It was easier to find the lobby than to discover in the dark her own bedroom door. She groped along the passages; she had counted the steps, but now was not quite sure whether it was thirty-five, or forty-five; she stopped now and then to listen in her groping return, and began to grow rather confused; and wished, as active-minded persons not unfrequently do, that she had remained quietly as she was.
In fact, she was precisely in the situation to lose her way, and step into a wrong bedroom, and was extremely uncomfortable in mind and cold in body; and very nervous beside, lest anyone should chance to come that way with a candle, and discover the nakedness of the land.
In this state my Aunt’s deliberations were of the very fussiest sort, and her exertions great; but I doubt if she could have recovered her room, at least at the first venture, without light. Light, however, did come, and this was the manner of its arrival.
On a sudden a door opened below stairs—near the foot of the staircase it must have been, she heard so clearly; and voices, before inaudible, now reached her ear.
A female was weeping loudly, and uttering broken sentences through her sobs.
“They’ve killed him—he’s murdered—they’ve murdered him!” and similar ejaculations came rapidly tumbling one over the other in her ululation.
“Arra, ma’am, go back again, and stay where ye wor. We’ll be even wid them yet, for it is murdher, the villians!” said a voice, which my Aunt had no difficulty in recognising as that of the Irish chambermaid. “Bud don’t be rousin’ the people—it must be done quiet.”
There was more sobbing, and more talk, and the weeping female gave way, and was again shut into her room, and a gleam of an approaching candle sent an angular shadow on the ceiling at the end of the passage in which my Aunt stood.
Extremely frightened, she crouched down close to the ground, and the forbidding-looking woman, with the high cheek bones, walked stealthily in from the stairhead passage, and stood, as pale as death, with her shoes off, and a candle in her hand, listening, as it seemed, at the far end of the gallery. She looked over her shoulder, and said, in a hard whisper—
“Stop there, wid their heavy shoes.”
She had a hammer in her hand, and looked unspeakably repulsive in her pallor. She lifted the candle above her head and listened. My Aunt was staring full at her from her place of semi-concealment, in a recess of one of the doors, with her face close to the ground.
If the woman saw her, she had presence of mind to make no sign; but with the hand in which the hammer was, she drew her dress up a little to enable her to step more freely, and, with a light, soft tread, passed across the entrance of the gallery.
IX
The Funeral Visitation
My Aunt was impressed with the most dismal and terrific ideas of what was going forward. She was quite unnerved. She saw, sometimes the shadow of this woman, and sometimes the full light of the candle, still thrown upon the floor and walls at the end of the lobby, and dared not move.
Quickly the woman returned. She had now the hammer under the arm which bore the candlestick, and whispered—
“Barney!”
Then she raised in her other hand a long, rather slender, steel blade, as it appeared to my aunt, quite straight, and whispered—
“That’s the thing—betther nor the hammer; there’s no one awake but herself for the life o’ ye, make no noise.”
She was crossing the far end of the passage as she said this, and she and the light of her candle quickly disappeared.
The last gleam threw the shadow of a pair of shoes from outside a bedroom door, along the floor, towards my Aunt. The door was next that in which she was crouched, and was a little open. She was now sure that she had discovered her room.
The moment the light had quite disappeared, she entered, and shut the door softly, and groped her way to the bed, and got in at her own side; and, being very cold, lay close to her companion for warmth. My Aunt envied Winnie her sound sleep. She vainly tried to compose herself, wildly conjecturing about unknown horrors, and longing for morning, and an escape from this suspected and mysterious house.
She was miserably cold, too. The night was sharp, and the fire long out. The bedclothes were insufficient, and Winnie also as cold as stone.
My Aunt had been in this state—freezing and listening, and awfully frightened for some ten minutes, perhaps, when she distinctly heard breathing near her door, and the muffled tread of shoeless feet, and then a whispering.
The door opened, and two men came in, carrying a coffin, on the lid of which a kitchen candle was burning dimly; and the ugly woman, Nell, between whom and my Aunt there had grown up, so fast, an unaccountable antipathy, followed, carrying in her hand the steel instrument which Aunt Margaret had observed before with so unpleasant a suspicion, and which was, in fact, a turnscrew.
The whole of this funereal pageant approached my Aunt like the imagery of a dream. The men paused for a moment, while the woman placed the candle on a chest of drawers, and slid the coffin-lid off, leaning it against the wall. They drew near; and as they laid their awful burden lengthways on the bed by her side, one of the two men said—
“I’ll go to the feet, and do you go to the head.”
Upon this my Aunt, almost beside herself with terror, bounced up in the bed; and, instead of despatching her, as she had expected, with a horrid roar and a screech, the men and woman fled from the room, and along the passage, leaving the coffin on the bed beside her.
“Winnie,
