in ghosts if I can possibly help it. Could you be perfectly sure that
you did not see Dunster himself at first? You know he was counted
among the missing only, there is no positive proof that he died,
though I admit there was only a chance he was not killed outright. We
never saw him buried," said Jack, with unsympathetic persistence. "I'm
sorry for you; but you mustn't give way to this thing. You have
thought about it until you can't forget it at all. Such cases are not
uncommon: it's simply a hallucination. I'll give you proofs enough
tomorrow. Have some more claret, won't you?" Jack spoke eagerly, with
the kindest tone; and his guest could not help responding by a faint,
dreary little smile. "Do you like music as much as ever? Suppose we go
over into the parlor, and my sister will play for us; won't you,
Helen?" which was asking a great deal of me just then.
And we apparently forgot all about Mr. Dunster for the rest of the
evening. And, when Jack asked Mr. Whiston if he remembered a song he
used to sing in college, to my delight he went at once to the piano,
and sang it with a very pleasant tenor voice; and when he ended, and
my brother applauded, he struck some new chords, and began to sing a
little Florentine street-song, which was always a great favorite of
mine. It is a sweet, piteous little song; and it bewitched me then as
much as it did the very first time I had heard some boys sing it, as
they went under our windows at night, when I was first in Florence
years ago.
He said no more about the ghost; but later that night, when I happened
to wake, I wondered if the poor man was keeping his anxious watch, and
listening in a strange house to hear the hours struck one by one. He
went away soon after breakfast; and, though he promised to come in
again to say good-by, that was the last we saw of him, and we did not
see his name on the steamer list either, so we were much puzzled, and
we talked about him a great deal, and told George Sheffield the story,
which he wished he had heard himself.
"Of course it is a hallucination," said Jack: "they are by no means
uncommon. I can read you accounts of any number of such cases. There
is a good deal about them in Griesinger's book,--the chapter called
'Elementary Disorders in Mental Disease,' Helen, if you care to look
at it, or any of those books on insanity. Didn't you have Dr. Elam's
'A Physician's Problems' a while ago? He has an essay there which is
very good."
"I was reading his essay on 'Moral and Criminal Epidemics,'" said I,
"that was all. It's a cheerful thing too!"
"Isn't there such a thing as these visions coming before slight
attacks of epilepsy?" said George. And my brother said yes; but
Mr. Whiston had nothing of that kind, he had taken pains to find out.
There was no hope of a cure, he feared; he was not wise in such cases.
But the trouble had gone too far, there were bad symptoms, and he
confesses he has hurt himself with opium during the last year or two.
"He will not live long at any rate," said Jack; "and I think the
sooner the end comes the better. He has a predisposition to mental
disease, and he was always a frail, curious make-up. But I don't
know--'There are more things in heaven and earth,' George Sheffield;
and I wish you had heard him tell his story."
And we talked over some strange, unaccountable things; and each told
stories which could neither be doubted nor explained. I had been
readier to believe in such things since I was warned myself before the
greatest sorrow I had ever known. I was by the sea; and one of my
friends and I were walking slowly toward home one dark and windy
evening, when suddenly we both heard a terrible low cry of fear and
horror close beside us. It was hardly a cry, it was no noise that
either of us had ever heard before; and we stopped for an instant,
because we were too frightened to move. And the noise came again. We
were in an open place, and there was nothing to be seen; but we both
felt there was something there, and that the cry had some awful
meaning. And it was not many days before I had reason to remember that
cry; for the trouble came. I do not know what it might have been that
I heard; but I knew it had the saddest meaning.
Two or three weeks after we saw Mr. Whiston, my brother came in one
afternoon; and I saw he could hardly wait for some friends to go away,
who were paying me a call.
"I have found poor Whiston," said he, when I joined him in the library
at last: "he is at the Carney Hospital. It seems he was ill for a few
days at his hotel, and the servant, who was very kind to him, advised
him to go there. He insists that he is very comfortable, and that he
has money enough. I wished to bring him over here at first; but I saw
that it was no use, and I asked him why he didn't let me know, but he
is completely wrecked; I doubt if he lives more than a day or two, he
was wandering half the time I was there. He said he should be very
glad if you would come to see him, and I told him I was sure you
would."
