"What are you looking at?" she asked. "What are you waiting for? Is it——?" The rest of the sentence died away on her lips: the words that would finish it were words too terrible to be spoken.
The sound of her voice produced no visible impression on Jack. Had it influenced him, in some unseen way? Something did certainly disturb the strange torpor that held him. He spoke. The tones were slow and mechanical—the tones of a man searching his memory with pain and difficulty; repeating his recollections, one by one, as he recovered them, to himself.
"When she moves," he muttered, "her hands pull the string. Her hands send a message up: up and up to the bell." He paused, and pointed to the cell-door.
The action had a horrible suggestiveness to the guilty wretch who was watching him.
"Don't do that!" she cried. "Don't point there!"
His hand never moved; he pursued his newly-found recollections of what the doctor had shown to him.
"Up and up to the bell," he repeated. "And the bell feels it. The steel thing moves. The bell speaks. Good bell! Faithful bell!"
The clock struck the half-hour past one. Madame Fontaine shrieked at the sound—her senses knew no distinction between the clock and the bell.
She saw his pointing hand drop back, and clasp itself with the other hand, round his knees. He spoke—softly and tenderly now—he was speaking to the dead. "Rise Mistress, rise! Dear soul, the time is long; and poor Jack is waiting for you!"
She thought the closed curtains moved: the delusion was reality to her. She tried to rouse Schwartz.