Jane Rodgers was a coward, and like many uneducated people extremely superstitious. The sound came from the room where she had left her mistress about half an hour before, "looking," as she had expressed it, "rather queer." She was the only person in the room; the sound had come from a heavy fall. It must, then, have been Mrs. Grey herself who had fallen. Had the trouble crushed her utterly? Was she dead? The bare supposition sent every particle of blood from Jane's face. She turned as pale as death. There rose up, in a grim host before her mind, some of the many ghost-stories that are the terror of the ignorant. If she were dead she would certainly return again to haunt the unfaithful servant, for Jane had a vague idea that death could clear up mysteries. And in what form would the injured lady come? Perhaps every evening at nightfall that sound of heavy falling would be heard, only muffled and terror-laden; perhaps as a sheeted ghost she would haunt the bedside of her unfaithful servant; perhaps—But Jane could scarcely bear to conjecture further; even certainty, however dreadful, would be better than this vague sense of horror.
With a hand made tremulous by fear she lit a candle. From Ajax downward human nature is the same. Whatever be the danger, darkness gives it an added horror. Jane Rodgers with her candle in her hand felt much braver than Jane Rodgers in the dark.
She paused for a moment on the threshold of Mrs. Grey's sitting-room, and applied first her ear and then her eye to the keyhole. Her ear told her that there was within the room a silence as of death; her eye could distinguish nothing through the gloom. In her superstitious horror she was on the point of running away from the door and from the house, but there came another dim perspective of future uneasiness to delay her.
If the lady were indeed dead—and Jane had almost come to this conclusion—it was a fact that could not be hidden. Her body would be found, then the neighbors would talk, the inquest would follow, and the cross-examination about her own whereabouts, as the landlady and servant, at the time of the accident. How would she be able to stand this? Then, if it should be found out that she, the pattern of strong-mindedness, she who talked in the village about her experience and knowledge of the world, who was known far and near as a person equal to any emergency—that she had turned tail like a frightened dog and fled from imaginary dangers, how would she bear the ridicule and contempt of her fellows?
These last considerations decided her; she opened the door of her mistress's sitting-room and peered in cautiously.
What she saw realized for the moment her worst fears. Margaret was stretched on the carpet rigid and motionless, her hands were clenched, her feet were drawn up under her; the attitude was that of one who had suddenly yielded in a struggle with dire agony.
Shading her candle with her hand, for the night-winds were sweeping through the room, and with a face almost as white as that she looked on, Jane Rodgers crept near to the prostrate lady. Jane had seen something of illness, and in her days of domestic service had been considered a good nurse; indeed, she had looked, and looked unflinchingly, on the face of death itself more than once in her life. What alarmed her so much on this occasion was the attendant circumstances, which had called into play the cowardly and superstitious side of her nature. The white face of her wronged mistress seemed to call for vengeance, while something whispered to Jane that the vengeance would come, and in a terrible form.
But as she drew near to Margaret her terror grew less. Her experienced eye, as soon as she was sufficiently herself to look at the matter calmly, told her that this was not death, but only a kind of fainting-fit, produced probably by strong mental excitement. Her first feeling was one of intense relief—her second, of indignation against the unconscious cause of her alarm.
"A body would think," she muttered, "that she'd done it a purpose."
As she spoke she lifted the fainting lady—without much difficulty, for Margaret had grown very thin, and Jane's physical strength was extraordinary—and laid her on the bed in the next room. Then with some roughness she proceeded to use the various remedies—splashed water in unnecessary quantities into her mistress's face, and rubbed Margaret's soft palms with her bony fingers.