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 bed-clothes 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 turn-screw.
The whole of this funereal pageant 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 burthen 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, Winnie — what is it?” cried my Aunt But no Winnie was there. In her stead lay a dead man, with a white-fringed cap on, and a black, stubbed beard, the growth of some three or four days, and a little line of the white of one eye shining between its half-closed lids.
It was now; my Aunt’s turn, and with a loud yell, and overturning the coffin, she jumped out of the bed, and ran screaming along the gallery, where she fell, and fainted on the floor.
When she came to herself, she was in her own room and bed once more, with Winnie beside her: and she exclaimed, so soon as recollection quite returned —
“Oh, save me, Winnie, save me.”
“You’re quite safe, ma’am, dear.”
“Where are we?”
“In the inn, ma’am.”
“Bolt the door, Winnie; bolt the door, and lock it — they’re all murderers.”
“Drink some water, ma’am.”
“Lock the door, you fool! We shall be murdered.”
“The maid was here, ma’am, very sorry you were so frightened; but you went into the wrong room, and they could not help it.”