WHEN I reached the drawing-room, after throwing off my bonnet and arranging my hair in the most breathless haste, terrified to hear the summons at the door before I was downstairs, I was thunderstruck to find Sara Cresswell there. The sight of her made an end of my awkward feeling of shame for my own haste and curiosity. Surely this was nothing less than a crisis that was coming. Sara had just arrived, and was explaining the reasons for her visit in such a very fluent and demonstrative way, that I could see at once they were all made up, and some motive entirely different from those she mentioned had brought her. She was still in her hat and velvet jacket, seated rather on the edge of her chair, talking very volubly, but looking breathless and anxious, while Aunt Milly, who was sitting in her own place, opposite her sister, and near the fireplace, looked at her, perplexed and uncertain, evidently rather suspicious of the many motives which had procured us this visit; which, if Sara had only said nothing about it, would have been received as a delightful surprise, and wanted no accounting for. It was evidently a great relief to Sara when I came in; she came to kiss me, turning her face away from Aunt Milly, and caught hold of me so tight, and gave me such a troubled, emphatic look, that even if I had not heard before, I should have known something was coming. I stood by her breathless for a moment, wondering why the door-bell did not ring,—Luigi had certainly had abundant time to have got to the door,—and then went up to the other end of the room on pretence of finding my work; while Sara, instead of following me, dropped into her chair again, evidently too nervous, too anxious, too eager to see the first of it and lose nothing, to do anything but sit still. We were both traitors and plotters. She had come to watch something that was about to happen, but which the principal person concerned did not know. While I, more cruel still, took my trembling way up to the other end of the apartment, and stationed myself behind Aunt Milly, that I might not lose a look or word from Miss Mortimer. I felt ashamed of myself, but I could not help it. I felt a kind of conviction that this was to be the decisive day.
But still there was no sound at the door; there was time to look round all the peaceable vast room, and be struck by the quietness, the repose of the scene in which some act of this mysterious drama was about to be enacted. It was always very light here, but the bright day and the sunshine out of doors, made it now even lighter than usual, and refused to any of us the slightest shade for our faces, whatever undue expression might come to them. Sara had adopted the only expedient possible, by turning her back upon the light, and had, besides, a little shelter in her hat. But dear Aunt Milly, looking at her favourite with a troubled inquiring expression, and laying down the work she had in hand in order to examine Sara’s countenance the better, was so fully set forth in all her looks, movements, and almost feelings, by that broad clear day-light, that I shrank back from it in spite of myself, fearing that it would betray me too. The only shadow in the room was that afforded by Miss Mortimer’s screen. She sat there just as usual, in her violet-coloured dress, her light muslin embroidered scarf, worn without any lining, now that the weather was warm, and her pretty cap, with ribbons corresponding to her dress; her head moving so slightly that it was difficult to perceive the motion; her pattern-book open on her knee, her head bent over it. At this moment, when the thunders of Providence were just about to break over her, she sat there, with her head over her knitting-book, counting her stitches, and trying a new pattern. When I saw how she was occupied, my own trembling pretence at work fell from my hands. I gazed at her openly with a wonder which was almost awe. My heart cried out against her in her dread composure. The Avenger was coming, and there she sat, all conscious, aware, in every nerve, of her guilt, and yet able to maintain that hideous calm. Yes! it would have been sublime had she been a good woman, threatened by some undeserved doom. I declare it was ghastly, devilish, dreadful to me!
All this time nobody came to the door. I daresay, perhaps, it was not very many minutes after all; but in the excitement and suspense it seemed a very long time to me. And either the house was specially quiet, or there was something in my agitated condition which made me think so. Miss Mortimer never lifted her head; if she had not been so engaged with her pattern, surely she would have noticed the perplexed looks of Aunt Milly, and my excited face. But she did not, she kept working on at her new stitch. We all relapsed into perfect silence; Sara’s voluble excuses for herself died all at once off her lips. Aunt Milly dropped into a strange anxious silence, looking at her. As for myself, I could not have spoken a word whatever had been the consequences. Sara’s nervous motion of her foot on the carpet startled me so much that I had nearly committed myself by some cry of agitation. It was a dread, inexplainable pause, which nobody dared either break or account for. Dead silence and expectation. And Miss Mortimer bending her head over her pattern-book counting the loops for her new stitch.
The bell did not ring. If it had rung it must have startled us all so much as to diminish the sense of what was coming; there was no such premonition;—a little sound of steps and subdued voices in the hall made my heart beat so loud that I felt sure my Aunt Milly must have heard it. Sara looked up at me suddenly when that sound became audible. Her face was perfectly colourless, and her hands firmly clasped together.
