The Deceased Wife's Sister, and My Beautiful Neighbour, v. 3

by William Clark Russell

"I will do for her, Sir, as if she was my own child," said Mrs. Williams in a tremulous tone, moved by my grief. "She shall never want for love while she is with me."

I took and pressed the kind creature's hand, and passed into the library. The window stood open as I had left it, for the night, though it was the autumn, was close. I entered the balcony. The air was dark; there was no moon; the stars were few and faint. The wind stole through the trees which towered above the house with a hollow plaining.

The gloom and stillness were friendly to thought and melancholy. Away down there among those black shadows I had first met her, walking with a queenly air, her face made marble by sleep, her eyes made sightless by the slumbering of her soul. Into what a life had her beauty led me! The intelligence of my spirit had not deceived me. Had it not inspired me with prophetic forebodings of some such commingling of mine and this fair creature's destinies as was now realised? Of what sin had I been guilty to merit this dread expiation? My love was pure; why was it made a misery?

I was in the act of leaving the balcony when I heard a cry—a human cry, as of some one in pain or distress. It smote my ear—faint but defined; but whence it had come, whether from right or left of me, or from the deep black shadows of the trees beyond, I knew not. I stood straining my hearing to catch the cry again, but it was not repeated.

Was it a human voice? I might have been mistaken. It might have been the dull note of some wakeful bird, humanised by my imagination. It might have been the moan of some homeless dog. I waited wondering.

All at once my thoughts rushed to Geraldine. The cry might have come from her room; its passage through the open window making it sound as though uttered in the garden.

I mounted the stairs gently and opened the bedroom door. A candle burnt on the toilet-table. I glanced at the bed; it was empty, yet her form had pressed it, and the clothes were disordered.

I hastened downstairs, possessed with a strange belief; I entered the balcony, passed down the steps, and gained the garden. I walked forward cautiously, peering to right and left, pausing at intervals to listen, then advancing noiselessly as before. Half-way down the grounds I stopped; I heard the sound of footsteps. In a few minutes a figure in white came out of the gloom and flitted rapidly by me.