A HAUNTED SOUL.
Helen rose and hastened to her brother, with a heart of lead in her
body.
She started when she saw him: some change had passed on him since
the morning! Was that eager look in his eyes a fresh access of the
fever? That glimmer on his countenance, doubtful as the first of the
morning, when the traveller knows not whether the light be in the
sky or only in his brain, did look more like a dawn of his old
healthful radiance than any fresh fire of madness; but at the same
time he appeared more wasted and pinched and death-like than she had
yet seen him. Or was it only in her eyes--was she but reading in his
face the agony she had herself gone through that day?
"Helen, Helen!" he cried as she entered the room, "come here, close
to me."
She hastened to him, sat down on the bedside, took his hand, and
looked as cheerfully as she could, yet it was but the more woefully,
in his face.
"Helen!" he said again, and he spoke with a strange expression in
his voice, for it seemed that of hope, "I have been thinking all day
of what you told me on Sunday."
"What was that, Poldie?" asked Helen with a pang of fear.
"Why, those words of course--what else? You sang them to me
afterwards, you know. Helen, I should like to see Mr. Wingfold.
Don't you think he might be able to do something?"
"What sort of thing, Poldie?" she faltered, growing sick at
heart.--Was this what came of praying! she thought bitterly.
"Something or other--I don't know what exactly," returned
Leopold.--"Oh Helen!" he broke out with a cry, stifled by the
caution that had grown habitual to both of them, "is there no help
of any kind anywhere? Surely Mr. Wingfold could tell me
something--comfort me somehow, if I were to tell him all about it! I
could trust the man that said such things as those you told me. That
I could!--Oh! I wish I hadn't run away, but had let them take me and
hang me!"
Helen felt herself grow white. She turned away, and pretended to
search for something she had dropped.
"I don't think he would be of the slightest use to you," she said,
still stooping.
And she felt like a devil dragging the soul of her brother to hell.
But that was a foolish fancy, and must be resisted!
"Not if I told him everything?" Leopold hissed from between his
teeth in the struggle to keep down a shriek.
"No, not if you told him everything," she answered, and felt like a
judge condemning him to death.
"What is he there for then?" said Leopold indignantly, and turned
his face to the wall and moaned.
Helen had not yet thought of asking herself whether her love to her
brother was all clear love, and nowise mingled with selfishness--
whether in the fresh horror that day poured into the cup that had
seemed already running over, it was of her brother only she thought,
or whether threatened shame to herself had not a part in her misery.
But, as far as she was aware, she was quite honest in saying that
the curate could not comfort him--for what attempt even had he made
to comfort her? What had he done but utter common-places and truisms
about duty? And who could tell but--indeed was she not certain that
such a man, bringing the artillery of his fanaticism to bear upon
her poor boy's wild enthusiastic temperament, would speedily
persuade him to make a reality of that terrible thing he had already
thought of, that hideously impossible possibility which she dared
not even allow to present itself before her imagination? So he lay
and moaned, and she sat crushed and speechless with despairing
misery.
All at once Leopold sat straight up, his eyes fixed and flaming, his
face white: he looked like a corpse possessed by a spirit of fear
and horror. Helen's heart swelled into her throat, the muscles of
her face contracted with irresistible rigor, and she felt it grow
exactly like his, while with wide eyes she stared at him, and he
stared at something which lest she also should see, she dared not
turn her head. Surely, she thought afterwards, she must have been
that moment in the presence of something unearthly! Her physical
being was wrenched from her control, and she must simply sit and
wait until the power or influence, whichever it might be, should
pass away. How long it was ere it relaxed its hold she could not
tell; it could not have been long, she thought. Suddenly the light
sank from Leopold's eyes, his muscles relaxed, he fell back
motionless, apparently senseless, on the pillow, and she thought he
was dead. The same moment she was free; the horror had departed from
her own atmosphere too, and she made haste to restore him. But in
all she did for him, she felt like the executioner who gives
restoratives to the wretch that has fainted on the rack or the
wheel. What right had SHE, she thought, to multiply to him his
moments of torture? If the cruel power that had created him for such
misery, whoever, whatever, wherever he might be, chose thus to
torture him, was she, his only friend, out of the selfish affection
he had planted in her, to lend herself his tool? Yet she hesitated
not a single moment in her ministrations.
There is so much passes in us of which our consciousness takes no
grasp,--or but with such a flitting touch as scarcely to hand it
over to the memory--that I feel encouraged to doubt whether ever
there was a man absolutely without hope. That there have been, alas,
are many, who are aware of no ground of hope, nay even who feel no
glimmer in them of anything they can call hope, I know; but I think
in them all is an underlying unconscious hope. I think that not one
in all the world has more than a shadowy notion of what hopelessness
means. Perhaps utter hopelessness is the outer darkness.
At length Leopold opened his eyes, gave a terrified glance around,
held out his arms to her, and drew her down upon his face.
"I saw her!" he said, in a voice that sounded as if it came from the
grave, and she heard it in her heart.
"Nonsense, dear Poldie! it was all fancy--nothing more," she
returned, in a voice almost as hollow as his; and the lightness of
the words uttered in such a tone jarred dismayfully on her own ear.
"Fancy!" he repeated; "I know what fancy is as well as any man or
woman born: THAT was no fancy. She stood there, by the wardrobe--in
the same dress!--her face as white as her dress! And--listen!--I
will tell YOU--I will soon satisfy you it COULD be no fancy."--Here
he pushed her from him and looked straight in her eyes.--"I saw her
back reflected in the mirror of the wardrobe-door, and"--here the
fixed look of horror threatened to return upon his face, but he went
on--"listen,--there was a worm crawling on it, over her lovely white
shoulder! Ugh! I saw it in the mirror!"
His voice had risen to a strangled shriek, his face was distorted,
and he shook like a child on the point of yelling aloud in an agony
of fear. Helen clasped his face between her hands, and gathering
courage from despair, if indeed that be a possible source of
courage, and it is not gathered rather from the hidden hope of which
I speak, and the love that will cleave and not forsake, she set her
teeth, and said:
"Let her come then, Poldie! I am with you, and I defy her! She shall
know that a sister's love is stronger than the hate of a jilt--even
if you did kill her. Before God, Poldie, I would after all rather be
you than she. Say what you will, she had herself to blame, and I
don't doubt did twenty worse things than you did when you killed
her."
But Leopold seemed not to hear a word she said, and lay with his
face to the wall.
At length he turned his head suddenly, and said,
"Helen, if you don't let me see Mr. Wingfold, I shall go mad, and
then everything will come out."