"I've heard her moving about," said Grandmother. "Dinner is ready, give her a call."
Before I had time to obey, however, I heard her bedroom door open. We sat down to table. The dining-room door was open, and I fancied there was something odd and shuffling in the way she was coming downstairs. Then I was startled by a series of thuds; it sounded as though she had lost her footing, and fallen down the last two or three stairs. We ran out, for Grandmother had heard too.
"Are you hurt, Jael?" She was lying full length on the bottom stair, her face was dark and flushed, her eyes odd and bleary. She appeared stunned, though it surprised me that to fall two or three stairs should have had so serious an effect.
She did not answer Grandmother, but began slavering and hiccoughing.
"Give her five poundsh an' a new shuit of clothes." The sentence was broken by hiccoughs. My nostrils caught the sudden reek of spirits.
Aunt Jael was drunk.
I looked at Grandmother and Grandmother looked at me. She spoke in a low voice, and there were tears in her eyes. "'Tis hard, my dear. Your aunt has lived a godly sober life these eighty years—and now, look! We must take it as His will."
Resolves are weak, and pity is stronger than hate. I had been looking forward all my life and during the past few weeks more venomously than ever to the day when I should see my hated Aunt the victim of some supreme humiliation. The day was here. There she lay: drunken, shameful, loathsome. Surely this was humiliation enough. I should have exulted in her shame; I was indeed wicked enough to have done so, but that some one different in me, the Other Me (at such moments of extreme alternative between good and evil I always felt the Second Presence), had only pity and sorrow. My cheeks burned as I thought of how I had been looking forward to a triumph like this. I saw in a flash the shamefulness of spite, the folly of all revenge.
We tried to lift her up. She was too heavy, especially as she resisted, at first dully and then with vigour. I stepped over her body on to the second stair. When I knelt down and began pulling at her shoulder she struck me with her fist and set up a shriek of "Murder!" The sudden noise deterred us. With tipsy cunning she noticed this, and followed up her success; shrieking "Murder!" again and again like a thing demented.