Isabel fell back on her pillow with the strangest sense of relief. She, who had never yielded to her stepmother in her life, felt a certain consolation in this exercise of authority.
‘It is not as if it was my own doing,’ she thought in herself, and kept still, satisfied for the moment with her relief from all responsibility. The manner in which she subsided into sudden listlessness and quiet frightened Jean still more. Had it been anyone else, she might have accepted it as the result of natural weakness or weariness, but nothing of the kind had ever been seen before in wilful Isabel. Nor did it last long. When Jean returned, an hour later, her charge was again struggling with excitement.
‘I am going to get up,’ she said, with two brilliant spots of colour on her cheeks. ‘I feel as if I were in my grave here. I must get out to the fresh air!’
Jean’s answer was to draw away the curtain from the window. Then Isabel saw, looking out on the hill-side, the falling of the noiseless rain. It was no white violent blast with actual colour and solidity, but the fine impalpable dropping which penetrates through every covering, and which the experienced West Highlander looks at with hopeless eyes. ‘To gan out into that wet would be as much as your life is worth,’ said Jean, solemnly. ‘The braes are nae better than a shaking moss, and the roads are running like burns. It’s an awfu’ saft day. Ye may get up and sit by the fire, but across the door ye’ll no go, or else you’ll quarrel with me.’
This time it was with a kind of despair that Isabel listened. He would never think of it—he could not expect her, nor would he go himself on such a day. His departure would be put off, and with it the crisis, and time would be left to think. A little time to think, even an hour more she felt would be something gained. She had another moment of tranquility, gazing out from where she lay through the low window, upon the melancholy braes.
After a temporary lull, however, her fever returned. This time she rose and dressed herself hastily, putting on, in a half-dream, not her new ‘mourning,’ with the crape on it, but a thick winter dress, black enough to indicate any depths of sorrow. Always like a walker in a dream—that was the only explanation she could have given of her own feelings. Clothed for her journey, yet without any intention of taking the journey, she wandered drearily about her sister’s room. One o’clock, struck by the solemn eight-day clock, which gave a kind of mechanical soul to the house, knelled upon Isabel’s ear, as she held her white trembling hands over the fire. It shook her like a convulsion of nature. But one hour more—and all to be decided in that hour—and her mind no nearer the solution, scarcely so near as last night.
‘You’re looking real weakly, my dear,’ said Jean; ‘shaking like a leaf. I’m no sure you should have risen out of your bed. Take this shawl round you, and I’ll give you some broth to warm you. You’ve eaten nothing the whole day.’
‘I could not eat!’ said Isabel, wrapping round her with a shiver the soft warm shawl. Tick, tick, tick! Would nothing arrest these inexorable moments? As they went on her thoughts seemed to rise round her like a whirlwind sweeping about and about her bewildered soul; every beat brought nearer to her the last moment when her fate should still be in her own power. And yet she was like one paralysed, and could not move. The minutes pressed and trod upon each other’s heels, and yet were so slow in their confused procession, that it might have been an age instead of an hour. At last, while Isabel sat striving to break the spell which bound her, the door flew open and then closed violently after Jamie rushing in wet and muddy from school.
‘It’s no raining now!’ cried the boy as he dashed forward to the side of the fire. Isabel started as if a shot had struck her. Just then the clock gave its little whirr of warning that it was about to strike the hour. She sprang up to her feet with a sudden cry—then sank down again—her pale head falling back against the chair, her hands falling listless on its arms. Jean, rushing to her, believed for the first moment that Isabel was dead. She was as one dead, her eyes half-closed and ghastly; her colour completely gone; her very lips deserted of all colour. The struggle had been too much for her. She lay insensible in a dead faint before her stepmother’s affrighted eyes.