"You"ve a scent bottle, Mrs. Macnamara--let her smell to it," said the grim woman in black, coldly, but with a scarcely perceptible gleam of triumph, as she glanced on the horrified faces of the women.
Well, it was a long fainting-fit; but she did come out of it. And when her bewildered gaze at last settled upon Mrs. Matchwell, who was standing darkly and motionless between the windows, she uttered another loud and horrible cry, and clung with her arms round Mrs. Mack"s neck, and screamed--
"Oh! Mrs. Mack, _there_ she is--_there_ she is--_there_ she is."
And she screamed so fearfully and seemed in such an extremity of terror, that Mary Matchwell, in her sables, glided, with a strange sneer on her pale face, out of the room across the hall, and into the little parlour on the other side, like an evil spirit whose mission was half accomplished, and who departed from her for a season.
"She"s here--she"s here!" screamed poor little Mrs. Nutter.
"No, dear, no--she"s not--she"s gone, my dear, indeed she"s gone,"
replied Mrs. Mack, herself very much appalled.
"Oh! is she gone--is she--_is_ she gone?" cried Mrs. Nutter, staring all round the room, like a child after a frightful dream.
"She"s gone, Ma"am, dear--she isn"t here--by this cra.s.s, she"s gone!"
said Betty, a.s.sisting Mrs. Mack, and equally frightened and incensed.
"Oh! oh! Betty, where is he gone? Oh! Mrs. Mack--oh! no--no--never! It can"t be--it couldn"t. It _is_ not he--he never did it."
"I declare to you, Ma"am, she"s not right in her head!" cried poor Betty, at her wits" ends.
"There--_there_ now, Sally, darling--_there_," said frightened Mrs.
Mack, patting her on the back.
"There--there--there--I see him," she cried again. "Oh!
Charley,--Charley, sure--sure I didn"t see it aright--it was not real."
"There now, don"t be frettin" yourself, Ma"am dear," said Betty.
But Mrs. Mack glanced over her shoulder in the direction in which Mrs.
Nutter was looking, and with a sort of shock, not knowing whether it was a bodily presence or a simulacrum raised by the incantations of Mary Matchwell, she beheld the dark features and white eye-b.a.l.l.s of Nutter himself looking full on them from the open door.
"Sally--what ails you, sweetheart?" said he, coming close up to her with two swift steps.
"Oh! Charley--"twas a dream--nothing else--a bad dream, Charley. Oh! say it"s a dream," cried the poor terrified little woman. "Oh! she"s coming--she"s coming!" she cried again, with an appalling scream.
"_Who_--what"s the matter?" cried Nutter, looking in the direction of his poor wife"s gaze in black wrath and bewilderment, and beholding the weird woman who had followed him into the room. As he gazed on that pale, wicked face and sable shape, the same sort of spell which she exercised upon Mrs. Mack, and poor Mrs. Nutter, seemed in a few seconds to steal over Nutter himself, and fix him in the place where he stood.
His mahogany face bleached to sickly boxwood, and his eyes looked like pale b.a.l.l.s of stone about to leap from their sockets.
After a few seconds, however, with a sort of gasp, like a man awaking from a frightful sleep, he said--
"Betty, take the mistress to her room;" and to his wife, "go, sweetheart. Mrs. Macnamara, this must be explained," he added; and taking her by the hand, he led her in silence to the hall-door, and signed to the driver.
"Oh! thank you, Mr. Nutter," she stammered; "but the coach is not mine; it came with that lady who"s with Mrs. Nutter."
He had up to this moved with her like a somnambulist.
"Ay, that lady; and who the devil is she?" and he seized her arm with a sudden grasp that made her wince.
"Oh! that lady!" faltered Mrs. Mack--"she"s, I believe--she"s Mrs.
Matchwell--the--the lady that advertises her abilities."
"Hey! I know--the fortune-teller, and go-between,--her!"
She was glad he asked her no more questions, but let her go, and stood in a livid meditation, forgetting to bid her good evening. She did not wait, however, for his courteous dismissal, but hurried away towards Chapelizod. The only thing connected with the last half-hour"s events that seemed quite clear and real to the scared lady was the danger of being overtaken by that terrible woman, and a dreadful sense of her own share as an accessory in the untold mischief that had befallen poor Mrs.
Nutter.
