I had with difficulty overcome Aunt Milly. I had represented to her how
much better I was able to bear it than she, and Aunt Milly herself had
sent off Sara Cresswell to bed. It was late at night, and all the house
was still. We were both together in the dressing-room. Nothing would
persuade dear Aunt Milly to leave me alone to this vigil. She wrapped
herself in a shawl and lay down upon the sofa. “I am at hand the moment
I am wanted,” she said. I had kissed baby, and said my prayers beside
him. I was not frightened or nervous now. I went in, wrapped in my
dressing-gown, to look at my patient. She stretched out her hand, and
then when she saw me, drew it back again with a fretful groan, and
turned her face to the wall. It was Carson, still Carson, whom she
missed at every turn. But she did not answer me when I asked if she
wanted anything, she only groaned again with a dismal impotence and
impatience. I sat and watched her at a distance while she lay in that
broad wakefulness, her eyes wandering to and fro, her mind evidently
wandering, too, into never-ending thought. It was to me a spirit,
somehow, chained and fettered to a body it could not throw off, which
lay in irksome confinement on that bed,--a spirit ever active,
sleepless, evil. Why was I sitting up with her? she was not even ill.
Was it that she had died that day, and some wicked spirit had taken
possession of the exhausted frame? I declare that this idea returned to
me in spite of myself. I could not escape from it; as the night crept on
strange fears came over me. Her eyes fascinated mine. I could not
withdraw my gaze from those two gleams of strange light within the
crimson curtains, moving about from minute to minute with their restless
observation. What was she thinking of? Could she tell that, under this
roof, the roof of his fathers, her injured son was sleeping? Was she
thinking of her youth, her life, the past, with all its dread,
pertinacious, stubborn cruelty? I did not know then how the
extraordinary story told by Luigi could be harmonised into possibility.
I could not think of any story; I could think of nothing but that
solitary woman pursuing those sleepless thoughts, which nobody shared,
through all the dread recesses of her conscience, through all the
scenes, visible to her only, of her hidden mysterious life.
It must have been about midnight when some one knocked softly at the
door. It made me start painfully with a terror I could not subdue. I
rose to see who it was, trembling at the summons. It was Carson, who
called me anxiously into the drawing room. She did not say anything, but
drew me to a little medicine-chest, which she opened, and from which,
all silently, with the speed of long custom, she took a little bottle,
and dropped some of its contents into a glass of water. “You must put
this by her bedside,” whispered Carson, “and here are all her medicines;
but don’t drop them yourself, for the love of pity!--you’ve no
experience. You might give her her death. When my missis wants her
draughts, will you call me?” While I promised to do so, Aunt Milly woke
up from a short sleep. “Has anything happened, Milly?” she cried,
starting up suddenly. Nothing had happened but that her start had thrown
down a footstool, and made a noise which sounded dreadful in the calm of
the night. The three of us dispersed hastily upon that sound. Carson
disappeared out of the room. Aunt Milly sat up trembling on the sofa. I
went back to the patient. The noise had roused her. She had struggled up
in bed, and was trying to look round to the dressing-room door.
“Who is it?” she cried, when I went in, her eyes fixing on me with
something of the dreadful expression they had in the drawing-room, as if
she had lost control over them, and the orbs turned wildly out and
fluttered to the light. “If it’s _him_, let him come here.”
“It was only Carson,” I said.
“Carson? let her not come near me. I will do her an injury,” cried Miss
Mortimer with wild exasperation. Then she suffered herself to fall back
on her pillows. “They’re all in a plot,” she went on, “all in a plot,
the very woman I trusted; I shall never trust anybody any more. But
here’s the wonderful thing; she is just as great a coward as she is a
fool; and to think she should hate me so much as to be able to go up and
down these passages in the middle of the night with a dead man! Hark,
there they are!”
I fell back from the bedside at the words, unable to refrain from a
shudder of horror.
“You’re afraid,” said Miss Mortimer, looking at me with a kind of
contemptuous curiosity. “Yet you saw him come in yesterday and you did
not faint. I remember seeing you stare and stare. Ah! it’s strange to
see a dead man!”
“I saw nobody but Luigi; nobody but your son,” cried I, in dismay.
When it was said I drew back in alarm, lest the words should rouse her
into passion. But they did not. She was beyond that.
“I could not see him, though,” she continued, going on in her dreadful
monologue; “it was only a kind of feeling he was there, and the scent of
the syringas in the garden. You know it’s very overpowering; those they
call the Virgin’s Breast. It was that made me faint.”
Here she fixed her eyes on me again, as if she imagined that she had
been setting up a plausible plea and dared me to contradict it.
“I wonder if he’s as handsome now he’s dead,” she went on in a very low
tone; “he was never as handsome for a man as I was for a woman. I’ll
never, never speak to Carson again; but you might ask her if he’s kept
his looks. Ah! I thought I saw some one behind the curtains there; but
he’ll never appear to me. For he swore, you know, he swore, he was never
to give me any trouble, and he kept his word till he died.”
