Night and fog were now one, and the darkness as thick as a blanket. I
felt vainly about for a bell. At last my hand came in contact with a
knocker and I lifted it. The clatter with which it fell sent a prolonged
echo through the silence; but for a minute or two nothing else happened.
“There’s no one there, I tell you!” the boy called impatiently from the
gate.
But there was. I had heard no steps inside, but presently a bolt shot
back, and an old woman in a peasant’s cap pushed her head out. She had
set her candle down on a table behind her, so that her face, aureoled
with lacy wings, was in obscurity; but I knew she was old by the stoop
of her shoulders and her fumbling movements. The candle-light, which
made her invisible, fell full on my face, and she looked at me.
“This is Miss Mary Pask’s house?”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice—a very old voice—was pleasant enough, unsurprised
and even friendly.
“I’ll tell her,” she added, shuffling off.
“Do you think she’ll see me?” I threw after her.
“Oh, why not? The idea!” she almost chuckled. As she retreated I saw
that she was wrapped in a shawl and had a cotton umbrella under her arm.
Obviously she was going out—perhaps going home for the night. I wondered
if Mary Pask lived all alone in her hermitage.
The old woman disappeared with the candle and I was left in total
darkness. After an interval I heard a door shut at the back of the house
and then a slow clumping of aged _sabots_ along the flags outside. The
old woman had evidently picked up her _sabots_ in the kitchen and left
the house. I wondered if she had told Miss Pask of my presence before
going, or whether she had just left me there, the butt of some grim
practical joke of her own. Certainly there was no sound within doors.
The footsteps died out, I heard a gate click—then complete silence
closed in again like the fog.
“I wonder—” I began within myself; and at that moment a smothered memory
struggled abruptly to the surface of my languid mind.
“But she’s _dead_—Mary Pask is _dead_!” I almost screamed it aloud in my
amazement.
It was incredible, the tricks my memory had played on me since my fever!
I had known for nearly a year that Mary Pask was dead—had died suddenly
the previous autumn—and though I had been thinking of her almost
continuously for the last two or three days it was only now that the
forgotten fact of her death suddenly burst up again to consciousness.
Dead! But hadn’t I found Grace Bridgeworth in tears and crape the very
day I had gone to bid her good-bye before sailing for Egypt? Hadn’t she
laid the cable before my eyes, her own streaming with tears while I
read: “Sister died suddenly this morning requested burial in garden of
house particulars by letter”—with the signature of the American Consul
at Brest, a friend of Bridgeworth’s I seemed to recall? I could see the
very words of the message printed on the darkness before me.
As I stood there I was a good deal more disturbed by the discovery of
the gap in my memory than by the fact of being alone in a pitch-dark
house, either empty or else inhabited by strangers. Once before of late
I had noted this queer temporary blotting-out of some well-known fact;
and here was a second instance of it. Decidedly, I wasn’t as well over
my illness as the doctors had told me.... Well, I would get back to
Morgat and lie up there for a day or two, doing nothing, just eating and
sleeping....
In my self-absorption I had lost my bearings, and no longer remembered
where the door was. I felt in every pocket in turn for a match—but since
the doctors had made me give up smoking, why should I have found one?
The failure to find a match increased my sense of irritated
helplessness, and I was groping clumsily about the hall among the angles
of unseen furniture when a light slanted along the rough-cast wall of
the stairs. I followed its direction, and on the landing above me I saw
a figure in white shading a candle with one hand and looking down. A
chill ran along my spine, for the figure bore a strange resemblance to
that of Mary Pask as I used to know her.
“Oh, it’s _you_!” she exclaimed in the cracked twittering voice which
was at one moment like an old woman’s quaver, at another like a boy’s
falsetto. She came shuffling down in her baggy white garments, with her
usual clumsy swaying movements; but I noticed that her steps on the
wooden stairs were soundless. Well—they would be, naturally!
I stood without a word, gazing up at the strange vision above me, and
saying to myself: “There’s nothing there, nothing whatever. It’s your
digestion, or your eyes, or some damned thing wrong with you somewhere—”
But there was the candle, at any rate; and as it drew nearer, and lit up
the place about me, I turned and caught hold of the doorlatch. For,
remember, I had seen the cable, and Grace in crape....
“Why, what’s the matter? I assure you, you don’t disturb me!” the white
figure twittered; adding, with a faint laugh: “I don’t have so many
visitors nowadays—”
She had reached the hall, and stood before me, lifting her candle
shakily and peering up into my face. “You haven’t changed—not as much as
I should have thought. But _I_ have, haven’t I?” she appealed to me with
another laugh; and abruptly she laid her hand on my arm. I looked down
at the hand, and thought to myself: “_That_ can’t deceive me.”
