In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit

‘I was Miss Ida’s nurse,’ said she, ‘and she told me to send for you. Who are you?’

‘Her husband—’

The woman looked at me with hard eyes, where intense surprise struggled with resentment.

‘Then may God forgive you!’ she said. ‘What you’ve done I don’t know, but it’ll be hard work forgivin’ you, even for Him!’

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘my wife—’

‘Tell you!’ The bitter contempt in the woman’s tone did not hurt me. What was it to the self-contempt that had gnawed my heart all these months. ‘Tell you! Yes, I’ll tell you. Your wife was that ashamed of you she never so much as told me she was married. She let me think anything I pleased sooner than that. She just come ’ere, an’ she said, “Nurse, take care of me, for I am in mortal trouble. And don’t let them know where I am,” says she. An’ me being well married to an honest man, and well-to-do here, I was able to do it, by the blessing.’

‘Why didn’t you send for me before?’ It was a cry of anguish wrung from me.

‘I’d never ’a sent for you. It was her doin’. Oh, to think as God A’mighty’s made men able to measure out such-like pecks o’ trouble for us womenfolk! Young man, I don’t know what you did to ’er to make ’er leave you; but it muster bin something cruel, for she loved the ground you walked on. She useter sit day after day a-lookin’ at your picture, an’ talkin’ to it, an’ kissin’ of it, when she thought I wasn’t takin’ no notice, and cryin’ till she made me cry too. She useter cry all night ’most. An’ one day, when I tells ’er to pray to God to ’elp ’er through ’er trouble, she outs with your putty face on a card, she does, an’, says she, with her poor little smile, “That’s my god, Nursey,” she says.’

‘Don’t!’ I said feebly, putting out my hands to keep off the torture; ‘not any more. Not now.’

‘Don’t!’ she repeated. She had risen, and was walking up and down the room with clasped hands. ‘Don’t, indeed! No, I won’t; but I shan’t forget you! I tell you, I’ve had you in my prayers time and again, when I thought you’d made a light-o’-love of my darling. I shan’t drop you outer them now, when I know she was your own wedded wife, as you chucked away when you tired of her, and left ’er to eat ’er ’eart out with longin’ for you. Oh! I pray to God above us to pay you scot and lot for all you done to ’er. You killed my pretty. The price will be required of you, young man, even to the uttermost farthing. Oh God in Heaven, make him suffer! Make him feel it!’

She stamped her foot as she passed me. I stood quite still. I bit my lip till I tasted the blood hot and salt on my tongue.

‘She was nothing to you,’ cried the woman, walking faster up and down between the rush chairs and the table; ‘any fool can see that with half an eye. You didn’t love her, so you don’t feel nothin’ now; but some day you’ll care for someone, and then you shall know what she felt – if there’s any justice in Heaven.’

I, too, rose, walked across the room, and leaned against the wall. I heard her words without understanding them.

‘Can’t you feel nothin? Are you mader stone? Come an’ look at ’er lyin’ there so quiet. She don’t fret arter the likes o’ you no more now. She won’t sit no more a-lookin’ outer winder an’ sayin’ nothin’ – only droppin’ ’er tears one by one, slow, slow on ’er lap. Come an’ see ’er; come an’ see what you done to my pretty – an’ then you can go. Nobody wants you ’ere. She don’t want you now. But p’raps you’d like to see ’er safe under ground afore yer go? I’ll be bound you’ll put a big stone slab on ’er – to make sure she don’t rise again.’

I turned on her. Her thin face was white with grief and rage. Her claw-like hands were clenched.

‘Woman,’ I said, ‘have mercy.’

She paused and looked at me.

‘Eh?’ she said.

‘Have mercy!’ I said again.

‘Mercy! You should ’a thought o’ that before. You ’adn’t no mercy on ’er. She loved you – she died loving you. An’ if I wasn’t a Christian woman, I’d kill you for it – like the rat you are! That I would, though I ’ad to swing for it afterwards.’

I caught the woman’s hands and held them fast, though she writhed and resisted.

‘Don’t you understand?’ I said savagely. ‘We loved each other. She died loving me. I have to live loving her. And it’s her you pity. I tell you it was all a mistake – a stupid, stupid mistake. Take me to her, and for pity’s sake, let me be left alone with her.’

She hesitated; then said, in a voice only a shade less hard: ‘Well, come along, then.’

We moved towards the door. As she opened it, a faint, weak cry fell on my ear. My heart stood still.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, stopping on the threshold.

‘Your child,’ she said shortly.

That too! Oh, my love! oh, my poor love! All these long months!

‘She allus said she’d send for you when she’d got over ’er trouble,’ the woman said, as we climbed the stairs. ‘“I’d like him to see his little baby, nurse,” she says; “our little baby. It’ll be all right when the baby’s born,” she says. “I know he’ll come to me then. You’ll see.” And I never said nothin’, not thinkin’ you’d come if she was your leavin’s, and not dreamin’ you could be ’er ’usband an’ could stay away from ’er a hour – ’er bein’ as she was. Hush!’

She drew a key from her pocket and fitted it to a lock. She opened the door, and I followed her in. It was a large, dark room, full of old-fashioned furniture and a smell of lavender, camphor, and narcissus.

The big four-poster bed was covered with white.

‘My lamb – my poor, pretty lamb!’ said the woman, beginning to cry for the first time as she drew back the sheet. ‘Don’t she look beautiful?’

I stood by the bedstead. I looked down on my wife’s face. Just so I had seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning, when the wind and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she would awaken, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek against mine – and that we should tell each other everything, and weep together, and understand, and be comforted.

So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the room.

But the red lips were like marble, and she did not waken. She will not waken now ever anymore.

I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written.

III

I lay that night in a big room, filled with heavy dark furniture, in a great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains – a bed, the counterpart of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.

They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.

I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me it was I who had done that. The tall clock at the stair-head sounded the hours – eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was dark and very still.

I had not yet been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the intoxication of grief – a real drunkenness, more merciful than the sober calm that comes afterwards.

Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought. And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been about three when I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the ticking of a clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet determined not to hear it, because it came from the next room – the room where the corpse lay.

And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I was nervous – miserably nervous – a coward, and a brute. It meant that I, having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body – the dead body that lay in the next room to mine. The heads of the beds were placed against the same wall: and from that wall I had fancied that I heard slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So that when I say I became aware of them, I mean that I, at last, heard a sound so definite as to leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and fell on my cold hands, as I held my breath and listened.

I don’t know how long I sat there – there was no further sound – and at last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.

‘You fool!’ I said to myself; ‘dead or alive, is she not your darling, your heart’s heart? Would you not go near to die of joy, if she came back to you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives you!’

‘I wish she would come,’ myself answered in words, while every fibre of my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.

I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked at the polished furniture – the commonplace details of an ordinary room. Then I thought of her, lying alone so near me, so quiet under the white sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up and walked across the floor, and turned the door-handle?

As I thought it, I heard – plainly, unmistakably heard – the door of the chamber of death open slowly. I heard slow steps in the passage, slow, heavy steps. I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain hands that felt for the latch.

Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.

I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened – that door on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet dared not turn away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the bed foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its chin. There was a scent of lavender and camphor and white narcissus. Its eyes were wide open, and looked at me with love unspeakable.

I could have shrieked aloud.