“Well, I hope to heaven mother doesn’t wish her on us!
She may.
To shut her mouth about Uncle Jim.”
But she did not go away at once.
She stood there, smoking fast and apparently thinking.
“Don’t you think Wallie’s been rather queer over all this?” she said. “‘So if anything happens to me you’ll understand,’” she mimicked him.
“If he knows anything now is the time to tell it.
And if he doesn’t, why don’t he keep out?
Where does he come in, anyhow?
What’s he worried about?”
“I do wish you’d keep out of all this, Judy.”
“Why?
It’s the day of the young, isn’t it?
Everybody says so.”
“It’s the hour for the young to be in bed.”
“All right, I’m going right now.
But just to show you why I’m not going back to New York, in spite of you and Dick—Wallie didn’t find that pencil on top of the skylight.
He took it up with him and put it there.”
With which she went away, whistling softly, and left me to my thoughts, which were nothing to boast about.
I did not go to bed. I sat shut in my bedroom, with the carpet from the car rolled in my closet, waiting for the house to quiet down for the night.
My mind was a welter of confusion; Jim’s evasions and half truths, the possible significance of the oil stain, and Judy’s strange statement as to Wallie and the pencil.
And to add to my discomfort Joseph tapped at my door after letting Dick out and locking up, and told me that the women in the house had started a tale that poor Sarah was “walking,” and were scaring themselves into a fit over it.
I am not a superstitious woman, but there is something of the mystic in every Christian, and I must confess that when, at something after one, the speaking tube in my room set up a thin whistle, my hair seemed to stand on end.
Ever since the night of Sarah’s death Joseph had been instructed to leave a light burning in the lower hall, and it was burning then.
I opened my door carefully and slipping out, leaned over the banister.
Save that Jock had apparently been asleep there, and had now risen and was stretching himself drowsily, there was no sign of anything unusual.
If there was a window or a door open in the drawing room I felt that it could stay open for a while. I had other business to attend to first.
Jock’s attitude had given me confidence, and at something after one, wearing a dressing gown and my felt-soled bedroom slippers, I took the rug and a bottle of patent cleaner and made my way gingerly to the basement laundry, stopping in the kitchen to pick up the poker from the range.
I was minded to have a weapon of some sort at hand.
I had a plan, of sorts.
If the stain came out I could return the rug to Amos, and he could think what he might; lay my high-handed proceeding to the eccentricities of a middle-aged female if it pleased him.
If it did not come out, I could burn the thing in the furnace.
But I was very nervous, and the basement itself daunted me; the long vistas of blackness forward, to the furnace and the coal and wood cellars, the darkness of the laundry and the drying room.
The small light at the foot of the stairs, which turned on from the back hall above, made little impression on the gloom, and as I stood there it seemed to me that something crawled over the wood in the wood cellar.
A rat, possibly, but it did not help my morale.
The laundry was dark, and to light it one must enter the room, and turn on the hanging globe in the center.
I went in, shivering, and directly in the center of the room I struck violently against something.
It was a chair, and it upset with a clatter that echoed and re-echoed in that cavernous place.
What was the chair doing there?
It belonged under a window, and here it was, out of place again.
What was it that moved that chair?
And Joseph’s somber statement came back to me, to complete my demoralization.
After all, chairs did move.
They moved in seances.
Chairs and tables, without being touched.
I was badly frightened, I confess.
A dozen stories of phantasms, discredited at the time, rose in my mind. The place seemed peopled with moving shadows, sinister and threatening, and from somewhere I seemed to hear footsteps, spectral, felt rather than heard.
And when I finally found courage to try the laundry light, it had burned out.
Such efforts as I could make then to remove the stain were of no practical value, and I decided once and for all to burn the rug and take the consequences.
I did one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life when I went forward to the furnace cellar, carrying the rug. Once the light there was on, however, I felt better.