I went to see him with my brother the next day, and I saw that Jack
was shocked at the change that had come already. There was that
peculiar, worried, anxious look in his face, that one only sees in
people who are very near death, and his fingers were picking at the
blanket. I do not believe he knew me; but he smiled,--he had a most
beautiful smile,--and I gave him some grapes, and wished I could make
him a little more comfortable. The sister came just afterward on her
round, and gave him his medicine, and raised him with a strong arm,
while she turned his pillow in a business-like way, and I thought what
a lonely place it was to be ill and die in; and I was more glad than
ever that Jack and I had a home, and were always to be together. I
left Jack to stay the night, and, as I came away, I had more and more
compassion for the man who was dying; yet I was glad to think so sad a
life was almost over with. His days had been all winter days in this
world, it seemed to me, and I hoped some wonderful, blessed spring was
waiting for him in the next.
When I went over in the morning, it was cheerless enough. The rain was
falling fast and the snow melting in the streets. My brother was
watching for me, and came out at once. "Poor Whiston is dead," said
he, as he shut the carriage-door. "He wished me to thank you for your
kindness to him," and I saw the tears in Jack's eyes. "There's another
star for the catalogue,--how small the class is growing! Poor fellow!
I didn't know he had gone, I thought he was asleep, for we were
talking together only a few minutes before. He was not at all
bewildered, as you saw him yesterday."
I heard this case talked over more than once by my brother, and one or
two professional friends of his who came often to the house. Nobody
was ready to believe that Mr. Whiston had seen an apparition; but the
truth always remained that the man's nerves were so shocked by what he
believed to be the appearance of a ghost, that he had become the prey
of a monomania, and had by little and little grown incapable of
distinguishing between real things and the creations and projections
of his own unsteady brain. _Il s'ecoutait vivre_, as the French phrase
has it; and, having nothing to live for but this, it was well that
life was over for him. I suppose the acute disease of which he died
met with little resistance, for he looked so ill when we first saw
him; but it would have been sadder if he had lingered a few more
years, so miserable as he was,--hardly fit either for the inside of an
asylum or the outside,--to die at last without money or friends to
give him the last of this world's comforts, perhaps without mind
enough left to miss them.
Strangely enough, some months after this, when it was spring, my
brother found Dunster at the Marine Hospital in Chelsea, where he had
gone with another surgeon to see a curious operation in which he felt
a great interest. He was walking through the accident ward when
somebody called him from one of the cots,--a wretched-looking
vagabond, whom at first he did not recognize. But it was Dunster, and
he tried to put on something of his old manner, which made him seem
like a wretched copy of his former self.
Jack made him give an account of himself. It seemed that he had been
thrown among the dead in that battle when he was supposed to have been
killed; but he had recovered his senses, and crawled from the place
where he had fallen farther into the enemy's lines, and he had been
sent to the rear. He had nearly died from the effects of his wounds,
and it was evident that he had been very intemperate. He had drifted
to New Orleans, and lead a most wretched life there; and at times he
had gone to sea. My brother asked him if he was ever in Rio; and at
first he denied it, and afterward confessed that he was there once,
and had seen Whiston in a boat, and had dropped over the side in the
dark to evade him, but when Jack questioned him about being at the
window, he denied it utterly. He said his ship sailed that day. It
might have been that he meant to commit a robbery, or that he really
told the truth, and that it was the first of poor Whiston's illusions.
Of course it was possible that Dunster might have swung himself down
from the flat roof by a rope, and they might have really met at other
times, it was not unlikely. But one can hardly conceive of
Mr. Whiston's perfect certainty, in such a case, that the glimpse he
had of his cousin's face was a supernatural vision.
