“How very strange!” cried Lady Whitney. “One might think murder had been done in it.”
Mrs. Parafin coughed significantly. “The wife died in it,” she said. “Some people thought her husband had—had—had at least hastened her death——”
“Hush, Matty!” interposed the doctor, warningly. “It was all rumour, all talk. Nothing was proved—or attempted to be.”
“Perhaps there existed no proof,” returned Mrs. Parafin. “And if there had—who was there to take it up? She was in her grave, poor woman, and he was left flourishing, master of himself and every one about him. Any way, Thomas, be that as it may, you cannot deny that the room has been like a haunted room since.”
Dr. Parafin laughed lightly, objecting to be serious; men are more cautious than women. “I cannot deny that people find themselves unable to sleep in the room; I never heard that it was ‘haunted’ in any other way,” he added, to Lady Whitney. “But there—let us change the subject; we can neither alter the fact nor understand it.”
After they left us, Lady Whitney said she should like to ask Miss Gay what her experience of the room had been. But Miss Gay had stepped out to a neighbour’s, and Susannah stayed to talk in her place. She could tell us more about it, she said, than Miss Gay.
“I warned my cousin she would do well not to take this house,” began Susannah, accepting the chair to which Lady Whitney pointed. “But it is a beautiful house for letting, as you see, my lady, and that and the low rent tempted her. Besides, she did not believe the rumour about the room; she does not believe it fully yet, though it is beginning to worry her: she thinks the inability to sleep must lie in the people themselves.”
“It has been an uncanny room since old Calson’s wife died in it, has it not, Susannah?” said John, as if in jest. “I suppose he did not murder her?”
“I think he did,” whispered Susannah.