“It’s not myself I’m thinking about,” she said, goaded into speech. “Maybe my liver was torpid, and maybe it wasn’t; but I know this: I’ve got some feelings left, and to see you standing at the foot of that staircase shootin’ through the door—I’ll never be the same woman again.”
“Well, I’m glad of that—anything for a change,” I said. And in came Eliza, flanked by Rosie and Mary Anne.
Her story, broken with sobs and corrections from the other two, was this: At two o’clock (two-fifteen, Rosie insisted) she had gone up-stairs to get a picture from her room to show Mary Anne. (A picture of a _lady_, Mary Anne interposed.) She went up the servants’ staircase and along the corridor to her room, which lay between the trunk-room and the unfinished ball-room. She heard a sound as she went down the corridor, like some one moving furniture, but she was not nervous. She thought it might be men examining the house after the fire the night before, but she looked in the trunk-room and saw nobody.
She went into her room quietly. The noise had ceased, and everything was quiet. Then she sat down on the side of her bed, and, feeling faint—she was subject to spells—(“I told you that when I came, didn’t I, Rosie?” “Yes’m, indeed she did!”)—she put her head down on her pillow and—
“Took a nap. All right!” I said. “Go on.”
“When I came to, Miss Innes, sure as I’m sittin’ here, I thought I’d die. Somethin’ hit me on the face, and I set up, sudden. And then I seen the plaster drop, droppin’ from a little hole in the wall. And the first thing I knew, an iron bar that long” (fully two yards by her measure) “shot through that hole and tumbled on the bed. If I’d been still sleeping” (“Fainting,” corrected Rosie) “I’d ’a’ been hit on the head and killed!”
“I wisht you’d heard her scream,” put in Mary Anne. “And her face as white as a pillow-slip when she tumbled down the stairs.”
“No doubt there is some natural explanation for it, Eliza,” I said. “You may have dreamed it, in your ‘fainting’ attack. But if it is true, the metal rod and the hole in the wall will show it.”
“The hole’s there all right, Miss Innes,” she said. “But the bar was gone when Mary Anne and Rosie went up to pack my trunk.”
“That wasn’t all,” Liddy’s voice came funereally from a corner. “Eliza said that from the hole in the wall a burning eye looked down at her!”