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Page 32
Earnestly pleading with her friend, Clara advances toward the
window. She too has suffered under the wasting influences of
suspense. Her face has lost its youthful freshness; no delicate
flush of color rises on it when she speaks. The soft gray eyes
which won Frank's heart in the by-gone time are sadly altered
now. In repose, they have a dimmed and wearied look. In action,
they are wild and restless, like eyes suddenly wakened from
startling dreams. Robed in white--her soft brown hair hanging
loosely over her shoulders--there is something weird and
ghost-like in the girl, as she moves nearer and nearer to the
window in the full light of the moon--pleading for music that
shall be worthy of the mystery and the beauty of the night.
"Will you come in here if I play to you?" Mrs. Crayford asks. "It
is a risk, my love, to be out so long in the night air."
"No! no! I like it. Play--while I am out here looking at the sea.
It quiets me; it comforts me; it does me good."
She glides back, ghost-like, over the lawn. Mrs. Crayford rises,
and puts down the volume that she has been reading. It is a
record of explorations in the Arctic seas. The time has gone by
when the two lonely women could take an interest in subjects not
connected with their own anxieties. Now, when hope is fast
failing them--now, when their last news of the _Wanderer_ and the
_Sea-mew_ is news that is more than two years old--they can read
of nothing, they can think of nothing, but dangers and
discoveries, losses and rescues in the terrible Polar seas.
Unwillingly, Mrs. Crayford puts her book aside, and opens the
piano--Mozart's "Air in A, with Variations," lies open on the
instrument. One after another she plays the lovely melodies, so
simply, so purely beautiful, of that unpretending and unrivaled
work. At the close of the ninth Variation (Clara's favorite), she
pauses, and turns toward the garden.
"Shall I stop there?" she asks.
There is no answer. Has Clara wandered away out of hearing of the
music that she loves--the music that harmonizes so subtly with
the tender beauty of the night? Mrs. Crayford rises and advances
to the window.
No! there is the white figure standing alone on the slope of the
lawn--the head turned away from the house; the face looking out
over the calm sea, whose gently rippling waters end in the dim
line on the horizon which is the line of the Hampshire coast.
Mrs. Crayford advances as far as the path before the window, and
calls to her.
"Clara!"
Again there is no answer. The white figure still stands immovably
in its place.
With signs of distress in her face, but with no appearance of
alarm, Mrs. Crayford returns to the room. Her own sad experience
tells her what has happened. She summons the servants and directs
them to wait in the drawing-room until she calls to them. This
done, she returns to the garden, and approaches the mysterious
figure on the lawn.
Dead to the outer world, as if she lay already in her
grave--insensible to touch, insensible to sound, motionless as
stone, cold as stone--Clara stands on the moonlit lawn, facing
the seaward view. Mrs. Crayford waits at her side, patiently
watching for the change which she knows is to come. "Catalepsy,"
as some call it--"hysteria," as others say--this alone is
certain, the same interval always passes; the same change always
appears.
It comes now. Not a change in her eyes; they still remain wide
open, fixed and glassy. The first movement is a movement of her
hands. They rise slowly from her side and waver in the air like
the hands of a person groping in the dark. Another interval, and
the movement spreads to her lips: they part and tremble. A few
minutes more, and words begin to drop, one by one, from those
parted lips--words spoken in a lost, vacant tone, as if she is
talking in her sleep.
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