I made my way back--to be satisfied--to be satisfied that you were still
mine." He bent a piercing look upon her.
"I observe by the calendar on your writing-table that some years have
elapsed since my----um----since I expired," he added, with a faint
blush. It appears that the matter of their dissolution is, in
conversation, rather kept in the background by well-bred ghosts.
"Heigho! How time does fly! You'll be joining me soon, my dear."
She drew herself splendidly up, and he was aware of her beauty in the
full of its tenacious excellence--of the delicate insolence of Life
looking upon Death--of the fact _that she had forgotten him_.
He rose, and confronted this, his trembling hands thrust into his
pockets, then turned away to hide the dismay of his countenance. He was,
however, a spook of considerable spirit, and in a jiffy he met the
occasion. To her blank, indignant gaze he drew a card from his case,
and, taking a pencil from the secretary, wrote, beneath the name:
Quiet to the breast
Wheresoe'er it be,
That gave an hour's rest
To the heart of me.
Quiet to the breast
Till it lieth dead,
And the heart be clay
Where I visited.
Quiet to the breast,
Though forgetting quite
The guest it sheltered once;
To the heart, good night!
Handing her the card he bowed, and, through force of habit, turned to
the door, forgetting that his ghostly pressure would not turn the knob.
As the door did not open, with a sigh of recollection for his spiritual
condition, he prepared to disappear, casting one last look at the
faithless Lady. She was still looking at the card in her hand, and the
tears ran down her face.
"She has remembered," he reflected; "how courteous!" For a moment it
seemed he could contain his disappointment, discreetly removing himself
now at what he felt was the vanishing-point, with the customary
reticence of the dead, but feeling overcame him. In an instant he had
her in his arms, and was pouring out his love, his reproaches, the story
of his longing, his doubts, his discontent, and his desperate journey
back to earth for a sight of her. "And, ah!" cried he, "picture my agony
at finding that you had forgotten. And yet I surmised it in the gloom.
I divined it by my restlessness and my despair. Perhaps some lines that
occurred to me will suggest the thing to you--you recall my old knack
for versification?
"Where the grasses weep
O'er his darkling bed,
And the glow-worms creep,
Lies the weary head
Of one laid deep, who cannot sleep:
The unremembered dead."
He took a chair beside her, and spoke of their old love for each other,
of his fealty through all transmutations; incidentally of her beauty, of
her cruelty, of the light of her face which had illumined his darksome
way to her--and of a lot of other things--and the Lady bowed her head,
and wept.
The hours of the night passed thus: the moon waned, and a pallor began
to tinge the dusky cheek of the east, but the eloquence of the visitor
still flowed on, and the Lady had his misty hands clasped to her
reawakened bosom. At last a suspicion of rosiness touched the curtain.
He abruptly rose.
"I cannot hold out against the morning," he said; "it is time all good
ghosts were in bed."
But she threw herself on her knees before him, clasping his ethereal
waist with a despairing embrace.
"Oh, do not leave me," she cried, "or my love will kill me!"
He bent eagerly above her. "Say it again--convince me!"
"I love you," she cried, again and again and again, with such an anguish
of sincerity as would convince the most skeptical spook that ever
revisited the glimpses of the moon.
"You will forget again," he said.
"I shall never forget!" she cried. "My life will henceforth be one
continual remembrance of you, one long act of devotion to your memory,
one oblation, one unceasing penitence, one agony of waiting!"
He lifted her face, and saw that it was true.
"Well," said he, gracefully wrapping his cloak about him, "well, now I
shall have a little peace."
He kissed her, with a certain jaunty grace, upon her hair, and prepared
to dissolve, while he lightly tapped a tattoo upon his leg with the
dove-colored gloves he carried.
"Good-by, my dear!" he said; "henceforth I shall sleep o' nights; my
heart is quite at rest."
"But mine is breaking," she wailed, madly trying once more to clasp his
vanishing form.
He threw her a kiss from his misty finger-tips, and all that remained
with her, besides her broken heart, was a faint disturbance of the air.
THE END
Transcriber's Notes:
Page 25--Possible typo, but left it as the original. "...and contented
himself, as a rule, with creeping about the passages in =list=
slippers,..."
Page 25--arquebuse--printer typo corrected to arquebus.
Page 231--setting--printer typo corrected to sitting.
Page 255--missing word "have" inserted to: "But now I'll none of you,
for you've played with me."
Page 304--Potential typo. "...walkin' round an' round the graveyard
=lie= a six days' race fer the belt at Madison Square."
Page 325--inpatient--typo corrected to impatient. Although inpatient is
a valid word, it is incorrectly used in this instance.
Page 345--is--printer typo corrected to in.
Page 408--Possible typo, but left it as in the original. "...then the
=affection= spread to her knees and gradually extended upward."
Several instances of variant spelling of reci-pe and recipe. Left as in
the original.
From
A Southern Porch
By
Dorothy Scarborough
_A Book of Whimsy_
The author does not preach the lost art of loafing. No! Nothing so
direct as preaching. She merely loafs,--consistently, restfully,
delightfully, but with an almost fatal hypnotic persuasiveness. She is a
sort of stationary Pied Piper, luring the unwary reader to her
sun-flecked porch, to watch with her the queer procession of created
things go by,--from lovers and ghosts to lizards and toads.
Under the spell, convinced that loafing is better than doing, the reader
stays and chuckles over the quiet humor and quaint fancies. He gets away
finally,--all delightful experiences must end in this work-a-day
world,--still chuckling, but with a renewed sense of life and life's
values.
* * * * *
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London
The
Kiltartan
Poetry Book
_Prose Translations from the Irish_
By
Lady Gregory
Author of "Irish Folk-History Plays," "Seven Short
Plays," "Our Irish Theatre," etc.
Certainly no single individual has done more than Lady Gregory to revive
the Irish Literature, and to bring again to light the brave old legends,
the old heroic poems. From her childhood, the author has studied this
ancient language, and has collected most of her material from close
association with the peasants who have inherited these poems and tales.
* * * * *
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York London
End of Project Gutenberg's Humorous Ghost Stories, by Dorothy Scarborough