"I say, you know Mrs. Peters, over at the brook! Well—she's dead."
"Dead!" echoed the girls, pausing in their work. "Why it was not a week ago that she was here."
"She's dead. They were laying her out when I came by just now. Some fever, they say, which took her off in no time; a catching fever, too. A mortal fright it put me in, to hear that; I shouldn't like to die yet awhile."
"If fever has broke out in the place, who knows but it's fever that has taken my lady!" exclaimed Emma, her stupid face alive with consternation: and the rest let their irons drop on their stands. "All our lives may be in jeopardy."
"Your places will be in greater jeopardy if you don't pay a little more attention to work, and leave off talking nonsense," called out the sharp voice of Mrs. Hill from the background. The servants started round at its sound, and the irons were taken up again.
CHAPTER XVI.
DISTURBED BY MRS. CHANDOS.
No candles yet in Lady Chandos's rooms, but a great flood of light in those of Mrs. Chandos. The commotion in the ironing-room, that followed on the discovered presence of Hill, had given me the opportunity to come away, and so exchange (not willingly) the gossiping cheerfulness of the back, for the dreary front of the house. I had nearly laughed aloud at those foolish servant-girls; nevertheless, in what they had said there was food for speculation. For when Harry Chandos was abed, sick with fever; when he was over in France, with the broad sea and many miles of land between him and his home; how could they have seen him, or fancied they saw him, in these dark walks, night after night, at Chandos?
Pacing the dark gravel-walk from wing to wing, glancing, as I passed each time, through the window-panes and the muslin curtains into the oak-parlour, where the solitary tea waited, I thought over it all, and came to the conclusion that, taking one curious thing with another, something was uncanny in the place. How long should I have to stay at it?—how long would it be before Emily de Mellissie came back to me?
The hall-door stood open, and the hall-lamp threw its light across the lawn in a straight line. It seemed like a ray of company amid the general dreariness. I took a fancy to walk along the pleasant stream, forgetting or unheeding the dew that might lie on the grass. On reaching the other side, I stood a moment at the top of the pine-walk, and then advanced a few steps down it.
Some one was there before me. A white figure—as it looked—was flitting about; and I gave a great start. What with the night-hour, the solitary loneliness of all around, the soft sighing sound from the branches of the trees, and the servant-girls' recent talk of the "ghost," I am not sure but I began to think of ghosts myself. Ghost, or no ghost, it came gliding up to me, with its slender form, its lovely face: Mrs. Chandos, in a white silk evening dress, with a small white opera-cloak on her shoulders. It was her pleasure, as I learnt later, to dress each day for her own lonely society just as she would for a state dinner-table.