“This is Miss Mary Pask’s house?”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice—a very old voice—was pleasant enough, unsurprised and even friendly.
“I’ll tell her,” she added, shuffling off.
“Do you think she’ll see me?” I threw after her.
“Oh, why not? The idea!” she almost chuckled. As she retreated I saw that she was wrapped in a shawl and had a cotton umbrella under her arm. Obviously she was going out—perhaps going home for the night. I wondered if Mary Pask lived all alone in her hermitage.
The old woman disappeared with the candle and I was left in total darkness. After an interval I heard a door shut at the back of the house and then a slow clumping of aged sabots along the flags outside. The old woman had evidently picked up her sabots in the kitchen and left the house. I wondered if she had told Miss Pask of my presence before going, or whether she had just left me there, the butt of some grim practical joke of her own. Certainly there was no sound within doors. The footsteps died out, I heard a gate click—then complete silence closed in again like the fog.
“I wonder—” I began within myself; and at that moment a smothered memory struggled abruptly to the surface of my languid mind.
“But she’s dead—Mary Pask is dead!” I almost screamed it aloud in my amazement.
It was incredible, the tricks my memory had played on me since my fever! I had known for nearly a year that Mary Pask was dead—had died suddenly the previous autumn—and though I had been thinking of her almost continuously for the last two or three days it was only now that the forgotten fact of her death suddenly burst up again to consciousness.
Dead! But hadn’t I found Grace Bridgeworth in tears and crape the very day I had gone to bid her good-bye before sailing for Egypt? Hadn’t she laid the cable before my eyes, her own streaming with tears while I read: “Sister died suddenly this morning requested burial in garden of house particulars by letter”—with the signature of the American Consul at Brest, a friend of Bridgeworth’s I seemed to recall? I could see the very words of the message printed on the darkness before me.