A scene of panic and hysteria followed below stairs, and, without Jane Bond’s description of it, Mary knew the people were running out of the house as from a plague.  She left her father with Masters, and strove to calm the frightened domestics.  She spoke well, and explained that the event, horrible though it was, yet proved that no cause for their alarm any longer existed.

“If it had been a wicked spirit we do not understand, it would have had no power over Mr. May, who was a saint of God,” she said.  “Be at peace, restrain yourselves, and fear nothing now.  There is no ghost here.  Had it been a demon or any such thing, it must have been conscious, and therefore powerless against Mr. May.  This proves that there is some fearful natural danger which we have not yet discovered hidden in the room, but no harm can happen to anybody if they do not go into the room.  The police are coming from Scotland Yard in an hour or two, and you may feel as sure, as I do, and Sir Walter does, that they will find out the truth, whatever it is.  You must none of you think of leaving before they come.  If you do, they will only send for you again.  Please prepare your breakfast and be reasonable.  Sir Walter is terribly upset, and it would be a base thing if any of you were to desert him at a moment like this.”

They grew steadier before her, and Mrs. Forbes, the housekeeper, who believed what Mary had said, added her voice.

Then Sir Walter’s daughter returned to her father, who was with Masters in the study.  A man had already started for a doctor, but with Mannering away there was none nearer than Neon Abbot.

Mary called on Masters to assert his authority, and reassure the household as she had done.  She told him her argument, and he accepted it as a revelation.

“Thank God you could keep your senses and see that, ma’am!  Tell the master the same, and make him drink a drop of spirits and get into his clothes.  He’s shook cruel!”

He had already brought the brandy, which was his panacea for all ills, and now left Mary and her father together.  She found him collapsed, and forgot the cause for a few moments in her present concern for him.  Indeed, she always thought, and often said afterwards, that but for the minor needs for action that intervened in this series of terrible moments she must herself have gone out of her mind.  But something always happened, as in this case, to demand her full attention, and so arrest and deflect the strain almost at the moment of its impact.

She found that the ideas she had just employed to pacify the servants’ hall were also in her father’s thoughts.  From them, however, he won no consolation, though he stood convinced.  But the fact that Septimus May should have failed, and paid for his failure with his life, now assumed its true significance for Sir Walter.  He was self-absorbed, prostrate, and desperate.  In such a condition one is not master of oneself, and may say and do anything.  The old man’s armor was off, and in the course of his next few speeches, by a selfish forgetfulness that he would have been the first to condemn in another, he revealed a thing that was destined to cause the young widow bitter and needless pain.  First, however, he pointed out what she already grasped and made clear to others.