In the days that followed, Ida was the object of a devotion on the part
of Miss Ludington and Paul which it would be inadequate to describe as
anything less than sheer idolatry. Her experience was such as a goddess's
might be who should descend from heaven and take up her abode in bodily
form among her worshippers, accepting in person the devotion previously
lavished on her effigy.
With Miss Ludington this devotion was the more intense as it was but a
sublimed form of selfishness, like that of the mother's to her child,
whom she feels to be a part, and the choicest part, of her own life. The
instinct of maternity, never gratified in her by the possession of
children, asserted itself toward this radiant girl, whose being was so
much closer to hers than even a child's could be, whose life was so
wonderfully her own and yet not her own, that, in loving her, self-love
became transfigured and adorable. She could not have told whether the
sense of their identity or their difference were the sweeter.
Her delight in the girl's loveliness was a transcendent blending of a
woman's pleasure in her own beauty and a lover's admiration of it. She
had transferred to Ida all sense of personal identity excepting just
enough to taste the joy of loving, admiring, and serving her.
To wait upon her was her greatest happiness. There was no service so
menial that she would not have been glad to perform it for her, and which
she did not grudge the servants the privilege of rendering. The happiness
which flooded her heart at this time was beyond description. It was not
such a happiness as enabled her to imagine what that of heaven might be,
but it was the happiness of heaven itself.
As might be expected, the semi-sacredness attaching to Ida, as a being
something more than earthly in the circumstances of her advent, lent a
rare strain to Paul's passion.
There is nothing sweeter to a lover than to feel that his mistress is of
a higher nature and a finer quality than himself. With many lovers, no
doubt, this feeling is but the delusion of a fond fancy, having no basis
in any real superiority on the part of the loved one. But the mystery
surrounding Ida would have tinged the devotion of the most prosaic lover
with an unusual sentiment of awe.
Paul compared himself with those fortunate youths of antiquity who were
beloved by the goddesses of Olympus, and in whose hearts religious
adoration and the passion of love blended in one emotion.
Ever since that night when her heart had been melted by the story of his
love, Ida had treated him with the graciousness which a maiden accords to
an accepted lover. But far from claiming the privileges which he might
apparently have enjoyed, it seemed to him presumption enough and
happiness enough to kiss her dress, her sleeve, a tress of her hair, or,
at most, her hand, and to dream of her lips.
The dazed appearance, as of one doubtful of herself and all about her,
which Ida had worn the night when she was brought home, had now wholly
passed away. But a certain pensiveness remained. Her smiles were the
smiles of affection not of gaiety, and there was always a shadow in her
eyes. It was as if the recollection of the mystery from which her life
had emerged were never absent from her mind.
Still she took so much pleasure in her daily drives with Miss Ludington
that the latter ordered a pony chaise for her special use, and when Paul
arranged a croquet set on the village green, she permitted him to teach
her the game, and even showed some interest in it.
When the first dresses which had been ordered for her came home, she was
delighted as any girl must have been, for they were the richest and most
beautiful fabrics that money could buy; but Miss Ludington seemed, of the
two, far the more pleased.
For herself she had cared nothing for dress. In forty years she had not
given a thought to personal adornment, but Ida's toilet became her most
absorbing preoccupation. On her account she became a close student of the
fashion-papers, and but for the girl's protests would have bought her a
new dress at least every day.
She would have liked Ida to change her costume a dozen times between
morning and evening, and asked no better than to serve as her
dressing-maid. To brush and braid her shining hair, stealthily kissing it
the while; to array her in sheeny satins and airy muslins; to hang jewels
upon her neck, and clasp bracelets upon her wrists, and to admire and
caress the completed work of her hands, constituted an occupation which
she would have liked to make perpetual.
When Miss Ludington's mother had died she had left to her daughter, then
a young girl, all her jewels, including a rather flue set of diamonds.
When one day Miss Ludington took the gems from the box in which they had
been hidden away for half a lifetime, and hung them upon Ida, saying,
"These are yours, my sister," the girl protested, albeit with
scintillating eyes, against the greatness of the gift.
"Why, my darling, they are yours," replied Miss Ludington. "I am not
making you a gift. It was to you that mother gave them. I only return you
your own. When you left the world I inherited them from you, and now that
you have come back I return them to you."
And so the girl was fain to keep them.
Thus it had come about that before Ida had been in the house a week it
was no longer as a mystery, or, at least, as an awe-inspiring mystery,
but as an ineffably dear and precious reality, that her presence was
felt. Had a stranger chanced to come there on a visit, at that time, he
would doubtless have been struck with the fact that a young girl was the
central figure of the household, around whom its other members revolved;
but it is probable that this fact, in itself not unparalleled in American
households, would have seemed to such an observer sufficiently explained
by the unusual gentleness and beauty of the girl herself. The necessity
of a supernatural explanation certainly would not have occurred to him.
The servants had been merely informed that Ida was a relative of Miss
Ludington's, and though they were very curious as to what connection she
might be, their speculations did not extend beyond the commonly
recognized modes of relationship. The housekeeper, indeed, who had been
in Miss Ludington's employ many years, and supposed she knew all about
the family, thought it strange that she could recall no young lady
relative answering to Ida's description. But as she found that her most
ingenious efforts entirely failed to extract any information on the
subject from Miss Ludington, Paul, or Ida herself, she was obliged, like
the rest, to accept the bare fact that the new-comer was Miss Ida
Ludington, and that she was somehow related to Miss Ludington; a fact
speedily supplemented by the discovery that to please Miss Ida was the
surest way to the favour of Miss Ludington and Mr. Paul.
