"What is it?"--I began;--then, looking round I saw that the hall was
full of panic-stricken servants, some of whom came forward, confusedly
murmuring together about being 'afraid,' and 'not knowing what to do.' I
motioned them back by a gesture and turned again to Mavis Clare.
"Tell me,--quick--what is wrong?"
"We fear something has happened to Lady Sibyl,"--she replied at
once--"Her rooms are locked, and we cannot make her hear. Her maid got
alarmed, and ran over to my house to ask me what was best to be done,--I
came at once, and knocked and called, but could get no response. You
know the windows are too high to reach from the ground,--there is no
ladder on the premises long enough for the purpose,--and no one can
climb up that side of the building. I begged some of the servants to
break open the door by force,--but they would not,--they were all
afraid; and I did not like to act on my own responsibility, so I
telegraphed for you----"
I sprang away from her before she had finished speaking and hurried
upstairs at once,--outside the door of the ante-room which led into my
wife's luxurious 'suite' of apartments, I paused breathless.
"Sibyl!" I cried.
There was not a sound. Mavis had followed me, and stood by my side,
trembling a little. Two or three of the servants had also crept up the
stairs, and were clinging to the banisters, listening nervously.
"Sibyl!" I called again. Still absolute silence. I turned round upon the
waiting and anxious domestics with an assumption of calmness.
"Lady Sibyl is probably not in her rooms at all;"--I said; "She may have
gone out unobserved. This door of the ante-chamber has a
spring-lock,--it can easily get fast shut by the merest accident. Bring
a strong hammer,--or a crowbar,--anything that will break it open,--if
you had had sense you would have obeyed Miss Clare, and done this a
couple of hours ago."
And I waited with enforced composure, while my instructions were carried
out as rapidly as possible. Two of the men-servants appeared with the
necessary tools, and very soon the house resounded with clamour,--blow
after blow was dealt upon the solid oaken door for some time without
success,--the spring lock would not yield,--neither would the strong
hinges give way. Presently however, after ten minutes' hard labour, one
of the finely carved panels was smashed in,--then another,--and,
springing over the débris I rushed through the ante-room into the
boudoir,--then paused, listening, and calling again, "Sibyl!" No one
followed me,--some indefinable instinct, some nameless dread, held the
servants back, and Mavis Clare as well. I was alone, ... and in complete
darkness. Groping about, with my heart beating furiously, I sought for
the ivory button in the wall which would, at pressure, flood the rooms
with electric light, but somehow I could not find it. My hand came in
contact with various familiar things which I recognised by touch,--rare
bits of china, bronzes, vases, pictures,--costly trifles that were
heaped up as I knew, in this particular apartment with a lavish luxury
and disregard of cost befitting a wanton eastern empress of old
time,--cautiously feeling my way along, I started with terror to see, as
I thought, a tall figure outline itself suddenly against the
darkness,--white, spectral and luminous,--a figure that, as I stared at
it aghast, raised a pallid hand and pointed me forward with a menacing
air of scorn! In my dazed horror at this apparition, or delusion, I
stumbled over the heavy trailing folds of a velvet _portiére_, and knew
by this that I had passed from the boudoir into the adjoining bedroom.
Again I stopped,--calling "Sibyl!" but my voice had scarcely strength
enough to raise itself above a whisper. Giddy and confused as I was, I
remembered that the electric light in this room was fixed at the side of
the toilet-table, and I stepped hurriedly in that direction, when all at
once in the thick gloom I touched something clammy and cold like dead
flesh, and brushed against a garment that exhaled faint perfume, and
rustled at my touch with a silken sound. This alarmed me more thoroughly
than the spectre I fancied I had just seen,--I drew back shudderingly
against the wall,--and in so doing, my fingers involuntarily closed on
the polished ivory stud which, like a fairy talisman in modern
civilization, emits radiance at the owner's will. I pressed it
nervously,--the light blazed forth through the rose-tinted shells which
shaded its dazzling clearness, and showed me where I stood, ... within
an arm's length of a strange, stiff white creature that sat staring at
itself in the silver-framed mirror with wide-open, fixed and glassy
eyes!