“Oh, Miss Mortimer,”--I cried, coming forward to the bed with the glass
in my hand. She held out hers eagerly, and interrupted me.
“Miss Mortimer! to be sure I am Miss Mortimer; I have always been Miss
Mortimer, you know that; then what’s all this made up story about a son?
For, you know,” she said, sinking her voice again into a whisper, and
holding the glass in her hand, “to be called countess would have been a
temptation to many a woman. But I never would have it, not for a day,
never after he refused to take our name. That’s what a man calls love,
you know. You shall take his name if it’s a beggar’s, and he will not
take yours if it brings a kingdom. But I was not the sort of woman to be
a beggarly Italian countess. And I’ve beaten him in his grave,” she
cried out in ghastly triumph,--“in his grave I’ve got the victory over
him! Here’s the child on his knees to me to call him Lewis Mortimer. Ah!
you’re Richard Mortimer’s daughter. I might have married Richard if I
had known how things were going to turn out. We’ll set it all right
to-morrow. Yes; stand by me, and we’ll set it all right. There’s no dead
man shall conquer me. Do you hear? There he is pacing about the passage
as he used to do when I refused to see him. But he dared not come in;
no, not if I had been a thousand times his wife.”
And I cannot help it if people may think me a fool; there were steps
outside in the passage. If it was a living creature I cannot tell; but,
as certain as I live, there were footsteps going up and down, up and
down, with a heavy, melancholy tread. She looked at me full in the face
as we heard them going on. She began to tremble so that the bed shook
under her; her eyes grew wilder, her colour more ghastly. In spite of
all she said, she was stricken to her very heart with fear.
And as for me, I did not feel I had courage to open the door. I called
out, “Whoever you are, go away, I beseech,--go away! She cannot rest
while you are here.” The steps stopped in a moment, then, after a pause,
went on and went away, growing fainter in the distance. Thank heaven it
must have been somebody living! perhaps Carson, perhaps her son.
When I came back to the bedside she had dropped asleep--actually, in the
midst of her terror, had fallen into an unnatural slumber. It was an
opiate that Carson had given her. The little medicine-chest was full of
different kinds of opiates. Scarcely one of them that was not marked
poison. I looked into the dressing-room for a minute to comfort poor
Aunt Milly, who had heard all her sister said, and was in a dreadful
state of agitation. She kissed me and blessed me, and leaned her dear
kind head upon my shoulder for the moment I dared stay beside her. “She
would never have said so much to me,” said Aunt Milly, and wrapped her
own shawl round me, and tried to make me take some wine which she had
brought upstairs. When I would not take that, lest it should make me
sleepy, Aunt Milly got up from the sofa to make some tea for me.
Everybody knows such nights--everybody knows how some one always tries
to comfort the watcher with such attentions--tender, useless,
heartbreaking attempts at outside consolation. I went back to the sick
room with a pang both of relief and anguish. If it had been my husband
or my baby that I was watching! Thank God it was not so! but the picture
came before me with a terrible force just then, when I did not know
where Harry was, nor how he might be lying, nor who might be watching
over him. I tried to shut out my own thoughts from this room; but who
could ever do that? I fancied I could see white soldiers’ huts rising in
the darkness, and groans of wounded men. It was a relief to me when my
patient groaned and turned in her bed. But she did not wake; She lay all
night long in what seemed more like a stupor than a sleep, interrupted
by groans and stifled outcries, and long sighs that broke one’s heart.
No wonder we had heard of her bad nights.
In the morning, when she woke at last, Miss Mortimer turned round upon
me with a half-stupified, wondering stare. Then she recollected herself.
She did not speak, but I saw all the thoughts of the previous night come
slowly back to her face. She watched me arranging the room in the
cheerful morning light; she even permitted me to raise her among her
pillows, and swallowed, though with an effort, the tea I brought her.
She bore no malice against me for anything I had said. She seemed even
pleased to have me beside her; but it was not for my sake; I believe she
thought I was doing it for an interested reason. And she--she thought
she had found an accomplice in me.
This morning she spoke with difficulty, and her looks were changed. She
looked ill, very ill. The morning light showed a strange widening and
breadth about her eyes, a solemn fixed expression in her face, which,
though I had never watched it coming before, went to my heart with an
instinctive chill and recognition. She could not bear me to be out of
her sight for a moment. When I went to the dressing-room door to speak a
word to Aunt Milly she called me back with an impatient, stifled cry. At
last she beckoned me close to her bedside.
“I want--I want--send--let him come,” she stammered out.
“Luigi?” I said.
She clasped her hands together in an access of passion. “To make my
will,” she cried, with a kind of scream; “now--now--this moment.” When
she had uttered the words she fell back panting, a flush of weakness and
fever coming to her face. I went and told Aunt Milly, who, all troubled
as she was, sent off a messenger immediately for Mr. Cresswell. “I will
send for the doctor, too, and--and the clergyman; but what can Dr.
