CHAPTER XVIII.
“LET ME GO HOME.”
WHEN Hetty woke in the middle of the night, and found herself in darkness, without a glimmer of light, curtains and shutters closing her in, doors locked between her and all the rest of the world, a gloom which could be felt weighing down her eyelids, the sensation of terror which overwhelmed her was no doubt entirely unreasonable. Miss Hofland next door felt these precautions essential to her rest. But little Hetty lay not daring to breathe, bound in a speechless and horrible panic which no words could express. Nothing that she could have seen or heard would have equalled the horror of seeing nothing, of lying there a hopeless prisoner of the darkness, the silence throbbing round her, the gloom pressing upon her like a tangible weight. How she had woke, whether by the reverberation of some cry, or by some stirring in the night, she could not tell. She thought it was both. She thought that some shriek penetrating the too great and tingling profundity of silence, and some movement in the intense, insupportable gloom, had broken the uneasy sleep into which she had fallen against her will while the firelight lasted, with its friendly blaze and little crackling. These had saved her from the horror of the shut-up place. But now the fire had died out, there was no glimpse or glimmer anywhere; all was dark, dark, horrible, a blackness growing upon her, getting into her very soul. Something of the effect of a nightmare was in that horrible gloom. It seemed to hold her so that she could not move, and scarcely could breathe. There seemed no air, but only darkness, darkness within and around. Her eyes were useless to her, as if she had none; and her ears, which seemed strained and worn with the effort, were the only sentinels she had to warn her of any approaching evil, and tingled and throbbed, either they or that black vacancy which they watched. All this was nothing, as the reader knows, it was only a child’s fantastic rendering of the most common-place fact, but to Hetty it was a fever, a nightmare, everything that was most appalling. She started up at last, defying the still greater horror of meeting or running against some awful presence hidden in the gloom, and groped about the dreadful place till she found the curtains, restraining all the time with the most frantic effort a scream which was in her throat, which only the strongest resolution kept from bursting forth. When at last she had succeeded in opening everything, and discerned with transport a pale gleam of sky, with black tree-tops tossing about it, Hetty dropped upon the floor beside the window, almost fainting with exhaustion and relief. At last here was a little light, though it was only the glimmer of midnight. It was the sky; there was one faint star in it, shining by the edge of a cloud. She was not shut up in a box of blackness and darkness and separated from all the world.
Feverish thoughts flew through Hetty’s brain in this half-swoon. She said to herself, Would death be like that?—all black, nothing to be heard or seen, a horrible blank, in which nothing but throbbing terror and dread consciousness were. She tried to tell herself that death was nothing at all, only a passage from earth to heaven, but had not enough command of her faculties to follow that or any other argument, but only to feel, with a wild relief, that she was not dead, for here was the sky still palely glimmering, light in it, not blackness, as the shut-up room had been. She supposed afterwards that she had fallen asleep there, half wrapped in the curtain near that blessed window which had brought her back to life; for when she came to herself much later, in the first profound chills of dawn, she found herself half lying, half sitting, in the elastic fold of the heavy curtain, aching with cold and exposure, and for the moment deeply wondering how she came there, at the foot of the tall window which was now full of the grey lightness of the coming day.
Hetty was paler than ever, nervous, and trembling, next day. She had caught a chill, everybody said; and again Miss Hofland prescribed the sofa, the novel, hot cups of tea, and other gratifications; the lessons were done by her side to save her trouble, and little Rhoda showed her a great deal of silent sympathy, stealing to her side in the intervals of those simple studies, putting an arm round her neck as she stood by the sofa, even bestowing a silent kiss by way of consolation. The girl recovered her courage during the day, especially as the sun shone, and everything looked brighter. But as evening drew near, Hetty paled and shivered once more. “A cold is always worse in the evening,” said Miss Hofland, and recommended bed earlier than usual, and a hot drink. Bed was the thing of all others that Hetty feared. She lay on the sofa by the comfortable fire in a state of confused and self-reproachful misery, such as only the very young are capable of feeling. Words seemed on her very lips which she with difficulty kept from becoming audible. “Oh, let me go home to mamma! oh, let me go home! let me go home!” She thought if she once began saying it, she would have to go on and on and never could stop herself. “Oh, let me go home!” She said it over and over and over within herself, but was checked continually by the thought that if she said it aloud, if she could have her wish, there would be an end of all that had been dreamed of, of the bills that might be paid, and the sealskin for mamma. Hetty bought the sealskin dear. It was that above all that kept her dumb, that kept down that cry, “Oh, let me go to mamma!” But then mamma would go cold in her thin cloak all next winter, because Hetty could not command herself. It came to a compromise at last in a fit of nervous sobbing, which she could not restrain when, after Rhoda had been sent away, Miss Hofland again proposed going to bed.
