In one of the galleries was a portrait of Sir John, which during the last twelve months had been visited daily by Lady Pollexfen. Every time she visited it, she made a practice of sticking a pin through some part of the figure, and leaving it there.
"One day less, Sir John, before the worms claim you as their own," was her usual remark on these occasions.
And then she would nod her head and jeer at the painted semblance of her dead husband.
"We shall have quite a little jubilee the day you leave us, by which you may judge how grieved we shall be to part from you. Another pin. Oh! that you could feel them, and that I could thus repay you in part for some of the thousands of heart-aches you caused me when you were alive!"
After she began to recover from the state of mental and bodily prostration into which she had sunk when no longer sustained by the excitement consequent on the search for the Diamond, she was not long before she was about again, apparently as well and strong as she had been for the last year or two. But to Janet it seemed that much of her strength was factitious, and that it did not arise from any real improvement in her health, but rather from the necessity which seemed to sit so heavily upon her of being up and doing on the day of Sir John's departure. To be lying weak and ill in bed on such a day would have seemed like an acknowledgment of regret for the departure of her husband to which her proud spirit could by no means submit.
She spoke nothing but the truth when she said that she so thoroughly detested the memory of the man, that it would be a day of jubilee for her when his body was borne out of her sight for ever.
She was probably influenced in her determination by another reason, but one which she would have been slow to acknowledge even to herself.
Her mind was powerfully impressed with the idea, that not only was the lifeless body of her husband under the roof of Dupley Walls, but that the house was haunted by his incorporeal presence; that, in fact, his spirit was doomed to wander unrestingly in and about the old house so long as his body--in accordance with his own foolish wish--remained unburied and unsanctified by the rites of Christian sepulture.
Hence the strange habit into which she had fallen of addressing her husband as though he were standing, an invisible presence, close by her elbow, and was cognizant of all she said.
It could not be other than a source of satisfaction to Janet to know that her midnight visits to the Black Room were so soon to come to an end. The duty she had there to perform was one which not even the custom of years could have rendered otherwise than distasteful to her. She never could quite conquer the superstitious thrill which touched her from head to foot every time she opened the door of the dreaded room. She never could quite get over the feeling that an unseen pair of eyes was watching her from behind the funereal drapery that clothed the walls. She could never descend the stairs on her way back to the habitable regions of the house without a nervous shiver at the thought that perhaps some shadowy hand was being put forth to clutch her from behind, Janet could not, therefore, be otherwise than pleased to think that the silent tenant of Dupley Walls would so soon have to find another and a more permanent home.