My brother said, "I did not tell him what wreck and ruin he had made
unconsciously of Whiston's life,--at least the part he had played in
it; it would do no good, and indeed he is hardly sane, I think. It
would be curious if they had both inherited from their common ancestry
the mental weakness which shows itself so differently in the two
lives,--Whiston's, so cowardly and shrinking and weak; and Dunster's,
so horribly low and brutal. There is not much the matter with him, he
had a fall on board ship. The nurse told me he was very troublesome,
and had fairly insulted the chaplain, who had said a kind word to him.
It is a pity that shot had not killed him; and I suppose most of the
class who ever think of him will say he was a hero, and died on the
field of honor."
And my brother and I talked gravely about the two men. God help us!
what sin and crime may be charged to any of us who take the wrong way
in life! The possibilities of wickedness and goodness in us are both
unlimited. I said, how many lives must be like these which seemed such
wretched failures and imperfections! One cannot help having a great
pity for such men, in whom common courage, and the power of
resistance, and the ordinary amount of will seem to have been wanting.
Warped and incapable, or brutal and shameful, one cannot pity them
enough. It is like the gnarled and worthless fruit that grows among
the fair and well-rounded,--the useless growth that is despised and
thrown away scornfully.
But God must always know what blighted and hindered any life or growth
of His; and let us believe that He sometimes saves and pities what we
have scorned and blamed.
A LATE SUPPER.
The story begins one afternoon in June just after dinner. Miss
Catherine Spring was the heroine; and she lived alone in her house,
which stood on the long village street in Brookton,--up in the country
city people would say,--a town certainly not famous, but pleasant
enough because it was on the outer edge of the mountain region, near
some great hills. One never hears much about Brookton when one is away
from it, but, for all that, life is as important and exciting there as
it is anywhere; and it is like every other town, a miniature world,
with its great people and small people, bad people and good people,
its jealousy and rivalry, kindness and patient heroism.
Miss Spring had finished her dinner that day, and had washed the few
dishes, and put them away. She never could get used to there being so
few, because she had been one of a large family. She had put on the
gray alpaca dress which she wore afternoons at home, and had taken her
sewing, and sat down at one of the front windows in the sitting-room,
which was shaded by a green old lilac-bush. But she did not sew as if
she were much interested in the work, or were in any hurry; and
presently she laid it down altogether, and tapped on the window-sill
with her thimble, looking as if she were lost in not very pleasant
thought. She was a very good woman, and a very pleasant woman; a good
neighbor all the people would tell you; and they would add also, very
comfortably left. But of late she had been somewhat troubled; to tell
the truth, her money affairs had gone wrong, and just now she did not
exactly know what to do. She felt more solitary than she had for a
long time before. Her father, the last of the family except herself,
had been dead for many years; and she had been living alone, growing
more and more contented in the comfortable, prim, white house, after
the first sharp grief of her loneliness had worn away into a more
resigned and familiar sorrow. It is, after all, a great satisfaction
to do as one pleases.
Now, as I have said, she had lost part of her already small income,
and she did not know what to do. The first loss could be borne; but
the second seemed to put housekeeping out of the question, and this
was a dreadful thing to think of. She knew no other way of living,
beside having her own house and her own fashion of doing things. If it
had been possible, she would have liked to take some boarders; but
summer boarders had not yet found out Brookton. Mr. Elden, the kind
old lawyer who was her chief adviser, had told her to put an
advertisement in one of the Boston papers, and she had done so; but it
never had been answered, which was not only a disappointment but a
mortification as well. Her money was not actually lost: it was the
failure of a certain railway to pay its dividend, that was making her
so much trouble.
Miss Spring tapped her thimble still faster on the window-sill, and
thought busily. "I'm going to think it out, and settle it this
afternoon," said she to herself. "I must settle it somehow, I will not
live on here any longer as if I could afford it." There was a niece of
hers who lived in Lowell, who was married and not at all strong. There
were three children, with nobody in particular to look after them.
