_The Chamber of Ghosts_.
But now she returned once more into the usual routine of the family. I
fear I was unable to repress all signs of agitation when, next day, she
entered the dining-room, after we were seated, and took her customary
place at the table. Her behaviour was much the same as before; but her
face was very different. There was light in it now, and signs of mental
movement. The smooth forehead would be occasionally wrinkled, and she
would fall into moods which were evidently not of inanity, but of
abstracted thought. She took especial care that our eyes should not
meet. If by chance they did, instead of sinking hers, she kept them
steady, and opened them wider, as if she was fixing them on nothing at
all, or she raised them still higher, as if she was looking at something
above me, before she allowed them to fall. But the change in her
altogether was such that it must have attracted the notice and roused
the speculation of Lady Hilton at least. For me, so well did she act her
part, that I was thrown into perplexity by it. And when day after day
passed, and the longing to speak to her grew, and remained unsatisfied,
new doubts arose. Perhaps she was tired of me. Perhaps her new studies
filled her mind with the clear, gladsome morning light of the pure
intellect, which always throws doubt and distrust and a kind of negation
upon the moonlight of passion, mysterious, and mingled ever with faint
shadows of pain. I walked as in an unresting sleep. Utterly as I loved
her, I was yet alarmed and distressed to find how entirely my being had
grown dependent upon her love; how little of individual, self-existing,
self-upholding life, I seemed to have left; how little I cared for
anything, save as I could associate it with her.
I was sitting late one night in my room. I had all but given up hope of
her coming. I had, perhaps, deprived her of the somnambulic power. I was
brooding over this possibility, when all at once I felt as if I were
looking into the haunted room. It seemed to be lighted by the moon,
shining through the stained windows. The feeling came and went suddenly,
as such visions of places generally do; but this had an indescribable
something about it more clear and real than such resurrections of the
past, whether willed or unwilled, commonly possess; and a great longing
seized me to look into the room once more. I rose with a sense of
yielding to the irresistible, left the room, groped my way through the
hall and up the oak staircase--I had never thought of taking a light
with me--and entered the corridor. No sooner had I entered it, than the
thought sprang up in my mind--“What if she should be there!” My heart
stood still for a moment, like a wounded deer, and then bounded on, with
a pang in every bound. The corridor was night itself, with a dim,
bluish-grey light from the windows, sufficing to mark their own spaces.
I stole through it, and, without erring once, went straight to the
haunted chamber. The door stood half open. I entered, and was bewildered
by the dim, mysterious, dreamy loveliness upon which I gazed. The moon
shone full upon the windows, and a thousand coloured lights and shadows
crossed and intertwined upon the walls and floor, all so soft, and
mingling, and undefined, that the brain was filled as with a flickering
dance of ghostly rainbows. But I had little time to think of these; for
out of the only dark corner in the room came a white figure, flitting
across the chaos of lights, bedewed, besprinkled, bespattered, as she
passed, with their multitudinous colours. I was speechless, motionless,
with something far beyond joy. With a low moan of delight, Lady Alice
sank into my arms. Then, looking up, with a light laugh--“The scales are
turned, dear,” she said. “You are in my power now; I brought you here. I
thought I could, and I tried, for I wanted so much to see you--and you
are come.” She led me across the room to the place where she had been
seated, and we sat side by side.
“I thought you had forgotten me,” I said, “or had grown tired of me.”
“Did you? That was unkind. You have made my heart so still, that, body
and soul, I sleep at night.”
“Then shall I never see you more?”
“We can meet here. This is the best place. No one dares come near the
haunted room at night. We might even venture in the evening. Look, now,
from where we are sitting, across the air, between the windows and the
shadows on the floor. Do you see nothing moving?”
I looked, but could see nothing. She resumed:--
“I almost fancy, sometimes, that what old stories say about this room
may be true. I could fancy now that I see dim transparent forms in
ancient armour, and in strange antique dresses, men and women, moving
about, meeting, speaking, embracing, parting, coming and going. But I
was never afraid of such beings. I am sure these would not, could not
hurt us.”
If the room was not really what it was well fitted to be--a rendezvous
for the ghosts of the past--then either my imagination, becoming more
active as she spoke, began to operate upon my brain, or her fancies were
mysteriously communicated to me; for I was persuaded that I saw such dim
undefined forms as she described, of a substance only denser than the
moonlight, flitting, and floating about, between the windows and the
illuminated floor. Could they have been coloured shadows thrown from the
stained glass upon the fine dust with which the slightest motion in such
an old and neglected room must fill its atmosphere? I did not think of
that then, however.
“I could persuade myself that I, too, see them,” I replied. “I cannot
say that I am afraid of such beings any more than you--if only they will
not speak.”
“Ah!” she replied, with a lengthened, meaning utterance, expressing
sympathy with what I said; “I know what you mean. I, too, am afraid of
hearing things. And that reminds me, I have never yet asked you about
the galloping horse. I too hear sometimes the sound of a loose
horse-shoe. It always betokens some evil to me; but I do not know what
it means. Do you?”
“Do you know,” I rejoined, “that there is a connection between your
family and mine, somewhere far back in their histories?”
“No! Is there? How glad I am! Then perhaps you and I are related, and
that is how we are so much alike, and have power over each other, and
hear the same things.”
“Yes. I suppose that is how.”
“But can you account for that sound which we both hear?”
“I will tell you what my old foster-mother told me,” I replied. And I
began by narrating when and where I had first heard the sound; and then
gave her, as nearly as I could, the legend which nurse had recounted to
me. I did not tell her its association with the events of my birth, for
I feared exciting her imagination too much. She listened to it very
quietly, however, and when I came to a close, only said:
“Of course, we cannot tell how much of it is true, but there may be
something in it. I have never heard anything of the sort, and I, too,
have an old nurse. She is with me still. You shall see her some day.”
She rose to go.
“Will you meet me here again soon?” I said.
“As soon as you wish,” she answered.
“Then to-morrow, at midnight?”
“Yes.”
And we parted at the door of the haunted chamber. I watched the
flickering with which her whiteness just set the darkness in motion, and
nothing more, seeming to see it long after I knew she must have turned
aside and descended the steps leading towards her own room. Then I
turned and groped my way back to mine.
We often met after this in the haunted room. Indeed my spirit haunted it
all day and all night long. And when we met amid the shadows, we were
wrapped in the mantle of love, and from its folds looked out fearless on
the ghostly world about us. Ghosts or none, they never annoyed us. Our
love was a talisman, yea, an elixir of life, which made us equal to the
twice-born,--the disembodied dead. And they were as a wall of fear about
us, to keep far off the unfriendly foot and the prying eye.
In the griefs that followed, I often thought with myself that I would
gladly die for a thousand years, might I then awake for one night in the
haunted chamber, a ghost, among the ghosts who crowded its stained
moonbeams, and see my dead Alice smiling across the glimmering rays, and
beckoning me to the old nook, she, too, having come awake out of the
sleep of death, in the dream of the haunted chamber. “Might we but sit
there,” I said, “through the night, as of old, and love and comfort each
other, till the moon go down, and the pale dawn, which is the night of
the ghosts, begin to arise, then gladly would I go to sleep for another
thousand years, in the hope that when I next became conscious of life,
it might be in another such ghostly night, in the chamber of the
ghosts.”