"Sibyl!" I gasped--"My wife ... ! ..." but the words died chokingly in my
throat. Was it indeed my wife?--this frozen statue of a woman, watching
her own impassive image thus intently? I looked upon her
wonderingly,--doubtingly,--as if she were some stranger;--it took me
time to recognize her features, and the bronze-gold darkness of her long
hair which fell loosely about her in a lavish wealth of rippling waves,
... her left hand hung limply over the arm of the chair in which, like
some carven ivory goddess, she sat enthroned,--and tremblingly, slowly,
reluctantly, I advanced and took that hand. Cold as ice it lay in my
palm much as though it were a waxen model of itself;--it glittered with
jewels,--and I studied every ring upon it with a curious, dull
pertinacity, like one who seeks a clue to identity. That large turquoise
in a diamond setting was a marriage-gift from a duchess,--that opal her
father gave her,--the lustrous circle of sapphires and brilliants
surmounting her wedding-ring was my gift,--that ruby I seemed to
know,----well, well! what a mass of sparkling value wasted on such
fragile clay! I peered into her face,--then at the reflection of that
face in the mirror,--and again I grew perplexed,--was it, could it be
Sibyl after all? Sibyl was beautiful,--_this_ dead thing had a devilish
smile on its blue, parted lips, and frenzied horror in its eyes!
Suddenly something tense in my brain seemed to snap and give
way,--dropping the chill fingers I held, I cried aloud--
"Mavis! Mavis Clare!"
In a moment she was with me,--in a glance she comprehended all. Falling
on her knees by the dead woman she broke into a passion of weeping.
"Oh, poor girl!" she cried--"Oh, poor, unhappy, misguided girl!"
I stared at her gloomily. It seemed to me very strange that she should
weep for sorrows not her own. There was a fire in my brain,--a confused
trouble in my thoughts,--I looked at my dead wife with her fixed gaze
and evil smile, sitting rigidly upright, and robed in the mocking sheen
of her rose-silk peignoir, showered with old lace, after the costliest
of Paris fashions,--then at the living, tender-souled, earnest creature,
famed for her genius throughout the world, who knelt on the ground,
sobbing over the stiffening hand on which so many rare gems glistened
derisively,--and an impulse rose in me stronger than myself, moving me
to wild and clamorous speech.
"Get up, Mavis!" I cried--"Do not kneel there! Go,--go out of this
room,--out of my sight! You do not know what she was--this woman whom I
married,--I deemed her an angel, but she was a fiend,--yes, Mavis, a
fiend! Look at her, staring at her own image in the glass,--you cannot
call her beautiful--_now_! She smiles, you see,--just as she smiled last
night when, ... ah, you know nothing of last night! I tell you, go!" and
I stamped my foot almost furiously,--"This air is contaminated,--it
will poison you! The perfume of Paris and the effluvia of death
intermingled are sufficient to breed a pestilence! Go quickly,--inform
the household their mistress is dead,--have the blinds drawn down,--show
all the exterior signs of decent and fashionable woe!"--and I began
laughing deliriously--"Tell the servants they may count upon expensive
mourning,--for all that money can do shall be done in homage to King
Death! Let everyone in the place eat and drink as much as they can or
will,--and sleep, or chatter as such menials love to do, of hearses,
graves and sudden disasters;--but let _me_ be left alone,--alone with
_her_;--we have much to say to one another!"
White and trembling, Mavis rose up and stood gazing at me in fear and
pity.
"Alone? ..." she faltered--"You are not fit to be alone!"
"No, I am not fit to be, but I must be,"--I rejoined quickly and
harshly--"This woman and I loved--after the manner of brutes, and were
wedded or rather mated in a similar manner, though an archbishop blessed
the pairing, and called upon Heaven to witness its sanctity! Yet we
parted ill friends,--and dead though she is, I choose to pass the night
with her,--I shall learn much knowledge from her silence! To-morrow the
grave and the servants of the grave may claim her, but to-night she is
mine!"
The girl's sweet eyes brimmed over with tears.
"Oh you are too distracted to know what you are saying," she
murmured--"You do not even try to discover how she died!"
"That is easy enough to guess,"--I answered quickly, and I took up a
small dark-coloured bottle labelled 'Poison' which I had already
perceived on the toilet-table--"This is uncorked and empty. What it
contained I do not know,--but there must be an inquest of
course,--people must be allowed to make money for themselves out of her
ladyship's rash act! And see there,--" here I pointed to some loose
sheets of note-paper covered with writing, and partially concealed by a
filmy lace handkerchief which had evidently been hastily thrown across
them, and a pen and inkstand close by--"There is some admirable reading
prepared for me doubtless!--the last message from the beloved dead is
sacred, Mavis Clare; surely you, a writer of tender romances, can
realize this!--and realizing it, you will do as I ask you,--leave me!"
