CHAPTER LI.
OUT IN THE STORM.
Why did that miserable woman prowl, so cat-like and stealthily, around those two houses? What motive could have brought her so far from home, a second Satan, to poison and blast the Eden of peace and charity those two aged people had gathered around them? What had they ever done, that she should persecute them so ruthlessly with her presence?
They knew her, that was certain, for Catharine, even beyond her own shuddering fear, had noticed that their limbs trembled beneath them as she approached, and that a deadly fear burned in their eyes and spoke in every line of their gentle faces.
Elsie too. The very sight of this evil woman had driven her into fierce insanity again. Why was this? Had they known her before? If so, how and where? The portrait of her husband,—was that, too, a mysterious link between these old people, so opposite in character, so unlikely to hold anything in common? How was she connected with them all?
These conjectures kept Catharine awake half the night, while poor Elsie moaned and muttered in her sleep, or started up with wild cries, calling upon God to drive her enemies forth and not let them torment her forever!
Catharine left her bed, feverish and excited by these thoughts. She felt sure that Madame De Marke had not recognized her; for she had been standing on one side in the library, when those evil eyes looked through the window. But the very sight of her old enemy left a nervous dread behind it, and she could not rest. Events of importance to her own destiny seemed to be crowding themselves around her, vaguely, it is true, but with a force that awoke a sort of terror in her.
She opened her chamber-window and sat down. Elsie was moaning and muttering in her bed, agonized by sleeping terrors. The wind without rose high and blustering; clouds lowered down among the trees; and gusts of rain drifted through the leaves, bathing them, as it were, with liquid diamonds, through which the lightning shot from time to time, with its thousand golden arrows.
Next to her chamber, the two old people lay awake. The sound of their conversation came to her ear at times through the pauses of the wind, like a softened and mournful echo of Elsie’s raving.
Beneath her was the library, with its mysterious associations. The trees around it loomed against the bank of clouds, disconnected from their blackness only by the lightning that shot from it. All was gloom within and without; and amid the storm, her sobs rose and swelled unheard and unfelt, save by her own lonely heart.
The lightning grew stronger and enveloped the whole landscape in broad, lurid sheets, revealing the country around and a sombre expanse of water beyond. At these times the new cottage stood out in broad relief, and the whole space of ground between that and the old mansion-house was momentarily illuminated. The scene gave the young woman a fierce sort of exaltation, while it filled her with grief. She thought of her husband and longed to shout his name aloud, to ask him to come forth from the bosom of the storm and tell her that he was yet alive.