“Happily for us and them, they don’t know,” he said.
And he began playing again. He was aware that Effie had risen and was
now seated at the writing-table. As he played he had his back to the
writing-table and the door.
The book on the piano ledge before him was Mendelssohn’s _Lieder ohne
Worte_ open as Effie had left it at Number Nine. He remembered that was
the one his mother had loved so much. His fingers fell of their own
accord into the prelude, into the melody, pressing out its thick, sweet,
deliberate sadness. It wounded him, each note a separate stab, yet he
went on, half-voluptuously enjoying the self-inflicted pain, trying to
work it up and up into a supreme poignancy of sorrow, of regret.
As he stopped on the closing chord he heard somewhere behind him a
thick, sobbing sigh.
“Effie—”
He looked round. But Effie was not there. He could hear her footsteps in
the room overhead. She had gone, then, before he had stopped playing,
shutting the door without a sound. It must have been his imagination.
He played a few bars, then paused, listening. The sighing had begun
again; it was close behind him.
He swung round sharply. There was nobody there. But the door, which had
been shut a minute ago, stood wide open. A cold wind blew in, cutting
through the hot, stagnant air. He got up and shut the door. The cold
wind wrapped him in a belt, a swirl; he stood still in it for a moment,
stiff with fear. When he crossed the room to the piano it was as if he
moved breast high in deep, cold water.
Somewhere in the secret place of his mind a word struggled to form
itself, to be born.
“Mother.”
It came to him with a sense of appalling, supernatural horror. Horror
that was there with him in the room like a presence.
“Mother.”
The word had lost its meaning. It stood for nothing but that horror.
He tried to play again, but his fingers, slippery with sweat, dropped
from the keyboard.
Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s
chair.
Then he saw her.
She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the
clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.
[Illustration: The apparition maintained itself with difficulty.]
The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had
grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial
framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two
shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an
anguish.
Hollyer stood up and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it
gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.
Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and
back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness,
keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.
And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there
a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.
Hollyer, rigid, pouring out sweat, still stared at the place where it
had stood. His heart-beats came together in a running tremor: it was as
if all the blood in his body was gathered into his distended heart,
dragging it down to meet his heaving belly.
Then he turned and went headlong towards the door, stumbling and
lurching. He threw out his hands to clutch at a support and found
himself in Effie’s arms.
“Wilfrid—darling—what is it?”
“Nothing. I’m giddy. I—I think I’m going to be sick.”
He broke from her and dragged himself upstairs and shut himself into his
study. That night his old single bed was brought back and made up there.
He was afraid to sleep in the room that had been his mother’s.
V
He had run through all the physical sensations of his terror. What he
felt now was the sharp, abominable torture of the mind.