“You make yourself ill when you are angry,” she said, seriously, looking down upon Amanda’s worn and flushed countenance; “it makes you very ill; it would be far better not to be angry. When you scold me I am sorry; but it does not make me ill. It hurts you most. You should stop yourself when you feel it coming on; because, perhaps, when you are scolding you might die—and it would be better to live and not to scold. I have thought about it, and that is what I think.”
Amanda was aghast at this speech—it subdued her as if a baby had suddenly opened its mouth, and uttered words of wisdom. She gave a gasp, half of wonder, half of terror, and felt herself checked and subdued as she had never been in her life before. The effect was so strange that she did not know what to make of it. She tried to laugh, and failed; finally, she said, “What an odd girl you are!” and settled down among her pillows, calmed in spite of herself. “Read to me,” she said, after a little pause, thrusting a book into Innocent’s hand. The calm was as sudden as the storm. The moment that she was told to do something definite Innocent resumed her usual obedient frame of mind, after this the longest speech she had ever made, and the most completely independent mental action she had ever been conscious of. She sat down and read, opening the book where she was told, pursuing without a question the course of a foolish story. She never thought of asking who or what were the personages she suddenly began to read about; she took the book as she had taken the fan, and used it in a similar way. And then there followed a curious little interval of calm. Amanda had prepared herself for the night while the others were at dinner; she had taken off her blue dressing-gown and her pretty ribbons; she was all white now, ready to go to sleep when the moment came. The room had been partially darkened for the same reason. Behind the curtain at the head of the bed was a lamp shaded from the eyes, but the other lights had been taken away, and the profound quiet grew slumbrous as Innocent’s soft voice rose through it, reading steadily and gently with a certain sweet monotony. I cannot tell how long Innocent continued reading. The calm grew more and more profound; no one came near the room; Amanda’s retirement was not invaded. Innocent herself grew drowsy as she listened to her own voice; it rose and fell with a gentle, but incessant, repetition; sometimes she would almost fall asleep, stumbling over the words—and then, as Mrs. Frederick, who was drowsy too, stirred and murmured at the cessation of the voice which acted upon her like a lullaby, the girl would resume her reading, startled into wakefulness. Once or twice poor aunty, who had been banished from the room, put in her head noiselessly at the door, and withdrew it as gently, seeing that all was still. Batty himself once did the same; but the household was too glad of the unusual stillness to do anything to disturb it. At length the soft girlish voice, after repeated breaks and faltering recommencements, dropped altogether, and Innocent fell fast asleep, with her head leaning upon the back of her chair, and the book in her clasped hands. She and the lamp by which she had been reading and the little table covered with medicine phials, were separated from the sleeper in the bed by the dropped curtain, which threw a rose-coloured reflection over Amanda in her sleep; this lasted for an hour or two, during which the patient and the young attendant who was so little used to watch, slept peacefully with but the veil of this curtain between them. Then Amanda began to stir. Her sleep was always broken and uncertain; the poor aunty to whom she was so cruel had accustomed her to constant and unfailing attendance—and when she woke and called and saw no one, sudden wrath flamed up in Amanda’s bosom. Gradually the circumstances came back upon her mind, and plucking back the curtain she saw poor Innocent quietly sleeping, her hair falling in the old childish way about her shoulders, and her dark eyelashes resting on her cheek, which looked so pale under them. Amanda did not care for the weary grace and abandon of the girl’s attitude, nor was she at all touched by the thought that Innocent had been occupied in her own service to her last moment of consciousness. Mrs. Frederick, on the contrary, was furious to find herself “left alone” with no obsequious nurse ready to attend to her wants. She shrieked at Innocent to rouse her, and stretching out of bed shook the girl, who started violently, and sprang up trembling and nervous. Amanda’s eyes were blazing, her figure trembling with sudden irritation.
“How dare you fall asleep?” she cried, “am I to be left with no one to take care of me? oh, you all want to kill me. Give me my drops, you cruel, wicked, sleepy, lazy, wicked girl! You don’t know how?—oh, you know well enough how to walk about with my husband—how to make love to him. My drops! can’t you understand?—there, in that bottle; you can read, I suppose, though you are a fool. Oh, to leave me to this horrid girl! Oh, to have no one to take care of me! My drops? can’t you hear? I’ll make it heard all over the house. My drops! Oh, you little idiot, can’t you do that much? I always said you was a fool; walk about with another woman’s husband—torment a man with clinging to him—but as for being of use. My drops! Put them in the glass, idiot! Can’t you see I want to go to sleep?”
