When I was well enough to trust myself to think about it all again I
found that a very little thinking got my temperature up, and my heart
hammering in my throat. No use.... I simply couldn’t stand it ... for
I’d seen Grace Bridgeworth in crape, weeping over the cable, and yet I’d
sat and talked with her sister, on the same sofa—her sister who’d been
dead a year!
The circle was a vicious one; I couldn’t break through it. The fact that
I was down with fever the next morning might have explained it; yet I
couldn’t get away from the clinging reality of the vision. Supposing it
_was_ a ghost I had been talking to, and not a mere projection of my
fever? Supposing something survived of Mary Pask—enough to cry out to me
the unuttered loneliness of a lifetime, to express at last what the
living woman had always had to keep dumb and hidden? The thought moved
me curiously—in my weakness I lay and wept over it. No end of women were
like that, I supposed, and perhaps, after death, if they got their
chance they tried to use it.... Old tales and legends floated through my
mind; the bride of Corinth, the mediaeval vampire—but what names to
attach to the plaintive image of Mary Pask!
My weak mind wandered in and out among these visions and conjectures,
and the longer I lived with them the more convinced I became that
something _which had been Mary Pask_ had talked with me that night.... I
made up my mind, when I was up again, to drive back to the place (in
broad daylight, this time), to hunt out the grave in the garden—that
“shady corner where the sun never bothers one”—and appease the poor
ghost with a few flowers. But the doctors decided otherwise; and perhaps
my weak will unknowingly abetted them. At any rate, I yielded to their
insistence that I should be driven straight from my hotel to the train
for Paris, and thence transshipped, like a piece of luggage, to the
Swiss sanatorium they had in view for me. Of course I meant to come back
when I was patched up again ... and meanwhile, more and more tenderly,
but more intermittently, my thoughts went back from my snow-mountain to
that wailing autumn night above the _Baie des Trépassés_, and the
revelation of the dead Mary Pask who was so much more real to me than
ever the living one had been.