He drew the door open with a fling, and stared in: but the closet was
empty, except for the clothes hanging from the pegs on the wall, and the
dressing-table and looking-glass facing the windows. He shut it sharply,
and locked it, and felt for a minute, he says, 'as if he were like to
lose his wits;' then, ringing at the bell, he brought the servants, and
with much ado they recovered Mrs. Prosser from a sort of 'trance,' in
which, he says, from her looks, she seemed to have suffered 'the pains
of death:' and Aunt Rebecca adds, 'from what she told me of her visions,
with her own lips, he might have added, "and of hell also."'
But the occurrence which seems to have determined the crisis was the
strange sickness of their eldest child, a little boy aged between two
and three years. He lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the
doctors who were called in, set down the symptoms to incipient water on
the brain. Mrs. Prosser used to sit up with the nurse by the nursery
fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.
His bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the
door of a press or cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close.
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