“My dear! what is the matter? Do you feel ill? Have you a sore throat? I do hope you are not going to be hysterical. My dear child, do get the better of that crying. Tell me frankly what’s the matter. If it’s anything I can help you in, I will do it; but, for goodness’ sake, don’t sob like that. What is it you want, my dear?”
“Oh, Miss Hofland, I don’t know. I suppose it’s only mamma. I feel as if I couldn’t do without mamma.”
“Oh, you poor child! Well, I have heard a great many girls say that, my dear. It’s common when you’re beginning your life. I never had any mother, and I used to envy them with their crying. I’d have given a great deal to have had anything to cry for. But every one has to be reasonable in the end, and you have a great deal of sense, my dear. You wouldn’t have been sent away unless they had thought it was best for you. Now isn’t that true? You must just make up your mind to it, and put up with it, till the time comes; and then all will be right, and you’ll get back.”
“Yes, I know; I can’t help saying it, Miss Hofland, but I don’t really want it. I want to—stay out my time, and—and get my—money,” Hetty said, keeping down her sobs.
“Yes, that is the right way to look at it,” said the governess. She understood well enough, having seen it so often, the little sudden access of home-sickness, the heroic childish resolution to bear up to the end and get the money, which so often means far more than money to the young creature who earns it. Miss Hofland patted Hetty’s shoulder, and soothed her with genuine feeling; and then she fell into the tone of one far older than Hetty, and which she truly called governessy. “Besides, my dear,” she said, “you must recollect that if you are to be from home at all, you couldn’t be in a more comfortable house. It’s a little queer, and I can’t help thinking that some day or other something will be found out to account for it: but they treat us very well; that can’t be denied. In some places they don’t allow you a fire in your room, and the schoolroom dinners are like nursery meals, only not so plentiful. It is a great addition to all the other things you have to put up with when that’s the case. But here everything is very comfortable. Your mother would be quite pleased if she saw how everything is arranged for us here.”
Hetty’s sobs died away under the influence of this speech—whether it was the good sense in it, or that the mode of consolation adopted was so entirely unfitted to the trouble, a thing which sometimes has quite a good effect.
“And then, you know,” said Miss Hofland, “there’s the satisfaction of knowing that whatever there may be that is strange and out of the way, it doesn’t concern us. They say that other people’s misfortunes make you enjoy your own comforts the more. I wouldn’t go quite so far as that: but it is a great gratification to reflect, when you are in a house where there is evidently a skeleton somewhere or other, that it is no business of yours. There’s no telling the comfort there is in that.’
“But, Miss Hofland,” said Hetty, “do you think that just to lock your door, and never to mind whatever may happen to the house, as Mrs. Mills says——”
“Is that what she says?” said the governess, quickly. “Oh, you may be sure that’s not her way; she would be at the bottom of it. I’m confident, whatever it was, they couldn’t conceal anything from her! But she’s got a good deal in her, that woman, though I don’t like her, my dear. I shouldn’t say but it would be the wisest thing, on the whole. For what could you do? You can’t clear up their mysteries or put things straight, so why should you give yourself any trouble? If you thought there were signs of fire, indeed, why then of course you should give the alarm at once; for we all should suffer from that, we poor ladies who have nothing to do with it, and the servants and all. Yes, I should always give the alarm, whatever it cost you, in case of a fire; but for other things I am not sure that she did not give you the very best advice. A man, if he heard a noise, would have to get up and see what it was; but a lady may always lock her door. I do it invariably wherever I am, my dear. In the first place, it’s safer, for you never know who might come blundering into your room, as I told you this morning; and then it frees you from a great deal of responsibility. As a rule, at the outset of your career, I should say that Mrs. Mills gave you very good advice.”
