“What a rasping night it is! The devil take that moth!”
The window was shut, and the persistent whirring and tapping of a big
white insect on the glass outside jarred irritably on my nerves.
“Let it in, for goodness’ sake,” I said, “if it _will_ insist on
making a holocaust of itself!”
Kelvin had looked up when I first spoke. Now he rose, with shining
eyes, and a curious little sigh of the sort that one vents on the
receipt of wonderful news coming out of suspense.
“Yes, I’ll open the window,” he said low; and with the word threw up
the casement. The moth whizzed in, whizzed round, and settled on his
hand. He lifted it, with an odd set smile, into the intimate range of
his vision, and scrutinized it intently. Suddenly and quickly, then,
as if satisfied about something, he held it away from him.
“_Ite missa est!_” he murmured, quoting some words of the Mass (he was
a Catholic); and the moth fluttered and rose. Now, you may believe it
or not; but there was a fire burning on the hearth, and straight for
that fire went the moth, and seemed to go up with the smoke into the
chimney. I was so astonished that I gasped; but Kelvin appeared
serenely unconcerned as he faced round on me.
“Well,” I exploded, “if a man mayn’t kill, he may persuade to suicide,
it seems.”
He answered good-humouredly, “All right; but it wasn’t suicide.”
Then he resumed his seat by me, and relighted his pipe. I sat
stolidly, with an indefinable feeling of grievance, and said nothing.
But the silence soon grew unbearable.
“Kelvin,” I said, suddenly and viciously; “what the deuce do you
mean?”
“You wouldn’t believe,” he answered, at once and cheerily, “even if I
told you.”
“Told me what?”
“Well, this. There was the soul of little Patsy that went up in the
smoke.”
“The village child you are so attached to?”
“Yes; and who has lain dying these weeks past.”
“Why should it come to you?”
“It was a compact between us—if she were summoned, in a moment,
without time for a good-bye. We were close friends.”
“Kelvin—excuse me—you are getting to be impossible.”
“All right. Look at your watch. Time was made for unbelievers. There’s
no convincing a sceptic but by foot-rule. Look at your watch.”
“I did, I confess—covertly—in the instant of distraction caused by
Kelvin’s little son, who came to bid his father good night. He was a
quiet, winning little fellow, glowing with health and beauty.
“Good night, Bobo,” said Kelvin, kissing the child fondly. “Ask God to
make little Patsy’s bed comfy, before you get into your own.”
I kissed the boy also; but awkwardly, for some reason, under his frank
courteousness. After he was gone, I sank back in my chair and said,
grudging the concession—
“Very well. It’s half-past eight.”
Kelvin nodded, and said nothing more for a long time. Then, all of a
sudden, he broke out—
“I usen’t to believe in such things myself, once upon a time; but Bobo
converted me. Would you like to hear the story?”
“O, yes!” I said, tolerantly superior. “Fire away!”
He laughed, filling his pipe—the laugh of a man too surely
self-convinced to regard criticism of his faith.
“Patsy,” he said, “had no Ghost-Leech to touch her well. Poor little
Patsy! But she’s better among the flowers.”
“Of Paradise, I suppose you mean? Well, if she is, she is,” I said, as
if I were deprecating the inevitably undesirable. “But what is a
Ghost-Leech?”
“A Ghost-Leech,” he said—“the sort, anyhow, that I’ve knowledge
of—is one who has served seven years goal-keeper in the
hurling-matches of the dead.”
I stared at him. Was he really going, or gone, off his head? He
laughed again, waving his hand to reassure me.
“You may accept my proof or not. Anyhow, Bobo’s recovery was proof
enough for me. A sense of humour, I admit, is outside our conception
of the disembodied. We lay down laughter with life, don’t we? You’d
count it heresy to believe otherwise. Yet have you ever considered how
man’s one great distinctive faculty must be admitted into all evidence
of his deeds upon earth, as minuted by the recording angel? It must be
admitted, of course, and appreciatively by the final assessor. How
could he judge laughter who had never laughed? The cachinnatory nerve
is touched off from across the Styx—wireless telegraphy; and man will
laugh still, though he be damned.”
“Kelvin! my good soul!”
“The dead, I tell you, do not put off their sense of humour with their
flesh. They laugh beyond the grave. They are full of a sense of fun,
and not necessarily the most transcendent.”
“No, indeed, by all the testimony of spiritualism.”
“Well; now listen. I was staying once in a village on the west coast
of Ireland. The people of my hamlet were at deadly traditional feud
with the people of a neighbouring hamlet. Traditional, I say, because
the vendetta (it almost amounted to one) derived from the old days of
rivalry between them in the ancient game of hurling, which was a sort
of primitive violent “rugger” played with a wooden ball. The game
itself was long fallen into disuse in the district, and had been
supplanted, even in times out of memory, by sports of a gentler, more
modern cast. But it, and the feud it had occasioned, were still
continued unabated beyond the grave. How do I know this? Why, on the
evidence of my Ghost-Leech.
“He was a strange, moody, solitary man, pitied, though secretly
dreaded, by his neighbours. They might have credited him with
possession—particularly with a bad local form of possession; to
suspect it was enough in itself to keep their mouths shut from
questioning him, or their ears from inviting confession of his
sufferings. For, so their surmise were correct, and he in the grip of
the hurlers, a word wrung from him out of season would have brought
the whole village under the curse of its dead.”
I broke in here. “Kelvin, for the Lord’s sake! you are too cimmerian.
Titillate your glooms with a touch of that spiritual laughter.”
