CHAPTER XX.
A MIDNIGHT VISITOR.
THIS was what had happened to Hetty.
In the middle of the night she had woke up suddenly as on that occasion when she had come to life out of her dreams, and felt the intolerable darkness go chill to her very soul. What it was that awakened her, whether sound or sensation, the rush of the cold night air, or only some consciousness of trouble and horror, she never could tell. She woke, but not to darkness this time. Her eyes went to the light instinctively—to the faint long opening of the window, which though all moonlight was gone still marked itself upon the darkness around. She woke with a gasp and suppressed cry. Her first sensation was the freshness of the air, which showed that her window was open, and then that something moved in that lighter space through which the wind blew. A terror, to which all her previous fright seemed only preliminary, a horror of anticipation and certainty, froze her very soul. Whatever it was, it had come, it had her at last. She lay paralyzed, not able to move; her eyes, the only capable things in her, straining into that dimness, a little lighter than the darkness, where something unformed and horrible moved: moved! that could be no delusion. She saw it with all the clearness of her young, keen faculties, strung into the most dreadful acuteness of perception—not what it was, but that it moved, now blocking the faint grey, wavering in it, moving out of it, in, into the darkness of her room, near her, close to her. Hetty lay motionless, in a trance of unspeakable terror. What it was she could not say. It would have been less horrible had she been able to see it. It was something that moved, that was all. And then there followed faint, stealthy sounds as if of contact with the furniture, like some one groping in the dark: and suddenly that dreadful something moved close to her, between her and the window, touching the line of her bed. It wavered, seemed to pass, then turned back. The miserable child did not breathe, kept still with one last effort, turned to stone by delirious fear. But something, the subtle consciousness that breathes from every living creature, betrayed her in the portentous gloom. Suddenly she felt something; a hand—was it a hand?—passed over her face; and then the thing, which was not distinct enough to be called a shadow, dropped by her bedside, and drew close—close with the breath of another human creature, upon her. “My child, my little darling, my little darling! I’ve found you, I’ve found you at last!” The breath, the voice, the touch of the cold hand, turned Hetty’s brain. And then it was that those shrieks arose, the indescribable, toneless, sharp discords, the cry of mortal terror passed into delirium; and she knew no more.
“She is not dead,” said Mr. Darrell, examining with the candle the horrible, fixed, staring eyes that saw nothing, that were unconscious of his examination and undazzled by the light. “She is not dead. I am not sure that she isn’t worse than dead.”
“How did it happen?” said the housekeeper, in quick, low tones.
“How can I tell you?—negligence! Get hot water, hot irons—anything that is handiest. We must bring back the circulation, if that is possible. Oh, thank you!” The young doctor threw a vague glance at the white figure that suddenly appeared from behind the curtains, and got into the bed beside Hetty’s marble form. He did not recognise who it was. “That’s the best thing you can do; rub her feet, get the blood back anyhow—anyhow. Get hot water, some of you, quick! Go on with that while I go and get something for her.”
The housekeeper laid her hand upon him as he was hurrying away. “Is all safe?” she asked in her low, quick voice. “Are you sure all’s safe?”
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently; “what’s that in comparison with this?”
“It’s our first business all the same,” said the woman. The young doctor made a despairing movement of his hand towards the bed and hurried away.
Miss Hofland had taken the girl’s inanimate figure into her arms. “I’m almost too cold myself to be of any use to her,” she said, shivering at the contact of the frozen limbs. Mrs. Mills put down her candle by the bedside, where it threw a strange side light upon that tragic mask on the pillow, with the open mouth and staring, awful eyes. Was it Hetty? Was it possible it could be Hetty? All human identity as of feature, or age, or character seemed to have gone out of the rigid face. The housekeeper had her wits all about her—the self-command, Miss Hofland instinctively reflected, of a person not taken by surprise. She gave a few orders to the frightened women, who stood huddled together staring at the foot of the bed, to shut the window, to light fires and prepare hot water. Then she came back to the bedside, quite cool, professional, unexcited. “If it’s cataleptic, all we can do won’t make much difference,” she said calmly: and proceeded to open the clenched hands, and disengage the coverings which were held as in a vice. “Ah!” said Mrs. Mills, “she’s not so unconscious as she looks. She resisted me then—only a little—but still she resisted. She’s coming round.”
“How can it have happened?” Miss Hofland asked. She had got over her first fright and horror, and to talk over a patient, however alarming may be his or her state, is a temptation which nurses, when there are two of them, can rarely resist. They were full of human kindness and interest, and doing everything for her that could be done; but their very interest and anxiety found relief in this discussion of the case.
“Who can tell? She had left her window open again. She never could be cured of that. Her mother must have some fad about open windows.”
“Then you think some one must have come in?”
“Some one? Who was there to come in? Something—perhaps one of the cattle or something—meaning no harm; or perhaps she only imagined it. Imagination is rather worse than fact.”
“I said a cow,” said Miss Hofland thoughtfully. “It would be very strange finding a cow by your bedside in the middle of the night: it might be any sort of a monster: but, goodness! not to overwhelm a girl like that! I think she’s not quite so cold. I think she’s not quite so rigid. Hetty, wake up, my dear!”
“Let her alone,” said the housekeeper. “She can’t hear you. If we get her circulation back, that will be the best chance.”
“But how could it have happened?” repeated Miss Hofland, “for I don’t much believe in the cow. I can’t say I believe in the cow. Oh, how her poor eyes stare! Do you believe she doesn’t see, though she stares so? Hetty! oh, shake it off, darling, shake it off! If you will only make an effort!”
