"Your wishes shall be regarded," I assured her. "If you do feel worse, ring this bell and Margery will notify me." And placing the bell rope near her hand, I drew back and presently quitted the room.
Lingering in the hall just long enough to see the lovely Honora flit across the threshold of the sitting-room which I had purposely ordered vacant for her use, I hurried to my room.
It was dark, dark as the secret chamber into which I now stole with the lightest and wariest of steps. Horror, gloom, and apprehension were in the air, which brooded stiflingly in the narrow spot, and had it not been for the righteous purpose sustaining me, I should have fallen at this critical moment, crushed beneath the terrible weight of my own feelings.
But one who has to listen, straining every faculty to catch the purport of what is going on behind an impenetrable wall, soon forgets himself and his own sensations. As I pressed my ear to the wall and caught the sound of a prolonged and painful stir within, I only thought of following the movements of madame, who, I was now sure, had left her bed and was dragging herself, with what difficulty and distress I could but faintly judge by the involuntary groans which now and then left her, across the floor toward the door, the key of which I presently heard turn.
This done, a heavy silence followed, then the slow, dragging sound began again, interrupted now by weary pants and heavy sobs that at first chilled me and then shook me with such fear that it was with difficulty that I could retain my place against the wall. She was crawling in my direction, and at each instant I heard the pants grow louder.
I gradually withdrew, step by step, till I found myself pressed up against the wall in the remotest corner I could find. And here was I standing, enveloped in darkness and dread, when the sounds changed to that of a shuddering, rushing noise which I had heard once before in my life, and from a narrow gap through which the faint light in the room beyond dimly shone in a thread of lesser darkness, the aperture grew, till I could feel rather than see her form, crawling, not walking, through the opening, and hear, distinct enough, her horrible, gurgling tones as she murmured:
"I shall have to grope for what I want—touch it, feel it, for I cannot see. O God! O God! What horror! What punishment!"
Nearer, nearer over the floor she came, dragging her useless limb behind her. Her outstretched arm groped, groped about the floor, while I stood trembling and agonized with horror till her hand touched the skirt of my dress, when, with a great shriek of suddenly liberated feeling, I pushed her from me, and crying out, "Murderess! do you seek the bones of your victim?" I flung open the door against which I stood and let the light from my own room stream in upon us two.
Her face as I saw it at that moment has never left my memory. She had fallen in a heap at my first move, and now lay crushed before me, with only her wide-staring eyes and shaking lips to tell me that she lived.
"You thought I did not know you," I burst forth. "You thought, because I had never seen your face, you could come back here, bringing your innocent daughter with you, and cast yourself into the very atmosphere of your crime without awakening the suspicion of the woman whose house you had made a sepulcher of for so many years. But crime was written too plainly on your brow. The spirit of Honora Urquhart, breaking the bounds of this room, has walked ever beside you, and I knew you from the first moment that you strayed down this hall."