Hetty’s attention failed while Miss Hofland ran on. She lost reckoning of the motives presented to her, the rule of conduct which her companion would have been the first to call governessy. Another subject was foremost in Hetty’s thought—her own room, into which she was about to be taken as into a prison, where all would be black again, as before, and the doors locked, everybody’s door locked, so that if any stronger horror should seize her, there was nowhere she could fly to, no one to whom she could escape and be safe. She was glad the governess should talk, in order to put off that evil hour as long as possible. Miss Hofland sat over the fire, quietly flowing forth in that philosophy of the dependent, how to keep safest in a sort of camp by yourself in the midst of an ungenial, if not unfriendly, world, how to avoid responsibility and secure calm, however those around you might be agitated. This was the code of things expedient which had been fixed in her mind by years of experience. The girl listened very vaguely at first, and then went off altogether into her own individual alarms. Her pretty, comfortable room, with its pleasant fire, that luxury which was not always allowed, had once more become a dark prison-house to Hetty. How was she to go through such another night?
There was a glimmer of comfort in the fact that Miss Hofland accompanied her there, to see that her hot footbath was ready, and her hot drink. “You must just jump into bed and cover yourself up warm, and never budge till morning; and you’ll see your cold will be ever so much better,” she said, tapping Hetty upon the cheek affectionately. “Now, my clear, don’t be a little goose.” And then Hetty, with anguish which she could scarcely contain, heard her go into her room and turn the key. “It frees you from a great deal of responsibility,” she had said. And how was she to know the miserable panic that was in the poor little girl’s heart, left thus alone with her consciousness of wanderers outside and mysteries within, and the sense of darkness and imprisonment, and no one within call, whatever might happen? Hetty’s first wild idea was that it would be better to sit up all night, and thus cheat the black gloom and silence that lay in wait for her. But she was very obedient and quite unused to act for herself; and there seemed to her something guilty, something dreadful, in thus disregarding all the usages of life. She sat down by her fire and read for as long a time as she could keep her attention to her novel, and then, trembling to find it was midnight, she stole to bed at last. Happily, she was so worn out that she slept immediately, as if there had been no panics or mysteries in the world, or as if her mother’s room—that shelter from all harm—had been open to her next door.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT.
“OH no! my dear young lady, no no; you must not be so easily discouraged. Our little friend is very fond of you, and everybody likes you. Come! you must try and put up with us a little longer. You must get back your pretty colour and throw off this nasty little fever. The will has a great deal to do with it, hasn’t it, Darrell? Come, Miss Hester! You must not make your mamma think we have been unkind to you; that would never do,” the kind old clergyman said.
“That is what I am always telling her,” said Miss Hofland. “She is too old, you know, to cry after her mother; and I tell her I used to envy the girls that had something to cry for, for I never had any mother. I might have cried my eyes out, and it wouldn’t have done me any good.”
“Dear, dear!” said the old Rector, looking at the governess with a mixture of wonder and alarm, a momentary tribute to her cleverness in getting into the world by some unknown way; and then he returned to Hetty, patting her affectionately upon the shoulder. “She’s not too old for anything,” he said soothingly. “She’s too young for anything, and never was away from her dear mother before: I feel sure she never knew what it was——”
“My dear! before the Rector and Mr. Darrell!” cried Miss Hofland. “You ought to have a little proper pride.”
For Hetty, hearing all these allusions to her mother and the talk that went on over her, and being very weak and in a paroxysm of excited feeling, had given way to a tempest of tears.
“Let her cry,” said the kind old Rector, still going on patting her with an almost mesmeric touch. “It must get vent, you know, and better here than when she is alone. Just leave her to me a little, and she will come round. You know, my dear young lady, if it should fall to your lot in this world to get your own living, as many a nice, good girl has to do, there are always difficulties to be got over at first. It’s not like home. Though you put ever so good a face upon it, it’s not like home. When you get used to it, you take the bitter with the sweet. But I have often seen at the beginning that there was a little crisis, and it was touch and go whether the poor little young heart could face the lot or not.”
“Oh yes,” cried Hetty convulsively; “it is not that; it’s only that I’m feeling—ill; it is not that I am—silly: indeed, indeed!” the poor child cried, struggling to speak steadily.
