Some lean, nervous temperaments, once fairly excited, and in presence of a substantial cause of uneasiness, are very hard to reduce to composure. After she had got back again, Mildred Tarnley fidgeted and turned in her bed, and lay in the dark, with her tired eyes wide open, and imagining, one after another, all sorts of horrors.
She was still in her clothes; so she got up again, and lighted a candle, and stole away, angry with herself and all the world on account of her fussy and feverish condition, and crept up the great stairs, and stealthily reached again the door of the “old soldier’s” room.
Not a sound, not a breath, could she hear from within. Gently she opened the door which no longer resisted. The fire was low in the grate; and, half afraid to look at the bed, she raised the candle and did look.
There lay the “Dutchwoman,” so still that Mrs. Tarnley felt a sickening doubt as she stared at her.
“Lord bless us! she’s never quite well. I wish she was somewhere else,” said Mrs. Tarnley, frowning sharply at her from the door.
Then, with a little effort of resolution, she walked to the bedside, and fancied, doubtfully, that she saw a faint motion as of breathing in the great resting figure, and she placed her fingers upon her arm, and then passed them down to her big hand, which to her relief was warm.
At the touch the woman moaned and turned a little.
“Faugh! what makes her sleep so like dead? She’d a frightened me a’most, if I did not know better. Some folks can’t do nout like no one else.” And Mildred would have liked to shake her up and bid her “snore like other people, and give over her unnatural ways.”
But she did look so pale and fixed, and altogether so unnatural, that Mrs. Tarnley’s wrath was overawed, and, rather uneasily, she retired, and sat for a while at the kitchen fire, ruminating and grumbling.
“If she’s a-goin’ to die, what for should she come all the way to Carwell? Wasn’t Lonnon good enough to die in?”