In the midst of her horrors and agitation Mrs. Mack"s curiosity was not altogether stunned. She wondered vaguely, as she pattered along, with what dreadful exhibition of her infernal skill Mary Matchwell had disordered the senses of poor little Mrs. Nutter--had she called up a red-eyed, sooty-raven to her shoulder--as old Miss Alice Lee (when she last had a dish of tea with her) told her she had once done before--and made the ominous bird speak the doom of poor Mrs. Nutter from that perch? or had she raised the foul fiend in bodily shape, or showed her Nutter"s dead face through the water?
With these images flitting before her brain, she hurried on at her best pace, fancying every moment that she heard the rumble of the accursed coach behind her, and longing to see the friendly uniform of the Royal Irish Artillery, and the familiar house fronts of the cheery little street, and above all, to hide herself securely among her own household G.o.ds.
When Nutter returned to the parlour his wife had not yet left it.
"I"ll attend here, go you up stairs," said Nutter. He spoke strangely, and looked odd, and altogether seemed strung up to a high pitch.
Out went Betty, seeing it was no good dawdling; for her master was resolute and formidable. The room, like others in old-fashioned houses with thick walls, had a double door. He shut the one with a stern slam, and then the other; and though the honest maid loitered in the hall, and, indeed, placed her ear very near the door, she was not much the wiser.
There was some imperfectly heard talk in the parlour, and cries, and sobs, and more talking. Then before Betty was aware, the door suddenly opened, and out came Mary Matchwell, with gleaming eyes, and a pale laugh of spite and victory and threw a look, as she pa.s.sed, upon the maid that frightened her, and so vanished into her coach.
Nutter disengaged himself from poor Mrs. Nutter"s arms, in which he was nearly throttled, while she sobbed and shrieked--
"Oh! Charley, dear--dearest Charley--Charley, darling--isn"t it frightful?" and so on.
"Betty, take care of her," was all he said, and that sternly, like a man quietly desperate, but with a dismal fury in his face.
He went into the little room on the other side of the now darkening hall, and shut the door, and locked it inside. It was partly because he did not choose to talk just now any more with his blubbering and shrieking wife. He was a very kind husband, in his way, but a most incapable nurse, especially in a case of hysterics.
He came out with a desk in his hands.
"Moggy," he said, in a low tone, seeing his other servant-woman in the dusk crossing at the foot of the stairs, "here, take this desk, leave it in our bed-room--"tis for the mistress; tell her so by-and-by."
The wench carried it up; but poor Mrs. Nutter was in no condition to comprehend anything, and was talking quite wildly, and seemed to be growing worse rather than better.
Nutter stood alone in the hall, with his back to the door from which he had just emerged, his hands in his pockets, and the same dreary and wicked shadow over his face.
"So that----Sturk will carry his point after all," he muttered.
On the hall wainscot just opposite hung his horse-pistols; and when he saw them, and that wasn"t for a while--for though he was looking straight at them, he was staring, really, quite through the dingy wooden panel at quite other objects three hundred miles away--when he _did_ see them, I say, he growled in the same tone--
"I wish one of those bullets was through my head, so t"other was through his."
And he cursed him with laconic intensity. Then Nutter slapped his pockets, like a man feeling if his keys and other portable chattels are all right before he leaves his home. But his countenance was that of one whose mind is absent and wandering. And he looked down on the ground, as it seemed in profound and troubled abstraction; and, after a while, he looked up again, and again glared on the cold pistols that hung before him--ready for anything. And he took down one with a s.n.a.t.c.h and weighed it in his hand, and fell to thinking again; and, as he did, kept opening and shutting the pan with a snap, and so for a long time, and thinking deeply to the tune of that castanet, and at last he roused himself, who knows from what dreams, and hung up the weapon again by its fellow, and looked about him.
The hall-door lay open, as Mary Matchwell had left it. Nutter stood on the door-step, where he could hear faintly, from above stairs, the cries and wails of poor, hysterical Mrs. Nutter. He remained there a good while, during which, unperceived by him, Dr. Toole"s pestle-and-mortar-boy, who had entered by the back-way, had taken a seat in the hall. He was waiting for an empty draught-bottle, in exchange for a replenished flask of the same agreeable beverage, which he had just delivered; for physic was one of poor Mrs. Nutter"s weaknesses, though, happily, she did not swallow half what came home for her.
When Nutter turned round, the boy--a sharp, tattling vagabond, he knew him well--was reading a printed card he had picked up from the floor, with the impress of Nutter"s hob-nailed tread upon it. It was endorsed upon the back, "For Mrs. Macnamara, with the humble duty of her obedient servant, M. M."
"What"s that, Sirrah?" shouted Nutter.