The Argosy — page 397: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

An Unsolved Mystery. 383 fully asked her mistress if she would go up to the nursery to the children should she hear them cry. ‘‘ Certainly, nurse. I suppose you will not be very long away?” ‘‘T cannot say, madam. I do not know Dublin.” “Then I think cook had better go with you—she has been here before. I daresay no one will call this evening.” ‘Thank you, madam,” and the nurse left the room. Presently, Mrs. Comyers heard the hall-door closed, and the two women’s foot- steps echoing down the steps. A quarter of an hour—twenty minutes passed. The doors between the drawing-room and the nursery, two flights higher up, were left open, so that Mrs. Comyers could hear every sound. The evening was fast closing in, and she experienced a strange feeling of loneliness, and began to regret her foolish impulse in allowing both servants to go out. She laid down the book she had been hia and presently one of the children gave a cry. The mother started from the couch where she was reclining, and was about to go up to the nursery, when hurried footsteps on the stairs struck upon her ear. “Oh! I need not go,” she said to ‘herself; “I suppose cook has Stayed at home, after all:” and, having by this time reached the door, she indeed saw, by the waning light, the figure of an elderly woman turning the landing of the flight upstairs opposite to her. Mrs. Comyers returned to her sofa. But the child’s crying did not cease; and as she listened, it increased from a whining cry to a wail of terror. In alarm she started up and ran to the nursery. The eldest boy, a child of three years old, was sitting up in bed, shrieking ; but the cook was nowhere to be seen. In vain Mrs. Comyers tried to pacify the child. “ Freddy,” she asked, “ did not cook come up to you ?” But the child only sobbed the more convulsively ; so much so, that the mother refrained from asking any further questions. Softly singing to him, he was soon asleep again, and she stole quietly from the room. It was almost dark, yet she distinctly saw, walking a few steps before her, the figure of the woman which she yet believed to be the cook. ‘Why, cook, I thought you had gone out with nurse.” The figure had just reached the bottom of the flight of stairs; it turned slowly round, revealing the face of an old woman with a white eap-border closely crimped around her puckered-up, leering face. <A gruesome, weird light seemed to surround her, so that Mrs. Comyers distinctly saw the shrivelled hips move, the bleared eyes gleam; and the shaky, skinny hand, which was raised and shaken menacingly at her. The figure then turned and ran swiftly down the stairs. For a moment, Mrs. Comyers was frightened ; but, girding up her courage, she blamed lierself for giving way to nervousness—persuading (CO) in CORnniclooolkks