“I’ll tell you all about it, presently,” whispered Celia Blang; but not in such a low voice but that the indignant Miss Furness overheard her.
“You will do nothing of the kind,” said the cross old maid, “and I desire that you instantly go back to your seat. If you know anything, you will be silent—silence is golden. Such things are not to be talked about, Miss Blang.”
Celia made a grimace behind her back, although she was said to be Miss Furness’s spy, and supposed to tell her everything; so Patty’s curiosity remained unsatisfied, while of course I pretended to know nothing at all about what had been going on.
Directly after breakfast, though, Patty had it all by heart, and came red-hot to tell me how that Clara had been caught trying to elope out of the conservatory, whilst Ann was talking from the tall staircase window, when Miss Sloman happened to hear a whispering—for she was lying awake with a bad fit of the toothache. So she went and alarmed the lady principal; and then, with Miss Furness and the Fraülein, they had all watched, and they found it out. Some one, too, had been in the tank, and the conservatory windows were broken, and that was all, except that Mrs Blunt had been writing to Lady Fitzacre—Clara’s mamma—and the poor girl was to be expelled; while for the present she was to be kept in her room till her mamma came, unless she would say who was the gentleman she was about to elope with—such stuff!—and then, if she would confess, she was to sit with Mrs Blunt, under surveillance, as they called it. When, leaving alone betraying the poor Signor, of course Clara preferred staying in her own room.
Such a miserable wet morning, and though I wanted to, very badly indeed, I could not get into the conservatory to set my poor mind at rest by poking down into the cistern with a blind lath; for if I had gone it might have raised suspicions.
Could he still be in the tank, and were my dreams in slumber right?
“Oh, how horrible!” I thought; “why, I should feel always like his murderer.”
But, there, I could not help it—it was fate, my fate, and his fate—my fate to be his murderess, his to be drowned; and I would have given worlds, if I had had them, to be able to faint, when about eleven o’clock the cook came to the door, and asked Mrs Blunt, in a strange, mysterious way, to please come into the conservatory. For the man servant had not come back from the station, and taking Ann’s boxes.
“Oh, he’s there, he’s there!” I muttered, as I wrung my hands beneath the table, and closed my eyes, thinking of the inquest and the other horrors to come; and seeing in imagination his wet body laid upon the white stones in the conservatory.
Oh, how I wanted to faint—how I tried to faint, and go off in a deep swoon, that should rest me for a while from the racking thoughts that troubled me. But I could not manage it anyhow; for of course nothing but the real thing would do at such a time as this.