"What is it, dear?" she asked, with an indescribable mellowness of voice, whose tone thrilled me with a fresh and passionate pity.
"I thought I heard Mr. Allison come in, but he always knocks; besides, it is not time for him yet." And she sighed.
That sigh went through my heart, rousing new feelings and deeper terrors; but I had no time to indulge in them, for the mother turned at the gasp which left my lips, and rising up, confronted me with an amazement which left her without any ability to speak.
"Who is it, mother?" inquired the blind girl, herself rising and beaming upon me with the sweetest of looks.
"Let me answer," I ventured softly. "I am Mr. Allison's wife. I have come to see if there is anything I can do to make your stay here more comfortable."
The look that passed over the mother's face warned me to venture no further in the daughter's presence. Whatever that mother had suffered, the daughter had experienced nothing but satisfied love and companionship in these narrow precincts. Her rounded cheeks showed this, and the indescribable atmosphere of peace and gladness which surrounded her.
As I saw this, and realized the mother's life and the self-restraint which had enabled her to accept the inevitable without raising a complaint calculated to betray to the daughter that all was not as it should be with them, I felt such a rush of awe sweep over me that some of my fathomless emotion showed in my face; for Mrs. Ransome's own countenance assumed a milder look, and advancing nearer, she pointed out a room where we could speak apart. As I moved toward it she whispered a few words in her daughter's ear, then she rejoined me.
"Oh, madame!" I murmured, "oh, madame! Show a poor girl what she can do to restore you to your rights. The door is open and you can descend; but that means——Oh, madame, I am filled with terror when I think what. He may be in the hall now. He may have missed the key and returned. If only you were out of the house!"
"My dear girl," she quietly replied, "we will be some day. You will see to that, I know. I do not think I could stay here, now that I have seen another face than his. But I do not want to go now, to-day. I want to prepare Theresa for freedom; she has lived so long quietly with me that I dread the shock and excitement of other voices and the pressure of city sounds upon her delicate ears. I must train her for contact with the world.
"But you won't forget me if I allow you to lock us in again? You will come back and open the doors, and let me go down again through my old halls into the room where my husband died; and if Mr. Allison objects——My dear girl, you know now that he is an unscrupulous man, that it is my money he begrudged me, and that he has used it and made himself a rich man."