On answering Mrs. Maldon’s summons in the night, Rachel had found the central door of the wardrobe swinging and the sacred big drawer at the bottom of that division only half shut, and Mrs. Maldon in a peignoir lying near it on the floor, making queer inhuman noises, not moans, but a kind of anxious, inarticulate entreaty, and shaking her head constantly to the left—­never to the right.  Mrs. Maldon had recognized Rachel, and had seemed to implore with agonized intensity her powerful assistance in some nameless and hopeless tragic dilemma.  The sight—­especially of the destruction of the old woman’s dignity—­was dreadful to such an extent that Rachel did not realize its effect on herself until several hours afterwards.  At the moment she called on the immense reserves of her self-confidence to meet the situation—­and she met it, assisting her pride with the curious pretence, characteristic of the Five Towns race, that the emergency was insufficient to alarm in the slightest degree a person of sagacity and sang-froid.

She had restored Mrs. Maldon to her bed and to some of her dignity.  But the horrid symptoms were not thereby abated.  The inhuman noises and the distressing, incomprehensible appeal had continued.  Immediately Rachel’s back was turned Mrs. Maldon had fallen out of bed.  This happened three times, so that clearly the sufferer was falling out of bed under the urgency of some half-conscious purpose.  Rachel had soothed her.  And once she had managed to say with some clearness the words, “I’ve been downstairs.”  But when Rachel went back to the room from dispatching Louis for the doctor, she was again on the floor.  Louis’ absence from the house had lasted an intolerable age, but the doctor had followed closely on the messenger, and already the symptoms had become a little less acute.  The doctor had diagnosed with rapidity.  Supervening upon her ordinary cardiac attack after supper, Mrs. Maldon had had, in the night, an embolus in one artery of the brain.  The way in which the doctor announced the fact showed to Rachel that nothing could easily have been more serious.  And yet the mere naming of the affliction eased her, although she had no conception of what an embolus might be.  Dr. Yardley had remained until four o’clock, when Mrs. Maldon, surprisingly convalescent, dropped off to sleep.  He remarked that she might recover.

At eight o’clock he had come back.  Mrs. Maldon was awake, but had apparently no proper recollection of the events of the night, which even to Rachel had begun to seem unreal, like a waning hallucination.  The doctor gave orders, with optimism, and left, sufficiently reassured to allow himself to yawn.  At a quarter past eight Louis had departed to his own affairs, on Rachel’s direct suggestion.  And when Mrs. Tams had been informed of the case so full of disturbing enigmas, while Rachel and she drank tea together in the kitchen, the daily domestic movement of the house was partly resumed, from vanity, because Rachel could not bear to sit idle nor to admit to herself that she had been scared to a standstill.