“Wait a little,” Alban interposed. “You are exciting yourself again—wait.”
“You’re wrong, sir! You think it ended when she finished her story, and shut up her book; there’s worse to come than anything you’ve heard yet. I don’t know what I did to offend her. She looked at me and spoke to me, as if I was the dirt under her feet. ‘If you’re too stupid to understand what I have been reading,’ she says, ‘get up and go to the glass. Look at yourself, and remember what happened to the slave who was under the spell. You’re getting paler and paler, and thinner and thinner; you’re pining away just as he did. Shall I tell you why?’ She snatched off the shade from the lamp, and put her hand under the table, and brought out an image of wax. My image! She pointed to three pins in it. ‘One,’ she says, ‘for no sleep. One for no appetite. One for broken nerves.’ I asked her what I had done to make such a bitter enemy of her. She says, ‘Remember what I asked of you when we talked of your being my servant. Choose which you will do? Die by inches’ (I swear she said it as I hope to be saved); ‘die by inches, or tell me—’”
There—in the full frenzy of the agitation that possessed her—there, Mrs. Ellmother suddenly stopped.
Alban’s first impression was that she might have fainted. He looked closer, and could just see her shadowy figure still seated in the chair. He asked if she was ill. No.
“Then why don’t you go on?”
“I have done,” she answered.
“Do you think you can put me off,” he rejoined sternly, “with such an excuse as that? What did Miss de Sor ask you to tell her? You promised to trust me. Be as good as your word.”
In the days of her health and strength, she would have set him at defiance. All she could do now was to appeal to his mercy.
“Make some allowance for me,” she said. “I have been terribly upset. What has become of my courage? What has broken me down in this way? Spare me, sir.”
He refused to listen. “This vile attempt to practice on your fears may be repeated,” he reminded her. “More cruel advantage may be taken of the nervous derangement from which you are suffering in the climate of this place. You little know me, if you think I will allow that to go on.”