On my way to the office next morning, it suddenly dawned on me what
Fawcett meant. How, in truth, was I to ascertain whether the singular
provision of Mrs. Drainger's will had or had not been met? Fawcett had
not, he said, been present at the death; and even if he had been, there
must elapse a considerable time in which Emily would necessarily be
alone with her mother's body.
The more I pondered, the more puzzled I grew. It seemed grotesque that
Mrs. Drainger should have overlooked this situation. Moreover, I was
naturally curious. Fawcett's narrative justified me in all I had
thought, but it had not given a motive for the veil, nor for the
tenacity with which Mrs. Drainger clung to it.
The house looked unchanged as I turned into the street on which it
faced. Death was, it said, of so little consequence to the walls which
had immured and conquered life itself. There was in the very lack of
change a great irony. A barren device of crepe on the door, one lower
window partly open--that was all. The very papers yellowing before the
door had not been swept away.
Mrs. Mueller, the woman who had witnessed the signing of the will, was
standing on the steps that led to the street. If my relations with the
Draingers had been odd, they were to conclude as strangely. The woman
was apparently expecting me, and her manner testified to recent terror.
"What do you want?" I asked.
"_She_ told me," Mrs. Mueller said, "to get you."
Her hunted look and the solemn glance she gave me testified that _she_
was as real to her as though Mrs. Drainger had not for twenty-four hours
been dead. "She told me if a certain thing happened I was to call you."
Suddenly I saw. That tremendous woman was reaching at me over the very
boundaries of life.
"I don't like it," continued Mrs. Mueller with an indescribable accent
of fear and a sidelong look at me for support. "I don't like it. But she
said the day before she died, she said, 'If Miss Emily uncovers my face
when I am dead, you are to tell Mr. Gillingham,' she said. And she made
me promise to watch."
She seemed to want to tell me something she could not put in words.
"It is terrible," she went on in a vague, haunted manner, "what I saw."
"What?"
"She was always a queer woman. 'If Miss Emily uncovers my face,' she
said, 'you are to call Mr. Gillingham.' And she made me watch. I didn't
want to. So when she died I came right over."
"How did you know when to come?"
"I don't know," she answered helplessly. "I just came. She told me Miss
Emily wasn't to see me, but I was to watch. It is terrible."
We were at the door. I had a sudden distaste for the woman, though she
was quite simply honest, and, as it were, the helpless and unconscious
spy that Mrs. Drainger, in her grave, had set upon her daughter. I was
anxious to get it over with.
"You will see," she said again and brought me into the house.
Her terror was beginning to affect me. She was quite unable to tell me
what she had seen, but her whole manner expressed a dazed horror, not so
much of some concrete fear as of the ghastly position in which she found
herself.
She led me to the door of the room in which I had last seen Mrs.
Drainger alive, but no inducement could make her come in, nor could I
get from her anything more explicit. Poor soul! I do not wonder at her
terror.
The room was as before. The shuttered windows admitted only faint bars
and pencils of light. The dim chairs and shadowy tables were
discernible, but, as if they yielded precedence to death, the most solid
object in the obscurity was the coffin in which Mrs. Drainger's body
lay. I advanced to it. The mistress of this ill-fated mansion seemed to
have grown larger in death; her body was no longer shrunken and her
folded hands still retained faintly their peculiar luminous quality. I
could see in the shadow that around her face there was no longer the
black mantle, but the face puzzled me--I could not make it out, and,
opening the shutter, I let in the light.
I stepped again to the side of the coffin. Could this be the queenly
beauty of whom Fawcett had spoken? For, where the features should have
been there was, naked to the light, only a shapeless, contorted mass of
flesh in which, the twisted eyelids being closed, there seemed to my
horrified gaze no decent trace of human resemblance!
I turned half-sick from the sight. Emily Drainger, tall, pallid yellow,
her great eyes burning with an evil glow, her lemon dress an unhealthy
splotch in the doorway, stood regarding me.
"The will--the will!" she cried. "She thought she could stop me, but she
could not!"
"Who--what has done this?" I pointed involuntarily to her mother's face.
She seemed to expand before my eyes with evil triumph.
"I--_I_," she cried at length, her black eyes holding me as I stood,
weak and faint, clinging unconsciously to the coffin for support.
"_Twenty years ago!_ But"--she laughed hysterically and came to look at
the shapeless, brutalized face--"I never knew, until she died, that it
was done so well!!"