot, and gave evidence of a general state of untidiness perceptible even in the dark.
At last the woman came to a wooden door, at which she paused. A gleam of light stole through a crevice over the threshold, and struggled around an iron key half turned in the lock. With this came a faint noise as of some person moving within.
Jane Kelly knocked at this door, rather timidly, as if she were a little uncertain about the place she sought.
There was no answer. But the noise of a moving chair, and a shuffle of feet as if approaching the door, kept Jane Kelly stationary. After some delay the door was partially opened and a face looked through.