“But you’ve eaten nothing, mem, since——”
“Am I thinking of what I eat! Go ben to your kitchen, and do what I tell you, and just leave me alone.”
Janet went away, and the long vigil began again. She sat a long time without moving, and then she took a turn about the house, looking into his room for one thing, and looking at the piles of books that he had carried up-stairs. There were few traces of him about, for he had nothing to leave behind,—only the big rough cloak, of a shape she had never seen before, which was folded on a chair. She lifted it, with a natural instinct of order, to hang it up, and found falling from a pocket in it a big badly printed newspaper, the same newspaper in which Mr Somerville had showed her her son’s name. She took it with her half consciously when she went down-stairs, but did not read it, being too much occupied with the dreadful whirl of her own thoughts. Nine o’clock passed too, and the colourless hours ran on. And then there was the sound all over the house of Andrew fulfilling his orders, shutting up every window and door. When he came to the parlour to shut the window by which she sat, his little mistress, always so quiet, almost flew at him. “Man, have you neither sense nor reason!” she cried. It was more than she could bear to shut and bar and bolt when nobody was there that either feared or could come to harm. No one disturbed her after that. The couple in the kitchen kept very quiet, afraid of her. Deep night came on; the last of all the trains rumbled by, making a great crash in the distance in the perfect stillness. There had been another time like this, when she had watched the whole night through. And midnight came and went again, and as yet there was no sound.
CHAPTER IX.
When one struck on the big kitchen clock, with an ominous sound like a knell, Janet, trying to reduce her big step to an inaudible footfall, came “ben” again. She found her mistress sitting still idly as if she were dead, the lamp burning solemnly, not the sound even of a breath in the room. “No stocking in her hands, not even reading a book,” Janet said. For a moment, indeed, with a quick impulse of fear, the woman thought that Mrs Ogilvy had died in the new catastrophe. “Oh, mem, mem!” she cried, and in an instant there was a faint stir.
“Well, Janet,” Mrs Ogilvy said in a stifled voice.
“Will ye sit up longer? A’ the trains are passed, and long passed. He will be coming in the morning; he must just—have missed the last.”
“I am not going to my bed just yet,” the mistress said.
“But, mem, you will be worn out. You have just had no meat and no sleep and no rest, and you’ll be weariet to death.”
“And what would it matter if I was?” she answered, with a faint smile.