“Oh, nothing—I only happened to be thinking that—that, perhaps—dear me! I never thought anything of the kind, only the neighbors, ma’am, might, from its suddenness, think it was something like cholera that took her off. If they do, what shall we servants say?”
“Say that you do not know; that will be right,” answered Mrs. Judson, struck with an idea that there might be safety in this supposition, yet unwilling to suggest a falsehood in words.
“Just as if we didn’t know all about it,” muttered Ellen, as she went down-stairs with the crape streamers in her hand. “Law! she might as well attempt to keep the wind from blowing as the whole neighborhood not finding out. The moment this is seen at the door, won’t we have calls from every basement in the block? Well, I haven’t told a word, anyhow.”
About half-past eleven that evening strange sounds were heard in that stately mansion. The tramp of heavy feet, and the smothered whispers of men carrying some burden up the broad staircase. This lasted a brief time; then the stealthy closing of a door, the rattle of wheels moving slowly down the street, and everything was still again. But all night long the gleam of a funeral light broke faintly through the imperfectly closed blinds of an upper chamber, where Jane Kelly sat, half asleep, watching by a coffin covered with black velvet, on which embossments and handles of silver gave out a faint glow, mournfully in keeping with the stillness and the shadows.
A lady, sitting alone in her chamber, heard these sounds with a shudder of mortal dread, and watched also, in bitter solitude; for sleep that night was impossible to her. The servants, high up under the French roof, whispered very seriously in their separate rooms; wondered, commented, and thought of going away in a body from the house, which might be dangerously infected. Early in the morning this excitement spread from basement to chamber, through the entire block; for long streamers of crape at Mrs. Judson’s door awoke general apprehension, and that day three families left the block, driven into the country by fear of the cholera, which had emanated in the mysterious hints of that prudent girl, Ellen.
That afternoon, a hearse with white plumes and a costly coffin, visible through the half-veiled crystal of its windows, drove slowly from the house, followed by a dozen carriages with the curtains down, most of them empty. Even Mrs. Judson’s popularity—joined to the pleasant remembrance of a fair young creature who had for a time been considered the sunlight of her home—could not induce the neighbors to brave their fears of infection in order to pay homage to the dead.
So the funeral cortege moved slowly away toward Greenwood, and the mystery of that young creature’s death was lost in the general apprehension of a disease which, about that time, was a word of terror in the land.
After this, a black-edged letter, written by a hand that shivered as it penned the words which were to give so much sorrow, went from that house to Europe; a few more were carried east and west. Then Mrs. Judson retired to her place in the country for a fortnight, while the gloom was swept away from the house.
CHAPTER XVI.
PARTING WITH THE CHILD.
Mary Margaret Dillon was about to leave the Institution. She had dressed her boy with great care, changed the hospital clothes for her own garments, and came to make a last call at Catharine Lacy’s bed.