All night I sat by Mildred’s bedside, and in the morning, without having
slept, I went downstairs to meet Harrison and the doctor.
“You must get her away, Beckwith,” began Harrison with a curious,
suppressed excitement. “Dr. Lakeby says she will be all right again as
soon as she gets back to Washington.”
“But I brought her away from Washington because Drayton said it was not
good for her.”
“I know, I know.” His tone was sharp, “But it’s different now. Dr.
Lakeby wants you to take her back as soon as you can.”
The old doctor was silent while Harrison spoke, and it was only after I
had agreed to take Mildred away to-morrow that he murmured something
about “bromide and chloral,” and vanished up the staircase. He impressed
me then as a very old man—old not so much in years as in experience, as
if, living there in that flat and remote country, he had exhausted all
human desires. A leg was missing, I saw, and Harrison explained that the
doctor had been dangerously wounded in the battle of Seven Pines, and
had been obliged after that to leave the army and take up again the
practice of medicine.
“You had better get some rest,” Harrison said, as he parted from me. “It
is all right about Mildred, and nothing else matters. The doctor will
see you in the afternoon, when you have had some sleep, and have a talk
with you. He can explain things better than I can.”
Some hours later, after a profound slumber, which lasted well into the
afternoon, I waited for the doctor by the tea-table, which had been laid
out on the upper terrace. It was a perfect afternoon—a serene and
cloudless afternoon in early summer. All the brightness of the day
gathered on the white porch and the red walls, while the clustering
shadows slipped slowly over the box garden to the lawn and the river.
I was sitting there, with a book I had not even attempted to read, when
the doctor joined me; and while I rose to shake hands with him I
received again the impression of weariness, of pathos and
disappointment, which his face had given me in the morning. He was like
sun-dried fruit, I thought, fruit that has ripened and dried under the
open sky, not withered in tissue paper.
Declining my offer of tea, he sat down in one of the wicker chairs,
selecting, I noticed, the least comfortable among them, and filled his
pipe from a worn leather pouch.
“She will sleep all night,” he said; “I am giving her bromide every
three hours, and to-morrow you will be able to take her away. In a week
she will be herself again. These nervous natures yield quickest to the
influence, but they recover quickest also. In a little while this
illness, as you choose to call it, will have left no mark upon her. She
may even have forgotten it. I have known this to happen.”
“You have known this to happen?” I edged my chair nearer.
“They all succumb to it—the neurotic temperament soonest, the phlegmatic
one later—but they all succumb to it in the end. The spirit of the place
is too strong for them. They surrender to the thought of the house—to
the psychic force of its memories—”
“There are memories, then? Things have happened here?”
“All old houses have memories, I suppose. Did you ever stop to wonder
about the thoughts that must have gathered within walls like these?—to
wonder about the impressions that must have lodged in the bricks, in the
crevices, in the timber and the masonry? Have you ever stopped to think
that these multiplied impressions might create a current of thought—a
mental atmosphere—an inscrutable power of suggestion?”
“Even when one is ignorant? When one does not know the story?”
“She may have heard scraps of it from the servants—who knows? One can
never tell how traditions are kept alive. Many things have been
whispered about Dare’s Gift; some of these whispers may have reached
her. Even without her knowledge she may have absorbed the suggestion;
and some day, with that suggestion in her mind, she may have gazed too
long at the sunshine on these marble urns before she turned back into
the haunted rooms where she lived. After all, we know so little, so
pitifully little about these things. We have only touched, we
physicians, the outer edges of psychology. The rest lies in darkness—”