Miss Catherine was sure this niece would like nothing better than to
have her come to stay with her. She thought with satisfaction how well
she could manage there, and how well her housekeeping capabilities
would come into play. It had grieved her in her last visit to see the
house half cared for, and she remembered the wistful way Mary had
said, "How I wish I could have you here all the time, Aunt Catherine!"
and at once Aunt Catherine went on to build a little castle in the
air, until she had a chilly consciousness that her own house was to be
shut up. She compared the attractions of Lowell and Brookton most
disdainfully: the dread came over her that most elderly people feel at
leaving their familiar homes and the surroundings to which they have
grown used. But she bravely faced all this, and resolved to write Mary
that evening, so the letter could go by the morning's mail. If Mary
liked the plan, which Miss Catherine never for an instant doubted, she
would stay through the early fall at any rate, and then see what was
best to be done.
She took up her sewing again, and looked critically at it through her
spectacles, and then went on with her stitching, feeling
lighter-hearted now that the question was decided. The tall clock
struck three slowly; and she said to herself how fast the last hour
had gone. There was a little breeze outside which came rustling
through the lilac-leaves. The wide street was left to itself, nobody
had driven by since she had sat at the window. She heard some children
laughing and calling to each other where they were at play in a yard
not far away, and smiled in sympathy; for her heart had never grown
old. The smell of the roses by the gate came blowing in sweet and
fresh, and she could see the great red peonies in generous bloom on
the borders each side the front walk. And, when she looked round the
room, it seemed very pleasant to her, the clock ticked steadily; and
the old-fashioned chairs, and the narrow high mirror with the gilt
eagle at the top, the stiff faded portraits of her father and mother
in their young days, the wide old brass-nailed sofa with its dim
worsted-worked cushion at either end,--how comfortable it all was! and
a great thrill of fondness for the room and the house came over our
friend. "I didn't know I cared so much about the old place," said she.
"'There's no place like home.'--I believe I never knew that meant so
much before;" and she laid down her sewing again, and fell into a
reverie.
In a little while she heard the click of the gate-latch; and, with the
start and curiosity a village woman instinctively feels at the
knowledge of somebody's coming in at the front-door, she hurried to
the other front-window to take a look at her visitor through the
blinds. It was only a child, and Miss Catherine did not wait for her
to rap with the high and heavy knocker, but was standing in the open
doorway when the little girl reached the steps.
"Come in, dear!" said Miss Catherine kindly, "did you come of an
errand?"
"I wanted to ask you something," said the child, following her into
the sitting-room, and taking the chair next the door with a shy smile
that had something appealing about it. "I came to ask you if you want
a girl this summer."
"Why, no, I never keep help," said Miss Spring. "There is a woman who
comes Mondays and Tuesdays, and other days when I need her. Who is it
that wants to come?"
"It's only me," said the child. "I'm small of my age; but I'm past
ten, and I can work real smart about house." A great cloud of
disappointment came over her face.
"Whose child are you?"
"I'm Katy Dunning, and I live with my aunt down by Sandy-river Bridge.
Her girl is big enough to help round now, and she said I must find a
place. She would keep me if she could," said the little girl in a
grown-up, old-fashioned way; "but times are going to be dreadful hard,
they say, and it takes a good deal to keep so many."
"What made you come here?" asked Miss Catherine, whose heart went out
toward this hard-worked, womanly little thing. It seemed so pitiful
that so young a child, who ought to be still at play, should already
know about hard times, and have begun to fight the battle of life. A
year ago she had thought of taking just such a girl to save steps, and
for the sake of having somebody in the house; but it never could be
more out of the question than now. "What made you come to me?"
"Mr. Rand, at the post-office, told aunt that perhaps you might want
me: he couldn't think of anybody else."
She was such a neat-looking, well-mended child, and looked Miss
Catherine in the face so honestly! She might cry a little after she
was outside the gate, but not now.
"I'm really sorry," said Miss Spring; "but you see, I'm thinking about
shutting my house up this summer." She would not allow to herself that
it was for any longer. "But you keep up a good heart. I know a good
many folks, and perhaps I can hear of a place for you. I suppose you
could mind a baby, couldn't you? No: you sit still a minute!" as the
child thanked her, and rose to go away; and she went out to her
dining-room closet to a deep jar, and took out two of her best
pound-cakes, which she made so seldom now, and saved with great care.
