I HAD with difficulty overcome Aunt Milly. I had represented to her how much better I was able to bear it than she, and Aunt Milly herself had sent off Sara Cresswell to bed. It was late at night, and all the house was still. We were both together in the dressing-room. Nothing would persuade dear Aunt Milly to leave me alone to this vigil. She wrapped herself in a shawl and lay down upon the sofa. “I am at hand the moment I am wanted,” she said. I had kissed baby, and said my prayers beside him. I was not frightened or nervous now. I went in, wrapped in my dressing-gown, to look at my patient. She stretched out her hand, and then when she saw me, drew it back again with a fretful groan, and turned her face to the wall. It was Carson, still Carson, whom she missed at every turn. But she did not answer me when I asked if she wanted anything, she only groaned again with a dismal impotence and impatience. I sat and watched her at a distance while she lay in that broad wakefulness, her eyes wandering to and fro, her mind evidently wandering, too, into never-ending thought. It was to me a spirit, somehow, chained and fettered to a body it could not throw off, which lay in irksome confinement on that bed,—a spirit ever active, sleepless, evil. Why was I sitting up with her? she was not even ill. Was it that she had died that day, and some wicked spirit had taken possession of the exhausted frame? I declare that this idea returned to me in spite of myself. I could not escape from it; as the night crept on strange fears came over me. Her eyes fascinated mine. I could not withdraw my gaze from those two gleams of strange light within the crimson curtains, moving about from minute to minute with their restless observation. What was she thinking of? Could she tell that, under this roof, the roof of his fathers, her injured son was sleeping? Was she thinking of her youth, her life, the past, with all its dread, pertinacious, stubborn cruelty? I did not know then how the extraordinary story told by Luigi could be harmonised into possibility. I could not think of any story; I{349} could think of nothing but that solitary woman pursuing those sleepless thoughts, which nobody shared, through all the dread recesses of her conscience, through all the scenes, visible to her only, of her hidden mysterious life.
It must have been about midnight when some one knocked softly at the door. It made me start painfully with a terror I could not subdue. I rose to see who it was, trembling at the summons. It was Carson, who called me anxiously into the drawing room. She did not say anything, but drew me to a little medicine-chest, which she opened, and from which, all silently, with the speed of long custom, she took a little bottle, and dropped some of its contents into a glass of water. “You must put this by her bedside,” whispered Carson, “and here are all her medicines; but don’t drop them yourself, for the love of pity!—you’ve no experience. You might give her her death. When my missis wants her draughts, will you call me?” While I promised to do so, Aunt Milly woke up from a short sleep. “Has anything happened, Milly?” she cried, starting up suddenly. Nothing had happened but that her start had thrown down a footstool, and made a noise which sounded dreadful in the calm of the night. The three of us dispersed hastily upon that sound. Carson disappeared out of the room. Aunt Milly sat up trembling on the sofa. I went back to the patient. The noise had roused her. She had struggled up in bed, and was trying to look round to the dressing-room door.
“Who is it?” she cried, when I went in, her eyes fixing on me with something of the dreadful expression they had in the drawing-room, as if she had lost control over them, and the orbs turned wildly out and fluttered to the light. “If it’s him, let him come here.”
“It was only Carson,” I said.
“Carson? let her not come near me. I will do her an injury,” cried Miss Mortimer with wild exasperation. Then she suffered herself to fall back on her pillows. “They’re all in a plot,” she went on, “all in a plot, the very woman I trusted; I shall never trust anybody any more. But here’s the wonderful thing; she is just as great a coward as she is a fool; and to think she should hate me so much as to be able to go up and down these passages in the middle of the night with a dead man! Hark, there they are!”
I fell back from the bedside at the words, unable to refrain from a shudder of horror.
“You’re afraid,” said Miss Mortimer, looking at me with a{350} kind of contemptuous curiosity. “Yet you saw him come in yesterday and you did not faint. I remember seeing you stare and stare. Ah! it’s strange to see a dead man!”
“I saw nobody but Luigi; nobody but your son,” cried I, in dismay.
When it was said I drew back in alarm, lest the words should rouse her into passion. But they did not. She was beyond that.
“I could not see him, though,” she continued, going on in her dreadful monologue; “it was only a kind of feeling he was there, and the scent of the syringas in the garden. You know it’s very overpowering; those they call the Virgin’s Breast. It was that made me faint.”
Here she fixed her eyes on me again, as if she imagined that she had been setting up a plausible plea and dared me to contradict it.
“I wonder if he’s as handsome now he’s dead,” she went on in a very low tone; “he was never as handsome for a man as I was for a woman. I’ll never, never speak to Carson again; but you might ask her if he’s kept his looks. Ah! I thought I saw some one behind the curtains there; but he’ll never appear to me. For he swore, you know, he swore, he was never to give me any trouble, and he kept his word till he died.”
“Oh, Miss Mortimer,”—I cried, coming forward to the bed with the glass in my hand. She held out hers eagerly, and interrupted me.
“Miss Mortimer! to be sure I am Miss Mortimer; I have always been Miss Mortimer, you know that; then what’s all this made up story about a son? For, you know,” she said, sinking her voice again into a whisper, and holding the glass in her hand, “to be called countess would have been a temptation to many a woman. But I never would have it, not for a day, never after he refused to take our name. That’s what a man calls love, you know. You shall take his name if it’s a beggar’s, and he will not take yours if it brings a kingdom. But I was not the sort of woman to be a beggarly Italian countess. And I’ve beaten him in his grave,” she cried out in ghastly triumph,—“in his grave I’ve got the victory over him! Here’s the child on his knees to me to call him Lewis Mortimer. Ah! you’re Richard Mortimer’s daughter. I might have married Richard if I had known how things were going to turn out. We’ll set it all right to-morrow. Yes; stand by me, and we’ll set it all right. There’s no dead man shall conquer me. Do you hear? There he is pacing about the passage as he{351} used to do when I refused to see him. But he dared not come in; no, not if I had been a thousand times his wife.”
And I cannot help it if people may think me a fool; there were steps outside in the passage. If it was a living creature I cannot tell; but, as certain as I live, there were footsteps going up and down, up and down, with a heavy, melancholy tread. She looked at me full in the face as we heard them going on. She began to tremble so that the bed shook under her; her eyes grew wilder, her colour more ghastly. In spite of all she said, she was stricken to her very heart with fear.
And as for me, I did not feel I had courage to open the door. I called out, “Whoever you are, go away, I beseech,—go away! She cannot rest while you are here.” The steps stopped in a moment, then, after a pause, went on and went away, growing fainter in the distance. Thank heaven it must have been somebody living! perhaps Carson, perhaps her son.
When I came back to the bedside she had dropped asleep—actually, in the midst of her terror, had fallen into an unnatural slumber. It was an opiate that Carson had given her. The little medicine-chest was full of different kinds of opiates. Scarcely one of them that was not marked poison. I looked into the dressing-room for a minute to comfort poor Aunt Milly, who had heard all her sister said, and was in a dreadful state of agitation. She kissed me and blessed me, and leaned her dear kind head upon my shoulder for the moment I dared stay beside her. “She would never have said so much to me,” said Aunt Milly, and wrapped her own shawl round me, and tried to make me take some wine which she had b............