*****
Ah, that cry! Was it my own? I am suffocating! What was that? The horror
of it! The pen has fallen from my hand. I must have slept; and I have
dreamed. In my dream she stole upon me, that white thing! Her velvety
hands were on my throat. The soul stared out from her eyes, the soul of
the cat! Even her body, her woman’s body, seemed to change at the moment
of vengeance. She slowly strangled me, and as the breath died from me,
and my failing eyes gazed at her, she was no longer woman at all, but
something lithe and white and soft. Fur enveloped my throat. Those hands
were claws. That breath on my face was the breath of an animal. The body
had come back to companion the soul in its vengeance, the body of----
Ah, it was too horrible!
Can vengeance for the dead bring with it resurrection of the dead?
Hark! There is a voice calling to me from upstairs.
“Ronald, are you never coming? I am tired of waiting for you. Ronald!”
“Yes.”
“Come to me!”
“And I must go.”
*****
Just at the glimmer of dawn the first pale shaft of the sun struck
across a bed upon which lay the huddled and distorted corpse of a man.
His head was sunk down in the pillows. His eyes, that could not see,
stared towards the rising light. And from the open window of the chamber
of death a woman in a white wrapper leaned out, watching eagerly with
wide blue eyes the birds as they darted to and fro, rested on the
climbing creepers, or circled above the gorge through which the river
ran. Her set lips smiled. She looked like one calm, easy, and at peace.
Presently an unwary sparrow perched on the trellis beneath the window
just within her reach. Her white hand darted down softly, closed on the
bird. She vanished from the window.
Can the dead hear? Did he catch the sound of her faint, continuous
purring as she crouched with her prey upon the floor?