Chapter 34: Towards Judgment

For possibly a couple of minutes she continued on the doorstep immobile, as if she not only did not understand what had happened, but as if she also still failed to realise that her legal adviser was at least no longer where he was. She repeated his name, at intervals--”Luker! Luker!”--almost as if she was a child who repeated, parrot-like, a meaningless formula. Then, after a while, when still there came no answer, she thrust her hand, as if mechanically, into the bosom of her dress, feeling for something. Presently it emerged, holding a flask. In the same odd, automatic fashion, as if her actions were not the product of her own volition, unscrewing the stopper, she placed the neck between her lips. After a perceptible interval, suddenly slipping between her fingers, it dropped on to the step with a clatter. It had contained ether; she had swallowed its entire contents.

What were the exact physical or mental results of what would have been a poison to an unaccustomed subject, it would be difficult to say. One fact may be baldly stated, it robbed her of her senses. Her capacity of judging between the real and the unreal had been trembling in the balance. When she emptied that flask unreality became all that was real. Not perhaps on the instant, but certainly after the expiration of a very few seconds.

At first she stood trembling, so that one might almost have expected to see her sink to the ground from sheer inability to stand. She stretched out her arms into the darkness, as if seeking for support, and found none. Then, putting her hands up to her face, she began to rub them up and down before her eyes, as if endeavouring to rub away some film which obscured her sight, and she began to cry, softly, beneath her breath. Then, dropping her hands to her sides, she began to see the things which were not, those visions which, in some form, are the inseparable companions of a mind diseased.

“I am coming!--I heard you!--you need not call so loud!”

The words were uttered not loudly, but with such clearness of intonation that, proceeding from her as she stood there all alone in the outer darkness, and addressed apparently to the circumambient air, they might have produced on unintentional listeners not an agreeable effect. She turned, making as if to insert the key which she still held into the lock of the door behind her, to find that the door already stood wide open, and that in the hall beyond there was a faint light which was just sufficient to render objects visible.