“What is the use?” said Mrs. Mills. “She can’t hear you. If she could, it would be bad for her to be roused so. Young Darrell is very clever, they say; he’ll do all that can be done.”
“He looked as if he knew what it was.”
“Oh, hush, here he is coming back! don’t let him hear you,” cried the housekeeper, and then the colloquy came to an end.
But the case was not so simple as Miss Hofland thought. No power of making an effort remained in poor little Hetty. Her previous terrors, which had been chiefly of the imagination, had undermined her strength. She had no longer any force to resist this overwhelming horror when it came. Whether it was her intelligence which had been killed by the blow, whether she were only stunned temporarily, or if it was a moral paralysis of the whole being which had laid her low, could not be divined. She came round a little from that first trance. After a time her eyes could close, her breathing began to be faintly audible, the rigidity of her limbs relaxed. After a longer interval she came to herself so much as to say “Thank you” faintly to the nurses, and to swallow, though with difficulty, the nourishment they administered. During this period there had been the greatest difficulty in satisfying Hetty’s correspondents at home. She had already fallen out of her early punctuality in respect to letter-writing, which smoothed matters a little; but when day by day went by without producing any amelioration in her state, and when letters began to rain upon the house at Horton full of demands for explanation, and to know what was the matter, Mr. Darrell one day announced to the housekeeper with some haste, and an unnecessary sharpness of tone, “I’ll tell you what it is. I’m going to send for her mother, and that without delay.”
Mrs. Mills looked up in consternation. “Her mother!” she cried. “The last woman in the world to come here!”
“She may be the last woman or anything else you please, but she is the only person that has anything to do here, and I am going to send for her. Look there! do you think that can be allowed to go on?” the young man cried, turning half round to where Hetty sat like a waxen image, supported by cushions in a chair. She lay back as white as the pillow upon which her head rested, her eyelids flickering now and then, her thin hands crossed in her lap. She made no complaint, said scarcely anything except that feeble “Thank you,” when anything was brought her, or when some of her anxious attendants paused to smooth her cushions, or ask if she wanted anything. It was a sight to melt the hardest heart.
“And it is more than a week since it happened,” said young Darrell, “and that is all we have been able to do. You are an excellent nurse, Mrs. Mills; you have neglected nothing: and Miss Hofland does everything that kindness can suggest: but you see yourself that we make no progress. I can do nothing more; her mother may.”
“Time will make it all right,” the housekeeper said. “Of course I am very sorry—I would give anything that it had not happened. Of course the poor little thing has got a dreadful shock. But she is very young, and in time she will get all right.”
“If you like to trust to time with such a delicate thing as a girl’s life,” said the young doctor, “I don’t. We must do something. Either that and try the effect of nature, or else I must have the best authority from town to see her; and you know what questions a physician would ask, and perhaps you know how we could answer him. I don’t.”
“Mr. Darrell,” said the housekeeper, “you’re my superior. I have to take my orders from you. All the same, I consider that our first business is to look after what we were put here for. I cannot acknowledge that a child frightened, even though she is frightened into fits, is any reason for giving up.”
“There are a hundred reasons for giving up,” cried the young man passionately. “I would give up this moment if I could, if there was any one to give up my charge to. It’s neither right nor necessary, what we’re doing. I have never stopped regretting I undertook it, never since——”
“Say the truth, Mr. Darrell, never since—this young lady came here! I’ve seen it from the first. She’s not much more than a child, but you think more of her than of every one else in the house.”
The young doctor blushed like a girl to the very roots of his hair. “I have no intention of answering any such accusation,” he said. “It is entirely uncalled for, and quite unjustifiable. I have done my duty to the utmost, if such a charge could ever be any one’s duty. My doubts have a very different foundation. But I don’t go so far as to sacrifice life to my engagements, and therefore I’m going to telegraph to Mrs. Asquith to beg her to come here at once, without an hour’s delay.”
“Then I’ll telegraph to Mrs. Rotherham,” said the housekeeper. “Oh, dear! she is so far away. How can you betray a poor lady that is so far away? I’ll send for the lawyer. It was he that brought this girl here, and he had better come and take her away. Yes, that’s it. Let’s make a compromise, Doctor. Send her away. To go home, of course, is the best thing for her. Change of air, and change of scene, and her own folks—that’s far, far better. I’ll run the chance of whatever she may say when she gets better. Let us send her away.”
Mr. Darrell turned and looked again at the motionless figure in the chair. His face softened into the deepest, tender pity. “If you think what she was when she came here,” he said, “all full of life and spirit, and to look at her now, like a withered flower! No. I can’t take the responsibility of sending her away. Her mother, or a physician, one or the other! I can’t have her life and her reason to answer for all alone. I am going to telegraph to Mrs. Asquith, now.”
The housekeeper stopped him, catching at his arm. “Do you know who Mrs. Asquith is?” she said.
“Mr. Tenby told me—a relation. Well, so much the better. I am sick of my share in it,” cried the young man. They had been standing talking at the window. Hetty had been moved to another room on the other side of the house, where nothing could remind her of the terrible incident which had changed her whole being, and which was lighted by a large recessed window. He left the housekeeper standing there, and went up to the girl, sitting motionless in her chair. “Is there anything you would like?” he said. “Can I get you anything? Shall I move you nearer the window? Do you think you would like to see any one? Shall I call Miss Hofland? Is there any one whom you would like me to call?” There was a faint hope in his mind that she would say “Mamma,” which she had cried so piteously at first. But Hetty said nothing save “Thank you,” with the faintest movement of her lips.
