"Sorry! tut! tut! tut! You ought to be getting better by this time, I should think!" said the Colonel, laying his finger on the pulse of Richard and looking up at vacancy as a Doctor has the habit of doing when he performs that very imposing (imposing upon whom?) operation. What was there in his glance, that met the eye of Joe Harris, as he did so—and gave her so plain a confirmation of her worst suspicions? What power is it that lets in the daylight on our darkest wishes and worst motives, just at the moment when we flatter ourselves that we have them more carefully hidden away in darkness than ever before? Joe was still at the window, where she had been joined by Bell, the latter already half-forgetful of her sick brother and eager to show some astounding purchase she had just made at one of the dry-goods palaces.
"There—go away, girls; you bother poor Richard with your chatter!" said Colonel Egbert, affecting great cordiality and a little familiarity. (The fact was, as may have been noticed, that Bell had spoken only five words aloud and Joe not a word, since the two had entered.) "Richard is not so well, I am afraid. I will sit by him awhile and you may go away and gabble to your heart's content."
"Just as you like," answered Isabella, doubling up a half-unrolled little package and preparing to go. "I have some little things to look after up-stairs. Will you go with me, Joe? Of course you are not going away until after dinner?"
"Humph! I do not know that I am going away at all!" said the wild girl, her words very different from her thought at the moment. "You are such nice people, and Dick is such an interesting invalid, and who knows—well, I will not speculate any more about that, in public, just yet! Yes, Bell, go up-stairs and attend to your finery; I am going down into the basement to ask Norah for two slices of bread-and-butter and the wing of a cold chicken!"
And away through the noiseless glass door buzzed Josephine, on her way to the basement, followed by Isabella on her way to the inner penetralia of the second floor; while Col. Egbert Crawford shied his fatigue-cap at the desk and drew up his chair to the side of the sofa occupied by the invalid. Isabella really went up-stairs, and for the purpose designated. Shame for Joe Harris, it must be said that while she really descended to the basement and made an inroad on Norah's larder to the extent of the wing of cold chicken and one slice of bread-and-butter, yet she thrust both the edibles into a piece of paper and into her pocket, at the imminent risk of greasing the latter convenient receptacle, and was back again on the parlor floor within the space of one and a half minutes by the little Geneva watch which she carried so bewitchingly at her belt. If mischief and sad earnest can both be blended in the expression of one face at one and the same time, they were so blended in hers at that moment. What was in the wind and who was to suffer?—for suffer somebody always did when Josey fairly started out on a campaign!
From the door leading to the basement, to that opening into the parlor from the hall, she probably stepped lighter than she had ever before done since playing blind-man's buff in early girlhood; and it is doubtful whether that parlor door had ever before opened and shut with so little noise, since the skilful hanger first oiled the plated hinges. From the door to the back part of the room she went on tip-toe—the fact cannot be denied,—little noise as her light shoes would have made on the heavy velvet. We all have something of the cat about us—man and the other animals; though the quality developes itself under different circumstances. Pussy treads even softer than usual, when after the coveted cream; that larger pussy, the tiger, steals lightly towards the ambushed hunter who is to furnish him the next delicious meal; and "Tarquin's ravishing strides" are undoubtedly a misnomer, for the Roman must have been something more or less than man if he did not tip-toe his sandals or cast them off altogether, when he stole towards the midnight bed of Lucrece.
The cream for which Pussy Harris—shame upon her for that same!—was just then making an adventurous foray,—was a hearing of the conversation which might take place between Richard Crawford and his cousin! That conversation she had determined to hear, at all hazards; for what, she scarcely knew herself, but with an undefinable impression that she must hear it—that (Jesuitically, and of course most horrible doctrine!) the end might justify the otherwise indefensible means—and that—that—in short, that she was going to do it, and this settled the matter as well as finished up the reason!
The piano stood on the left, passing down from the parlor door towards the rear of the room, and behind it was a small inlaid table covered with books, and a large easy chair designed for lazy reading. Any person in the chair would be within twelve inches of the glass doors and not over ten feet from the two men at the sofa in the little back room. Josephine distinctly heard, through the thin glass, the hum of their voices as she approached the table, but not many of the words were audible. Confound it!—she thought—her plan of sitting in the chair, pretending to read as a safeguard against possible detection, and overhearing by laying her head back against the door—this would never do. Time was pressing—finesse must give way to boldness; and in the sixteenth of a minute thereafter the sliding doors were softly parted by less than half an inch of space—too little to be readily noticed from the back room, which was the lighter of the two, and yet enough to see through if necessary, (but she did not intend to look,) and to hear through, which was the matter of first consequence. And there she stood—an eaves-dropper of the first order—a flush of shame and of half-conscious guilt on cheek and brow, and a wild, startled look in her eyes, such as a hare might show when listening for the second bay of the hound—liable to be caught by some one entering the parlor from the hall, or by the Colonel taking a fancy to enter the room for any purpose—and yet chained there, with her ear within an inch of the opening, as if present happiness and eternal salvation had both depended upon her keeping that position!
Could anything be more shameful?—anything more despicable? Was ever a heroine so placed, even by English romancers or French dramatists? And was not the long dissertation at the beginning of this chapter, to prove the applicability of the spy system to war time, an absolute necessity?
What might have passed precedently, while she was looking after the chicken and the bread-and-butter, Josephine had no means of divining. At the time of her assuming her post of observation, Richard Crawford was still lying back upon the sofa, and looking up; as he had been half an hour before when she was herself conversing with him. If the spasms had not ceased altogether, they were at least conquered by the will and concealed from the eyes of the Colonel, as they had not been from hers. The young girl thought she could detect, too, upon the face of the invalid, a less hopeless look, and some evidence of more determined insight in the glance, than she had marked for a considerable period. Colonel Egbert Crawford was sitting with his chair drawn up reasonably close in front of his cousin, and conversing eagerly with him, yet with his face partially turned away most of the time, and not meeting his gaze directly as most honest and earnest men do the observation of those with whom they converse on important subjects. Perhaps that disposition of the Colonel's face gave both his seen and his unseen listeners better opportunities for close study of his expression than they might otherwise have enjoyed.