"What do you mean, Davies?" I asked, but without looking up in the glass for fear of meeting her eyes there. "What has the sea-wall to do with my illness? It was not there you found me when I fainted. You told me it was by the fountain."
The old woman took a paper from her stays, and out of it a muddy piece of linen which she spread out on the dressing-table in front of me. It was a handkerchief of mine; and I understood that she had found it, treasured it as a sign of what I had witnessed. The place, the moment, might mean my death-warrant; for what I thought I saw had been really seen.
"It was on the sea-wall the morning that Lady Brandling fainted in the shrubbery," she answered. And I felt that her eyes were on my face, asking what I had seen that day.
I made a prodigious effort over myself.
"And why have you kept it in that state instead of washing it? Did you—was it picked up then or only now? I suppose some one else found it?"
Merciful God! how every word of that last sentence beat itself out in my heart and throat!—and yet I heard the words pronounced lightly, indifferently.
"I picked it up myself, my lady," answered Mrs. Davies. "I went down to the sea-wall after I had put Lady Brandling to bed. I thought she might have left something there. I thought I should like to go there before the others came. I thought Lady Brandling had seen something. I want Lady Brandling to tell me truly if she saw something on the sea-wall."
I felt it was a struggle, perhaps a struggle for life and death between her and me. I took a comb in my hand, to press it and steady me; and I looked up in the mirror and faced Davies's eyes, ready, I knew, to fix themselves on mine. "Perhaps I may answer your question later, Davies," I said. "But first you must answer mine: am I right in thinking that you were set to spy upon my husband and me from the moment we first came to St. Salvat's?"
A great change came over Davies's face. Whatever her intentions, she had not expected this, and did not know how to meet it. I felt that, were her intentions evil, I now held her in my hands, powerless for the time being.
But to my infinite surprise, and after only a short silence, she looked into my eyes quite simply and answered without hesitating.