Sometimes a ghastly fear would seize her that Alfred Wimple was coming back. She could hear his footsteps going round the house; she fancied he was creeping beneath the verandah, that he was trying the window. He wanted to come in and strangle her. She could feel his long hands closing round her throat, and put up her own to draw them, finger by finger, away. It was not the killing she would mind, but the pollution of his touch.
Through the day she wandered from room to room—now looking at the table at which he had sat the last night of all; or seeing him, with his back to the buttery-hatch, eating the sole and the chicken she had brought from London; or standing in the doorway, when he came afterwards and asked her for the evening paper. She went to the window and looked at the garden, and the pathway down to the dip; but this was more than she could bear, and she would turn away and sit down by the empty fireplace again. She grew hungry once; a terrible craving for food came over her. She gathered some sticks together, and made a fire, all the time seeing strange visions and grinning fiends that mocked her. She took them to be the punishment of her sin—for sin she counted all that she had done—but in reality they were but signs of the illness and starvation that were contending for the mastery of her. She put a little water on to boil over the blazing sticks, and watched it greedily. She made some tea, with trembling eagerness, and found a new excitement in the strength it gave her; but when the fire had died away, and an hour had passed, she was prostrate again. Gradually she became so ill that she could scarcely drag herself from the drawing-room to the kitchen; the sense of being unfit to stay in the world grew upon her—a dread of seeing people, a haunting fear of some one coming to the door. But no one came through all those terrible days except, once or twice, Jane Mitchell, only to be told that “her services were not required.”
She thought of Walter and Florence sometimes, and was afraid of their coming back. She could never look them in the face again, or dare to speak to them, or see the children. Just as before she had exaggerated her own importance in the world and her own virtue, now she exaggerated her own disgrace. She knew what the women she had once despised felt like—“I was never lenient,” she said to herself. “I was very harsh, as if they had gone out of their way to do wrong. I ought to have shown them more clemency”—and as she said this, there came before her the face of Mrs. North. She sat and looked at it. “She was young, and there was excuse for her; and I am old, yet could not forgive her. I will make atonement now. I will write and tell her.” Her fingers were so weak she could hardly hold the pen, but she managed to put down a little entreaty for forgiveness. “I ought to have been more gentle to you,” she wrote. “I know that now, for I have been as frail”—she stopped and gave a sad little wink at the word—“as you. I know what your sufferings have been by my own, and can pity your humiliation.” The letter remained on the table—she almost forgot it; fever and blackness filled her life—she could scarcely walk across the room.
The morning brought the postman, with a letter from Walter and Florence. “Would you put a postage-stamp on this for me?” she said, giving him the one for Mrs. North. “I will repay you the next time you come; I have no change for the moment.”
She put the letter with the Monte Carlo postmark on the mantelpiece, and stood looking at the familiar handwriting, and imagining them together beneath the blue sky, Walter in high spirits, and Florence with her pretty hair plaited round her head. “Dear children,” she said. “He is growing more and more like his father.” She closed her eyes for a moment; her limbs swayed and gave way beneath her; and she fell from sheer weakness, and could make no effort to rise. Presently she pulled the cushion down, and lay on the rug again as she had on the night of Alfred Wimple’s departure. She did not know how the day passed—probably most of it went in forgetfulness. The next afternoon came, and she had not noticed the hours.
The click of the gate, and footsteps coming towards the house—Aunt Anne struggled up, panting, and listened—a quick knock at the door. She hesitated, raised herself to her feet by the armchair, and went out, but could not gather courage to undo the lock.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Let me in,” cried a voice that was familiar enough, though she could not identify it. She bowed her head—she was about to be looked at in all her humiliation—and, with trembling hands, opened the door.
Mrs. North walked in, with a happy laugh. She was perfectly dressed, as usual, and carried a white basket.
“My dear old lady,” she said, “what is the matter? Your letter frightened me out of my senses. I came off the moment it arrived. You poor old darling, what is the matter? Why, you can’t stand—I must carry you.” She supported the old lady back into the drawing-room—cheerless and cold enough it looked; that was the first impression Mrs. North had of it—and sat down beside her on the sofa.