The abandoned farm, and Connie's mistakeHolmes, Mary Jane
General
The abandoned farm, and Connie's mistake
Holmes, Mary Jane
American fiction -- 20th century
She had not seen her grandmother, but she had been in the attic. The
habit of her childhood, which she hoped she had outgrown, had come back,
and she knew why she felt so weak and depressed. She had always felt
this way after walking in her sleep. She had dreaded these fits of
somnambulism, and rejoiced when they left her, and she could not
understand why they had returned, unless induced by the unusual strain
upon her nerves since coming to Maplehurst and from thinking so much of
the chest.
“Yes, it was that,” she said to herself. “It was in my mind when I went
to sleep, and that is why I got up. I must have had a great deal of
strength to move that chest. But it seems I did it. I was always strong
when I was in this sleep. Did I really find the key, and where did I put
it if I did? I used to hide things. Oh, this is dreadful!”
In a dazed kind of way she began to look for the key, a cold, clammy
sweat breaking out through every pore when she found it in her work-box.
For a moment she recoiled from it as from something uncanny, then,
picking it up, she whispered: “I must take it to them and tell them, and
that it is my great-grandmother’s chest.”
She heard the rasping sound of the file as she began to ascend the
stairs, and tried to hurry, when she was suddenly stopped by Alex.’s
voice, sounding just as it did in the dining-room when she dropped the
salad and saying nearly the same words: “Sherry, go down. You are not
wanted here.”
But for the railing on the side of the staircase she would have fallen,
she grew so faint and dizzy.
“Yes, I’ll go,” she thought, feeling her way back to her room, where she
shank into a chair, with her hands over her eyes and her brain in such a
whirl that she did not think of the dog until she felt his paws on her
shoulders and his hot breath on her face.
Uncovering her eyes, she saw him looking at her, with an expression so
human and full of pity that she put her arms around his neck, and
burying her face in his long mane began to cry.
“You dear old dog,” she sobbed; “it was you he meant and not me. I might
have known it, but I couldn’t think, I feel so queer.”
The dog’s answer was a low whine as he capered round her with little
barks of joy.
“Hush, hush,” she said, trying to quiet him. “They must not know I am
here unless I take the key, as I suppose I ought.”
Just then there came to her cries of delight. The chest was opened and
the young ladies were going into raptures over its contents, while
Charley Reeves was careering around the attic with a white silk bonnet
on his head ornamented with pink satin bows and long streamers of wide
ribbon for strings. It was Mrs. Crosby’s wedding bonnet of a fashion
seventy years back, and the young ladies were wild over it, as they were
over everything.
“They do not need the key,” she thought. “I’ll keep it, and before I go
away I’ll give it to Mr. Marsh and tell him the truth.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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