and I didn’t believe the half of that.
“One night I went to a masked ball with Mrs. Sutton — she was a larky one, she was, and led her husband a pretty dance. It was latish when I came back; I hadn’t enjoyed myself one bit, and left in a temper and came off home by myself I let myself in at the front door, and when I came into this room, on the table just here”— she pointed with her finger —“there was a pillow, and on the pillow was the baby, and he was kneeling on the floor in front, his elbows on the table, and his face on his hands, and the tears streaming down his cheeks as if they’d never stop. I’d been to the ball as a ballet girl — though he hadn’t known it, and I hadn’t meant that he should, but the sight took me so aback that, without thinking, I dropped my cloak and stood before him just as I was. ‘What’s the matter now?’ I cried; ‘what’s the child down here at this time of the night for?’ I expected that he’d let fly at me, and perhaps send me packing out of the house right there and then. But, instead, he just glanced my way as if he hardly saw me, or wanted to, and said, ‘Baby’s dying.’ When he said that, it was as if he had run something right into my heart. ‘Dying,’ I cried, ‘stuff!’ I ran to the table and bent over the pillow. I had never seen anybody dying before, and knew nothing at all about it, but directly I looked at it, I seemed to know that what he said was true, and that the child was dying. My heart stopped beating — I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move, I could only stare like a creature who had lost her wits — it was as if a hand had been stretched right out of Heaven to strike me a blow. There he was on one side of the table — and there was me leaning right over the other, both of us motionless, neither of us speaking a word; and there was the baby lying on the pillow between us, stiller than we were. How long we stopped like that I don’t know; it seemed to me as if it was hours — but I daresay it was only a few minutes. All at once the baby — my baby — gave a little movement with its little arms — a sort of trembling. He moved his arm, and put one of his fingers into its tiny hand; the baby seemed to fasten on to it. ‘Give it one of your fingers,’ he said, sobbing as if his heart would break. ‘It’ll like to feel your finger as it goes!’ Hardly knowing what I was doing, I stretched out one of my fingers; it was the first finger of my right hand — this one.” She held up the finger in question in its ragged casing. “And I put it in the mite’s wee hand. It took it — yes, it took it. It closed its fingers right round it, and gave it quite a squeeze — yes, quite a squeeze. Then it loosened its hold. It was dead. Dead upon the pillow. — And it’s there now. Can’t you see it lying on the pillow, with a smile on its face? a smile! Can’t you see the ghost?”
Stooping, the woman made pretence to kiss the lips of some one who was lying just beneath her. It might have been that to her the thing was no pretence, and that, as in a vision, the dead lips did indeed touch hers. Then, drawing herself erect again, she broke into another of her discordant laughs. Throwing out her arms on either side of her, she exclaimed in strident tones:
“Ghosts! Ghosts! The place is full of them — I see them everywhere. I touch them, hear them all the time. They’ve been with me all through the years, wherever I’ve been — and where haven’t I been? My God — in heaven and hell! crowds and crowds of them, more and more as the years went on. And do you think that I can’t see them here — in their house, and mine! Can’t you see them too?”
Madge replied between set lips — she had been forming her own conclusions while the woman raved:
“No, I do not see them. Nor would you were you not under the influence of drink.”
The woman stared at her in what seemed genuine surprise.
“Under the influence of drink! Me? No such luck! I wish I were.” Again she gave one of those bursts of laughter which so jarred on Madge’s nerves. “When I’m drunk I can’t see ghosts — it’s only when I’m sober. I’ve had nothing to eat since I don’t know when, let alone to drink. I’m starving, starving! That’s the time when I see ghosts. They point at me with their fingers and say, ‘Look at us and look at you — this is what it’s come to!’ They make me see what might have been. He made me come today; I didn’t want to, but he made me. And now he’s in all the house. — Listen! He’s getting out of bed in the room upstairs — that’s his bedroom. Can’t you hear his lame foot moving about the floor? How often I’ve thrown that lame foot in his face when I’ve been wild! — can’t you hear it hobble — hobble?”
“You are mad! How dare you talk such nonsense? There’s no one in the house but you and I.”
The woman seemed to believe so implicitly in the diseased imaginings of her conscience-haunted brain, that Madge felt that unless she made a resolute effort her own mental equilibrium might totter. On the other’s face there came a look of shrewd, malignant cunning.
“Isn’t there! That’s all you know — I’m no more mad than you are. And I tell you what — he’s not the only thing that’s in the house. There’s something else as well. It was his, and now it’s mine. And don’t you think to rob me.”
“Rob you? — I.”
“Yes, you. There’s others after it as well as you — I know! I’m not the simpleton that some may think. But I won’t be robbed by all the lot of you — you make no error. It was his, and now it’s mine.”
“If there really is anything in the house to which you have the slightest shadow of a claim, which I very much doubt, and let me know what it is, and where it is, I’ll see that you have it without fail.”
A look of vacancy came on the woman’s face. She passed her hand across her brow.
“That’s it — I don’t know just where it is. He comes and tells me, almost, but never quite. He says it’s in the house, but he doesn’t say exactly where. But he never lies — so I do know it’s in the house, and I won’t be robbed.”
“I have not the slightest idea of what you mean — if you really do mean anything at all. I don’t know if you know me — or are under the impression that I know you; if so, I can only assure you that I don’t. I have not the faintest notion who you are.”
The woman, drawing nearer, clutched Madge’s arm with both her hands.
“Don’t you know who I am? I’m the ghost’s wife!”
Her manner was not only exceedingly unpleasant; it was, in a sense, uncanny — so uncanny that, in spite of herself, Madge could not help a startled look coming into her face. The appearance of this look seemed to amuse her tormentor. She broke into a continuous peal of unmelodious laughter.
“I’m the ghost’s wife!” she kept repeating. “I’m the ghost’s wife.”
Madge Brodie prided herself on her strength of nerve, and as, a rule, not without cause. But, on that occasion, almost for the first time in her life it played her false. She would have been glad to have been able to scream and flee; but she was incapable even of doing that. The other seemed to hold her spellbound; she was conscious that her senses were reeling — that, unless something happened soon, she would faint.
But from that final degradation she was saved.
“Madge,” exclaimed a voice, “who is this woman?”
It was Ella Duncan, and with her was Jack Martyn. At the sound of the voice, the woman released her hold. Never before had Madge been sensible of such a spasm of relief. She rushed to Ella with a hysterical sob.
“Oh, Ella!” she cried, “how thankful I am you’ve come.”
Ella
