“It’s very beautiful. But you wouldn’t have seen _me_ then. You’d have
had to take your choice between me and the landscape. I hate the
light—it makes my head ache. And so I sleep all day. I was just waking
up when you came.” She smiled at me with an increasing air of
confidence. “Do you know where I usually sleep? Down below there—in the
garden!” Her laugh shrilled out again. “There’s a shady corner down at
the bottom where the sun never bothers one. Sometimes I sleep there till
the stars come out.”
The phrase about the garden, in the consul’s cable, came back to me and
I thought: “After all, it’s not such an unhappy state. I wonder if she
isn’t better off than when she was alive?”
Perhaps she was—but I was sure _I_ wasn’t, in her company. And her way
of sidling nearer to the door made me distinctly want to reach it before
she did. In a rush of cowardice I strode ahead of her—but a second later
she had the latch in her hand and was leaning against the panels, her
long white raiment hanging about her like grave-clothes. She drooped her
head a little sideways and peered at me under her lashless lids.
“You’re not going?” she reproached me.
I dived down in vain for my missing voice, and silently signed that I
was.
“Going—going away? Altogether?” Her eyes were still fixed on me, and I
saw two tears gather in their corners and run down over the red
glistening circles on her cheeks. “Oh, but you mustn’t,” she said
gently. “I’m too lonely....”
I stammered something inarticulate, my eyes on the blue-nailed hand that
grasped the latch. Suddenly the window behind us crashed open, and a
gust of wind, surging in out of the blackness, extinguished the candle
on the nearest chimney-corner. I glanced back nervously to see if the
other candle were going out too.
“You don’t like the noise of the wind? _I_ do. It’s all I have to talk
to.... People don’t like me much since I’ve been dead. Queer, isn’t it?
The peasants are so superstitious. At times I’m really lonely....” Her
voice cracked in a last effort at laughter, and she swayed toward me,
one hand still on the latch.
“Lonely, lonely! If you _knew_ how lonely! It was a lie when I told you
I wasn’t! And now you come, and your face looks friendly ... and you say
you’re going to leave me! No—no—no—you shan’t! Or else, why did you
come? It’s cruel.... I used to think I knew what loneliness was ...
after Grace married, you know. Grace thought she was always thinking of
me, but she wasn’t. She called me ‘darling,’ but she was thinking of her
husband and children. I said to myself then: ‘You couldn’t be lonelier
if you were dead.’ But I know better now.... There’s been no loneliness
like this last year’s ... none! And sometimes I sit here and think: ‘If
a man came along some day and took a fancy to you?’” She gave another
wavering cackle. “Well, such things _have_ happened, you know, even
after youth’s gone ... a man who’d had his troubles too. But no one came
till tonight ... and now you say you’re going!” Suddenly she flung
herself toward me. “Oh, stay with me, stay with me ... just tonight....
It’s so sweet and quiet here.... No one need know ... no one will ever
come and trouble us.”
I ought to have shut the window when the first gust came. I might have
known there would soon be another, fiercer one. It came now, slamming
back the loose-hinged lattice, filling the room with the noise of the
sea and with wet swirls of fog, and dashing the other candle to the
floor. The light went out, and I stood there—we stood there—lost to each
other in the roaring coiling darkness. My heart seemed to stop beating;
I had to fetch up my breath with great heaves that covered me with
sweat. The door—the door—well, I knew I had been facing it when the
candle went. Something white and wraithlike seemed to melt and crumple
up before me in the night, and avoiding the spot where it had sunk away
I stumbled around it in a wide circle, got the latch in my hand, caught
my foot in a scarf or sleeve, trailing loose and invisible, and freed
myself with a jerk from this last obstacle. I had the door open now. As
I got into the hall I heard a whimper from the blackness behind me; but
I scrambled on to the hall door, dragged it open and bolted out into the
night. I slammed the door on that pitiful low whimper, and the fog and
wind enveloped me in healing arms.