"Do you think Mr. Castle is well enough to be moved, yet?" Leah ventured.
"Didn't I say he was going down-stairs?" Miss Fielding repeated impatiently. "I think we can decide that question. You do as I say. Go and get Uncle Jerdon, and be quick about it, too!"
"She's spoiled. She thinks she runs this house," Miss Fielding complained to me, when Leah had left.
I said nothing, watching her closely. My theory was now pretty well substantiated. I could not pass this scene off as merely one of the "moods" that she and Leah had both mentioned. There was something definitely wrong with Miss Fielding to-day—something more than a mere whim of temper. There had been something wrong two days before, when she had acted similarly. She was distinctly not herself, if her normal self was the graceful, delicate, tactful creature who had first charmed me.
It was not only her mood or her taste in costume that seemed different. It was something not quite describable which seemed to permeate her whole personality. She had taken a chair and sat with her right arm cast up over the back. The angle of her raised elbow threw her into a distinctly awkward position. Her gestures, too, were characteristic of this mysterious difference. When they were not distinctly imitative, as in mimicking Uncle Jerdon's table-manners, they were irrelevant, mere spasmodic exhibitions of activity—as when she caught the fly, or swung her arms with active tennis-like gestures. This spontaneous irrelevancy she showed now in the way she doubled her fists and brought them athletically to her shoulders, as she talked, or, raising her foot a little, made circles with her toe, showing the slenderness and suppleness of her ankle. I don't say that all this ebullition of high spirits wasn't, in its way, charming. It was. But it was different from the way she had acted yesterday. Perhaps I can best describe it by saying that she seemed quite ten years younger.
She sprang up and, apropos of nothing at all, proceeded to dance or hop sidewise across the room and back hilariously, in sheer excess of vigor. It was what she called "galumphing," and, from time to time, during the day, usually at the end of some little over-serious conversation, she repeated the performance, to my great amusement and delight. It was the absurdly meaningless gamboling of a kid, but it was so delicious in its inconsequence that every time it provoked my laughter.
While we were talking nonsense there, Leah came up with Uncle Jerdon. Uncle Jerdon was distinctly a New England type—the chin-bearded, straw-chewing farmer, quaintly original, confident, droll. He was well on in years, a dried-up, wrinkled, toothless bachelor with sparse, straw-colored hair, long in the neck, and twinkling blue eyes full of good nature. He wore overalls and reeked of the stable.
Miss Fielding introduced him, and I shook his skinny hand.
"Wall," he drawled, "thinkin' abeout movin', be ye? I guess Leah an' me'll make a pretty good elevator. I'll help ye get dressed, fust-off, an' then we'll take ye up tenderly, lift ye with care."
The two women left while I got my clothes on. It felt good to leave the bed.