CHAPTER XVIII
A SILVER CHALICE
With knees trembling and lips quivering, Katy hastened across the Hartman lawn. She was still smarting too hotly from the shock of her loss and the shame of discovery to realize how great a burden had been lifted from her shoulders by the mere sharing of her secret. Poor Alvin seemed meaner than he was, her association with him criminal, herself imbecilic. She remembered his touch with loathing, his beseeching gaze with disgust. She thought of his father, with his queer, glancing eyes, his muttering, his praying. It was no wonder that David Hartman despised them. She saw herself through David's scornful eyes; she remembered the outrageous struggle at the Sheep Stable; she could have sunk through the ground in her distress.
But David had been avenged. Against her new madness of affection Katy was still struggling. By night she dreamed of David, by day she thought of David. Her care of Cassie, her sweeping and cleaning of the great house, had become labors of love.
"I do not think even any more of education," mourned Katy in her alarm. "I am at last quite crazy."
She hurried now into the Hartman kitchen, alarmed because she had been so long away. Cassie grew daily worse, a little less able to make the journey from her bed to the settle in the kitchen, a little more preoccupied, a little more silent. Katy's attentions troubled her, she did not like to have a hand laid upon her shoulder or an arm thrown round her. Once, when she had insisted upon going about the house, she had fainted, and Katy had sent in terror for the doctor, and Cassie had been put to bed in her little room. When she had recovered in a measure, she told Katy where she would find in the drawers of one of the great bureaus certain clothes for her laying away. It was not a cheerful position which Katy held!
To-day Cassie had stayed in her bed, her cheek on her hand, her eyes closed. Often she lay thus for hours. She did not seem to think, often she did not seem to breathe. The atrophy of Cassie's mind and heart were almost complete.
Katy, opening the door softly, so as not to rouse Cassie if she slept, found the kitchen as she had left it, dark and silent and warm. She did not stop to take off the scarlet shawl which she had worn when she went to satisfy herself that her hoard was still in the putlock hole, but climbed at once the steep, narrow stairway which led to the rooms above. Her body ached for rest, but there was still bread to be set and the fire to be fixed for the night. There awaited Katy, also, a more difficult experience than these.
Upstairs, also, all was dark and quiet. Katy tiptoed across the hall to look in upon the invalid. With hands resting on the sides of the door, she peered in. She could see the outlines of the bureau and the narrow bed; she thought that she heard the even, regular breathing of the sleeper, and she was about to turn and go down the steps. Then a startling suspicion halted her. The bedcovers seemed to hang straight and even to the floor, the pillows to stand stiffly against the headboard; there was, after all, it seemed suddenly to Katy, no sound of breathing. For an instant she clung to the door frame, her back to the room, then she turned slowly and compelled herself to take the few short steps to the bed. There she felt about with her hands. The covers were smooth; instead of the hand or cheek of Cassie Hartman, she touched the starched ruffles of a fresh pillowcase.