“Don’t go, mother.  I’ll wake Marthy,” cried Gabriella, for Mrs. Carr, inspired by the spirit of panic, was darting out of the door in her felt slippers.  Then, while the children, crying distractedly, rushed to Jane’s bedside, the girl ran out of the house and along the brick walk to the kitchen and the room above it where Marthy lived the little life she had apart from her work.  In answer to Gabriella’s call she emerged entirely dressed from the darkness; and at the news of Jane’s illness she was seized with the spurious energy which visits her race in the moment of tragedy.  She offered at once to run for the doctor, and suggested, without a hint from Gabriella, that she had better leave word, on her way home, for Marse Charley.

“I knowed ‘twuz comin’ jez ez soon ez I lay eyes on ’er,” she muttered, for she was an old family servant.  “Dar ain’ no use ‘n tryin’ ter come betweenst dem de good Lawd is done jine tergedder fur worse.  A baid husban’!  Hi!  Dar ain’t un ’oman erlive, I reckon, dat ’ouldn’t ruther own a baid husban’ den no husban’ at all.  You all is got to teck ’em de way dey’s made, en dar’s moughty few un um dat is made right.”

Still muttering, she stumbled down the walk and out of the gate, while Gabriella returned to her mother’s room and hurried the weeping children into their shoes and stockings.  Mrs. Carr, still in her flannel wrapper, with her little flat gray curls screwed up on pins for the night, and her thin ankles showing pathetically above her felt slippers, ran nervously to and fro with mustard plasters and bottles of hot water which she continually refilled from the kettle on the fender.  Occasionally she paused long enough to hold the camphor to Jane’s nose or to lift the quilt from the bottom of the bed and then put it carefully back in the very spot where it had lain before she had touched it.  And because she was born to take two steps to every one that was necessary, because she could not accomplish the simplest act without a prodigious waste of energy and emotion, because she died twenty deaths over the slightest anxiety, and, most of all, because she was the last person on earth who ought to have been burdened with poverty and hard work and an unhappily married daughter—­because of all these things Mrs. Carr wore herself to a shadow in the quarter of an hour they spent waiting for the doctor and Charley Gracey.

Though she had brought Jane through at least a dozen “attacks,” she still lost her presence of mind as completely as on that January night when, utterly distraught, she had hurried Gabriella to the first death-bed scene of her sister; she still grew as forgetful of herself and her own feelings, and, in obedience to some profound law of her nature, she still as confidently “expected the worst.”  For Mrs. Carr’s philosophy, like Jane’s, was of that active but dreary sort that thrives best upon misery.  Just as Jane, who had lost every illusion about Charley, went on loving him in spite of it, so Mrs. Carr, having lost her illusions about life, retained a kind of wistful fondness for the thing that had wounded her.