"Besides," my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated herself again, "there are the books." He plucked his spectacles off, and gazed vaguely in her direction: "Oh, yes, yes, there are the books."
Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion of so pickling hop-poles that they would last for ever. But the press was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.
And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own room. We cannot change the past, or foresee the future. But if only Pollie had not been a heavy sleeper; if only I had escaped that trivial ailment—how tangled is life's skein! It was the May after my eighteenth birthday and full moonlight.
Troubled in mind by my illness and other worries and mortifications, my mother, not fully aroused perhaps, got up in the small hours and mounted the stone staircase in order to look in on me. I was awake, and heard the rustling of her nightdress and the faint touch of her slippered feet ascending from stone to stone. I guessed her errand, and in my folly thought I would pretend to be asleep and give her a "surprise." I drew my curtains and lay motionless on my back as if I were dead. With eyes closed, listening, I smilingly waited.
Then suddenly I heard a muffled, gasping cry; and all was utterly, icily still. I flung aside the silk curtains and leapt out of bed.
The moonlight was streaming in a lean ray across the floor of my room. I ran down this luminous pathway into the dusk at the open door. At the stair-head beyond, still and silent, I saw my poor dear. On through the cold dark air I ran, and stood in her loosened hair beside her head. It lay unstirring, her cheek colourless, her hand stretched out, palm upward, on the stone. I called into her ear, first gently and pleadingly, then loud and shrill. I ran and chafed her fingers, then back again, and stooped, listening with my cheek to her lips. She exhaled a trembling sigh. I called and called; but my shrillness was utterly swallowed up in the vast night-hung house. Then softly in the silence her lids unsealed and her eyes, as if wonderful with a remote dream, looked up into my face. "My dear," she whispered, wakefulness gathering faintly into her gaze, "my dear, is it you?" There was an accent in her voice that I had never heard before. Perhaps her tranceful eyes had magnified me. Then once more the lids closed down and I was alone. I fell on my knees beside her and crouched, praying into her heedless ear.
It was my first acquaintance with calamity, and physically powerless to aid her, I could think of nothing for a moment but to persuade her to speak to me again. Then my senses returned to me. To descend that flight of stairs—down which hitherto I had always been carried—would waste more precious time than I could spare. There seemed to be but one alternative—to waken Pollie. I ran back into my bedroom and tugged violently at the slack of her bedclothes. A mouse might as well have striven to ring Great Paul. She breathed on with open mouth, flat on her back, like a log. Then a thought came to me.
There was a brass-bound box under my bed, a full fifteen inches long, though shallow, in which my grandfather had lately sent me some gowns and finery from Paris. With some little difficulty I lugged and pushed this all across the room, and out on to the staircase. My strength seemed to be superhuman. One moment I flew to my mother, but now she lay in a profound sleep indeed, her cheek like marble. With a last effort I edged my box on its side between the balusters, and at some risk of falling after it, shoved it over into the moon-silvered dusk below. The house echoed with its resounding brazen clatter as it pitched from stair to stair. Then quiet. Clutching with either hand the baluster I leaned over, listening. Then a voice cried sleepily: "Hah!" then a call, "Caroline!" and a moment afterwards I discerned my father ascending the staircase....
For weeks I lay desperately ill. The chill, the anguish, and horror of that night had come upon a frame already weakened. Life was nothing but an evil dream, a world of terrifying shadows and phantoms. But our old friend Dr Grose was familiar with my constitution, and at last I began to mend. Pollie, stricken with remorse, nursed me night and day, giving my small bed every hour she could spare in a house stricken and disordered. I was never told in so many words that my mother was dead. In my extreme weakness I learned it of the air around me, of every secret sound and movement in the house.
Morning and evening appeared my father's great face in the doorway, his eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles. To see his misery I almost wished that I might die to spare him more. When Dr Grose gave him permission, he sat down beside my bed and stooping low, told me that my mother had remembered our last speech together on the staircase, and he gave me her last message. A thousand and one remembrances of her patience and impulsiveness, of our long hours of solitude together, of her fits of new life as if she were a tree blossoming in the Spring, of her voice, her dignified silence with Miss Fenne, her sallies with my grandfather, her absent musings—these all return to me.