“Children, what is it?” said Aunt Milly, with a sharp frightened cry, breaking off suddenly in a troubled manner as the steps drew nearer. Miss Mortimer lifted her head from her book. She looked up, she looked full at me; she smiled. She was listening, but she was not afraid.
When suddenly the door was thrown open; Ellis called out, with his fullest voice: “The Count Sormonata,” and somebody came in. I cannot tell who it was that came in. I heard Sara cry out with a kind of shriek and repeat the name, “The Count Sermoneta!” The work and the book and all the trifling matters about her fell off from Miss Mortimer. She rose up, clenching her hand, ghastly, like a dead woman. She cried out in a voice I shall never forget: “he is dead, dead!” she cried, with the wildest scream and outcry. “I tell you, he is dead, dead! My God, he is dead! Will nobody believe me?” shrieked out the miserable woman. Her sister ran to her, and was thrust away with those terrible clenched hands. But she never turned to look, nor cast aside her screen that hid the new comer from her. She stood still like some frightful statue, rigid, with her wild eyes fixed upon the air before her—heaven knows what she might see there!—listening in some frightful agony to the steps that came slowly up the room. When that scream burst from her the footsteps faltered and stopped. Then Miss Mortimer looked at me, the only creature she saw before her, and laughed a dreadful laugh of madness and misery. “He knows it!” she cried out, triumphantly, “if you did not, he does. He is dead, dead!” and then came to another dreadful pause, leaning her clenched hands upon the table and fixing her wild eyes upon something straight before her. While I followed the mad stare of her eyes with a shudder I could not refrain, another person came with noiseless rapidity into the spot she was gazing on. It was not a spectre—it was simply Luigi, from whose face agitation had banished all the colour, and who stood trembling and speechless, wringing his hands, and gazing at her with an unspeakable appeal and entreaty. She did not say anything more; she stood with her eyes full opened and staring wide, leaning her hands on that table. I believe, if anybody had touched her, she would have fallen. I almost believed, while I looked at her, that she had died standing, and that it was a lifeless form that stood fixed in that horrible erect attitude, fronting us all, fronting a thousand times more than us, all the guilt and sins of her life. I gave a cry myself in the extremity of my terror and trouble. I went to her, I cannot tell how, stumbling over Aunt Milly, who had either fallen or fainted, or I cannot tell what. I went and put my arm round that dreadful ghastly figure. It was not her I was approaching, but it, the terrible mask and image of her. I had not a thought but that she was dead.
When I touched her, she fell, as I had thought she would. But so strong an impression did her dreadful appearance have upon me, that, when her figure sank into the chair and showed some elasticity, instead of going down on the floor, crumbling down, dropping to pieces, as somehow I had expected, I was struck with a horrible fear and surprise. She was not dead. I called out to them all, what were we to do? and she seemed to hear me. I saw, with a terror I cannot explain, her terrible eyes turn from Luigi—they looked at me, at Aunt Milly, they cast a glance over the room. Was it that the spirit was living and the body dead?
I cannot tell what we did for a dreadful interval after that. Carson came into the confused crowd. Luigi disappeared to find a doctor, and we tried to get her lifted and laid upon the sofa. But though she neither moved nor spoke, and scarcely seemed to breathe, she resisted, in some dreadful way, and would not be removed. I shall never forget that dreadful face; when I am ill it comes back to me, a recollection never to be banished;—dead—yet never consenting to die, keeping alive, determined, resolute, unshaken. I can see the discoloured lips begin to move, the words formed on the inarticulate tongue, the eyes lightening out of that fixed stare. Half the house had stolen into the room in this dreadful emergency without anybody observing them. But the dead woman observed them. And I, who was standing nearest, recoiled from her side, and the whole circle round her broke up and fell back in speechless horror, when a sound broke from that dreadful convulsed mouth. Old Carson, trembling but faithful, stood by her mistress. The poor creature said she understood that sound. It was to send everybody away, said the woman, whose limbs would scarcely support her, and whose very teeth chattered. They all went away, terrified but curious; the boldest lingered behind the screen. Nobody remained within sight of those dreadful eyes but Aunt Milly and me. We two stood huddled on each other, not daring to say a word, or even to exchange looks. Carson stood by her mistress’s side. Carson knew all and everything, more than we knew. She held some cordial to the dead lips, she chafed the ghastly hand, she gazed with pitiful eyes and tears and entreaties at the terrible face. This woman was not deserted in her terrible necessity. The voice of that humble love reached somehow to the springs of existence, and she came back slowly, in a solemn, fearful waking, out of death into life. We stood looking on, with an awe and terror impossible to describe. It was a miracle slowly enacting before us. She was dead and was alive again. Ghastly and dreadful, like a woman out of the grave, Miss Mortimer woke up to all her misery again.