“I’m afeared she’s wuss, an’ they’ve all gone to the big house,” sighed Mrs. Thompson. “Maybe we won’t git thar in time.”
Joe made no response, but he whipped his mare into a quicker pace. When they reached the veranda and alighted no one came to meet them. A negro woman hastened across the hall, but she did not look toward Mrs. Thompson, who stood on the steps waiting for Joe to hitch his mare to a post nearby.
“Ain’t you goin’ to come in?” she asked, when he came toward her.
“No, I’ll wait out here,” he answered, and he sat down on the steps.
She hesitated for an instant, then she turned resolutely into the great carpeted hall, and through a door on the right she entered a large parlor. No one was there. The carpet was rich in color and texture, the furniture massive and fine. Over the mantel was a large oil portrait of Colonel Hansard, and on the opposite wall one of his wife painted just after her marriage. Set into the wall and hung about with lace drapery was a mirror that reached from the floor to the ceiling. From this room, through an open door on her left, Mrs. Thompson went into another. It was the library. No one was there. On all sides of the room were glass-doored cases of richly bound books. Here and there on tables and stands stood time-yellowed marble busts and pots of plants. In a corner of the room was a revolving bookcase, and in the centre a long writing-table covered with green cloth.
The old woman looked about her perplexed. Everything was so still that she could hear the scratching of a honeysuckle vine against the window under the touch of the breeze. She wondered if her sister had died, and if everybody had gone to the funeral.
She was on the point of returning to Joe, when she was startled by a low moan in an adjoining room. The sound came through a door on her right, which was slightly ajar. She cautiously pushed it open. The room contained an awed and silent group. The crisis had come. Mrs. Hansard was dying. She lay on a high-canopied bed in a corner, hidden from Mrs. Thompson’s view by the family and servants gathered at the bed. Seeing a vacant chair in a row of women against a wall, the visitor went in and sat down. Her black cotton sunbonnet hid her face, and, as there were others present as humbly clad as she, she attracted little notice.
There was a breathless silence for a moment. Those at the bed seemed to be leaning forward in great agitation. Suddenly one of the daughters of the dying woman cried out: “Oh, doctor! Come quick!” and a physician who stood near advanced and bent over his patient.
After a moment he silently withdrew to the fireplace, where he simply stood looking at the fire in the grate. Edith, the eldest child, followed and asked him a question. He gravely nodded, and with her handkerchief to her eyes she burst into tears. Her husband, the Governor’s son, a handsome, manly fellow, came to her and, putting his arm around her, drew her back to the bed.
“She’s trying to speak,” he whispered, and for the next moment the dying woman’s labored breathing was the only sound in the room.