A TALK ABOUT GHOSTS.
But again he was the first.
They had turned and gone a good way down the long garden, and had again
turned towards the house.
“This place makes me feel as I never felt before,” he said. “There is
such a wonderful sense of vanished life about it. The whole garden
seems dreaming about things of long ago--when troops of ladies, now
banished into pictures, wandered about the place, each full of her own
thoughts and fancies of life, each looking at everything with ways of
thinking as old-fashioned as her garments. I could not be here after
nightfall without feeling as if every walk were answering to unseen
feet, as if every tree might be hiding some lovely form, returned to
dream over old memories.”
“Where is the good of fancying what is not true? I can’t care for what
I know to be nonsense!”
She was glad to find a spot where she could put down the foot of
contradiction, for she came of a family known for what the neighbours
called common sense, and in the habit of casting contempt upon
everything characterized as superstition: she had now something to say
for herself!
“How do you know it is nonsense?” asked Donald, looking round in her
face with a bright smile.
“Not nonsense to keep imagining what nobody can see?”
“I _can_ only imagine what I do not see.”
“Nobody ever saw such creatures as you suppose in any garden! Then why
fancy the dead so uncomfortable, or so ill looked after, that they come
back to plague us!”
“Plainly they have never plagued you much!” rejoined Donal laughing.
“But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of night?”
“Never once,” answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of indignation.
“I never was so absurd!”
“Then there may be a whole night-world that you know nothing about. You
cannot tell that the place is not then thronged with ghosts: you have
never given them a chance of appearing to you. I don’t say it is so,
for I know nothing, or at least little, about such things. I have had
no experience of the sort any more than you--and I have been out whole
nights on the mountains when I was a shepherd.”
“Why then should you trouble your fancy about them?”
“Perhaps just for that reason.”
“I do not understand you.”
“I mean, because I can come into no communication with such a world as
may be about me, I therefore imagine it. If, as often as I walked
abroad at night, I met and held converse with the disembodied, I should
use my imagination little, but make many notes of facts. When what may
be makes no show, what more natural than to imagine about it? What is
the imagination here for?”
“I do not know. The less one has to do with it the better.”
“Then the thing, whatever it be, should not be called a faculty, but a
weakness!”
“Yes.”
“But the history of the world shows it could never have made progress
without suggestions upon which to ground experiments: whence may these
suggestions come if not from the weakness or impediment called the
imagination?”
Again there was silence. Miss Graeme began to doubt whether it was
possible to hold rational converse with a man who, the moment they
began upon anything, went straight aloft into some high-flying region
of which she knew and for which she cared nothing. But Donal’s
unconscious desire was in reality to meet her upon some common plane of
thought. He always wanted to _meet_ his fellow, and hence that abundance
of speech, which, however poetic the things he said, not a few called
prosiness.
“I should think,” resumed Miss Graeme, “if you want to work your
imagination, you will find more scope for it at the castle than here!
This is a poor modern place compared to that.”
“It is a poor imagination,” returned Donal, “that requires age or any
mere accessory to rouse it. The very absence of everything external,
the bareness of the mere humanity involved, may in itself be an
excitement greater than any accompaniment of the antique or the
picturesque. But in this old-fashioned garden, in the midst of these
old-fashioned flowers, with all the gentlenesses of old-fashioned life
suggested by them, it is easier to imagine the people themselves than
where all is so cold, hard, severe--so much on the defensive, as in
that huge, sullen pile on the hilltop.”
“I am afraid you find it dull up there!” said Miss Graeme.
“Not at all,” replied Donal; “I have there a most interesting pupil. But
indeed one who has been used to spend day after day alone, clouds and
heather and sheep and dogs his companions, does not depend on much for
pastime. Give me a chair and a table, fire enough to keep me from
shivering, the few books I like best and writing materials, and I am
absolutely content. But beyond these things I have at the castle a fine
library--useless no doubt for most purposes of modern study, but full of
precious old books. There I can at any moment be in the best of company!
There is more of the marvellous in an old library than ever any magic
could work!”
“I do not quite understand you,” said the lady.
But she would have spoken nearer the truth if she had said she had not
a glimmer of what he meant.
“Let me explain!” said Donal: “what could necromancy, which is one of
the branches of magic, do for one at the best?”
“Well!” exclaimed Miss Graeme; “--but I suppose if you believe in
ghosts, you may as well believe in raising them!”
“I did not mean to start any question about belief; I only wanted to
suppose necromancy for the moment a fact, and put it at its best:
_suppose_ the magician could do for you all he professed, what would it
amount to?--Only this--to bring before your eyes a shadowy resemblance
of the form of flesh and blood, itself but a passing shadow, in which
the man moved on the earth, and was known to his fellow-men? At best
the necromancer might succeed in drawing from him some obscure
utterance concerning your future, far more likely to destroy your
courage than enable you to face what was before you; so that you would
depart from your peep into the unknown, merely less able to encounter
the duties of life.”
“Whoever has a desire for such information must be made very different
from me!” said Miss Graeme.
“Are you sure of that? Did you never make yourself unhappy about what
might be on its way to you, and wish you could know beforehand
something to guide you how to meet it?”
“I should have to think before answering that question.”
“Now tell me--what can the art of writing, and its expansion, or
perhaps its development rather, in printing, do in the same direction
as necromancy? May not a man well long after personal communication
with this or that one of the greatest who have lived before him? I
grant that in respect of some it can do nothing; but in respect of
others, instead of mocking you with an airy semblance of their bodily
forms, and the murmur of a few doubtful words from their lips, it
places in your hands a key to their inmost thoughts. Some would say
this is not personal communication; but it is far more personal than
the other. A man’s personality does not consist in the clothes he
wears; it only appears in them; no more does it consist in his body,
but in him who wears it.”
As he spoke, Miss Graeme kept looking him gravely in the face,
manifesting, however, more respect than interest. She had been
accustomed to a very different tone in young men. She had found their
main ambition to amuse; to talk sense about other matters than the
immediate uses of this world, was an out-of-the-way thing! I do not
say Miss Graeme, even on the subject last in hand, appreciated the
matter of Donal’s talk. She perceived he was in earnest, and happily
was able to know a deep pond from a shallow one, but her best thought
concerning him was--what a strange new specimen of humanity was here!
The appearance of her brother coming down the walk, put a stop to the
conversation.