CHAPTER XIX MRS. LISTER OPENS AN OLD BUREAU
Mrs. Lister lay motionless for many moments after Thomasina had left. Exhausted both mentally and physically she was for a little while dull to her own woes. She should not have talked to Thomasina, but neither should Thomasina have responded as she did. Thomasina had put her in the wrong, she had not acted like a friend.
"As though I made it up!" sobbed Mary Alcestis. "What does she think I am?"
Once more she dropped into a doze which was not so much physical as mental. She dreamed that a dreadful danger threatened them all, like the collapse of the solid Lister house, and under the impression of the dream she stepped from bed without being fully awake. Once on her feet, she understood its significance and determined to carry out that which she had long intended. She felt under the edge of the bed for her slippers and put them on and wrapped round her a capacious dressing-gown. Locomotion, tried at first warily, proved easier than she expected. Opening the door, she stood still and listened. Dr. Lister was doubtless comfortable in the conviction that she was asleep and would consequently be lost in his book until dinner-time.
Opening the door more widely, she stepped out into the hall. She was not accustomed to stealing about her own house and her weakness and the throbbing of her heart terrified her. But with the foresight of one accustomed to sly deeds, she closed the door softly. If her husband came upstairs he would think that she was asleep and he would not disturb her. She went stealthily along the hall to the stairway and stopped once more. There were certain steps that creaked so that they could be heard all over the house, but she knew which steps they were and with painful care stepped over them. Her dressing-gown got in her way and almost tripped her, and she steadied herself by the aid of the banister and stood for a long time trembling.
"I shall say I am going to find something I need," she planned. "I have a perfect right to go into my own attic."
But mercifully she heard no sound nearly as loud as the throbbing of her own heart. Each step made her feel weaker and more miserable as it lifted her into the hot darkness of the third-story hall with its smell of dry wood and camphor and other faintly odorous objects. The shutters were closed tight and the blinds were drawn, but through them and through the roof the sun penetrated until the air was furnace-heated. She gasped, feeling a sharp pain in her head, but she moved on, her hand against the wall, to the door of Basil's room.
There she turned the key and entered. The temperature was higher than that of the hall and the odors stronger and more significant. Each simple article of furniture, the narrow bed, the high, old-fashioned bureau, the little washstand with its Spartan fittings, a single chair, a little table, the old trunk, all was as it had been for twenty years. In it was no life or reminder of life; it was empty, terrible as an old burial vault.
She did not open a window and thereby admit a breath of saving though heated air; her purpose must be quickly accomplished and admitted of no discovery and no interruption. She believed that if any one should come upon her suddenly at this moment she would die of shock. She went directly to the old bureau and opened the upper drawer. There, each garment wrapped in paper with a little piece of camphor in its folds, lay specimens of Basil's clothes going as far back as a little winter coat discarded when he was five. How often had she wept over them! How speedily her husband or Thomasina would have consigned them to the flames, refusing to connect a human life with the garments of the past, now so grotesque!