"I must apprehend her, now," thought Sir Richard Blunt; "I have no resource but to apprehend her at once."
With this object he was about to dart forward, when something strange about the appearance of Mrs. Lovett arrested his attention, and stayed his progress. He paused and remained leaning partly upon the back of a chair, while she slowly advanced into the room, and then as she came nearer to him he became convinced of what he had begun to suspect, namely—that she was walking in her sleep. There is something awful in this wandering of the mortal frame when its senses seem to be locked up in death. It looks like a resurrection from the grave—as though a corpse was again revisiting
"The glimpses of the pale moon;"
and even Sir Richard Blunt, with all his constitutional and acquired indifference to what would be expected to startle any one else could not help shrinking back a little, and feeling an unusual sort of terror. This transient nervousness of his, though, soon passed away, and then he set himself to watch the actions of Mrs. Lovett with all the keenness of intense interest and vividly awakened curiosity. She did not disappoint him. Moving forward into the room with a slow and stately action, so that the little flame of the rushlight was by no means disturbed, she reached the middle of the parlour and then she paused. She assumed such a natural attitude of listening, that Sir Richard Blunt voluntarily shrunk down behind the chair, for it seemed to him at the moment that she must have heard him. Then, in a low and slightly indistinct tone, she spoke—
"Hush! hush! So still. The poison! Where is the poison?—Will he take it? Ah, that is the question, and yet how clear it is. But he is fiend-like in his suspicions. When will he come?"
She moved on towards the cupboard, in which the decanter of poisoned wine had been placed, and opening it, she felt in vain upon the shelf for it. It was still upon the table, and if anything more than another could have been a convincing proof of the mere mechanical actions of the somnambulist, this fact, that she passed the wine where it was, and only recollected where it had been, would have been amply sufficient. After finding that her search was ineffectual, she turned from the cupboard, and stood for a few moments in silence. Then a horror shook her frame, and she said—
"They must all die. Bandage your eyes, and you will shut out the death shrieks. Yes, that will be something, to get rid of those frightful echoes. Bandage after bandage will, and shall do it."
Sir Richard stood silently watching; but such was the horror of the tones in which she spoke, that even his heart felt cold, as though the blood flowed but sluggishly through its accustomed channels.
"Who," he thought to himself, "for the world's wealth, would have this woman's memory of the past?"
She still held the light, and it appeared to him as though she were about to go into the shop, but she paused before she reached the half-glass door of communication between it and the parlour, and shook like one in an ague.