"Mother! mother!" cried the terrified girl. "Speak to me—are you ill—I will get you some water—wait for me, only a few moments and I will fetch assistance."
"No, no, no!" cried the woman in a spasmodic way. "No! I am better—it is nothing—stay here—fetch nobody—I have something to say to you."
She spoke with such a stem authority that the girl could not but obey.
Then came a long silence, a great suspense—the girl watching her mistress with open, frightened eyes; the woman sitting motionless with a fixed inscrutable look again on her features, as if absorbed in painfully intense thought.
But Catherine King was not thinking at all. The image of Mary, the touch of the dear hand, had fascinated her, had paralyzed her brain for the time. She was conscious of no mental operations; memory and emotion were effaced. Her mind was a blank, or rather in a state of expectant attention, waiting for some accident to wake it again to a rush of thought; like a magazine of powder, inactive till the spark should come. Such a complete suspension of the mental faculties often succeeds to excessive excitement and conflict of ideas, only to precede another mightier wave of emotion, and fiercer gust of will, even as the calm precedes the storm.
Of a sudden the spark came, the mind was at work again. But a strange thing had come to pass. It seemed to Catherine as if her brain had become a mere machine. Will was dead; there was no deliberation, no weighing of conflicting motives; but some other power, some dominant idea that had come from outside, took the place of will, and worked the mind—drove it along one narrow groove, allowing it to go neither to the right nor to the left, but straight on, wandering into no side associations, hindered by no opposing fears, hopes, or memories.
It was if some demon had possessed her, before whom her reason bowed, a demon whose biddings she must obey without resistance.
She felt as if the chord of volition had snapped in her brain, when this strong impulse fell on it. So without hesitation, or thought of consequences, she obeyed the impulse and spoke what she was compelled to—spoke in a dreamy passionless voice at first, like one under the mesmeric influence. All the fierce love and all the fierce hate were slumbering for the time, the idea was alone in her mind.
She rose to her full height, and taking the girl's hand again in hers, the words, unpremeditated by her, came forth slowly.