“It is only this, that she is feverish, and her nerves have received a shock,” said the young doctor. “Now that the days are brightening, and she can get out in the open air——”
The little old clergyman nodded his head and went on, “I understand all that. But all the same there’s this little crisis which has to be got over. I daresay, my dear, that Miss Hofland had it too, though she tells us that she never had what most people have. I was once a tutor in my young days, and I felt it, though I was a man. There are particular qualities that are wanted for this dependent sort of life. We are all more or less dependents here,” he said, looking round benevolently upon the group about him. The speech was very well meant, but it was not very well received: the young doctor made a hasty step apart, as if to separate himself from the others, while Miss Hofland cried, “Oh, Mr. Rector!” with suppressed indignation, “I do not consider myself a dependent. I have accepted a position for a year, and so long as I do the duties I’ve undertaken, I hope I’m as independent as any one. I don’t mix myself up with the family at all,” Miss Hofland said.
“Well, my dear young lady,” said the old clergyman, “I am, if nobody else is: for though I am called the Rector by most people, and though I have been here for a great number of years, I am only here, after all, as locum tenens, which is a name you will no doubt have heard, as a clergyman’s daughter; that means, you know, that I am here enjoying all my little comforts at the will and pleasure of somebody else. He might send me away to-morrow, or at least in three months’ time: or he might die. He has been expected to die a great many times. I think sometimes he never will. He’s an old, old fellow, much older that I am, and I, though I am an old man, am quite dependent upon him, so, you see, I know what I am talking about.”
“Oh, Mr. Rector, if that is what you mean!” murmured Miss Hofland, abashed.
“Papa was the same once,” said Hetty, roused out of her self-occupation. “We had a delightful house and a great, beautiful garden. But then the old gentleman died, and we had to give it up.”
“When my old gentleman dies, I shall have to give it up too; but I hope he will outlive me. When an old man like that gets up among the eighties, he may just as well live for ever: and I’m sure I hope he will. So, you see, I have a long experience of being dependent; and I should like to give you the help of my experience, you who are at the other end. But I hope you will not have to live this kind of life.”
“You needn’t feel any dependence unless you please,” said Miss Hofland. “I would not set her against it, Mr. Rector, if she should have to follow it, for a girl in most cases cannot choose for herself.”
“I don’t mean to set her against it,” said the old clergyman; but they were both interrupted by Hetty, to whom this opening of a new interest was invaluable.
“If this old gentleman is so old,” she said, “I wonder what his name is? I wonder if perhaps he is the old Rector, Uncle Hugh, that mamma used to tell us about?”
The little group round Hetty was thunder-struck by this remark. Miss Hofland hastily took up the eau-de-cologne, with a glance of alarm; and the doctor lifted his head sharply and fixed his eyes upon her, as if with a sudden gleam of hope.
“Uncle Hugh!” cried the old clergyman. “My dear Miss Hester—I—this is very surprising. He is Mr. Hugh Prescott, certainly, if you happen to mean that.”
“Oh,” cried Hetty, with awakened interest, “then it is Uncle Hugh! Mamma has not heard of any of them for such a long time. She says it is so wrong not to keep up writing, but there are so many of us, and she has so much to do. Then Uncle Hugh is still alive! I will write directly and tell her. She will be so pleased to know.”
“Then your mother is——? To be sure!” cried the old clergyman. “Asquith! I ought to have remembered. It is not so common a name but that I might have remembered. Your father was once the curate here.” He looked round upon his companions with a strange look, as if admitting some new possibility from which unknown combinations might arise. “Why, she’s a relation of the family,” he said.
The housekeeper had come into the room while this conversation was going on. She was always coming and going; and it was a great grievance with Miss Hofland that she had begun constantly to open the door without knocking, which was an assertion of equality on the housekeeper’s part which the governess could not bear. She came forward now with a cup of chicken-broth for Hetty, and in a moment became somehow the central figure in the group. “Of the old family,” she said firmly, “and that is what I have always thought. I thought from the beginning that there was more than met the eye in that young lady being here.”
The doctor stepped forward quickly, giving the woman a hasty, warning look. “I wish I had known before,” he said. “It might have made things easier.” And then he stopped, both in words and action, as if suddenly perceiving either that he had said too much, or that his confusion had betrayed him into something which ought not to have been said at all. “To be sure, I don’t see that it makes much difference,” he said between his teeth.