Innocent trembling, chilled, ignorant, incapable, only half awake, took the bottle that was pointed out to her, and endeavoured, as she had seen people do, to drop the liquid into a glass; she failed twice over in her fright and tremor. Then she kneeled down by the table to try for the third time, propping herself up against the chair. I don’t know what thoughts might be passing unconscious through her mind. I don’t think she was conscious of anything, except the miserable feeling of sudden waking—the cold, the sense of being beaten down with angry words—and the frightened attempt to do what she could not do, in obedience to the fiercest order she had ever received in her life. Where she knelt, painfully endeavouring to count the drops of the opiate, she was within reach of Amanda’s arm, who by this time had worked herself into a wild, shrieking passion. Once more she dashed aside the curtain, and plucked at Innocent, calling to her with words which had become unintelligible to the ears of the frightened girl. “Give it me, you fool—give it me, you fool!” she said, then snatched the glass out of Innocent’s hand, and lifted it to her lips. Between the fright of the one and the passion of the other the bottle had been half emptied into the glass. Amanda held it for a moment in one hand, grasping Innocent with the other, and trying to recover breath. She was past thinking of any consequences, as Innocent was past knowing what was happening under her eyes. With a sudden long effort to regain her breath she put the glass to her panting lips, and drank it. How much she swallowed no one ever knew; the glass dropped out of her hand, spilling some dark drops upon the white coverlid, and Amanda dropped back heavily upon the pillows. Then there followed such a stillness as seemed to make the whole house, the very walls, shiver. Innocent, with the little phial clutched in one hand, with Amanda’s fingers slowly relaxing from the other, stood stupefied, listening to the horrible stillness. Oh, God, what did it mean?
CHAPTER XXXIII.
FLIGHT.
The inhabitants of the Villa were well used to the sudden sounds and sudden stillnesses which marked the changes of Amanda’s moods, and on ordinary occasions no one thought of interfering or taking any notice. So long as aunty was there these were recognized as her share of the advantages of this life, and the rest of the household left her in undisturbed enjoyment of her privileges. But somehow on this evening other sentiments had been called into being. Aunty herself loved, in her way, the wilful creature whom she had nursed all her life, notwithstanding the ill recompense she received, and could not take advantage of the unusual holiday she was having. Instead of going to bed, she hung about the passages, sometimes listening at Amanda’s door, more vigilant, more wakeful than ever. The maids who slept above were wakeful too. They were interested in the visitor, the curious pale girl who was one of Mr. Eastwood’s great relations, “a real lady,” and so much unlike the usual visitors to the house. Besides, though both the patient and her poor little unaccustomed attendant had slept, it was still comparatively early, about the hour of midnight. I do not know what there was peculiar in the stillness that crept through the house. Often enough before Amanda had fainted after one of her paroxysms of passion, and everything had gone on as usual, no one except her special nurse being much the wiser. But on this night a still horror seemed to creep through the place. The women up-stairs rose from their beds with a sensation of alarm, and poor aunty stood trembling at the door, not knowing whether to venture in, at the risk of disturbing the quiet, or stay outside at the risk perhaps of neglecting the patient. The moments are long in such an emergency. It seemed to her, I think wrongly, that this stillness had lasted full half an hour, when at last, emboldened by terror, and stimulated by the appearance on the stairs of the frightened housemaid in her nightgown, whispering “Was anything the matter?” she opened softly the door of the room. All that aunty could see was Innocent, standing, gazing at the bed on which, to all appearance, the patient lay calm, with the softened reflection of the rose-coloured curtain over her. Innocent stood like a statue, white, immovable, gazing. Aunty stole in, frightened, with noiseless steps, afraid lest some creak of the floor should betray her presence. She laid her hand softly on Innocent’s shoulder.
“Is she asleep?” she asked.
Innocent awoke as from a trance.
“What is it?” she said shivering, and in low tones of terror. “Look, look! what does it mean——”
Next moment a great cry rang through the silent house—the windows were thrown open, the bells rung, the maids rushed in, half frantic with excitement; what was it? A dreadful interval followed while they crowded about the bed, and while aunty, moaning, weeping, calling upon Amanda, tried to raise the senseless figure, to bring back animation by all the means which she had so often used before. The wild yet subdued bustle of such a terrible domestic incident, the hurried sending for the doctor, the running hither and thither for remedies, the strange dream-like horror of that one unresponsive, unmoving figure in the midst of all this tumult of anxious but bootless effort—how can I describe it? The cold night air poured into the room, ineffectually summoned to give breath to the lips that could draw breath no longer, and waved the lights about like things distracted, and chilled the living to the bone, as they ran to and fro, seeking this and that, making one vain effort after another. Innocent stood behind, leaning against the wall, like a marble image. She had been pushed aside by the anxious women. She stood with her eyes fixed on the bed, with a vague horror on her face. It was a dream to her, which had begun in her sleep; was she sleeping still? or was this a horrible reality? or what had she to do with it? she, a little while ago the chief actor, now the spectator, helpless, knowing nothing, yet with a chill of dread gnawing at her, like the fox in the fable, gnawing her heart. Innocent’s head seemed to turn round and round, as the strange group which had swept in, made all those wild circles round the bed, doing one strange thing after another, incoherent to her—moving and rustling, and talking low under the disturbed waving of the lights, and in the shadow of the curtains. When, after a long terrible interval, these figures dispersed, and one alone remained, throwing itself upon the bed in wild weeping, the girl roused herself.