She was curious rather than alarmed.
In her bare feet and night dress she went on up quietly, but not thinking of caution.
However, near the top she must have made some sound.
She had only an instant to see a white figure bending over something. The next moment she was stumbling down the staircase. But she was not quick enough.
The thing, and she shuddered when she said it, the thing overtook her and passed her.
She felt the brushing of its spectral garments, as she put it, and it was then that she screamed.
When Joseph found her—the women would not stir out of their rooms—she was locked in her room and was still screaming.
It was some time before he could induce her to open her door.
When I talked to her, which was that night, she was still sitting in Katherine’s room and obstinately refusing to go to bed.
“I think you dreamed it, Elise,” said Judy.
“What’s the use of being a fool?
There is no such thing as a ghost.”
“I saw it.
I touched it, mademoiselle.”
“Well, you can’t touch a ghost.
And mind you, nothing of this nonsense to mother.
Go to bed and say your prayers.
That ought to help.”
We had to take her up ourselves finally, and wait until she was safely locked in.
Then and only then did Judy look directly at me.
“Now,” she said. “She saw something, or somebody.
She may be an idiot, but I’ll say this for her.
It takes a lot to keep her out of her bed.”
Together we went up to the attic, but although it was rather ghastly at that hour of the night, I could not find that anything had been disturbed.
Judy, it appeared, had been up before, and had found nothing.
It was from Joseph, still waiting in the pantry to admit Katherine, that I secured what looked like a partial explanation.
“The sewing room window on the second floor was open,” he said.
“I think he got out there, madam.
He could drop to the roof of the kitchen porch.”
He had, it seems, instructed Elise to say that she had seen a mouse!
Which, as Judy said, was from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Katherine came in very late, and I thought she looked rather better.
She had been going over Jim’s house, she said, and she had decided to move over there.
“It looks as though I shall be here for some time, Elizabeth,” she said.
“At least until they have cleared Jim of this ridiculous trumped-up charge.
And there are three of us.
I don’t like to crowd you.
I can get the servants from New York, and be quite comfortable.”
I made no demur.
I saw that she was determined, although Judy looked rather unhappy over it.
“What will you do with Amos?”
“I shall let him go,” she said with decision.
“I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.”
The net result of which was that Amos gave his damaging testimony before the Grand Jury and then disappeared.
That was on Friday, May the twentieth.
I daresay some such system must exist, but the whole proceeding drove me almost to madness.
And it was sheer farce from beginning to end.
The result was a foregone conclusion, with, as Godfrey Lowell says, the indictment typed and ready to sign before it began.
There was no chance from the first; from that sonorous opening by the District Attorney:
“Gentlemen of the Grand Jury, it becomes my duty this morning to bring to your attention a most serious case.