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 bridge-worth 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 door-latch. 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.
i shook my head.
“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 to-night . . . 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.
