An idea struck her, she too would go to church. It was the proper thing to do in the country--besides, it might afford her an opportunity of captivating some young squire or other local grandee.
"What a lark!" she said to herself. "Fancy _my_ going to church."
She entered the church, and was placed by an old gentleman, who acted as pew-opener, in an empty pew which was in a very prominent position.
Once there, all her pluck and gladness seemed to run out of her finger ends again quite suddenly.
Her old landlady was right. The letter had only produced a temporary relief, a reaction all the more quickly fleeting, that it was so intense. The Furies had not left her yet.
It was a strange sensation that came over her. The silence of the church before the service commenced, the number of quiet faces--faces that had a.s.sumed that look of solemn misery which the rustic considers proper to the sacredness of the day and place--seemed to mesmerize her. A sense of vague terror crept over her, her nerves were strung to breaking. It was as if some explosion, something horrible, was about to happen at any moment.
The wretched woman was on a rack of mental agony and suspense. She could not move and leave the church; she was held there by the mesmeric gaze of all those quiet faces, which she believed was concentrated on herself.
Everything that occurred through that awful hour was as a separate stab.
And all was so deliberate too, so cruelly deliberate.
The old clergyman mounted slowly into his pulpit, and putting on his spectacles deliberately, looked at her for a moment or two. It was horrible!
Then commenced the slow, deliberate, monotonous words of the service, each an instrument of torture. She rose, and sat, and knelt, without knowing what she did, with the other people.
At last came the dreary intoning of the ten commandments.
On hearing the first, she suddenly remembered that there was another further on, the sixth, which said, "_Thou shalt do no murder_." She felt as if her face must express her guilt, when these words were drawled out. She would be betrayed to all those people.
She waited for it without breathing. Her heart seemed to stop. She thought she would die when it came.
One by one the commandments seemed to boom out in her ears like some distant death-knell.
Slowly the last words of the fifth were uttered by the sleepy old clergyman. He actually paused before the sixth to adjust his spectacles.
"Oh! it was done on purpose," she thought. "They knew all!" She could not suppress a low groan, and then a dark veil seemed to fall over her eyes.
"_Thou--shalt--do--no--murder._"
Her head swam, a great roaring sound filled her ears, but still louder, above it, rang out those awful words.
"A sort of epileptic fit," said the village doctor rather vaguely to the squire as he met him at the church door after the service. "Poor thing!
I wonder who she is. We took her home to her lodgings. It seems she"s been here about two weeks. The landlady says she"s been very strange and in low spirits till to-day, when a letter cheered her up. There"s the danger of sudden reaction and excitement, you see," rubbing his hands and winking with one eye in a knowing way at the squire, who himself was a choleric man, with a tendency to apoplexy.
Endowed with a vigorous const.i.tution, she soon recovered from the effects of the seizure, whatever it was.
But she could not shake off the terror. The Furies would not let her go.
She felt that she must go mad if this continued. She even contemplated suicide.
Then she took to opium, and was never without a bottle of laudanum in her pocket, from which she would take frequent sips.
Yet she _knew_ that she was quite safe. She tried to prove this to herself. She tried to laugh away her senseless fears, but it was no good. The horrors will not give way to logic.
Though human law could not punish her, she suffered enough in all conscience to satisfy those strictest lovers of retributive justice who would require even more than a tooth for a tooth.
A month of this condition robbed her of a considerable portion of her beauty. Her peachy complexion was no more; her cheeks were sunken and sallow; and the crows" feet about her eyes were as those of a woman twice her age.
Curiously enough, it was the very loss of beauty which at last brought about her recovery, and prevented her from becoming a hopeless lunatic.
The horror had to battle with a formidable foe--vanity, and, indeed, had ultimately to retreat before it.
Her great dread of age and ugliness saved her.
She observed the fast deepening wrinkles, the fading roses, and felt greatly alarmed. "This must not be allowed to go on," she thought. "I must live more healthily. I must get calmer, or all my beauty will go."
So now she had another idea, though it was an unpleasant one, to occupy her thoughts.
The horror did not now altogether absorb her mind--one terror distracted her attention from the other. Thus monomania was averted.
It is better to be possessed by two or even a legion of devils than by one alone.
So, gradually, she became something like her old self again, but not quite so. She had lost a good deal of her nerve, and could not altogether abandon her laudanum drinking. The horror faded away, but the wrinkles would not. She could not smooth those crows" feet out. Her cheeks resumed their roundness, but not all their purity of complexion.
This soured her temper. Her old jovial flippancy, objectionable though it was, gave way to a still more objectionable cynical ill-humour, which made her hurt the feelings of others whenever possible. She could not help revealing this at times even to the men she wished to fascinate.
She made a practice of saying very nasty things on all occasions, and became a very disagreeable person generally.
She never returned to the hospital to resume her duties as nurse, but when she was fairly recovered from her strange illness, she went up to London, reported herself to the Secret Society, and threw herself with a zeal she had never displayed before into its machinations. With congenial villainy and occasional laudanum, she hoped to drown thought and so recover her lost beauty.
CHAPTER XVII.
A DARKENED MIND.
As soon as Catherine King heard of Mary"s illness, she hurried to the hospital in her great anxiety. She loved the girl with the intensity which characterised all her pa.s.sions--loved her far more dearly than her own life and happiness--almost as much as she loved the "cause" itself.
Pale and trembling with fear for her darling, the usually cold, stern woman appeared before Dr. Duncan.
"Let me see her," she said, in a choking voice.
"Dear Mrs. King," he replied, "I think it will be better for her if you do not see her just yet. Sit down and I will tell you all about her.
Pray do not alarm yourself."
"Is it dangerous?" she interrupted in the same tones, seemingly not having heard what he said.
"We cannot tell yet; she has received a severe shock. It may prove to be merely a pa.s.sing attack, or it may be--"
"May be what?"