She put these on a pretty pink-and-white china plate, and filled a mug
with milk. "Here," said she, as she came back, "I want you to eat
these cakes. You have walked a long ways, and it'll do you good. Sit
right up to the table, and I'll spread a newspaper over the cloth."
Katy looked at her with surprise and gratitude. "I'm very much
obliged," said she; and her first bite of the cake seemed the most
delicious thing she had ever tasted.
Yes, I suppose bread and butter would have been quite as good for her,
and much less extravagant on Miss Catherine's part; but of all the
people who had praised her pound-cakes, nobody had so delighted in
their goodness as this hungry little girl, who had hardly ever eaten
any thing but bread all her days, and not very good bread at that.
"Don't hurry," said Miss Spring kindly, "you're a good girl, and I
wish I could take you,--I declare I do." And, with a little sigh, she
sat down by the window again, and took up the much-neglected sewing,
looking up now and then at her happy guest. When she saw the mug was
empty, and that Katy looked at it wistfully as she put it down, she
took it without a word, and went to the shelf in the cellar-way where
the cream-pitcher stood, and poured out every drop that was in it,
afterward filling the mug to the brim with milk, for her little
pitcher did not hold much. "I'll get along one night without cream in
my tea," said she to herself. "That was only skim-milk she had first,
and she looks hungry."
"It's real pleasant here," said Katy, "you're so good! Aunt said I
could tell you, if you wanted to take me, that I don't tear my
clothes, and I'm careful about the dishes. She thought I wouldn't be a
bother. Would you tell the other people? I should be real glad to get
a place."
"I'll tell 'em you're a good girl," said Miss Catherine; "and I'll get
you a good home if I can." For she thought of her niece in Lowell, and
how much trouble there was when she was there about getting a careful
young girl to take care of the smallest child. Then it occurred to her
that Katy was very small herself, and did not look very strong, and
Mary might not hear to it; so, after Katy had gone, she began to be
sorrowful again, and to wish she had promised less, and need not
disappoint the little thing.
Another hour had gone, and it was four o'clock now, and in a few
minutes she heard a carriage stop at the gate. She heard several
voices, and was discouraged for a minute. Three people were coming in;
and she was so glad when she saw it was a nephew and his wife from a
town a dozen miles away, and a friend with them whom she had often
seen at their house. They came in with good-natured chatter and much
laughing. They had started out for a drive early after dinner, and had
found the weather so pleasant that they had kept on to Brookton.
"I don't know what the folks will think," said they: "we meant to be
back right away."--"Well," said the niece, "I'm so glad we found you
at home; and how well you do look, Aunt Catherine! I declare, you're
smarter than any of us."
"I guess she is," said her nephew, who was a great favorite. "I tell
you she's the salt of the earth." And he gave her a most affectionate
and resounding great kiss, and then they were all merrier than ever.
"What are you sitting down for, without laying off your bonnets?"
asked the hostess. "You must stay and get supper before you ride home.
I'll have it early, and there's a moon. You take the horse right round
into the yard, Joseph: there's some more of that old hay in the barn;
you know where to find it." And, after some persuasion, the visitors
yielded, and settled themselves quietly for the rest of the afternoon.
They had said, as they came over, that they were sure Aunt Catherine
would ask them to stay until evening, and she always had such good
suppers. Miss Stanby had never been at the house before, and only once
as far as Brookton; and she seemed very pleased. She took care of her
step-mother, who was very old, and a great deal crosser than there was
any need of being. This little excursion would do her a world of good;
and luckily her married sister happened to be at home for a day or
two's visit, so she did not feel anxious about being away. She was a
sharp-faced, harassed-looking little woman, who might have been pretty
if she had been richer and less worried and disappointed. She was a
pleasant and patient soul, and this drive and visit were more to her
than a journey to Boston would be to her companions. They were
well-to-do village people, comfortable and happy and unenvious as it
is possible for village people, or any other people, to be.