When I reached the drawing-room, after throwing off my bonnet and
arranging my hair in the most breathless haste, terrified to hear the
summons at the door before I was downstairs, I was thunderstruck to find
Sara Cresswell there. The sight of her made an end of my awkward feeling
of shame for my own haste and curiosity. Surely this was nothing less
than a crisis that was coming. Sara had just arrived, and was explaining
the reasons for her visit in such a very fluent and demonstrative way,
that I could see at once they were all made up, and some motive entirely
different from those she mentioned had brought her. She was still in her
hat and velvet jacket, seated rather on the edge of her chair, talking
very volubly, but looking breathless and anxious, while Aunt Milly, who
was sitting in her own place, opposite her sister, and near the
fireplace, looked at her, perplexed and uncertain, evidently rather
suspicious of the many motives which had procured us this visit; which,
if Sara had only said nothing about it, would have been received as a
delightful surprise, and wanted no accounting for. It was evidently a
great relief to Sara when I came in; she came to kiss me, turning her
face away from Aunt Milly, and caught hold of me so tight, and gave me
such a troubled, emphatic look, that even if I had not heard before, I
should have known something was coming. I stood by her breathless for a
moment, wondering why the door-bell did not ring,--Luigi had certainly
had abundant time to have got to the door,--and then went up to the
other end of the room on pretence of finding my work; while Sara,
instead of following me, dropped into her chair again, evidently too
nervous, too anxious, too eager to see the first of it and lose nothing,
to do anything but sit still. We were both traitors and plotters. She
had come to watch something that was about to happen, but which the
principal person concerned did not know. While I, more cruel still, took
my trembling way up to the other end of the apartment, and stationed
myself behind Aunt Milly, that I might not lose a look or word from Miss
Mortimer. I felt ashamed of myself, but I could not help it. I felt a
kind of conviction that this was to be the decisive day.
But still there was no sound at the door; there was time to look round
all the peaceable vast room, and be struck by the quietness, the repose
of the scene in which some act of this mysterious drama was about to be
enacted. It was always very light here, but the bright day and the
sunshine out of doors, made it now even lighter than usual, and refused
to any of us the slightest shade for our faces, whatever undue
expression might come to them. Sara had adopted the only expedient
possible, by turning her back upon the light, and had, besides, a little
shelter in her hat. But dear Aunt Milly, looking at her favourite with a
troubled inquiring expression, and laying down the work she had in hand
in order to examine Sara’s countenance the better, was so fully set
forth in all her looks, movements, and almost feelings, by that broad
clear day-light, that I shrank back from it in spite of myself, fearing
that it would betray me too. The only shadow in the room was that
afforded by Miss Mortimer’s screen. She sat there just as usual, in her
violet-coloured dress, her light muslin embroidered scarf, worn without
any lining, now that the weather was warm, and her pretty cap, with
ribbons corresponding to her dress; her head moving so slightly that it
was difficult to perceive the motion; her pattern-book open on her knee,
her head bent over it. At this moment, when the thunders of Providence
were just about to break over her, she sat there, with her head over her
knitting-book, counting her stitches, and trying a new pattern. When I
saw how she was occupied, my own trembling pretence at work fell from my
hands. I gazed at her openly with a wonder which was almost awe. My
heart cried out against her in her dread composure. The Avenger was
coming, and there she sat, all conscious, aware, in every nerve, of her
guilt, and yet able to maintain that hideous calm. Yes! it would have
been sublime had she been a good woman, threatened by some undeserved
doom. I declare it was ghastly, devilish, dreadful to me!
All this time nobody came to the door. I daresay, perhaps, it was not
very many minutes after all; but in the excitement and suspense it
seemed a very long time to me. And either the house was specially quiet,
or there was something in my agitated condition which made me think so.
Miss Mortimer never lifted her head; if she had not been so engaged with
her pattern, surely she would have noticed the perplexed looks of Aunt
Milly, and my excited face. But she did not, she kept working on at her
new stitch. We all relapsed into perfect silence; Sara’s voluble excuses
for herself died all at once off her lips. Aunt Milly dropped into a
strange anxious silence, looking at her. As for myself, I could not have
spoken a word whatever had been the consequences. Sara’s nervous motion
of her foot on the carpet startled me so much that I had nearly
committed myself by some cry of agitation. It was a dread, inexplainable
pause, which nobody dared either break or account for. Dead silence and
expectation. And Miss Mortimer bending her head over her pattern-book
counting the loops for her new stitch.
The bell did not ring. If it had rung it must have startled us all so
much as to diminish the sense of what was coming; there was no such
premonition;--a little sound of steps and subdued voices in the hall
made my heart beat so loud that I felt sure my Aunt Milly must have
heard it. Sara looked up at me suddenly when that sound became audible.
Her face was perfectly colourless, and her hands firmly clasped
together.
“Children, what is it?” said Aunt Milly, with a sharp frightened cry,
breaking off suddenly in a troubled manner as the steps drew nearer.
