“I think Mr. Meredith is going to bed,” said Mrs. Harwood; “he is a little tired. Take it into his room, Priscilla. And Miss Gussy has gone to bed; you may come now and help me to get into my room, and then shut up everything. It is later than I thought.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Priscilla, in those quiet tones of commonplace which calm down every excitement.
Priscilla indeed was herself bursting with curiosity and eagerness to find out what had happened. The long-shut-up door stood ajar, and every maid in the house had already come to peep into the dark passage and wonder what it led to: and the keenest excitement filled the house. But a parlor-maid has as high a standard of duty as any one, were it an archbishop. It was against the unwritten household law to show any such commotion. She took hold of the handle of her mistress’s chair as she did on the mildest of domestic evenings, and drew her very steadily and gently away. The only revelation she made of knowing anything was in the suggestion that a little gruel with a glass of wine in it would be a proper thing for Mrs. Harwood to take.
“You may bring me the glass of wine without the gruel,” Mrs. Harwood was heard saying as the sound of her wheels moved slowly across the hall, an hour ago the scene of such passionate agitation. “I don’t think I have caught cold. A glass of wine—and a few biscuits,” she said as by an afterthought.
Was this part of the elaborate make-believe intended to deceive the servants and persuade them that nothing particular had happened? or was she indeed capable of munching those biscuits after such a night of fate?
“Ju, don’t you turn against me,” said Dolff, feebly, throwing himself into a chair when they were thus left alone.
“Oh!” cried Julia, still panting with her outburst, “to think you had hold of him and didn’t really hurt him, not to matter! I can never, never forgive you, Dolff.”
“Oh, hold your tongue, you little fool; the only thing I’m glad of is that I didn’t hurt him—to matter! You don’t know what it is to live for a long week, all the time he was insensible, thinking you have killed a man!”
“When it was only Charley Meredith!” Julia said.