All this time nobody came to the door. I daresay, perhaps, it was not very many minutes after all; but in the excitement and suspense it seemed a very long time to me. And either the house was specially quiet, or there was something in my agitated condition which made me think so. Miss Mortimer never lifted her head; if she had not been so engaged with her pattern, surely she would have noticed the perplexed looks of Aunt Milly, and my excited face. But she did not, she kept working on at her new stitch. We all relapsed into perfect silence; Sara’s voluble excuses for herself died all at once off her lips. Aunt Milly dropped into a strange anxious silence, looking at her. As for myself, I could not have spoken a word whatever had been the consequences. Sara’s nervous motion of her foot on the carpet startled me so much that I had nearly committed myself by some cry of agitation. It was a dread, inexplainable pause, which nobody dared either break or account for. Dead silence and expectation. And Miss Mortimer bending her head over her pattern-book counting the loops for her new stitch.
The bell did not ring. If it had rung it must have startled us all so much as to diminish the sense of what was coming; there was no such premonition;—a little sound of steps and subdued voices in the hall made my heart beat so loud that I felt sure my Aunt Milly must have heard it. Sara looked up at me suddenly when that sound became audible. Her face was perfectly colourless, and her hands firmly clasped together.
“Children, what is it?” said Aunt Milly, with a sharp frightened cry, breaking off suddenly in a troubled manner as the steps drew nearer. Miss Mortimer lifted her head from her book. She looked up, she looked full at me; she smiled. She was listening, but she was not afraid.
When suddenly the door was thrown open; Ellis called out, with his fullest voice: “The Count Sormonata,” and somebody came in. I cannot tell who it was that came in. I heard Sara cry out with a kind of shriek and repeat the name, “The Count Sermoneta!” The work and the book and all the trifling matters about her fell off from Miss Mortimer. She rose up, clenching her hand, ghastly, like a dead woman. She cried out in a voice I shall never forget: “he is dead, dead!” she cried, with the wildest scream and outcry. “I tell you, he is dead, dead! My God, he is dead! Will nobody believe me?” shrieked out the miserable woman. Her sister ran to her, and was thrust away with those terrible clenched hands. But she never turned to look, nor cast aside her screen that hid the new comer from her. She stood still like some frightful statue, rigid, with her wild eyes fixed upon the air before her—heaven knows what she might see there!—listening in some frightful agony to the steps that came slowly up the room. When that scream burst from her the footsteps faltered and stopped. Then Miss Mortimer looked at me, the only creature she saw before her, and laughed a dreadful laugh of madness and misery. “He knows it!” she cried out, triumphantly, “if you did not, he does. He is dead, dead!” and then came to another dreadful pause, leaning her clenched hands upon the table and fixing her wild eyes upon something straight before her. While I followed the mad stare of her eyes with a shudder I could not refrain, another person came with noiseless rapidity into the spot she was gazing on. It was not a spectre—it was simply Luigi, from whose face agitation had banished all the colour, and who stood trembling and speechless, wringing his hands, and gazing at her with an unspeakable appeal and entreaty. She did not say anything more; she stood with her eyes full opened and staring wide, leaning her hands on that table. I believe, if anybody had touched her, she would have fallen. I almost believed, while I looked at her, that she had died standing, and that it was a lifeless form that stood fixed in that horrible erect attitude, fronting us all, fronting a thousand times more than us, all the guilt and sins of her life. I gave a cry myself in the extremity of my terror and trouble. I went to her, I cannot tell how, stumbling over Aunt Milly, who had either fallen or fainted, or I cannot tell what. I went and put my arm round that dreadful ghastly figure. It was not her I was approaching, but it, the terrible mask and image of her. I had not a thought but that she was dead.
When I touched her, she fell, as I had thought she would. But so strong an impression did her dreadful appearance have upon me, that, when her figure sank into the chair and showed some elasticity, instead of going down on the floor, crumbling down, dropping to pieces, as somehow I had expected, I was struck with a horrible fear and surprise. She was not dead. I called out to them all, what were we to do? and she seemed to hear me. I saw, with a terror I cannot explain, her terrible eyes turn from Luigi—they looked at me, at Aunt Milly, they cast a glance over the room. Was it that the spirit was living and the body dead?
I cannot tell what we did for a dreadful interval after that. Carson came into the confused crowd. Luigi disappeared to find a doctor, and we tried to get her lifted and laid upon the sofa. But though she neither moved nor spoke, and scarcely seemed to breathe, she resisted, in some dreadful way, and would not be removed. I shall never forget that dreadful face; when I am ill it comes back to me, a recollection never to be banished;—dead—yet never consenting to die, keeping alive, determined, resolute, unshaken. I can see the discoloured lips begin to move, the words formed on the inarticulate tongue, the eyes lightening out of that fixed stare. Half the house had stolen into the room in this dreadful emergency without anybody observing them. But the dead woman observed them. And I, who was standing nearest, recoiled from her side, and the whole circle round her broke up and fell back in speechless horror, when a sound broke from that dreadful convulsed mouth. Old Carson, trembling but faithful, stood by her mistress. The poor creature said she understood that sound. It was to send everybody away, said the woman, whose limbs would scarcely support her, and whose very teeth chattered. They all went away, terrified but curious; the boldest lingered behind the screen. Nobody remained within sight of those dreadful eyes but Aunt Milly and me. We two stood huddled on each other, not daring to say a word, or even to exchange looks. Carson stood by her mistress’s side. Carson knew all and everything, more than we knew. She held some cordial to the dead lips, she chafed the ghastly hand, she gazed with pitiful eyes and tears and entreaties at the terrible face. This woman was not deserted in her terrible necessity. The voice of that humble love reached somehow to the springs of existence, and she came back slowly, in a solemn, fearful waking, out of death into life. We stood looking on, with an awe and terror impossible to describe. It was a miracle slowly enacting before us. She was dead and was alive again. Ghastly and dreadful, like a woman out of the grave, Miss Mortimer woke up to all her misery again.