Miss Mortimer lifted her head from her book. She looked up, she looked
full at me; she smiled. She was listening, but she was not afraid.
When suddenly the door was thrown open; Ellis called out, with his
fullest voice: “The Count Sormonata,” and somebody came in. I cannot
tell who it was that came in. I heard Sara cry out with a kind of shriek
and repeat the name, “The Count Sermoneta!” The work and the book and
all the trifling matters about her fell off from Miss Mortimer. She rose
up, clenching her hand, ghastly, like a dead woman. She cried out in a
voice I shall never forget: “he is dead, _dead!_” she cried, with the
wildest scream and outcry. “I tell you, he is dead, dead! My God, he is
dead! Will nobody believe me?” shrieked out the miserable woman. Her
sister ran to her, and was thrust away with those terrible clenched
hands. But she never turned to look, nor cast aside her screen that hid
the new comer from her. She stood still like some frightful statue,
rigid, with her wild eyes fixed upon the air before her--heaven knows
what she might see there!--listening in some frightful agony to the
steps that came slowly up the room. When that scream burst from her the
footsteps faltered and stopped. Then Miss Mortimer looked at me, the
only creature she saw before her, and laughed a dreadful laugh of
madness and misery. “He knows it!” she cried out, triumphantly, “if you
did not, he does. He is dead, dead!” and then came to another dreadful
pause, leaning her clenched hands upon the table and fixing her wild
eyes upon something straight before her. While I followed the mad stare
of her eyes with a shudder I could not refrain, another person came with
noiseless rapidity into the spot she was gazing on. It was not a
spectre--it was simply Luigi, from whose face agitation had banished all
the colour, and who stood trembling and speechless, wringing his hands,
and gazing at her with an unspeakable appeal and entreaty. She did not
say anything more; she stood with her eyes full opened and staring wide,
leaning her hands on that table. I believe, if anybody had touched her,
she would have fallen. I almost believed, while I looked at her, that
she had died standing, and that it was a lifeless form that stood fixed
in that horrible erect attitude, fronting us all, fronting a thousand
times more than us, all the guilt and sins of her life. I gave a cry
myself in the extremity of my terror and trouble. I went to her, I
cannot tell how, stumbling over Aunt Milly, who had either fallen or
fainted, or I cannot tell what. I went and put my arm round that
dreadful ghastly figure. It was not her I was approaching, but _it_, the
terrible mask and image of her. I had not a thought but that she was
dead.
When I touched her, she fell, as I had thought she would. But so strong
an impression did her dreadful appearance have upon me, that, when her
figure sank into the chair and showed some elasticity, instead of going
down on the floor, crumbling down, dropping to pieces, as somehow I had
expected, I was struck with a horrible fear and surprise. She was not
dead. I called out to them all, what were we to do? and she seemed to
hear me. I saw, with a terror I cannot explain, her terrible eyes turn
from Luigi--they looked at me, at Aunt Milly, they cast a glance over
the room. Was it that the spirit was living and the body dead?
I cannot tell what we did for a dreadful interval after that. Carson
came into the confused crowd. Luigi disappeared to find a doctor, and we
tried to get her lifted and laid upon the sofa. But though she neither
moved nor spoke, and scarcely seemed to breathe, she resisted, in some
dreadful way, and would not be removed. I shall never forget that
dreadful face; when I am ill it comes back to me, a recollection never
to be banished;--dead--yet never consenting to die, keeping alive,
determined, resolute, unshaken. I can see the discoloured lips begin to
move, the words formed on the inarticulate tongue, the eyes lightening
out of that fixed stare. Half the house had stolen into the room in
this dreadful emergency without anybody observing them. But the dead
woman observed them. And I, who was standing nearest, recoiled from her
side, and the whole circle round her broke up and fell back in
speechless horror, when a sound broke from that dreadful convulsed
mouth. Old Carson, trembling but faithful, stood by her mistress. The
poor creature said she understood that sound. It was to send everybody
away, said the woman, whose limbs would scarcely support her, and whose
very teeth chattered. They all went away, terrified but curious; the
boldest lingered behind the screen. Nobody remained within sight of
those dreadful eyes but Aunt Milly and me. We two stood huddled on each
other, not daring to say a word, or even to exchange looks. Carson stood
by her mistress’s side. Carson knew all and everything, more than we
knew. She held some cordial to the dead lips, she chafed the ghastly
hand, she gazed with pitiful eyes and tears and entreaties at the
terrible face. This woman was not deserted in her terrible necessity.
The voice of that humble love reached somehow to the springs of
existence, and she came back slowly, in a solemn, fearful waking, out of
death into life. We stood looking on, with an awe and terror impossible
to describe. It was a miracle slowly enacting before us. She was dead
and was alive again. Ghastly and dreadful, like a woman out of the
grave, Miss Mortimer woke up to all her misery again.