Salem Chapel. Volume 2/2

CHAPTER III

WAS it possible that she had slept? A moment ago and it was daylight – a red sunset afternoon: now the pale half-light, struggling with the black darkness, filled the apartment. She was lying on the sofa where Mary had laid her, and by her side, upon a chair within her reach, was some tea untasted, which Mary must have brought after she had fallen into that momentary slumber. The fire burned brightly, with occasional little outbreaks of flame. Such a silence seemed in the house – silence that crept and shuddered – and to think she should have slept!

The night had found covert in all the corners, so dark they were; but one pale line of light came from the window, and the room had a little ruddy centre in the fire. Mrs. Vincent, in the poignant anguish of her awakening, grew superstitious; some other breath – some other presence – seemed in the room besides her own. She called “Mary,” but there was no answer. In her excited condition anything was possible – the bounds of the living world and the possible seemed gone for ever. She might see anything – hear anything – in the calm of her desperation. She got up, and hastily lighted the candle which stood on the table. As she looked over the little light a great cry escaped her. What was it? rising darkly, rising slowly, out of the shadows in which it had been crouching, a huddled indistinct figure. Oh God! not Susan! not her child! As it rose slowly facing her, the widow cried aloud once more, and put her hand over her eyes to shut out the dreadful vision. Ghastly white, with fixed dilated eyes – with a figure dilated and grandiose – like a statue stricken into marble, raised to grandeur – could it be Susan who stood there, without a word, without a movement, only with a blank dark gaze at the horrified woman, who dared not meet those dreadful eyes? When life rallied in Mrs. Vincent’s horror-stricken heart, she went to the ghastly creature, and put warm arms round it, and called it Susan! Susan! Had it any consciousness at all, this dreadful ghost? had it come from another world? The mother kissed it with lips that woke no answer – held it motionless in her trembling arms. She cried again aloud – a great outcry – no longer fearing anything. What were appearances now? If it was Susan, it was Susan dead whom she held, all unyielding and terrible in her warm human arms.

Mary heard and came with exclamations of terror and sympathy. They got her between them to the fire, and chafed her chill hands and feet. Nobody knew how she had got in, where she had come from; no one was with her – no one had admitted her. She sat a marble woman in the chair where they had placed her, unresistant, only gazing, gazing – turning her awful eyes after her mother. At last she drew some long gasping breaths, and, with a shudder which shook her entire frame, seemed to come to herself. “I am Susan Vincent,” said the awful ghost. No tears, nor cries, nor wild pressure of her mother’s arms, nor entreaties poured into her cold ear, could extract any other words. Mrs. Vincent lost her self-possession: she rushed out of the room for remedies – rung the bell – called for Arthur in a voice of despair – could nobody help her, even in this horrible crisis? When she had roused the house she recollected herself, and shut the door upon the wondering strangers, and returned once more to her hopeless task. “Oh, Mary! what are we to do? Oh, Susan, my child, my darling! speak to your poor mother,” cried the widow; but the marble figure in the chair, which was Susan, made no reply. It began to shiver with dreadful trembling fits – to be convulsed with long gasping sobs. “I am – Susan – Susan Vincent” – it said at intervals, with a pitiful iteration. The sight of her daughter in this frightful condition, coming after all her fatigue and strain of excitement, unnerved Mrs. Vincent completely. She had locked the door in her sudden dismay. She was kneeling, clasping Susan’s knees – wasting vain adjurations upon her – driven beyond hope, beyond sense, beyond capacity. Little rustic Mary had all the weight of the emergency thrown upon her shoulders. It was she who called to the curious landlady outside to send for the doctor, and who managed to get Susan put into her mother’s bed. When they had succeeded in laying her down there, a long interval, that seemed like years, passed before Dr. Rider came. The bed was opposite the window, through which the pale rays of the twilight were still trembling. The candle on the other side showed Mrs. Vincent walking about the room wringing her hands, now and then coming to the bedside to look at the unconscious form there, rent by those gasping sobs, uttering those dreadful words. Mary stood crying at the foot of the bed. As for the widow, her eyes were tearless – her heart in an intolerable fever of suffering. She could not bear it. She said aloud she could not bear it – she could not bear it! Then she returned again to call vainly upon her child, her child! Her strength had given way – she had spent all her reserves, and had nothing to resist this unexpected climax of misery.

It was quite dark when Dr. Rider came. Mary held the candle for him as he felt Susan’s pulse, and examined her wide-open eyes. The doctor knew nothing about her any more than if he had not been a doctor. He said it must have been some dreadful mental shock, with inquiring looks at Mrs. Vincent, who began to recover herself. He put back the heavy locks of golden brown hair, which had been loosened down from Susan’s head, and said he was afraid there was pressure on the brain. What could he say? – he knew nothing more about it. He left some simple directions, said he would send some medicine, and took Mrs. Vincent into a corner to ask what it was. “Some severe mental shock?” asked Dr. Rider; but, before she could reply, a cab drove rapidly up to the door, and sounds of a sudden arrival were audible in the house. “Oh, doctor, thank God, my son is come – now I can bear it,” said the widow. Dr. Rider, who was of a compassionate nature, waited with pitying eyes till the minister should come up, and went to take another look at the patient, relieved to think he could speak to her brother, instead of racking her mother’s heart. Mrs. Vincent grew calm in the sudden consolation of thinking Arthur at hand. She sat down by the bedside, with her eyes fixed on the door, yearning for her son, the only living creature from whom she could have entire sympathy. Was it necessary that they should speak so loudly as they came up-stairs? – could he be bringing a stranger with him to Susan’s sickroom? Her heart began to beat louder with mingled expectation and displeasure. It was not like Arthur – and there was no sound of his voice in the noise that swept up the stair. She rose up instinctively as the footsteps approached – heavy steps, not like her son’s. Then the door was thrown open. It was not Arthur who stood upon the dim threshold. It was a stranger in a rough travelling-coat, excited, resolute, full of his own errand. He made a stride into the room to the bedside, thrusting Mrs. Vincent aside, not wittingly, but because she was in his way. Mary stood at the other side with the doctor, holding up the one pale candle, which threw a flickering light upon the marble white figure on the bed, and the utter consternation and surprise in Dr. Rider’s face. Mrs. Vincent, too much alarmed and astonished to offer any resistance, followed the man who had thus entered into her sanctuary of anguish. He knew what he was doing, though nobody else did. He went straight forward to the bed. But the sight of the unconscious figure there appalled the confident stranger. “It is she, sure enough,” he said; “are you a doctor, sir? is the lady taken ill? I’ve come after her every step of the way. She’s in my custody now. I’ll not give any trouble that I can help, but I must stay here.”

