Part 28 (1/2)

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.