His lip curled, and for a minute he hesitated; then something in my aspect or the straight-forward look I gave him, softened him and he answered frankly, if coldly:
“Word has gone there, of course, but only the servants are affected by it so far. Miss Cumberland, the younger, is very ill, and the boy—I don’t know his name—has not shown up since last evening. He’s very dissipated, they say, and may be in any one of the joints in the lower part of the town.”
I stopped in dismay, clutching wildly at the railing of the stairs we were descending. I had hardly heard the latter words, all my mind was on what he had said first.
“Miss Carmel Cumberland ill?” I stammered, “too ill to be told?”
I was sufficiently master of myself to put it this way.
“Yes,” he rejoined, kindly, as he urged me down the very stairs I had seen her descend in such a state of mind a few hours before. “A servant who had been out late, heard the fall of some heavy body as she was passing Miss Cumberland’s rooms, and rushing in found Miss Carmel, as she called her, lying on the floor near the open fire. Her face had struck the bars of the grate in falling, and she was badly burned. But that was not all; she was delirious with fever, brought on, they think, by anxiety about her sister, whose name she was constantly repeating. They had a doctor for her and the whole house was up before ever the word came of what had happened here.”
I thanked him with a look. I had no opportunity for more. Half a dozen officers were standing about the front door, and in another moment I was bustled into the conveyance provided and was being driven away from the death-haunted spot.
I had heard the last whisper of those pines for many, many days. But not in my dreams; it ever came back at night, sinister, awesome, haunted with dead hopes and breathing of an ever doubtful future.
VII
CLIFTON ACCEPTS MY CASE
This hand of mine
Is yet a maiden and an innocent hand,
Not painted with the crimson spots of blood.
Within this bosom never enter’d yet
The dreadful motion of a murd’rous thought.