Mrs. Vincent, who scarcely could endure to hear, and did not understand, rushed forward while he was speaking, and seized him by the arm – “Leave the room!” she cried with sudden passion – “He has made some impudent mistake, doctor. God help me! – will you let my child be insulted? Leave the room, sir – leave the room, I say! This is my daughter, Miss Vincent, lying here. Mary, ring the bell – he must be turned out of the room. Doctor, doctor! you are a man; you will never let my child be insulted because her brother is away.”

“What does it mean?” cried Dr. Rider – “go outside and I will come and speak to you. Miss Vincent is in a most dangerous state – perhaps dying. If you know her – ”

“Know her, doctor! you are speaking of my child,” cried Mrs. Vincent, who faced the intruder with blazing eyes. The man held his ground, not impertinently, but with steadiness.

“I know her fast enough,” he said; “I’ve tracked her every step of the way; not to hurt the lady’s feelings, I can’t help what I’m doing, sir. It’s murder; – I can’t let her out of my sight.”

Mrs. Vincent clasped her hands together with a grasp of desperation. “What is murder?” she said, in a voice that echoed through the room. The doctor, with an exclamation of horror, repeated the same question. Murder! it seemed to ring through the shuddering house.

“It’s hard upon a lady, not to say her mother,” said the man, compassionately; “but I have to do my duty. A gentleman’s been shot where she’s come from. She’s the first as suspicion falls on. It often turns out as the one that’s first suspected isn’t the criminal. Don’t fret, ma’am,” he added, with a glance of pity, “perhaps it’s only as a witness she’ll be wanted – but I must stay here. I daren’t let her out of my sight.”

There was a dreadful pause. Mrs. Vincent looked up at the two men before her with a heartrending appeal in her eyes. Would anybody tell her what it meant? – would nobody interfere for Susan? She moaned aloud inarticulate in her voiceless misery. “And Arthur is not here!” was the outcry which at last burst from her heart. She was beyond feeling what this was – her senses were confused with extremity of suffering. She only felt that another blow had been dealt at her, and that Arthur was not here to help to bear it. Then the stranger, who had put himself so horribly in possession of Susan’s sickroom, once more began to speak. The widow could not tell what he said – the voice rang in her ears like a noise of unmeaning sound, but it stirred her to a flush of female passion, as violent as it was shortlived. She sprang forward and took hold of his arm with her white little trembling hand: “Not here – not here!” cried the mother in her passion. With her feeble force excited into something irresistible, she put the astonished stranger out of the room before he knew what she was doing. If an infant had done it the man could not have been more utterly astonished. Outside, the people of the house were standing in an excited group. She thrust the dreadful messenger of justice out with those hands that shook with tremors of anguish and weakness. She shut the door upon him with all her feeble strength, locked it, put a chair against it; then she stumbled and fell as she stretched out for another – fell down upon her knees, poor soul! and remained so, forgetting, as it seemed, how she came there, and gradually, by instinct, putting together the hands which trembled like leaves in the wind – “Lord, Lord!” cried the mother, hovering on the wild verge between passion and insensibility. She called Him by name only as utter anguish alone knows how; she had nothing to tell Him; she could only call upon Him by His name.

Dr. Rider took the half-insensible form up in his arms and carried her to the bedside, where Susan still lay motionless with her eyes wide open, in an awful abstraction and unconsciousness. He put Mrs. Vincent tenderly into the chair, and held the hands that shook with that palsied irrestrainable tremor. “No one can bring her to life but you,” said the doctor, turning the face of the miserable mother towards her child. “She has kept her senses till she reached you; when she was here she no longer wanted them; she has left her life in your hands.” He held those hands fast as he spoke; pressed them gently, but firmly; repeated his words over again. “In your hands,” said the doctor once more, struck to his heart with horror and pity. Susan’s bare beautiful arm lay on the coverlid, white, round, and full, like marble. The doctor, who had never seen the fair Saxon girl who was Mrs. Vincent’s daughter a week ago, thought in his heart that this full developed form and face, rapt to grandeur by the extremity of woe, gave no contradiction to the accusation he had just heard with so much horror. That week had obliterated Susan’s soft girlish innocence and the simplicity of her eighteen years. She was a grand form as she lay there upon that bed – might have loved to desperation – fallen – killed. Unconsciously he uttered aloud the thought in his heart – “Perhaps it would be better she should die!”