Leaning farther over the bed, she boldly took the Countess by the shoulder and shook her. Not even this effort succeeded in rousing the sleeping woman. She still lay back in the chair, possessed by a torpor like the torpor of death--insensible to sound, insensible to touch. Was she really sleeping? Or had she fainted?
Agnes looked closer at her. She had not fainted. Her breathing was audible, rising and falling in deep heavy gasps. At intervals she ground her teeth savagely. Beads of perspiration stood thickly on her forehead. Her clenched hands rose and fell slowly from time to time on her lap. Was she in the agony of a dream? or was she spiritually conscious of something hidden in the room?
The doubt involved in that last question was unendurable.
Agnes determined to rouse the servants who kept watch in the hotel at night.
The bell-handle was fixed to the wall, on the side of the bed by which the table stood.
She raised herself from the crouching position which she had assumed in looking close at the Countess; and, turning towards the other side of the bed, stretched out her hand to the bell. At the same instant, she stopped and looked upward. Her hand fell helplessly at her side.
She shuddered, and sank back on the pillow.
What had she seen?
She had seen another intruder in her room.
Midway between her face and the ceiling, there hovered a human head--severed at the neck, like a head struck from the body by the guillotine.
Nothing visible, nothing audible, had given her any intelligible warning of its appearance. Silently and suddenly, the head had taken its place above her. No supernatural change had passed over the room, or was perceptible in it now. The dumbly-tortured figure in the chair; the broad window opposite the foot of the bed, with the black night beyond it; the candle burning on the table--these, and all other objects in the room, remained unaltered.
One object more, unutterably horrid, had been added to the rest.
That was the only change--no more, no less.
By the yellow candlelight she saw the head distinctly, hovering in mid-air above her. She looked at it steadfastly, spell-bound by the terror that held her.
The flesh of the face was gone. The shrivelled skin was darkened in hue, like the skin of an Egyptian mummy--except at the neck.
There it was of a lighter colour; there it showed spots and splashes of the hue of that brown spot on the ceiling, which the child's fanciful terror had distorted into the likeness of a spot of blood.
Thin remains of a discoloured moustache and whiskers, hanging over the upper lip, and over the hollows where the cheeks had once been, made the head just recognisable as the head of a man. Over all the features death and time had done their obliterating work.
The eyelids were closed. The hair on the skull, discoloured like the hair on the face, had been burnt away in places. The bluish lips, parted in a fixed grin, showed the double row of teeth.
By slow degrees, the hovering head (perfectly still when she first saw it) began to descend towards Agnes as she lay beneath.
By slow degrees, that strange doubly-blended odour, which the Commissioners had discovered in the vaults of the old palace--which had sickened Francis Westwick in the bed-chamber of the new hotel--spread its fetid exhalations over the room.
Downward and downward the hideous apparition made its slow progress, until it stopped close over Agnes--stopped, and turned slowly, so that the face of it confronted the upturned face of the woman in the chair.
There was a pause. Then, a supernatural movement disturbed the rigid repose of the dead face.
The closed eyelids opened slowly. The eyes revealed themselves, bright with the glassy film of death--and fixed their dreadful look on the woman in the chair.
Agnes saw that look; saw the eyelids of the living woman open slowly like the eyelids of the dead; saw her rise, as if in obedience to some silent command--and saw no more.
Her next conscious impression was of the sunlight pouring in at the window; of the friendly presence of Lady Montbarry at the bedside;and of the children's wondering faces peeping in at the door.
