'Oh, Meg! Oh, Meg! I know what you mean,' said I, faintly.
'Ay, Miss, I'm feared they'll try it; they'll try to make away wi' ye somehow. I'm goin' to your friends arter dark; I darn't try it no sooner. I'll git awa to Ellerston, to your lady-cousin, and I'll bring 'em back wi' me in a rin; so keep a good hairt, lass. Meg Hawkes will stan' to ye. Ye were better to me than fayther and mother, and a';' and she clasped me round the waist, and buried her head in my dress; 'an I'll gie my life for ye, darling, and if they hurt ye I'll kill myself.'
She recovered her sterner mood quickly—
'Not a word, lass,' she said, in her old tone. 'Don't ye try to git away—they'll kill ye—ye can't do't. Leave a' to me. It won't be, whatever it is, till two or three o'clock in the morning. I'll ha'e them a' here long afore; so keep a brave heart—there's a darling.'
I suppose she heard, or fancied she heard, a step approaching, for she said—
'Hish!'
Her pale wild face vanished, the door shut quickly and softly, and the key turned again in the lock.
Meg, in her rude way, had spoken softly—almost under her breath; but no prophecy shrieked by the Pythoness ever thundered so madly in the ears of the hearer. I dare say that Meg fancied I was marvellously little moved by her words. I felt my gaze grow intense, and my flesh and bones literally freeze. She did not know that every word she spoke seemed to burst like a blaze in my brain. She had delivered her frightful warning, and told her story coarsely and bluntly, which, in effect, means distinctly and concisely; and, I dare say, the announcement so made, like a quick bold incision in surgery, was more tolerable than the slow imperfect mangling, which falters and recedes and equivocates with torture. Madame was long away. I sat down at the window, and tried to appreciate my dreadful situation. I was stupid—the imagery was all frightful; but I beheld it as we sometimes see horrors—heads cut off and houses burnt—in a dream, and without the corresponding emotions. It did not seem as if all this were really happening to me. I remember sitting at the window, and looking and blinking at the opposite side of the building, like a person unable but striving to see an object distinctly, and every minute pressing my hand to the side of my head and saying—
'Oh, it won't be—it won't be—Oh no!—never!—it could not be!' And in this stunned state Madame found me on her return.
But the valley of the shadow of death has its varieties of dread. The 'horror of great darkness' is disturbed by voices and illumed by sights. There are periods of incapacity and collapse, followed by paroxysms of active terror. Thus in my journey during those long hours I found it—agonies subsiding into lethargies, and these breaking again into frenzy. I sometimes wonder how I carried my reason safely through the ordeal.