The Wildfire Club - The Emma Hardinge Britten Archive

OR rORN LEAVES FROM LIFE HISrORY. 207
and every gallery is dark in midnight's sombre robe. Beneath
each marble form and ghostly bust a shapeless something
seems to lurk, waiting a signal to creep forth, and
do a deed she cannot name, and yet she knows 'tis .. murder."
And all these galleries are full 2,f things waiting
for her husband. She starts, and wakes. The cold moonbeam,
with pallid fingers, writes upon the window, " Murder."
She turns and turns the long and weary nightthe
night - the ages in one night. Sure it must be many
long years, that dreary, livelong night; for how many old
and bygone histories she recalls of wretched ladies forced
by fate on crime - the hapless Cenci's dark and fearful
mystery- the dreadful Borgias, and even the Hebrew
Judith; ay, it was a noble deed - a brave, fair woman
ridding the earth of monsters, not fit to live. Now she
is in France beside the fair Brinvilliers; how skilfully she
knew the trade of poisoning! It was world-wide, the
knowledge how to let life out, and yet she, this wretched
wife, so wrotiged, with a serpent in her way so dire they
could not both live - one must kill the other; slle knew
nought of poisoning.
Thank God, it was morning. Last bitter night she had
prayed for darkness; now she longed for light. Another
hour and she would say, "Would God it were night! "
0, miserable lady! Hark! The skylark sounds its matin
in the sky; the small birds twitter, and the thrush awakes.
Alas, they all cry, "Murder, murder!" By day or night
some phantom in her ears holloes in ocean's roar or booms
in thunder, howls in the winds or murmurs in the breeze,
chants in the voice of birds or sighs in flowers -" Murder,
murder." " Nothing else but murder."
Had you asked her why she thought of murder, she would
have turned on you a piteous glance, and told you of evil