Chapter XVI.
THIS extraordinary revival was going on when the doctor rushed in. Carson, who had been the principal person in all this scene, rushed at him and drew him back. She kept her hand on his arm, detained him, ran into voluble but trembling explanations. When he came forward the doctor gazed with a troubled face at the patient. A fainting fit brought on by great agitation; nobody could give any other account of it; he felt her pulse, and prescribed, and lingered, and looked at us all with mingled inquiry and suspicion. What had we been doing to her? Why had she not been removed to bed? A flash came from the awakening eyes. She made a motion of her hand, waving him away, then looked at me, and pointed vaguely but imperatively before her. When I did not obey immediately, she repeated the question, and at last spoke, with great evident pain, impatience, and imperiousness: “Bring him?” were those the words? She was so imperative, so fiercely determined, that I hastened out to call Luigi. I found him at the door watching, very pale, and in profound distress. He came in after me without saying a word; he went up to her without waiting for me, and knelt down at her feet, and took her hands in his own. “Mother! Mother!” cried the young man. If it did not go to her heart, it went to the heart of every other person present; and Aunt Milly, with a great cry of amazement and terror, repeated it after him, “Mother!” But who could think of any discovery then? The doctor stood listening, thunderstruck, behind the screen. I believe Sara Cresswell was in the room. But we who were round about this terrible figure could observe nothing else, except the dread inarticulate waves of passion that kept rising in her dead face. She thrust at her son with a wild motion of her bloodless hands as if to put him away. She questioned him with her eyes in such frantic impatience, because he could not understand her, that the sight was more than I could bear. I fell back from her trembling and like to faint. Then her will got the better of her weakness. She cried out aloud, with a voice that I am sure could have been heard all over the house;—it was not a living voice; it rang out wild, and loud, and hard, in separate words,—“Where is he?—he? dead! let him come. I know he is dead, let him come;—Count!” and here the terrible voice rose and broke in a wild horror of babbling cries. God help us! It was a dreadful scene. Aunt Milly stood supporting herself by a chair, unable to utter a word or even to move. I was afraid to stir, lest I should faint and fall on the floor. Carson only stood close by her mistress, supporting her head and gazing with wistful eyes at Luigi; the young man stumbled up from his knees in an agony of pity and horror. He held up his hands in wild appeal, whether to her, or to us, or only to God, I cannot tell. “It is my father!” he cried. “She thinks it was my father; and I am to blame!” Then he knelt down again humbly at her feet, and held up his clasped hands to her as if he were praying. I think he must have done it with an intention of drawing her attention by any means, and to prove to her that it was the truth he said.
“Mother,” he cried, looking up at those eyes which had returned, and were fixed upon him,—“mother, I am your son! My father is dead and undisturbed in his grave; he has sent me to his wife. It is I, it is no other. He is with the saints, where there are no names. It is I who am Sermoneta; mother! Oh, heaven, does she not hear me? will she not hear me? It was I, only I. It was Luigi, Countess! If I must not bear your name, I must bear my own. I say it was I, not my father, who can neither do evil nor endure it,—me, either Luigi Sermoneta or Lewis Mortimer, as you will,—your son!”
It is impossible to describe the effect this had upon us all. Aunt Milly burst forth into weeping, convulsive, and not to be restrained. Poor Carson’s bosom heaved with silent sobs. Luigi, who had risen up as he said these last words, stood erect in a passionate self-assertion and defence before his miserable mother. Even she changed under this sudden blaze of revelation. She sat up in her chair, and grew more human; her rigid head began to tremble, her dread-eyes to lose their horror. Now it was no longer that mad ghastly stare with which she regarded the young man before her. She looked at him, leaning forward, slowly recovering her powers. Some convulsive gasps or sobs in her throat alone interrupted this pause of terrible silence. She looked at him, from head to foot, with a slow, dismal scrutiny. Only once before in her life had she met him face to face; then she had been strong enough to send him away and disown him. Now, perforce, the mother looked at her son. The young man trembled under that steady gaze; he held out his hands, and cried out “Mother!” as if all the eloquence in the world lay in that word. She continued perusing him all over with that slow examination. Gradually she returned to be herself again. Not changed, not subdued! Out of that death and agony there came forth, not a repentant woman, but Sarah Mortimer, a creature who would not believe in everlasting truth and justice—not though one should rise from the dead.