“Do you think—do you think he understands Laurie?” she said.
“He has known him for fifteen years,” remarked Mrs. Baxter.
“Perhaps it’s Laurie that doesn’t understand him then,” said Maggie tranquilly.
“I daresay.”
“And—and what do you think Mr. Rymer will be able to do?” asked the girl.
“Just settle the boy. … I don’t think Laurie’s very happy. Not that I would willingly disturb his mind again; I don’t mean that, my dear. I quite understand that your religion is just the one for certain temperaments, and Laurie’s is one of them; but a few helpful words sometimes—” Mrs. Baxter left it at an aposiopesis, a form of speech she was fond of.
There was a grain of truth, Maggie thought, in the old lady’s hints, and she helped herself in silence to marmalade. Laurie’s letters, which she usually read, did not refer much to religion, or to the Brompton Oratory, as his custom had been at first. She tried to make up her mind that this was a healthy sign; that it showed that Laurie was settling down from that slight feverishness of zeal that seemed the inevitable atmosphere of most converts. Maggie found converts a little trying now and then; they would talk so much about facts, certainly undisputed, and for that very reason not to be talked about. Laurie had been a marked case, she remembered; he wouldn’t let the thing alone, and his contempt of Anglican clergy, whom Maggie herself regarded with respect, was hard to understand. In fact she had remonstrated on the subject of the Vicar. …
Maggie perceived that she was letting her thoughts run again on disputable lines; and she made a remark about the Balkan crisis so abruptly that Mrs. Baxter looked at her in bewilderment.
“You do jump about so, my dear. We were speaking of Laurie, were we not?”
“Yes,” said Maggie.
“It’s the twentieth he’s coming on, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Maggie.
“I wonder what train he’ll come by?”
“I don’t know,” said Maggie.
A few days before Laurie’s arrival she went to the greenhouse to see the chrysanthemums. There was an excellent show of them.
“Mrs. Baxter doesn’t like them hairy ones,” said the gardener.
“Oh! I had forgotten. Well, Ferris, on the nineteenth I shall want a big bunch of them. You’d better take those—those hairy ones. And some maidenhair. Is there plenty?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Can you make a wreath, Ferris?”
“Yes, miss.”
“Well, will you make a good wreath of them, please, for a grave? The morning of the twentieth will do. There’ll be plenty left for the church and house?”
“Oh yes, miss.”
“And for Father Mahon?”
“Oh yes, miss.”
“Very well, then. Will you remember that? A good wreath, with fern, on the morning of the twentieth. If you’ll just leave it here I’ll call for it about twelve o’clock. You needn’t send it up to the house.”
“Very good, miss.”
VI
I
Laurie was sitting in his room after breakfast, filling his briar pipe thoughtfully, and contemplating his journey to Stantons.
It was more than six weeks now since his experience in Queen’s Gate, and he had gone through a variety of emotions. Bewildered terror was the first, a nervous interest the next, a truculent skepticism the third; and lately, to his astonishment, the nervous interest had begun to revive.
At first he had been filled with unreasoning fear. He had walked back as far as the gate of the park, hardly knowing where he went, conscious only that he must be in the company of his fellows; upon finding himself on the south side of Hyde Park Corner, where travelers were few, he had crossed over in nervous haste to where he might jostle human beings. Then he had dined in a restaurant, knowing that a band would be playing there, and had drunk a bottle of champagne; he had gone to his rooms, cheered and excited, and had leapt instantly into bed for fear that his courage should evaporate. For he was perfectly aware that fear, and a sickening kind of repulsion, formed a very large element in his emotions. For nearly two hours, unless three persons had lied consummately, he—his essential being, that sleepless self that underlies all—had been in strange company, had become identified in some horrible manner with the soul of a dead person. It was as if he had been informed some morning that he had slept all night with a corpse under his bed. He woke half a dozen times that night in the pleasant curtained bedroom, and each time with the terror upon him. What if stories were true, and this Thing still haunted the air? It was remarkable, he considered afterwards, how the sign which he had demanded had not had the effect for which he had hoped. He was not at all reassured by it.
Then as the days went by, and he was left in peace, his horror began to pass. He turned the thing over in his mind a dozen times a day, and found it absorbing. But he began to reflect that, after all, he had nothing more than he had had before in the way of evidence. An hypnotic sleep might explain the whole thing. That little revelation he had made in his unconsciousness, of his sitting beneath the yews, might easily be accounted for by the fact that he himself knew it, that it had been a deeper element in his experience than he had known, and that he had told it aloud. It was no proof of anything more. There remained the rapping and what the medium had called his “appearance” during the sleep; but of all this he had read before in books. Why should he be convinced any more now than he had been previously? Besides, it was surely doubtful, was it not, whether the rapping, if it had really taken place, might not be the normal cracks and sounds of woodwork, intensified in the attention of the listeners? or if it was more than this, was there