On that score, however, there was no need of any special inducement,
Ida's sweet face, and gracious, considerate ways, having already made her
a favourite with all who were attached to the household.
It was ten days or a fortnight after Ida had been in the house that Miss
Ludington received a letter from Dr. Hull, in which that gentleman said
that he should do himself the honour of calling on her the following day.
He said she might be interested to know that he had already received
several communications from Mrs. Legrand, through mediums, in which she
had declared herself well content to have died in demonstrating so great
a truth as that immortality is not individual, but personal. She
considered herself to be most fortunate in that her death had not been a
barren one, as most deaths are; but that in dying, she had been permitted
to become the second mother of another, and far brighter life than hers
had been. She felt that she had made a grand barter for her own earthly
existence, which had been so sick and weary.
The bulk of Dr. Hull's letter, which was quite a long one, consisted of
further quotations from Mrs. Legrand's communications.
She said that she had been welcomed by a great multitude of spirits, who
to her had owed the beginning of their recognition on earth, and that
their joy over this discovery, which should bring consolation to many
mournful mortals, as well as to themselves, was only equalled by their
wonder that it had not been made years before. It appeared that, since
intercourse between the two worlds had first begun, it had been the
constant effort of the spirits to teach this truth to men; but the stupid
refusal of the latter to comprehend had till now baffled every attempt.
How it had been possible that men who had reached the point of believing
in immortality at all should be content to rest in the inadequate and
preposterous conception that it only attached to the latest phase of the
individual, was the standing wonder of the spirit world.
It was as if one should throw away the contents of a cup of wine, and
carefully preserve the dregs in the bottom.
That so loose an association of personalities as the individual, and
those personalities so utterly diverse, no two of them even alive at the
same time, should have impressed even the most casual observer as a unit
of being--a single person--was accounted a marvel by the angels. If men
had believed all the members of a family to have but one soul among them,
their mistake would have been more excusable, for the members of a family
are, at least, alive at the same time, while the persons of an individual
are not even that.
Dr. Hull said that he had gathered from Mrs. Legrand's communications
that she had seen many things which would teach mortals not to grieve for
their departed friends, as for shades exiled to a world of strangers. To
such mourners she sent word that their own past selves, who have likewise
vanished from the earth, are keeping their dear dead company in heaven.
And far more congenial company to them are these past selves than their
present selves would be, who, through years and changes since their
separation, have often grown out of sympathy with the departed, as they
will find when they shall meet them. The aged husband, who has mourned
all his life the bride taken from him in girlhood, will find himself
well-nigh a stranger to her, and his mourning to have been superfluous;
for all these years his own former self, the husband of her youth, has
borne her company.
Dr. Hull said, in closing, that, as probably Miss Ludington would
presume, his particular motive in making bold to break in upon her
privacy was a desire, which he was sure she would not confound with
vulgar curiosity, to see again the young lady who had succeeded to his
friend's earthly life in so wonderful a manner, and to learn, what, if
any, were the later developments in her case. He was preparing a book
upon the subject, in which, of course without giving the true names, he
intended to make the facts of the case known in the world. Its
publication, he felt assured, would mark a new departure in spiritualism.
Miss Ludington read the letter aloud to Ida and Paul, as all three sat
together in the gloaming on the piazza. As Paul from time to time, during
the reading, glanced at Ida he noticed that she kept her face averted.
"I am glad," said Miss Ludington, as she finished the letter, "that Mrs.
Legrand is happy. It is so hard to realize that about the dead. The
feeling that, our happiness was purchased by her death has been the only
cloud upon it. And yet it would be strange indeed if she were not happy.
As she says, she did not die a barren death, but in giving birth. And it
was no tiny infant's existence, of doubtful value, that she exchanged her
life for, but a woman's in the fulness of her youth and beauty. Such a
destiny as hers never fell to a mother before."
"Never before," echoed Paul, rising to his feet in an access of
enthusiasm; "but who shall say that it may not often fall to the lot of
women in the ages to come, as the relations between the worlds of men and
of spirits, become more fully known? The dark and unknown path that Ida
trod that night back to our world will, doubtless, in future times,
become a beaten and lighted way. This woman through whom she lives again
did not die of her own choice; but I do not find it incredible that many
women will hereafter be found willing and eager to die as she did, to
bring back to earth the good, the wise, the heroic, and beloved. The
world will never need to lose its heroes then, for there will never lack
ardent and devoted women to contend for such crowns of motherhood."
He stopped abruptly, for he had observed that Ida's face betrayed acute
distress.
"Forgive me," he said. "You do not like us to talk of this."
"I think I do not," she replied, in a low voice, without looking up. "It
affects me very strangely to think about it much. I would like to forget
it if I could and feel that I am like other people."
She had, in fact, shown a marked and increasing indisposition almost from
the first to discuss the events of that wonderful night at Mrs.
Legrand's. After having had the circumstances once fully explained to
her, she had never since referred to them of her own accord.
She apparently had the shrinking which any person, and especially a
woman, would naturally have from the idea of being regarded as something
abnormal and uncanny, and mingled with this was, perhaps, a certain
sacred shamefacedness, at the thought that this most intimate and vital
mystery of her second birth had been witnessed and was the subject of
curious speculations.