CHAPTER LI.OUT IN THE STORM.
Why did that miserable woman prowl, so cat-like and stealthily, around those two houses? What motive could have brought her so far from home, a second Satan, to poison and blast the Eden of peace and charity those two aged people had gathered around them? What had they ever done, that she should persecute them so ruthlessly with her presence?
They knew her, that was certain, for Catharine, even beyond her own shuddering fear, had noticed that their limbs trembled beneath them as she approached, and that a deadly fear burned in their eyes and spoke in every line of their gentle faces.
Elsie too. The very sight of this evil woman had driven her into fierce insanity again. Why was this? Had they known her before? If so, how and where? The portrait of her husband,—was that, too, a mysterious link between these old people, so opposite in character, so unlikely to hold anything in common? How was she connected with them all?
These conjectures kept Catharine awake half the night, while poor Elsie moaned and muttered in her sleep, or started up with wild cries, calling upon God to drive her enemies forth and not let them torment her forever!
Catharine left her bed, feverish and excited by these thoughts. She felt sure that Madame De Marke had notrecognized her; for she had been standing on one side in the library, when those evil eyes looked through the window. But the very sight of her old enemy left a nervous dread behind it, and she could not rest. Events of importance to her own destiny seemed to be crowding themselves around her, vaguely, it is true, but with a force that awoke a sort of terror in her.
She opened her chamber-window and sat down. Elsie was moaning and muttering in her bed, agonized by sleeping terrors. The wind without rose high and blustering; clouds lowered down among the trees; and gusts of rain drifted through the leaves, bathing them, as it were, with liquid diamonds, through which the lightning shot from time to time, with its thousand golden arrows.
Next to her chamber, the two old people lay awake. The sound of their conversation came to her ear at times through the pauses of the wind, like a softened and mournful echo of Elsie’s raving.
Beneath her was the library, with its mysterious associations. The trees around it loomed against the bank of clouds, disconnected from their blackness only by the lightning that shot from it. All was gloom within and without; and amid the storm, her sobs rose and swelled unheard and unfelt, save by her own lonely heart.
The lightning grew stronger and enveloped the whole landscape in broad, lurid sheets, revealing the country around and a sombre expanse of water beyond. At these times the new cottage stood out in broad relief, and the whole space of ground between that and the old mansion-house was momentarily illuminated. The scene gave the young woman a fierce sort of exaltation, while it filled her with grief. She thought of her husband and longed to shout his name aloud, to ask him to come forth from the bosom of the storm and tell her that he was yet alive.
While this excitement was upon her, a crash of thunderbroke over the house, and a rush of wind rent its way through the trees, scattering their foliage in torn masses from the boughs. Then came another fiery scroll, unfolding itself upon the wind, casting its blue radiance upon the earth, and kindling the sky with its forked light.
The flash was so vivid and so prolonged that she started up with a cry of alarm. It was echoed by a shriek that cut sharper than steel through the noise of the storm.
“See, see,” cried Elsie, who now stood beside her, “the lightning has got him; call him back; call him back, I say!”
Her eyes flashed out their insane fire, lightning against lightning, both springing from darkness. The wind swept through her hair, filling it with rain-drops. The white folds of her garments and those flowing sleeves fluttered and shook about her like the wings of a spirit. Her clasped hands were extended over Catharine’s head into the storm. Elsie, aroused by the burst of thunder, had rushed from her sleep and stood before the window, daring the tempest as if she had been its spirit.
“Call him back; he is mine. Call him back!” she shrieked.
“Great heaven! what is this?” answered Catharine, pale with astonishment, for directly before her, passing, as it seemed, backward beneath the branches of the elm-tree, was her own husband. But while the words were on her lip, the lightning passed by; and the man who had appeared before her for a single moment was engulfed in the darkness.
It was an open casement by which they stood, just over the bay-window of the library. I have mentioned that an old forest-tree overshadowed this portion of the house, drooping its branches downward like a tent. As the darkness closed in upon them, Elsie leaped like a panther through the casement, lodged a moment on the bay-window,and seizing a pendent branch, flung herself forward into the blackness of the storm. A sharp, long cry came back from the tempest in which Elsie seemed to have been engulfed.
Catharine stood helpless with surprise and terror, straining her eyes to discover a trace of the maniac. But Elsie had disappeared. A flash of lightning revealed her for an instant as she rushed through its gleams beneath the trees, giving her white garments and her long hair back to the blast; then all was dark again.
Trembling with affright, Catharine ran down-stairs, seized a blanket-shawl, and went out in search of her charge. The storm still raged, but not so furiously as it had done—everything was wet through and through; every leaf dripped rain, the grass was so wet that it seemed like wading through a swamp as she passed on. Her night-robe was soon soaked, and her bare feet chilled to marble, as they sunk in the cold grass.
But she took no heed of this. Elsie had gone toward the water, and she was wild with fear that in her madness the maniac might plunge into the deep.
Quick as the lightning that now and then revealed her way, she darted shoreward, calling out for Elsie as she went; but terror and speed deprived her voice of all power, and she could utter the name of her charge in hoarse whispers only.
As she passed by the cottage, a glare of lightning fell upon her, and through it she saw an open window lighted from within. That same man was framed in the open sash, whose apparition, a few minutes before, had drawn Elsie into the storm.
Was it a real being? Or was it the picture which she had copied in the library? The same proportions were there; the coloring was alike; but this picture looked human. Was it her breathing husband? Or had terror driven her mad also?
She paused a moment, with her face uplifted, wondering if she were mad, or not; if the vision were a hallucination or a reality. The rain beat into her uplifted face, the wind blew fiercely over her thinly clad form. No wonder she seemed ghost-like to the man who saw her from the window.
A voice down toward the water aroused her from this wild trance. She turned and ran toward it, calling aloud “Elsie! oh, Elsie!”