Roberts do for _her_?” cried poor Aunt Milly, wringing her hands. The
clergyman! What, indeed, could that sleek, comfortable man do at this
deathbed of guilt and passion? Ah me! A poor priest might have done
something, perhaps, or a poor preacher accustomed to matters of life and
death.
The day glided on while we waited. She would not let me leave her; but
she did not say anything, except disjointed murmurs, and strange broken
conversations with herself. It was not the present time that her mind
was busy with. Listening in the silence of that room I became aware of a
passionate prime of life, an Italian summer, a bitter mortification,
disappointment, revenge--revenge which had come back upon the
remorseless inflictor, and made her life the desert it had been. It all
opened up before me in breaks and glimpses; afterwards, when I knew the
story, it was with the force of an actual representation that I
remembered this broken, unconscious autobiography. She was not raving;
she was only calling up and setting in order the incidents of that
crisis of her life, I cannot follow her through it now; but I remember
that the awe, and interest, and excitement kept me from feeling any
weariness.
I could not turn away for any sort of refreshment; I sat fascinated
before that revelation of the secret of her days. She seemed to have
foresworn husband and child, life itself and all that made it bearable,
in dreadful vengeance for some broken promise or unfulfilled vow. Her
father came flitting across the troubled picture; the count, and some
dreadful controversy about a name, all intermixed with recollections of
certain rooms and their furniture; of a garden and a thicket of
syringas. What that point of deception or disappointment was, on which
the whole story turned, I could not tell; but for this she had left the
stream of life when life was at its fullest promise; for this she had
settled down in a frightful, stubborn determination, behind that screen
in the drawing-room of the Park. All her after existence, huddled up
into one long monotonous day, had not made these scenes less fresh in
her memory. This was now she had revenged herself--on the Count, who was
dead--on her son, whom she disowned and cast away from her; ah! above
all, a thousand times more bitterly, on herself.
It was afternoon when Mr. Cresswell came. He was brought up to the room
immediately, without a word of explanation, and accordingly knew nothing
of all the dreadful history of the last twenty-four hours. He had not
even a hint that anything was changed, except the health of Miss
Mortimer. He came and expressed his concern in the common-place tone of
an unexcited stranger; he expressed his surprise to see me with her. In
his heart he set it down that this will was of my suggesting. I am
certain he did; and smiled to find me the nurse of the sick woman. But
Miss Mortimer (that I should still go on calling her by that name after
all I had heard!) left him very little time. She recovered herself
wonderfully at sight of him; her very utterance became easier in the
anxiety she showed to express herself plainly. She was impatient of his
inquiries and condolences. She moved her hands uneasily about the bed,
and for a moment her eyes fluttered as they had done the day before; but
as soon as he had prepared his papers, and taken his pen in hand, she
was composed again. My heart beat so loud with anxiety to hear what she
said, that I could scarcely breathe. Was she now at last to set right
the injustice of a life?
“Write,” she cried, with a gasp for breath, “that I leave
everything--mind, it is everything, Bob Cresswell, no partitions. My
sister Milly, though she is a fool, is as fond of her, ah! as--as I
am--all the Park and the lands belonging to it, to Millicent Mortimer.
There! the young soldier’s wife; and to--eh! who is it? Who speaks to
me?”
I grasped her hand hard in my sudden passion. It was cold, cold, a dead
hand, and horrified me with its touch. “Stop,” I cried, “oh, stop, Mr.
Cresswell; she cannot mean such horrible injustice! Miss Mortimer!
Countess! whatever you are! will you dare to die and never repent? Do
you think I will let you bring a curse on my innocent baby? Stop! Stop!
I forbid it, for her soul’s sake!”
Mr. Cresswell pushed back his chair and stared in amazement too great
for words. She looked at me with a strange air of cunning and superior
wisdom, and then at him.
“She thinks,” said the dying woman, in a kind of whisper, addressing Mr.
Cresswell, “to draw me into some foolish talk, and bring it up against
the will. Fool! they are all fools; go on.”
“What does it mean?” he said looking at me.
“It means that she ought to do justice,” I cried; “that it is all she
can do now; that she is going to die without repenting, without making
amends. If you write it, it will be a sin.”
“Bob Cresswell, go on; it is I who am the person to be attended to,”
said Miss Mortimer. “This creature, do you hear, is a fool. I know what
I mean.”
“There is something here I don’t understand; my dear lady, you’re not so
very ill, suppose we put it off,” said the lawyer in great perplexity;
“and there’s Miss Milly, you know, she has her share in the Park.”
“Attend to _me_!” cried Miss Mortimer, wildly. “You will kill me; am I
to be thwarted _now_, as well as all my life? Oh, good heavens! in my
own house, and in bed, and perhaps going to die--and I am not to have my
will, my will! I shall have my will, if I should write it myself!”
She stretched out her eager hand towards the writing things, stretching
out of bed, and by some chance touched Mr. Cresswell. When he felt that
deathly touch he grew very grave, and started with a shudder. He took up
his pen immediately.
“I will do what you please,” he said. He could not resist that cry of
death.