“I think,” said the housekeeper, somewhat severely, “that if you will reflect a moment, you will see that it makes no difference at all.”
Miss Hofland, who was entirely in the dark, looked from one to another with bewilderment. “Do you mean that Hetty is a relation of little Rhoda?” she cried.
“The Rector said, Miss Hofland, of the old family,” said the housekeeper pointedly; but neither of the gentlemen spoke. A curious silence fell over the little party, as if no one, except Mrs. Mills, whose views were peremptory, understood what was to be made of this new idea, whether it were of great importance or of no importance at all. It did not end in any additional demonstrations towards Hetty, to whom indeed, in the little lingering illness, which, after all, was no more than a feverish cold, aggravated by the tortures of the imagination which she had been going through, and which Dr. Darrell only partly guessed at, everybody had been as kind as it was possible to be. The housekeeper herself, though so severe and secretly distrusted by all the party, had been very kind to Hetty. If it had been the daughter of the house, as Miss Hofland remarked, there could not have been more pains taken with her. “Certainly they do treat us very well; there is nothing whatever to be found fault with in that respect.” But no doubt Miss Hofland herself looked upon the girl with a different eye. A relation of the old family! The governess at least entertained from the beginning the conviction, formed at once on her entry on her duties, that the old family was very much superior to the new.
As for Hetty herself, this little discovery did her more good than the chicken-broth. It raised her failing spirit; it gave the pleasant impulse of a new event. It was indeed, when she came to think of it, no event at all, for though it had not seemed necessary to speak of it to the servants and dependents of the new family, or to the little heiress who was all she was acquainted with of the new family, Hetty herself had been aware from the first that the house in which she was living was the house of her ancestors, and that probably, as she thought, she had far more to do with it, and certainly with the old pictures, than Rhoda had, to whom everything would some day belong. There were no old servants in the establishment who could remember her mother, no sign of any one recollecting that such an unusual name as that of Asquith had once been known at Horton. But now that the discovery had come about in this natural way, it pleased Hetty. She had not written much to her mother since she had been ill; but now, in the pleasant excitement of her discovery, it was the first thing she thought of. As soon as the visitors went away, she got up from her sofa of her own accord, forgetting her dizziness and weakness, and began to write a little. “Such a discovery has been made,” she wrote. “Uncle Hugh is alive still, he is living abroad for his health, and the Rector is only locum tenens, as papa was at Retford. He hopes Uncle Hugh may live for ever, but that is not very likely, is it? My cold is a great deal better. I think hearing this has driven it away; not that it makes much difference, but still it makes one feel one’s self more at home, and as if the house really did belong to us once.” After she had written this cheerful letter, Hetty spent the most cheerful evening she had known for a long time. Her fever seemed to have flown; her hands were moist; a little soft pink colour came back to the cheeks which had alternated between red and white. The sense of being better is in itself the best of medicines. It went on raising her courage, strengthening her nerves, making her altogether like herself. She went to sleep tranquilly, without any alarm or excitement, with the shutters folded back a little, the curtains drawn back, and one line of the light she loved, one little span of sky, looking in upon her, so that she could see it where she lay. It was a moonlight night, very soft, the temperature having risen, and everything, as Miss Hofland said, “turning for the best.”
It might be the middle of the night, veering towards the morning, when that calm was disturbed. The moon had gone down, and it was still long before dawn: the darkness intense, the softness of the evening lost in the dead chill and depth of night, and, so far as any one was aware, the great house of Horton all silent, filled with sleep and quiet—when suddenly a wild and terrible shriek pealed through the stillness, a cry that might have waked the dead, a cry of terror past reason, almost past humanity, shrill and awful; it was followed by two others in swift succession, cutting the silence like stabs of a weapon. It takes much to wake a house so wrapped in quiet, in the midst of its night’s sleep; but there was an instantaneous awakening in one quarter of the house, which helped to rouse the rest; and when Miss Hofland, too much startled by the keen ring of that shriek, almost at her very door, to think of her own philosophy of precaution, hurried out into the passage in consternation, her hair hanging over her shoulders, her naked feet thrust into slippers, she met with a second shock almost as great as the first, the housekeeper in her usual trim dress hurrying towards Hetty’s door with a candle in her hand. This sight transfixed the dishevelled maids, who, taking courage from their numbers, were rushing from all sides crying, “What is it? Who is it?” with shrieks almost as noisy, though so wonderfully different in intensity, from that which had awakened the house. The governess was aware of the second bewilderment, though she did not pause to think what it was. A blast of cold air came in their faces, as they burst into Hetty’s room, from the window, one side of which stood open, like a door, into the profoundest midnight darkness. On the bed lay Hetty, or her ghost—a white face with staring eyes, with the bedclothes drawn up tightly as if with an effort to pull them over her face in her two clenched and rigid hands. Her eyes stared wide open, but there was no meaning in them; the mouth still seemed to quiver with that shriek, but was capable of no utterance. The horror of some sight unspeakable seemed to linger in the awful lines about the staring eyes, and in the wild hollows of the marble cheeks—marble white, and with the rigidity of marble too. A murmur of horror came from the women, cowed at the sight, except Mrs. Mills, who held up her candle, throwing a strange light upon the paralysed face. The candle trembled in her hand, but she uttered no word. It was thought afterwards that this was what she had expected to see.