I have always been a noticer of hands. The key to character that other
people seek in the eyes, the mouth, the modelling of the skull, I find
in the curve of the nails, the cut of the finger-tips, the way the palm,
rosy or sallow, smooth or seamed, swells up from its base. I remembered
Mary Pask’s hand vividly because it was so like a caricature of herself;
round, puffy, pink, yet prematurely old and useless. And there,
unmistakably, it lay on my sleeve: but changed and shrivelled—somehow
like one of those pale freckled toadstools that the least touch resolves
to dust.... Well—to dust? Of course....
I looked at the soft wrinkled fingers, with their foolish little oval
finger-tips that used to be so innocently and naturally pink, and now
were blue under the yellowing nails—and my flesh rose in ridges of fear.
“Come in, come in,” she fluted, cocking her white untidy head on one
side and rolling her bulging blue eyes at me. The horrible thing was
that she still practised the same arts, all the childish wiles of a
clumsy capering coquetry. I felt her pull on my sleeve and it drew me in
her wake like a steel cable.
The room she led me into was—well, “unchanged” is the term generally
used in such cases. For as a rule, after people die, things are tidied
up, furniture is sold, remembrances are despatched to the family. But
some morbid piety (or Grace’s instructions, perhaps) had kept this room
looking exactly as I supposed it had in Miss Pask’s lifetime. I wasn’t
in the mood for noting details; but in the faint dabble of moving
candle-light I was half aware of bedraggled cushions, odds and ends of
copper pots, and a jar holding a faded branch of some late-flowering
shrub. A real Mary Pask “interior”!
The white figure flitted spectrally to the chimney-piece, lit two more
candles, and set down the third on a table. I hadn’t supposed I was
superstitious—but those three candles! Hardly knowing what I did, I
hurriedly bent and blew one out. Her laugh sounded behind me.
“Three candles—you still mind that sort of thing? I’ve got beyond all
that, you know,” she chuckled. “Such a comfort ... such a sense of
freedom....” A fresh shiver joined the others already coursing over me.
“Come and sit down by me,” she entreated, sinking to a sofa. “It’s such
an age since I’ve seen a living being!”
Her choice of terms was certainly strange, and as she leaned back on the
white slippery sofa and beckoned me with one of those unburied hands my
impulse was to turn and run. But her old face, hovering there in the
candle-light, with the unnaturally red cheeks like varnished apples and
the blue eyes swimming in vague kindliness, seemed to appeal to me
against my cowardice, to remind me that, dead or alive, Mary Pask would
never harm a fly.
“Do sit down!” she repeated, and I took the other corner of the sofa.
“It’s so wonderfully good of you—I suppose Grace asked you to come?” She
laughed again—her conversation had always been punctuated by rambling
laughter. “It’s an event—quite an event! I’ve had so few visitors since
my death, you see.”
Another bucketful of cold water ran over me; but I looked at her
resolutely, and again the innocence of her face disarmed me.
I cleared my throat and spoke—with a huge panting effort, as if I had
been heaving up a grave-stone. “You live here alone?” I brought out.
“Ah, I’m glad to hear your voice—I still remember voices, though I hear
so few,” she murmured dreamily. “Yes—I live here alone. The old woman
you saw goes away at night. She won’t stay after dark ... she says she
can’t. Isn’t it funny? But it doesn’t matter; I like the darkness.” She
leaned to me with one of her irrelevant smiles. “The dead,” she said,
“naturally get used to it.”
Once more I cleared my throat; but nothing followed.
She continued to gaze at me with confidential blinks. “And Grace? Tell
me all about my darling. I wish I could have seen her again ... just
once.” Her laugh came out grotesquely. “When she got the news of my
death—were you with her? Was she terribly upset?”
I stumbled to my feet with a meaningless stammer. I couldn’t answer—I
couldn’t go on looking at her.
“Ah, I see ... it’s too painful,” she acquiesced, her eyes brimming, and
she turned her shaking head away.
“But after all ... I’m glad she was so sorry.... It’s what I’ve been
longing to be told, and hardly hoped for. Grace forgets....” She stood
up too and flitted across the room, wavering nearer and nearer to the
door.
“Thank God,” I thought, “she’s going.”
“Do you know this place by daylight?” she asked abruptly.