To come back to the empty house, having watched the train carry them off (“Kiss papa good bye! . . . good bye . . . good bye, my darlings! Come back with rosy cheeks. — Try to forget, Mary . . . my poor old wife!”): to come back to the empty house was like facing death anew. All the doors, three on each side of the central passage, stood open, showing unnatural-looking rooms. Mary had done her best to leave things tidy, but she had not been able to avoid the last disorder inevitable on a journey. Odd sheets of newspaper lay about, and lengths of twine; the floors were unswept, the beds unmade; one of the children had dropped a glove . . . Mahony stooped to it . . . Cuffy’s, for a wager, seeing that the middle finger was chewed to pulp. And as he stood holding it, it seemed as if from out these yawning doors, these dismal rooms, one or other of his little ones must surely dart and run to him, with a cry of “Papa . .. Papa!” But not a sound broke the silence, no shadow smudged the whitewash of the walls.
The first shock over, however, the litter cleared up, the rooms dressed, he almost relished the hush and peace to which the going of wife and children had left him. For one thing, he could rest on the knowledge that he had done for them all that was humanly possible. In return, he would, for several weeks to come, be spared the mute reproach of two wan little faces, and a mother’s haggard eyes. Nor need he crack his brains for a time over the problem of an education for the children in this wilderness, or be chafed by Mary’s silent but pregnant glosses on the practice. In a word he was FREE . . . free to exist unobserving and unobserved.
But his satisfaction was short-lived: by the end of the second day the deathlike stillness had begun to wear him down. Maria was shut off in the detached kitchen; and on getting home of a late afternoon he knew that, but for the final mill-screech, and the distant rumble of the ten-o’clock train, no mortal sound would reach his ears the long night through. The silence gathered, descended and settled upon him, like a fog or a cloud. There was something ominous about it, and instead of reading he found himself listening . . . listening. Only very gradually did the thought break through that he had something to listen for. Dark having fallen, might not a tiny ghost, a little spirit that had not yet found rest afar from those it loved, flit from room to room in search of them? What more likely indeed? He strained his ears. But only his pulses buzzed there. On the other hand, about eleven o’clock one night, on coming out of the surgery to cross to the bedroom, he could have sworn to catching a glimpse of a little shape . . . vague, misty of outline, gone even as he saw it, and yet unmistakable . . . vanishing in the doorway of the children’s room. His heart gave a great leap of joy and recognition. Swiftly following, he called a name; but on the empty air: the room had no occupant. For two nights after he kept watch, to waylay the apparition should it come; but, shy of human eyes, it did not show itself again. Not to be baulked, he tried a fresh means: taking a sheet of paper he let his hand lie lightly along the pencil. And, lo and behold! at the second trial the pencil began to move, seemed to strive to form words; while by the fourth evening words were coming through. HER MAMMA . . . HER LUCE . . . WANTS HER MAMMA.
The kitchen clock had stopped: Maria, half undressed, stealing tiptoe into the house to see the time, a tin lamp with a reflector in her hand, was pulled up short, half-way down the passage, by the sound of voices. Hello! who was Doctor talking to? A patient at this hour? But nobody had knocked at the door. And what . . . oh, crikey! whatever was he saying? The girl’s eyes and mouth opened, and her cheeks went pale, as the sense of what she heard broke on her. Pressing herself against the wall, she threw a terrified glance over her shoulder into the inky shadows cast by the lamp. ——
“Ma! I was fair skeered out of me senses. To hear ’im sitting there a-talkin’ to that pore little kid, what’s been dead and buried this month and more! An’ him calling her by her name, and saying her Ma would soon be back, and then she wouldn’t need to feel lonely any more — why, I tell yer, even this mornin’ in broad daylight I found meself lookin’ behind me the whole time. — Go back? Stop another night there? Not me! I couldn’t, Ma. I’m SKEERED.”
“You great ninny, you! What could ‘urt yer, I’d like to know? . . . as long as you say yer prayers reg’lar and tells the troof. Ghosts, indeed! I’ll ghost you!”— But Maria, more imaginatively fibred, was not to be won over.
Mahony listened to the excuses put forward by her mother on his reaching home that evening: listened with the kindly courtesy he kept for those beneath him who met him civilly and with respect. Maria’s plea of loneliness was duly weighed. “Though I must say I think she has hardly given the new conditions a fair trial. However, she has always been a good girl, and the plan you propose, Mrs. Beetling, will no doubt answer very well during my wife’s absence.”
It not only answered: it was an improvement. Breakfast was perhaps served a little later than usual, and the cooking proved rather coarser than Maria’s, who was Mary-trained. But it was all to the good that, supper over, Mrs. Beetling put on her bonnet and went home, leaving the place clear. His beloved little ghost was then free to flit as it would, without fear of surprise or disturbance. He continually felt its presence — though it did not again materialise — and message after message continued to come through. Written always by a third person, in an unfamiliar hand . . . as was only to be expected, considering that the twins still struggled with pothooks and hangers . . . they yet gave abundant proof of their authorship.