And presently, running in hot haste, with every mark of agitation, pale, with the perspiration pouring down his face, as if he had been engaged in some mortal struggle, the young doctor in his ordinary dress came down the corridor and entered Hetty’s room. He had the tail of his coat half torn off at one side, the governess remarked, as, remembering her own undressed condition, she took refuge behind the curtain. The young man flung himself down on his knees by the bedside, calling out to the housekeeper to hold her candle low, and loosening or trying to loosen the rigid hands. “Is she dead, Doctor? Is she dead?” Mrs. Mills said in a low voice of horror. She trembled in every limb, but she was not surprised.
CHAPTER XX.
A MIDNIGHT VISITOR.
THIS was what had happened to Hetty.
In the middle of the night she had woke up suddenly as on that occasion when she had come to life out of her dreams, and felt the intolerable darkness go chill to her very soul. What it was that awakened her, whether sound or sensation, the rush of the cold night air, or only some consciousness of trouble and horror, she never could tell. She woke, but not to darkness this time. Her eyes went to the light instinctively—to the faint long opening of the window, which though all moonlight was gone still marked itself upon the darkness around. She woke with a gasp and suppressed cry. Her first sensation was the freshness of the air, which showed that her window was open, and then that something moved in that lighter space through which the wind blew. A terror, to which all her previous fright seemed only preliminary, a horror of anticipation and certainty, froze her very soul. Whatever it was, it had come, it had her at last. She lay paralyzed, not able to move; her eyes, the only capable things in her, straining into that dimness, a little lighter than the darkness, where something unformed and horrible moved: moved! that could be no delusion. She saw it with all the clearness of her young, keen faculties, strung into the most dreadful acuteness of perception—not what it was, but that it moved, now blocking the faint grey, wavering in it, moving out of it, in, into the darkness of her room, near her, close to her. Hetty lay motionless, in a trance of unspeakable terror. What it was she could not say. It would have been less horrible had she been able to see it. It was something that moved, that was all. And then there followed faint, stealthy sounds as if of contact with the furniture, like some one groping in the dark: and suddenly that dreadful something moved close to her, between her and the window, touching the line of her bed. It wavered, seemed to pass, then turned back. The miserable child did not breathe, kept still with one last effort, turned to stone by delirious fear. But something, the subtle consciousness that breathes from every living creature, betrayed her in the portentous gloom. Suddenly she felt something; a hand—was it a hand?—passed over her face; and then the thing, which was not distinct enough to be called a shadow, dropped by her bedside, and drew close—close with the breath of another human creature, upon her. “My child, my little darling, my little darling! I’ve found you, I’ve found you at last!” The breath, the voice, the touch of the cold hand, turned Hetty’s brain. And then it was that those shrieks arose, the indescribable, toneless, sharp discords, the cry of mortal terror passed into delirium; and she knew no more.
“She is not dead,” said Mr. Darrell, examining with the candle the horrible, fixed, staring eyes that saw nothing, that were unconscious of his examination and undazzled by the light. “She is not dead. I am not sure that she isn’t worse than dead.”
“How did it happen?” said the housekeeper, in quick, low tones.
