"You will see," she said again and brought me into the house.
Her terror was beginning to affect me. She was quite unable to tell me what she had seen, but her whole manner expressed a dazed horror, not so much of some concrete fear as of the ghastly position in which she found herself.
She led me to the door of the room in which I had last seen Mrs. Drainger alive, but no inducement could make her come in, nor could I get from her anything more explicit. Poor soul! I do not wonder at her terror.
The room was as before. The shuttered windows admitted only faint bars and pencils of light. The dim chairs and shadowy tables were discernible, but, as if they yielded precedence to death, the most solid object in the obscurity was the coffin in which Mrs. Drainger's body lay. I advanced to it. The mistress of this ill-fated mansion seemed to have grown larger in death; her body was no longer shrunken and her folded hands still retained faintly their peculiar luminous quality. I could see in the shadow that around her face there was no longer the black mantle, but the face puzzled me—I could not make it out, and, opening the shutter, I let in the light.
I stepped again to the side of the coffin. Could this be the queenly beauty of whom Fawcett had spoken? For, where the features should have been there was, naked to the light, only a shapeless, contorted mass of flesh in which, the twisted eyelids being closed, there seemed to my horrified gaze no decent trace of human resemblance!
I turned half-sick from the sight. Emily Drainger, tall, pallid yellow, her great eyes burning with an evil glow, her lemon dress an unhealthy splotch in the doorway, stood regarding me.
"The will—the will!" she cried. "She thought she could stop me, but she could not!"
"Who—what has done this?" I pointed involuntarily to her mother's face.
She seemed to expand before my eyes with evil triumph.
"I—I," she cried at length, her black eyes holding me as I stood, weak and faint, clinging unconsciously to the coffin for support. "Twenty years ago! But"—she laughed hysterically and came to look at the shapeless, brutalized face—"I never knew, until she died, that it was done so well!!"