“You don’t care for me. You don’t think of my escape.”
He lifted his eyes from the bed, seeming suddenly to remember. Then he pulled her to him, kissed her with all the calm restraint of last night, smoothed her hair—petted her as if she were a startled bird. But all the time his eyes were turning to the bed. He treated her tenderly—as a pet thing who had narrowly missed destruction. But any pet was less than a woman. Gainah was a woman—the wreck of the woman who had been his mother, his mentor, his tyrant all his days. His eyes dwelt sorrowfully on the bed. Pamela pushed him to the door rather pettishly.
“We must get her undressed,” she said. “Egbert will be here soon. Tell Nettie to bring up a needle and thread. The tick must be sewn or we shall have the feathers all over the place.”
He went away reluctantly. When Pamela was alone she sat down on the edge of the sofa. Once she shrugged her shoulders and gave a cold short laugh of terror. Only last night she had been discontented because her return to Folly Corner had lacked the elements of drama. There had been tragedy brewing for her all the while.
Gainah was on her side, just as Jethro had left her. A gentle, almost imperceptible, vibration of her head was unceasing; it extended to her hands, which clutched round the edge of the blanket. She seemed to be slowly crawling back to some muffled kind of consciousness. Once, when her eyes met Pamela’s, the girl fancied that she saw a gleam of terror. In another moment she felt certain that Gainah recognized her, was abjectly afraid of her, was trying, in an agony and without the least avail, to slip down in the bed and get out of sight.
It was the monthly washing day. It had been the day of the monthly wash when Pamela first came to Folly Corner. She thought of that as she threw back the window and heard the rasping, spasmodic sound of the brush.
Nettie came up. Between them they took off Gainah’s clothes, divested her of her many flannel packings. Then Pamela went and looked for a nightgown. She opened all Gainah’s boxes and drawers in the search. She wanted a fairly smart nightgown—for the doctor. She rejected those of daily wear—coarse, plain things which any self-respecting housemaid would disdain—narrow things, like bolster-cases with the bottoms out.
She found, at last, a parcel sewn in linen. On it was pinned a paper with the words, written in an uncertain, illiterate hand:
She hesitated—for sentimental reasons. Then—for practical reasons, and the practical was usually uppermost with her when it came to other people’s affairs—she unpinned the parcel. Woman’s pity for another woman touched her heart as she flipped the carefully-made nightgown, of fair, thin stuff, over her arm.