“How can I tell you?—negligence! Get hot water, hot irons—anything that is handiest. We must bring back the circulation, if that is possible. Oh, thank you!” The young doctor threw a vague glance at the white figure that suddenly appeared from behind the curtains, and got into the bed beside Hetty’s marble form. He did not recognise who it was. “That’s the best thing you can do; rub her feet, get the blood back anyhow—anyhow. Get hot water, some of you, quick! Go on with that while I go and get something for her.”
The housekeeper laid her hand upon him as he was hurrying away. “Is all safe?” she asked in her low, quick voice. “Are you sure all’s safe?”
“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently; “what’s that in comparison with this?”
“It’s our first business all the same,” said the woman. The young doctor made a despairing movement of his hand towards the bed and hurried away.
Miss Hofland had taken the girl’s inanimate figure into her arms. “I’m almost too cold myself to be of any use to her,” she said, shivering at the contact of the frozen limbs. Mrs. Mills put down her candle by the bedside, where it threw a strange side light upon that tragic mask on the pillow, with the open mouth and staring, awful eyes. Was it Hetty? Was it possible it could be Hetty? All human identity as of feature, or age, or character seemed to have gone out of the rigid face. The housekeeper had her wits all about her—the self-command, Miss Hofland instinctively reflected, of a person not taken by surprise. She gave a few orders to the frightened women, who stood huddled together staring at the foot of the bed, to shut the window, to light fires and prepare hot water. Then she came back to the bedside, quite cool, professional, unexcited. “If it’s cataleptic, all we can do won’t make much difference,” she said calmly: and proceeded to open the clenched hands, and disengage the coverings which were held as in a vice. “Ah!” said Mrs. Mills, “she’s not so unconscious as she looks. She resisted me then—only a little—but still she resisted. She’s coming round.”
“How can it have happened?” Miss Hofland asked. She had got over her first fright and horror, and to talk over a patient, however alarming may be his or her state, is a temptation which nurses, when there are two of them, can rarely resist. They were full of human kindness and interest, and doing everything for her that could be done; but their very interest and anxiety found relief in this discussion of the case.
“Who can tell? She had left her window open again. She never could be cured of that. Her mother must have some fad about open windows.”
“Then you think some one must have come in?”
“Some one? Who was there to come in? Something—perhaps one of the cattle or something—meaning no harm; or perhaps she only imagined it. Imagination is rather worse than fact.”
“I said a cow,” said Miss Hofland thoughtfully. “It would be very strange finding a cow by your bedside in the middle of the night: it might be any sort of a monster: but, goodness! not to overwhelm a girl like that! I think she’s not quite so cold. I think she’s not quite so rigid. Hetty, wake up, my dear!”
“Let her alone,” said the housekeeper. “She can’t hear you. If we get her circulation back, that will be the best chance.”
“But how could it have happened?” repeated Miss Hofland, “for I don’t much believe in the cow. I can’t say I believe in the cow. Oh, how her poor eyes stare! Do you believe she doesn’t see, though she stares so? Hetty! oh, shake it off, darling, shake it off! If you will only make an effort!”
“What is the use?” said Mrs. Mills. “She can’t hear you. If she could, it would be bad for her to be roused so. Young Darrell is very clever, they say; he’ll do all that can be done.”
“He looked as if he knew what it was.”
“Oh, hush, here he is coming back! don’t let him hear you,” cried the housekeeper, and then the colloquy came to an end.
But the case was not so simple as Miss Hofland thought. No power of making an effort remained in poor little Hetty. Her previous terrors, which had been chiefly of the imagination, had undermined her strength. She had no longer any force to resist this overwhelming horror when it came. Whether it was her intelligence which had been killed by the blow, whether she were only stunned temporarily, or if it was a moral paralysis of the whole being which had laid her low, could not be divined. She came round a little from that first trance. After a time her eyes could close, her breathing began to be faintly audible, the rigidity of her limbs relaxed. After a longer interval she came to herself so much as to say “Thank you” faintly to the nurses, and to swallow, though with difficulty, the nourishment they administered. During this period there had been the greatest difficulty in satisfying Hetty’s correspondents at home. She had already fallen out of her early punctuality in respect to letter-writing, which smoothed matters a little; but when day by day went by without producing any amelioration in her state, and when letters began to rain upon the house at Horton full of demands for explanation, and to know what was the matter, Mr. Darrell one day announced to the housekeeper with some haste, and an unnecessary sharpness of tone, “I’ll tell you what it is. I’m going to send for her mother, and that without delay.”