She looked at me in deep compassion, and slowly turned to go.
"God help you!" she said sobbingly--"God console you!"
At this, some demon in me broke loose, and springing to her side I
caught her hands in mine.
"Do not dare to talk of God!" I said in passionate accents; "Not in this
room,--not in _that_ presence! Why should you call curses down upon me?
The help of God means punishment,--the consolations of God are terrible!
For strength must acknowledge itself weak before He will help it,--and a
heart must be broken before He will console it! But what do I say!--I
believe in _no_ God--! I believe in an unknown Force that encompasses me
and hunts me down to the grave, but nothing more. _She_ thought as I
do,--and with reason,--for what has God done for her? She was made evil
from the first,--a born snare of Satan...."
Something caught my breath here,--I stopped, unable to utter another
word. Mavis stared at me affrighted, and I stared back again.
"What is it?" she whispered alarmedly. I struggled to speak,--finally,
with difficulty I answered her--
"Nothing!"
And I motioned her away with a gesture of entreaty. The expression of my
face must have startled or intimidated her I fancy, for she retreated
hastily and I watched her disappearing as if she were the phantom of a
dream,--then, as she passed out through the boudoir, I drew close the
velvet portiére behind her and locked the intermediate door. This done I
went slowly back to the side of my dead wife.
"Now Sibyl,"--I said aloud--"we are alone, you and I--alone with our own
reflected images,--you dead, and I living! You have no terrors for me in
your present condition,--your beauty has gone. Your smile, your eyes,
your touch cannot stir me to a throb of the passion you craved, yet
wearied of! What have you to say to me?--I have heard that the dead can
speak at times,--and you owe me reparation,--reparation for the wrong
you did me,--the lie on which you based our marriage,--the guilt you
cherished in your heart! Shall I read your petition for forgiveness
here?"
And I gathered up the written sheets of note-paper in one hand, feeling
them rather than seeing them, for my eyes were fixed on the pallid
corpse in its rose-silk 'negligée' and jewels, that gazed at itself so
pertinaciously in the shining mirror. I drew a chair close to it, and
sat down, observing likewise the reflection of my own haggard face in
the glass beside that of the self-murdered woman. Turning presently, I
began to scrutinize my immovable companion more closely--and perceived
that she was very lightly clothed,--under the silk peignoir there was
only a flowing white garment of soft fine material lavishly embroidered,
through which the statuesque contour of her rigid limbs could be
distinctly seen. Stooping, I felt her heart,--I knew it was pulseless;
yet I half imagined I should feel its beat. As I withdrew my hand,
something scaly and glistening caught my eye, and looking I perceived
Lucio's marriage-gift circling her waist,--the flexible emerald snake
with its diamond crest and ruby eyes. It fascinated me,----coiled round
that dead body it seemed alive and sentient,--if it had lifted its
glittering head and hissed at me I should scarcely have been surprised.
I sat back for a moment in my chair, almost as rigid as the corpse
beside me,--I stared again, as the corpse stared always, into the mirror
which pictured us both, we 'twain in one,' as the sentimentalists aver
of wedded folk, though in truth it often happens that there are no two
creatures in the world more widely separated than husband and wife. I
heard stealthy movements and suppressed whisperings in the passage
outside, and guessed that some of the servants were there watching and
waiting,--but I cared nothing for that. I was absorbed in the ghastly
night interview I had planned for myself, and I so entered into the
spirit of the thing, that I turned on all the electric lamps in the
room, besides lighting two tall clusters of shaded candles on either
side of the toilet-table. When all the surroundings were thus rendered
as brilliant as possible, so that the corpse looked more livid and
ghastly by comparison, I seated myself once more, and prepared to read
the last message of the dead.
"Now Sibyl,"--I muttered, leaning forward a little, and noting with a
morbid interest that the jaws of the corpse had relaxed a little within
the last few minutes, and that the smile on the face was therefore more
hideous--"Confess your sins!--for I am here to listen. Such dumb,
impressive eloquence as yours deserves attention!"
A gust of wind fled round the house with a wailing cry,--the windows
shook, and the candles flickered. I waited till every sound had died
away, and then--with a glance at my dead wife, under the sudden
impression that she had heard what I said, and knew what I was doing, I
began to read.