The Last of the Mortimers

Chapter XVII

ALL the remainder of that dreadful afternoon we spent in vain endeavours to get admission. No answer came to us from those closed doors—silence, dead and unbroken, was within those concealing walls, which it seemed wonderful to me did not beat and throb with the torturing life within them. The whole house was disturbed, as was to be supposed. While we stood in an anxious, troubled group round Miss Mortimer’s door, Carson, with her melancholy and ashamed face, stood anxious and terrified at a little distance—the maids below came to take furtive peeps upon the stairs—and Ellis himself stood listening in the hall, catching at every sound. The whole house was conscious of some dreadful crisis, which had occurred, or was occurring; and even in the frightful anxiety which possessed us, Aunt Milly began to feel that extraordinary infraction of all the decorums of such a house. She whispered to Sara to leave us, and go downstairs to restore the equilibrium of the household a little, and sent Carson into Lizzie’s room, where the poor creature sank, overpowered and almost fainting, upon the bed. Then Aunt Milly went away to her own apartment, and came back with a huge bunch of keys. With these in her hand she motioned me to follow her round about into the little corridor to which Miss Mortimer’s dressing-room opened. “Milly, stand by me,” she cried, with a sob. “I’d rather face so many lions than go in upon her against her will—but it must be—I cannot help myself. After what we saw to-day, I should be guilty, I should be a criminal—don’t you think so, Milly?—if I left her alone to-night.”

It was getting dusk, and the light was pale and ghastly in that little corridor which was close upon the backstairs, and very bare and chill. The door opened without the assistance of the keys. We went into the little luxurious room where the fire burned brightly, warm though the weather was, and which bore all the marks of being lived in and cherished. An easy-chair and footstool were placed at the side of the fire, and close by stood a little table with a raised ornamental rim, like a tray, in which some books and some of Miss Mortimer’s materials for work were placed. At the other end of the room was a window, where stood a plain rush-bottomed chair and a large round basket of work; there was Carson’s place; and the union of the two in this their joint retirement and dwelling-place—the junction of the lady’s luxuries and the servant’s labours in this habitation common to them both—struck me with a pathetic force, now that this old, long, immemorial connection was brought to a close so hurriedly. Aunt Milly did not linger in this room; she went straight to the door leading into the bedchamber which was fastened. “Sarah,” she called softly, “Sarah!” there was no answer. We listened, and the silence round was dreadful; the silence and the gathering twilight, and the terrible mystery of life or death that lay in that closed-up room. Then she tried the keys with her trembling hands. Still not a word from the solitary within, not even of remonstrance or indignation. After what seemed to us a dreadful tedious interval, in which the night appeared visibly to darken round us, the lock at length yielded. The key that had been in it fell, with a dull, heavy sound, inside, making our hearts beat. Then Aunt Milly opened the door. I shall never forget the sensation with which I entered that dark room. What we were to find there, a ghastly corpse or a miserable living creature, nobody could tell; treading on the soft carpets that made our footsteps noiseless, brushing past those soft-drawn curtains which shut out every draught, coming into this atmosphere of care, and comfort, and luxury, the contrast was almost too dreadful to bear. I remember trying to listen for her breath, but could not for the terrified beating of my own heart. The darkness made everything more dreadful still, for the blinds were drawn down, and the little light there was fell so faintly through them that we could scarcely find our way through the room. Aunt Milly was before me; she made a terrified plunge forward, and gave a cry as we came past the head of the bed, which was towards the dressing-room door. Something lay in a heap on the floor by the side of the bed. She threw herself down on the floor beside that heap. I don’t think she was conscious, even when she touched it, what it was; but as I rushed to help her, as I thought, I was suddenly arrested by a gleam of eyes from the bed. “I am not dead,” said Miss Mortimer. I could not help nor command myself. Some scream or shriek came from me in the extremity of my awe and terror. I could hear it answered by a sudden stir and commotion outside the door. “They’re killing my mistress,” was Lizzie’s voice; and with the wildest alarm lest some violent attack on the door should follow, I rushed to it, opened it, and asked for lights.

Outside were half the household grouped at various distances. No precautions could stifle that eager curiosity which knew by instinct that some wonderful mystery was here. They all dispersed when they saw me, frightened and ashamed of themselves. Only Lizzie kept her ground. She seized hold of my sleeve and detained me. “You’re no to stay there!” cried Lizzie. “Oh, no you, no you! You’ll gang and let them kill you, and the bairn’ll perish, and the Captain never come hame! Let me in! I’ll get the drinks and keep up the fire, and never close an e’e; but it’s no you that’s to watch, and you the light o’ folks e’en. It’s no to be you! If I was to gang to my bed and sleep, what would the Captain say to me?” cried poor Lizzie, with a trembling burst of excitement and anxiety, standing close up by me, holding my sleeve, pressing to enter the room. Somehow it comforted me, though it was a piece of folly. I told her again to get the lights, and went back into the dark, solemn room. These sounds of the outside world had not entered there. Miss Mortimer lay on the bed with her eyes wide-awake and gleaming, gathering into them all the little light in the room. Aunt Milly stood beside her, asking how she was; herself scarcely recovered from the shock that had been given her by that heap of clothes upon the floor, trembling, not knowing very well what she said, her great yearning anxiety and curiosity to get at her sister’s heart, overflowing in uneasy questions. Did she feel ill? Would she have anything? How was she? Miss Mortimer took no notice of her questions. She repeated once “I am not dead,” with a strange spitefulness and defiance, and for the rest lay silent, looking at me as I moved about the room, a dark undecipherable figure, and at poor Aunt Milly standing beside me. She took no other notice. It seemed to please her to lie there silent, defying all our curiosity. But she did not complain or find fault with our presence. I believe in my heart she was glad to have her dreadful solitude thus broken, and that it was a comfort to her desolation to see living creatures moving in the darkness. I cannot help thinking so; but after that one expression, twice repeated, not all the anxious questions of her sister could bring a syllable to her lips.

