“You pleased him so much that he broke his promise to me, and it was almost the only promise I had ever asked of him. He sang to you, because you pleased him so much. I will not forgive you. I never will. But he is dead now. See! I kiss him. He does not open his eyes as he used to do when I kissed him softly.”
The dark figure bent down and Hester kissed the dead face, and again her unnatural smile seemed to be reflected in it.
“He smiles,” she said. “But he cannot kiss me. And he cannot sing to you any more. You made him do it once. He will not do it again. Once you made him break his promise. He will not break it again. He will keep it. The dead keep their promises, and he has promised to be mine always now. I am not so sorry that he is dead, because he will be always mine. He smiles, you see. He knows it. He does not want you, because you cannot please him now that his eyes are shut so fast. He does not want you now. Go away, Katharine Lauderdale. Walter does not want you.”
There was no rising intonation in the voice that spoke, no emphasis, no authority. But the calm, unchanging tone was far more terrifying than any passionate outburst could have been. Katharine shrank back, and then stood still a moment.
“Why do you stay?” asked the voice. “We hate you. Go away. You see that we want to be alone together. We do not want you.”
Katharine felt herself growing white with the horror of it all. She bowed her head in silence and went to the door, turning a moment to look back as her hand was on the spring. She felt as though she were in some mysterious tomb of ancient days, where the living and the dead were buried together—the rigid dead upon his couch, the living beside him, flexible, mad, dangerous with the overstrain of an incredible, inexpressible grief.
The dark figure stood erect with dropped and folded hands. The white face stood out luminously pale against the grey smoke-clouds of the incense and myrrh, the yellow flaming candles flickered still from the draught of Katharine’s dress as she had passed and threw an uncertain, moving light upon the motionless mask of the dead man.
“Leave us alone together. We want to be alone together. Go away and never come back to us again.”
Katharine was going, but her terror suddenly overcame her, and she opened the door, went out, and closed it behind her in a flash, gasping for a breath of unscented air. She reeled as she came out, under the clear daylight of the glass roof which covered the staircase, and she steadied herself against the door-post, stupidly staring at the tapestry on the opposite wall. She felt sick and faint, and for a moment she knew that she could not get downstairs without falling. She felt that she was full of the perfume-loaded air she had breathed, that it clung to her like a blanket, and hindered her from drawing a full breath. She raised her left arm to her face mechanically, and smelled it. The stuff was full of the incense, and she threw her head back with parted lips, to draw in freshness if she could.
She was so strong that she did not faint, but stood erect against the door-post until she could trust herself to walk. She listened at the door for a moment to hear whether the mad woman were still talking over her dead husband, or whether, perhaps, the madness had suddenly yielded to the merciful tide of tears. But there was no sound. They were alone together, as Hester had said that they wished to be.