Mrs. Mills looked up in consternation. “Her mother!” she cried. “The last woman in the world to come here!”
“She may be the last woman or anything else you please, but she is the only person that has anything to do here, and I am going to send for her. Look there! do you think that can be allowed to go on?” the young man cried, turning half round to where Hetty sat like a waxen image, supported by cushions in a chair. She lay back as white as the pillow upon which her head rested, her eyelids flickering now and then, her thin hands crossed in her lap. She made no complaint, said scarcely anything except that feeble “Thank you,” when anything was brought her, or when some of her anxious attendants paused to smooth her cushions, or ask if she wanted anything. It was a sight to melt the hardest heart.
“And it is more than a week since it happened,” said young Darrell, “and that is all we have been able to do. You are an excellent nurse, Mrs. Mills; you have neglected nothing: and Miss Hofland does everything that kindness can suggest: but you see yourself that we make no progress. I can do nothing more; her mother may.”
“Time will make it all right,” the housekeeper said. “Of course I am very sorry—I would give anything that it had not happened. Of course the poor little thing has got a dreadful shock. But she is very young, and in time she will get all right.”
“If you like to trust to time with such a delicate thing as a girl’s life,” said the young doctor, “I don’t. We must do something. Either that and try the effect of nature, or else I must have the best authority from town to see her; and you know what questions a physician would ask, and perhaps you know how we could answer him. I don’t.”
“Mr. Darrell,” said the housekeeper, “you’re my superior. I have to take my orders from you. All the same, I consider that our first business is to look after what we were put here for. I cannot acknowledge that a child frightened, even though she is frightened into fits, is any reason for giving up.”
“There are a hundred reasons for giving up,” cried the young man passionately. “I would give up this moment if I could, if there was any one to give up my charge to. It’s neither right nor necessary, what we’re doing. I have never stopped regretting I undertook it, never since——”
“Say the truth, Mr. Darrell, never since—this young lady came here! I’ve seen it from the first. She’s not much more than a child, but you think more of her than of every one else in the house.”
The young doctor blushed like a girl to the very roots of his hair. “I have no intention of answering any such accusation,” he said. “It is entirely uncalled for, and quite unjustifiable. I have done my duty to the utmost, if such a charge could ever be any one’s duty. My doubts have a very different foundation. But I don’t go so far as to sacrifice life to my engagements, and therefore I’m going to telegraph to Mrs. Asquith to beg her to come here at once, without an hour’s delay.”
“Then I’ll telegraph to Mrs. Rotherham,” said the housekeeper. “Oh, dear! she is so far away. How can you betray a poor lady that is so far away? I’ll send for the lawyer. It was he that brought this girl here, and he had better come and take her away. Yes, that’s it. Let’s make a compromise, Doctor. Send her away. To go home, of course, is the best thing for her. Change of air, and change of scene, and her own folks—that’s far, far better. I’ll run the chance of whatever she may say when she gets better. Let us send her away.”
Mr. Darrell turned and looked again at the motionless figure in the chair. His face softened into the deepest, tender pity. “If you think what she was when she came here,” he said, “all full of life and spirit, and to look at her now, like a withered flower! No. I can’t take the responsibility of sending her away. Her mother, or a physician, one or the other! I can’t have her life and her reason to answer for all alone. I am going to telegraph to Mrs. Asquith, now.”
The housekeeper stopped him, catching at his arm. “Do you know who Mrs. Asquith is?” she said.
“Mr. Tenby told me—a relation. Well, so much the better. I am sick of my share in it,” cried the young man. They had been standing talking at the window. Hetty had been moved to another room on the other side of the house, where nothing could remind her of the terrible incident which had changed her whole being, and which was lighted by a large recessed window. He left the housekeeper standing there, and went up to the girl, sitting motionless in her chair. “Is there anything you would like?” he said. “Can I get you anything? Shall I move you nearer the window? Do you think you would like to see any one? Shall I call Miss Hofland? Is there any one whom you would like me to call?” There was a faint hope in his mind that she would say “Mamma,” which she had cried so piteously at first. But Hetty said nothing save “Thank you,” with the faintest movement of her lips.