Such a proof, for instance, as the night when he found that his script ran: HER BABY . . . NOSE . . . KITCHEN FIRE.
For a long time he could make nothing of this, though he twisted it this way and that. Then, however, it flashed upon him that the twins had nursed large waxen dolls clad as infants; and straightway he rose to look for the one that had been Lallie’s. After a lengthy search by the light of a single candle, in the course of which he ransacked various drawers and boxes, he found the object in question . . . tenderly wrapped and hidden away in Mary’s wardrobe. He drew it forth in its white trappings and, upon his soul, when he held it up to the candle to examine it, he found that one side of the effigy’s nose had run together in a kind of blob . . . MELTED . . . no doubt through having been left lying in the sun, or — yes, OR held too close to a fire! Of a certainty he had known nothing of this: never a word had been said, in HIS hearing, of the accident to so expensive a plaything. At the time of purchase he had been wroth with Mary over the needless outlay. Now . . . now . . . oh! there’s a divinity that shapes our ends . . . now it served him as an irrefragable proof.
In his jubilation he added a red-hot postscript to his daily letter. I HAVE GREAT— GREAT AND JOYFUL— NEWS FOR YOU, MY DARLING. BUT I SHALL KEEP IT TILL YOU COME BACK. IT WILL BE SOMETHING FOR YOU TO LOOK FORWARD TO, ON YOUR RETURN TO THIS DREADFUL PLACE.
To which Mary replied: YOU MAKE ME VERY CURIOUS, RICHARD. CAN NORTH LONG TUNNELS HAVE STRUCK THE REEF AT LAST?
And he: SOMETHING FAR, FAR NEARER OUR HEARTS, MY DEAR, THAN MONEY AND SHARES. I REFER TO NEWS COMPARED WITH WHICH EVERYTHING EARTHLY FADES INTO INSIGNIFICANCE.
Alas! he roused no answering enthusiasm. NOW, RICHARD, DON’T DELUDE YOURSELF . . . OR LET YOURSELF BE DELUDED. OF COURSE YOU KNEW ABOUT THAT DOLL’S NOSE. LALLIE CRIED AND WAS SO UPSET. I’M SURE WHAT’S HAPPENING IS ALL YOUR OWN IMAGINATION. I DO THINK ONE CAN GROSSLY DECEIVE ONESELF— ESPECIALLY NOW YOU’RE QUITE ALONE. BUT OH DON’T TRIFLE WITH OUR GREAT SORROW. I COULDN’T BEAR IT. IT’S STILL TOO NEAR AND TOO BITTER.
Of his little ghostly visitant he asked that night: HOW SHALL WE EVER PROVE, LOVE, TO DEAR MAMMA THAT YOU ARE REALLY AND TRULY HER LOST DARLING?
To which came the oddly disconcerting, matter-of-fact reply: USELESS. OTHER THINGS TO DO. COME NATURAL TO SOME. NOT TO HER. But Mahony could not find it in his heart to let the matter rest there. So fond a mother, and to be unwilling . . . not to dare to TRUST herself . . . to believe!
And believe what, too? Why, merely that their little one, in place of becoming a kind of frozen image of the child they had known, and inhabiting remote, fantastic realms to which they might some day laboriously attain: that she was still with them, close to them, loving and clinging, and as sportive as in her brief earthly span. It was no doubt this homely, UNDIGNIFIED aspect of the life-to-come that formed the stumbling-block: for people like Mary, death was inconceivable apart from awfulness and majesty: in this guise alone had it been rung and sung into them. For him, the very lack of dignity was the immense, consoling gain. Firmly convinced of the persistence of human individuality subsequent to the great change, he had now been graciously permitted to see how thin were the walls between the two worlds, how interpenetrable the states. And he rose of a morning, and lay down at night, his heart warm with gratitude to the Giver of knowledge.
But a little child-ghost, no longer encased in the lovely rounded body that had enhanced its baby prattle and, as it were, decked it out: a little ghost had, after all, not very much to say. A proof of identity given, assurances exchanged that it still loved and was loved, and the talk trickled naturally to an end. You could not put your arms round it, and hold it to you in a wordless content. Also, as time passed and Lallie grew easier in her new state, it was not to be denied that she turned a trifle freakish. She would not always come when called, and, pressed as to where she lingered, averred through her mentor that she was “fossicking.” An attempt to get at the meaning of this involved Mahony in a long, rambling conversation with the elder ghost, that was dreary in the extreme. For it hinged mainly on herse............