She was no woman, but a female
monster. I stood and gazed.
"My presence was more potent than I knew. She opened her eyes--opened
them straight into mine. All the colour sank away out of her face, and it
stiffened to that of a corpse. With the staring eyes of one strangled,
she lay as motionless as I stood. I moved not an inch, spoke not a word,
drew not a step nearer, retreated not a hair's-breadth. Motion was taken
from me. Was it hate that fixed my eyes on hers, and turned my limbs into
marble? It certainly was not love, but neither was it hate.
"Agony had been burrowing in me like a mole; the half of what I felt I
have not told you: I came to find my brother, and found only, in a sweet
sleep, the woman who had just killed him. The bewilderment, of it all,
with my long insensibility and wet garments, had taken from me either the
power of motion or of volition, I do not know which: speechless in the
moonlight, I must have looked to the wretched woman both ghostly and
ghastly.
"Two or three long moments she gazed with those horror-struck eyes; then
a frightful shriek broke from her drawn, death-like lips. She who could
sleep after turning love into hate, life into death, would have fled into
hell to escape the eyes of the dead! Insensibility is not courage. Wake
in the scornfullest mortal the conviction that one of the disembodied
stands before him, and he will shiver like an aspen-leaf.
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