When the candles came she closed her eyes; then, after a little interval, made a wrench at the curtains and gave an impatient sigh. The sigh was for Carson, who doubtless knew exactly what she liked and what she did not like. The fire was laid already in the grate, and I lighted it, and began to put away those things which lay on the floor. Wherever I moved, when it was within her sight, she followed me with her eyes from within the crimson shadow of the curtain. She was perfectly composed and self-possessed. She was even well as it appeared. The ghastly colour had disappeared from her face. She lay there self-absorbed, as she sat over her knitting. All the dread incidents of this day had passed over, and left Sarah Mortimer unchanged. Such a woman could deny, defy, live through any thing. I watched her with indescribable awe and–. Well! I had pitied her while she was alone; but do you suppose I could love such a woman, lying there unmoved and unrepentant, in her dread self-occupation? It was not possible I hated her, loathed her, turned away with sickening and disgust from her dreadful looks. It was hard, even, to pity her now.

Chapter XVIII

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 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 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 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 brought upstairs. When I would not take that, lest it should make me sleepy, Aunt Milly got up from the sofa to make some tea for me. Everybody knows such nights—everybody knows how some one always tries to comfort the watcher with such attentions—tender, useless, heartbreaking attempts at outside consolation. I went back to the sick room with a pang both of relief and anguish. If it had been my husband or my baby that I was watching! Thank God it was not so! but the picture came before me with a terrible force just then, when I did not know where Harry was, nor how he might be lying, nor who might be watching over him. I tried to shut out my own thoughts from this room; but who could ever do that? I fancied I could see white soldiers’ huts rising in the darkness, and groans of wounded men. It was a relief to me when my patient groaned and turned in her bed. But she did not wake; She lay all night long in what seemed more like a stupor than a sleep, interrupted by groans and stifled outcries, and long sighs that broke one’s heart. No wonder we had heard of her bad nights.

In the morning, when she woke at last, Miss Mortimer turned round upon me with a half-stupified, wondering stare. Then she recollected herself. She did not speak, but I saw all the thoughts of the previous night come slowly back to her face. She watched me arranging the room in the cheerful morning light; she even permitted me to raise her among her pillows, and swallowed, though with an effort, the tea I brought her. She bore no malice against me for anything I had said. She seemed even pleased to have me beside her; but it was not for my sake; I believe she thought I was doing it for an interested reason. And she—she thought she had found an accomplice in me.

This morning she spoke with difficulty, and her looks were changed. She looked ill, very ill. The morning light showed a strange widening and breadth about her eyes, a solemn fixed expression in her face, which, though I had never watched it coming before, went to my heart with an instinctive chill and recognition. She could not bear me to be out of her sight for a moment. When I went to the dressing-room door to speak a word to Aunt Milly she called me back with an impatient, stifled cry. At last she beckoned me close to her bedside.

“I want—I want—send—let him come,” she stammered out.

“Luigi?” I said.

She clasped her hands together in an access of passion. “To make my will,” she cried, with a kind of scream; “now—now—this moment.” When she had uttered the words she fell back panting, a flush of weakness and fever coming to her face. I went and told Aunt Milly, who, all troubled as she was, sent off a messenger immediately for Mr. Cresswell. “I will send for the doctor, too, and—and the clergyman; but what can Dr. Roberts do for her?” cried poor Aunt Milly, wringing her hands. The clergyman! What, indeed, could that sleek, comfortable man do at this deathbed of guilt and passion? Ah me! A poor priest might have done something, perhaps, or a poor preacher accustomed to matters of life and death.

The day glided on while we waited. She would not let me leave her; but she did not say anything, except disjointed murmurs, and strange broken conversations with herself. It was not the present time that her mind was busy with. Listening in the silence of that room I became aware of a passionate prime of life, an Italian summer, a bitter mortification, disappointment, revenge—revenge which had come back upon the remorseless inflictor, and made her life the desert it had been. It all opened up before me in breaks and glimpses; afterwards, when I knew the story, it was with the force of an actual representation that I remembered this broken, unconscious autobiography. She was not raving; she was only calling up and setting in order the incidents of that crisis of her life, I cannot follow her through it now; but I remember that the awe, and interest, and excitement kept me from feeling any weariness.

I could not turn away for any sort of refreshment; I sat fascinated before that revelation of the secret of her days. She seemed to have foresworn husband and child, life itself and all that made it bearable, in dreadful vengeance for some broken promise or unfulfilled vow. Her father came flitting across the troubled picture; the count, and some dreadful controversy about a name, all intermixed with recollections of certain rooms and their furniture; of a garden and a thicket of syringas. What that point of deception or disappointment was, on which the whole story turned, I could not tell; but for this she had left the stream of life when life was at its fullest promise; for this she had settled down in a frightful, stubborn determination, behind that screen in the drawing-room of the Park. All her after existence, huddled up into one long monotonous day, had not made these scenes less fresh in her memory. This was now she had revenged herself—on the Count, who was dead—on her son, whom she disowned and cast away from her; ah! above all, a thousand times more bitterly, on herself.