We never talked about her. It was not my brother’s way. Words hurt him,
to speak or to hear them.
He had become more morose than ever, but less irritable, the source of
his irritation being gone. Though he plunged into work as another man
might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you
could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved
it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love. He
would spend the greater part of the day and the long evenings shut up in
his library, only going out for a short walk an hour before dinner. You
could see that soon all spontaneous impulses would be checked in him and
he would become the creature of habit and routine.
[Illustration]
I tried to rouse him, to shake him up out of his deadly groove; but it
was no use. The first effort—for he did make efforts—exhausted him, and
he sank back into it again.
But he liked to have me with him; and all the time that I could spare
from my housekeeping and gardening I spent in the library. I think he
didn’t like to be left alone there in the place where they had the
quarrel that killed her; and I noticed that the cause of it, the Token,
had disappeared from his table.
And all her things, everything that could remind him of her, had been
put away. It was the dead burying its dead.
Only the chair she had loved remained in its place by the side of the
hearth—_her_ chair, if you could call it hers when she wasn’t allowed to
sit in it. It was always empty, for by tacit consent we both avoided it.
We would sit there for hours at a time without speaking, while he worked
and I read or sewed. I never dared to ask him whether he sometimes had,
as I had, the sense of Cicely’s presence there, in that room which she
had so longed to enter, from which she had been so cruelly shut out. You
couldn’t tell what he felt or didn’t feel. My brother’s face was a
heavy, sombre mask; his back, bent over the writing-table, a wall behind
which he hid himself.
You must know that twice in my life I have more than _felt_ these
presences; I have seen them. This may be because I am on both sides a
Highland Celt, and my mother had the same uncanny gift. I had never
spoken of these appearances to Donald because he would have put it all
down to what he calls my hysterical fancy. And I am sure that if he ever
felt or saw anything himself he would never own it.
I ought to explain that each time the vision was premonitory of a death
(in Cicely’s case I had no such warning), and each time it only lasted
for a second; also that, though I am certain I was wide awake each time,
it is open to anybody to say I was asleep and dreamed it. The queer
thing was that I was neither frightened nor surprised.
And so I was neither surprised nor frightened now, the first evening
that I saw her.
It was in the early autumn twilight, about six o’clock. I was sitting in
my place in front of the fireplace; Donald was in his arm-chair on my
left, smoking a pipe, as usual, before the lamplight drove him out of
doors into the dark.
I had had so strong a sense of Cicely’s being there in the room that I
felt nothing but a sudden sacred pang that was half joy when I looked up
and saw her sitting in her chair on my right.
The phantasm was perfect and vivid, as if it had been flesh and blood. I
should have thought that it was Cicely herself if I hadn’t known that
she was dead. She wasn’t looking at me; her face was turned to Donald
with that longing, wondering look it used to have, searching his face
for the secret that he kept from her.
[Illustration: ... her face was turned to Donald ...]
I looked at Donald. His chin was sunk a little, the pipe drooping from
the corner of his mouth. He was heavy, absorbed in his smoking. It was
clear that he did not see what I saw.
And whereas those other phantasms that I told you about disappeared at
once, _this_ lasted some little time, and always with its eyes fixed on
Donald. It even lasted while Donald stirred, while he stooped forward,
knocking the ashes out of his pipe against the hob, while he sighed,
stretched himself, turned, and left the room. Then, as the door shut
behind him, the whole figure went out suddenly—not flickering, but like
a light you switch off.
I saw it again the next evening and the next, at the same time and in
the same place, and with the same look turned towards Donald. And again
I was sure that he did not see it. But I thought, from his uneasy
sighing and stretching, that he had some sense of something there.
No; I was not frightened. I was glad. You see, I loved Cicely. I
remember thinking, “At last, at last, you poor darling, you’ve got in.
And you can stay as long as you like now. He can’t turn you away.”
The first few times I saw her just as I have said. I would look up and
find the phantasm there, sitting in her chair. And it would disappear
suddenly when Donald left the room. Then I knew I was alone.
But as I grew used to its presence, or perhaps as it grew used to mine
and found out that I was not afraid of it, that indeed I loved to have
it there, it came, I think, to trust me, so that I was made aware of all
its movements. I would see it coming across the room from the doorway,
making straight for its desired place, and settling in a little
curled-up posture of satisfaction, appeased, as if it had expected
opposition that it no longer found. Yet that it was not happy, I could
still see by its look at Donald. _That_ never changed. It was as
uncertain of him now as she had been in her lifetime.
Up till now, the sixth or seventh time I had seen it, I had no clue to
the secret of its appearance; and its movements seemed to me mysterious
and without purpose. Only two things were clear: it was Donald that it
came for—the instant he went it disappeared; and I never once saw it
when I was alone. And always it chose this room and this hour before the
lights came, when he sat doing nothing. It was clear also that he never
saw it.
But that it was there with him sometimes when I was not I knew; for,
more than once, things on Donald’s writing-table, books or papers, would
be moved out of their places, though never beyond reach; and he would
ask me whether I had touched them.
“Either you lie,” he would say, “or I’m mistaken. I could have sworn I
put those notes on the left-hand side; and they aren’t there now.”
And once—that was wonderful—I saw, yes, I _saw_ her come and push the
lost thing under his hand. And all he said was, “Well, I’m—I could have
sworn—”
For whether it had gained a sense of security, or whether its purpose
was now finally fixed, it began to move regularly about the room, and
its movements had evidently a reason and an aim.
It was looking for something.
One evening we were all there in our places, Donald silent in his chair
and I in mine, and it seated in its attitude of wonder and of waiting,
when suddenly I saw Donald looking at me.
“Helen,” he said, “what are you staring for like that?”
I started. I had forgotten that the direction of my eyes would be bound,
sooner or later, to betray me.