Agreeably to my banter, he smiled.
“There’s fun in it,” he said; “only it’s rather ghastly fun. What do
you say to the rival teams meeting in one or other of the village
graveyards, and whacking a skull about with long shank-bones?”
“I should say, It doesn’t surprise me in the least. Anything turning
upon a more esoteric psychology would. What pitiful imaginations you
Christmas-number seers are possessed of!”
“I dare say. But I’m not imagining. It’s you practical souls that
imagine—that common sense, for instance, is reason; that the top-hat
is the divinely-inspired shibboleth of the chosen; and so on. But you
don’t disappoint me. Shall I go on?”
“O, yes! go on.”
“The hurlers meet under the full moon, they say, in one or other of
the rival graveyards; _but they must have a living bachelor out of
each parish to keep goal for them_.”
“I see! ‘They say’? I see!”
“The doom of the poor wretch thus chosen is, as you may suppose, an
appalling one. He must go, or suffer terrors damning out of reason.
There is no power on earth can save him. One night he is sitting,
perhaps, in his cabin at any peaceful work. The moor, mystic under the
moonlight, stretches from miles away up to his walls, surrounding and
isolating them. His little home is an ark, anchored amid a waste and
silent sea of flowers. Suddenly the latch clinks up, advances, falls.
The night air breathing in passes a presence standing in the opening,
and quivers and dies. Stealthily the door gapes, ever so little, ever
so softly, and a face, like the gliding rim of the moon, creeps round
its edge. It is the face, he recognizes appalled, of one long dead.
The eyeplaces are black hollows; but there is a movement in them like
the glint of water in a deep well. A hand lifts and beckons. The
goal-keeper is chosen, and must go. For seven years, it is said, he
must serve the hurling-matches of the dead.”
“State it for a fact. Don’t hedge on report.”
“I don’t. This man served his time. If he hadn’t, Bobo wouldn’t be
here.”
“O? Poor Bobo!”
“This man, I say, survived the ghastly ordeal—one case out of a dozen
that succumb. Then he got his fee.”
“O, a fee! What was that? A Rachel of the bogs?”
“The power to cure by touch any human sickness, even the most humanly
baffling.”
“Really a royal reward. It’s easy to see a fortune in it.”
“He would have been welcome to mine; but he would take nothing. He
made my little boy whole again.”
“Kelvin! I dare say I’m a brute. What had been the matter with him?”
“Ah, what! He simply moaned and wasted—moaned eternally. Atrophy;
meningitis; cachexy—they gave it a dozen names, but not a single
cure. He was dying under slow torture—a heavy sight for a father.
“One day an old Shaman of the moors called upon me. He was ancient,
ancient—as dry as his staff, and so bent that, a little more, and he
had tripped over his long beard in walking. I can’t reproduce his
brogue; but this is the substance of what it conveyed to me:—
“Had I ever heard speak of Baruch of the lone shebeen—him that had
once kept an illicit still, but that the ghosts had got hold of for
his sins? No? Well, he, the Shaman, was come too near the end of his
own living tether to fear ghoulish reprisals if he told me. And he
told me.
“Baruch, he said, was suspected in the village of keeping the dead’s
hurling-goal—had long been suspected—it was an old tale by now. But,
och, wirrastrue! if, as he calculated, Baruch was nearing the close of
his seven years’ service, Baruch was the man for me, and could do for
my child what no other living man, barring a ghosts’ goal-keeper,
could do likewise.
“I humoured him when he was present; laughed at him when he was gone;
but—I went to see Baruch. It’s all right: you aren’t a father.”
“You went to see Baruch. Go on.”
“He lived remote in such a little cabin as I have described. Lord!
what a thing it was!—a living trophy of damnation—a statue
inhabiting the human vestment! His face was young enough; but sorrow
stricken into stone—unearthly suffering carved out of a block. It is
astonishing what expression can be conveyed without a line. There was
not a wrinkle in Baruch’s face.
“All scepticism withered in me at the sight—all the desperate
effrontery with which I had intended to challenge his gift. I asked
him simply if he would cure my child.
“He answered, in a voice as hoarse and feeble as an old man’s, but
with a queer little promise of joy in it, like a sound of unborn rain,
‘Asthore! for this I’ve lived me lone among the peats, and bid me
time, and suffered what I know. In a good hour be it spoken! Wance
more, and come again when the moon has passed its full.’
“I went, without another question, or the thought of one. That was a
bad week for me—a mortal struggle for the child. The dead kept
pulling him to draw him down; but he fought and held on, the little
plucked one. On the day following the night of full moon, I carried
him in my arms to the cabin—myself, all the way. I wouldn’t let on to
a soul; I went roundabout, and I got to Baruch unnoticed. I knew it
was kill or cure for Bobo. He couldn’t have survived another night.
“I tell you, it was a laughing spirit that greeted me. Have you ever
seen Doré’s picture of the ‘Wandering Jew,’ at the end of his
journey, having his boots pulled off? There is the same release
depicted, the same sweet comedy of redemption—the same figure of fun,
if you like, that Baruch presented.
“He put his hands on Bobo’s head, and——”
“Well?”
“Bobo walked home with me, that’s all.”
Kelvin got up from his chair to relight his pipe at the fire. As he
moved, the door of the room opened, and a decent woman, his
housekeeper, stood, with a grave face, in the entrance.
“Patsy’s dead?” said Kelvin.
“Ah, the poor mite!” answered the woman, with a burst of tears. “She
passed but now, sir, at half after eight, in her little bed.”