Cousin Mary

by Mrs. Oliphant

The housekeeper had come into the room while this conversation was going on. She was always coming and going; and it was a great grievance with Miss Hofland that she had begun constantly to open the door without knocking, which was an assertion of equality on the housekeeper’s part which the governess could not bear. She came forward now with a cup of chicken-broth for Hetty, and in a moment became somehow the central figure in the group. “Of the old family,” she said firmly, “and that is what I have always thought. I thought from the beginning that there was more than met the eye in that young lady being here.”

The doctor stepped forward quickly, giving the woman a hasty, warning look. “I wish I had known before,” he said. “It might have made things easier.” And then he stopped, both in words and action, as if suddenly perceiving either that he had said too much, or that his confusion had betrayed him into something which ought not to have been said at all. “To be sure, I don’t see that it makes much difference,” he said between his teeth.

“I think,” said the housekeeper, somewhat severely, “that if you will reflect a moment, you will see that it makes no difference at all.”

Miss Hofland, who was entirely in the dark, looked from one to another with bewilderment. “Do you mean that Hetty is a relation of little Rhoda?” she cried.

“The Rector said, Miss Hofland, of the old family,” said the housekeeper pointedly; but neither of the gentlemen spoke. A curious silence fell over the little party, as if no one, except Mrs. Mills, whose views were peremptory, understood what was to be made of this new idea, whether it were of great importance or of no importance at all. It did not end in any additional demonstrations towards Hetty, to whom indeed, in the little lingering illness, which, after all, was no more than a feverish cold, aggravated by the tortures of the imagination which she had been going through, and which Dr. Darrell only partly guessed at, everybody had been as kind as it was possible to be. The housekeeper herself, though so severe and secretly distrusted by all the party, had been very kind to Hetty. If it had been the daughter of the house, as Miss Hofland remarked, there could not have been more pains taken with her. “Certainly they do treat us very well; there is nothing whatever to be found fault with in that respect.” But no doubt Miss Hofland herself looked upon the girl with a different eye. A relation of the old family! The governess at least entertained from the beginning the conviction, formed at once on her entry on her duties, that the old family was very much superior to the new.

As for Hetty herself, this little discovery did her more good than the chicken-broth. It raised her failing spirit; it gave the pleasant impulse of a new event. It was indeed, when she came to think of it, no event at all, for though it had not seemed necessary to speak of it to the servants and dependents of the new family, or to the little heiress who was all she was acquainted with of the new family, Hetty herself had been aware from the first that the house in which she was living was the house of her ancestors, and that probably, as she thought, she had far more to do with it, and certainly with the old pictures, than Rhoda had, to whom everything would some day belong. There were no old servants in the establishment who could remember her mother, no sign of any one recollecting that such an unusual name as that of Asquith had once been known at Horton. But now that the discovery had come about in this natural way, it pleased Hetty. She had not written much to her mother since she had been ill; but now, in the pleasant excitement of her discovery, it was the first thing she thought of. As soon as the visitors went away, she got up from her sofa of her own accord, forgetting her dizziness and weakness, and began to write a little. “Such a discovery has been made,” she wrote. “Uncle Hugh is alive still, he is living abroad for his health, and the Rector is only locum tenens, as papa was at Retford. He hopes Uncle Hugh may live for ever, but that is not very likely, is it? My cold is a great deal better. I think hearing this has driven it away; not that it makes much difference, but still it makes one feel one’s self more at home, and as if the house really did belong to us once.” After she had written this cheerful letter, Hetty spent the most cheerful evening she had known for a long time. Her fever seemed to have flown; her hands were moist; a little soft pink colour came back to the cheeks which had alternated between red and white. The sense of being better is in itself the best of medicines. It went on raising her courage, strengthening her nerves, making her altogether like herself. She went to sleep tranquilly, without any alarm or excitement, with the shutters folded back a little, the curtains drawn back, and one line of the light she loved, one little span of sky, looking in upon her, so that she could see it where she lay. It was a moonlight night, very soft, the temperature having risen, and everything, as Miss Hofland said, “turning for the best.”

It might be the middle of the night, veering towards the morning, when that calm was disturbed. The moon had gone down, and it was still long before dawn: the darkness intense, the softness of the evening lost in the dead chill and depth of night, and, so far as any one was aware, the great house of Horton all silent, filled with sleep and quiet—when suddenly a wild and terrible shriek pealed through the stillness, a cry that might have waked the dead, a cry of terror past reason, almost past humanity, shrill and awful; it was followed by two others in swift succession, cutting the silence like stabs of a weapon. It takes much to wake a house so wrapped in quiet, in the midst of its night’s sleep; but there was an instantaneous awakening in one quarter of the house, which helped to rouse the rest; and when Miss Hofland, too much startled by the keen ring of that shriek, almost at her very door, to think of her own philosophy of precaution, hurried out into the passage in consternation, her hair hanging over her shoulders, her naked feet thrust into slippers, she met with a second shock almost as great as the first, the housekeeper in her usual trim dress hurrying towards Hetty’s door with a candle in her hand. This sight transfixed the dishevelled maids, who, taking courage from their numbers, were rushing from all sides crying, “What is it? Who is it?” with shrieks almost as noisy, though so wonderfully different in intensity, from that which had awakened the house. The governess was aware of the second bewilderment, though she did not pause to think what it was. A blast of cold air came in their faces, as they burst into Hetty’s room, from the window, one side of which stood open, like a door, into the profoundest midnight darkness. On the bed lay Hetty, or her ghost—a white face with staring eyes, with the bedclothes drawn up tightly as if with an effort to pull them over her face in her two clenched and rigid hands. Her eyes stared wide open, but there was no meaning in them; the mouth still seemed to quiver with that shriek, but was capable of no utterance. The horror of some sight unspeakable seemed to linger in the awful lines about the staring eyes, and in the wild hollows of the marble cheeks—marble white, and with the rigidity of marble too. A murmur of horror came from the women, cowed at the sight, except Mrs. Mills, who held up her candle, throwing a strange light upon the paralysed face. The candle trembled in her hand, but she uttered no word. It was thought afterwards that this was what she had expected to see.

And presently, running in hot haste, with every mark of agitation, pale, with the perspiration pouring down his face, as if he had been engaged in some mortal struggle, the young doctor in his ordinary dress came down the corridor and entered Hetty’s room. He had the tail of his coat half torn off at one side, the governess remarked, as, remembering her own undressed condition, she took refuge behind the curtain. The young man flung himself down on his knees by the bedside, calling out to the housekeeper to hold her candle low, and loosening or trying to loosen the rigid hands. “Is she dead, Doctor? Is she dead?” Mrs. Mills said in a low voice of horror. She trembled in every limb, but she was not surprised.