‘Good God!’ cried Miss Bostock, in an agony of terror, ‘her brain is going. John, John!’ she called out over the banisters, ‘come here quick to Ellen, she is very ill!’
The mournful cortège had, by this time, entered the house, and deposited their burden on the white-draped table in the boudoir on the ground floor. The coffin had been temporarily closed, but the undertakers, who had met it at the station, unclosed it again, and Jenny Walcheren lay revealed, placid and immovable, under her father’s roof. Mr Crampton, hearing his sister-in-law’s appeal, and thinking his wife had fainted, ran upstairs at once, but was surprised to meet her on the landing with a strange look in her eyes, but an unmoved countenance, as she extended her hand to him.
‘John!’ she said, in a muffled voice, ‘our Jenny has come home. I heard her enter the house. Take me down to see her without delay.’
‘Oh, John!’ whispered the terrified Aunt Clem, ‘it will kill her. Ought she to see her? I believe she is going out of her mind with grief.’
‘Poor soul! and well she may,’ replied Mr Crampton, as he looked into his wife’s staring eyes. ‘But let her come; the sight can’t make her worse than she is. Come, Ellen,’ he added, affectionately, ‘come and see your lamb, then. God has taken her from us, Nelly, but there is no help for it, and railing won’t bring her back again. Come and see how peacefully she sleeps.’
He led the bereaved mother downstairs and into the boudoir as he spoke. The servants, who had been gazing tearfully on the remains of their young mistress, withdrew respectfully, as they saw the approach of their employers; and, as they entered the room, Mr Crampton closed the door behind them. The most expensive coffins that Dover could produce had been procured to convey poor Jenny’s remains to Hampstead, and there she lay in a white satin-lined shell, enclosed in a polished oak sarcophagus, heavily clamped and ornamented with brass. Mrs Crampton had had her Jenny before her mental eyes all day, dead indeed, but plump and filled-out as when she had parted with her. She was prepared to see a corpse, but a corpse that was only a marble likeness of her child, and when her husband reverently and solemnly lifted the cambric cloth that hid the features of the deceased, and she perceived a little, shrunken and fallen-in body with a pallid face, looking half the size it used to be, and flattened hands with purple nails and palms, she drew one gasping breath, and gave a scream that echoed and re-echoed through the mansion.
‘That my Jenny?’ she exclaimed; ‘that my child—my daughter? Oh, God! be merciful, be merciful!’ and dropped upon the floor in a dead faint.
Miss Bostock, who was sobbing at the sad sight before her as if her heart would break, flung herself down in terror beside her prostrate sister.
‘John, John,’ she cried, ‘it has killed her. I told you it would.’
‘Don’t say that, Clem,’ exclaimed the unhappy man, ‘for, if I lose her as well, I shall have nothing left to live for. Go and send William for Dr Sewell at once.’