Some weeks, as I have said, are simply struck out of my existence. When gradually the cold, grey light of returning life stole in upon me, I almost hoped it might be fallacious. I hated to come back to the frightful routine of existence. I was so very weak that even after the fever left me I might easily have died at any moment.
I was promoted at length to the easy-chair, in which, in dressing-gown and slippers, people recover from dangerous illness. There, in the listlessness of exhaustion, I used to sit for hours, without reading, without speaking, without even thinking. Gradually, by little, my spirit revived, and, as life returned, the black cares and fears essential to existence glided in, and gathered round with awful faces.
One day old Rebecca, who, no doubt, had long been anxious, asked:
"How did you come by that knife, Miss Ethel, that you fetched home in your hand the night you took ill?"
"A knife? Did I?" I spoke, quietly suppressing my horror. "What was it like?"
I was almost unconscious until then that I had really taken away the dagger in my hand. This speech of Rebecca's nearly killed me. They were the first words I had heard connecting me distinctly with that ghastly scene.
She described it, and repeated her question.
"Mr. Carmel took it away with him," she replied, "the same night."
"Mr. Carmel?" I repeated, remembering with a new terror his connexion with Monsieur Droqville. "You had no business to allow him to see it, much less--good Heaven!--to take it."
I stood up in my terror, but I was too weak, and stumbled back into the chair.
I would answer no question of hers. She saw that she was agitating me, and desisted.
The whole scene in the jeweller's shop remained emblazoned in vivid tints and lights on my memory. But there was something more, and that perhaps the most terrible ingredient in it.
I had recognised another face besides Droqville's. It started between me and the wounded man as I recoiled from my own blow. One hand was extended towards me, to prevent my repeating the stroke--the other held up the wounded man.
Sometimes I doubted whether the whole of that frightful episode was not an illusion. Sometimes it seemed only that the pale face, so much younger and handsomer than Monsieur Droqville's--the fiery eyes, the frown, the scarred forehead, the suspended smile that had for only that dreadful moment started into light before me so close to my face, were those of a spectre.