“Dead?” she said faintly.
Mrs. Mosey looked at her in vacant surprise.
“I wish to say, miss, that your aunt has frightened me.”
Even that vague allusion was enough for Emily.
“You need say no more,” she replied. “I know but too well how my aunt’s mind is affected by the fever.”
Confused and frightened as she was, Mrs. Mosey still found relief in her customary flow of words.
“Many and many a person have I nursed in fever,” she announced. “Many and many a person have I heard say strange things. Never yet, miss, in all my experience—!”
“Don’t tell me of it!” Emily interposed.
“Oh, but I must tell you! In your own interests, Miss Emily—in your own interests. I won’t be inhuman enough to leave you alone in the house to-night; but if this delirium goes on, I must ask you to get another nurse. Shocking suspicions are lying in wait for me in that bedroom, as it were. I can’t resist them as I ought, if I go back again, and hear your aunt saying what she has been saying for the last half hour and more. Mrs. Ellmother has expected impossibilities of me; and Mrs. Ellmother must take the consequences. I don’t say she didn’t warn me—speaking, you will please to understand, in the strictest confidence. ‘Elizabeth,’ she says, ‘you know how wildly people talk in Miss Letitia’s present condition. Pay no heed to it,’ she says. ‘Let it go in at one ear and out at the other,’ she says. ‘If Miss Emily asks questions—you know nothing about it. If she’s frightened—you know nothing about it. If she bursts into fits of crying that are dreadful to see, pity her, poor thing, but take no notice.’ All very well, and sounds like speaking out, doesn’t it? Nothing of the sort! Mrs. Ellmother warns me to expect this, that, and the other. But there is one horrid thing (which I heard, mind, over and over again at your aunt’s bedside) that she does not prepare me for; and that horrid thing is—Murder!”
At that last word, Mrs. Mosey dropped her voice to a whisper—and waited to see what effect she had produced.