I lay that night in a big room filled with heavy, dark furniture, in a
great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains--a bed the counterpart
of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.
They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she
saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.
I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow
fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had
brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head
over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told
myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me that it was I who
had done that. The tall clock at the stairhead sounded the
hours--eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was
dark and very still.
I had not been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the
intoxication of grief--a real drunkenness, more merciful than the calm
that comes after.
Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what
was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought.
And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been
about two that I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the
ticking of the clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew
perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet
determined not to hear it, _because it came from the next room_--the
room where the corpse lay.
And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I
was nervous--miserably nervous--a coward and a brute. It meant that I,
having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her
breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body--the dead
body that lay in the room next to mine. The heads of the beds were
placed against the same wall; and from that wall I had fancied I heard
slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So when I say that I became
aware of them I mean that I at last heard a sound so distinct as to
leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position
in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and
fell on my cold hands as I held my breath and listened.
I don't know how long I sat there--there was no further sound--and at
last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.
"You fool!" I said to myself; "dead or alive, is she not your darling,
your heart's heart? Would you not go near to die of joy if she came to
you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives
you!"
"I wish she would come," myself answered in words, while every fibre of
my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.
I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked
at the polished furniture--the commonplace details of an ordinary room.
Then I thought of her, lying alone, so near me, so quiet under the white
sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did
move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up, and walked across
the floor and turned the door-handle?
As I thought it, I heard--plainly, unmistakably heard--the door of the
chamber of death open slowly--I heard slow steps in the passage, slow,
heavy steps--I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain
hands, that felt for the latch.
Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.
I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened--that door
on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet I dared not turn
away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of
my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the
bed-foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its
chin. There was a scent of lavender. Its eyes were wide open and looked
at me with love unspeakable.