 | WHAT WAS THE MATTER? Men, women, and ghosts |  |
7. WHAT WAS THE MATTER?
I could not have been more than seven or eight
years old, when it happened; but it might have been
yesterday. Among all other childish memories, it
stands alone. To this very day it brings with it the
old, utter sinking of the heart, and the old, dull sense
of mystery.
To read what I have to say, you should have known
my mother. To understand it, you should understand
her. But that is quite impossible now, for there is a
quiet spot over the hill, and past the church, and beside
the little brook where the crimsoned mosses grow
thick and wet and cool, from which I cannot call her.
It is all I have left of her now. But after all, it is not
of her that you will chiefly care to hear. My object
is simply to acquaint you with a few facts, which,
though interwoven with the events of her life, are
quite independent of it as objects of interest. It is, I
know, only my own heart that makes these pages a
memorial, — but, you see, I cannot help it.
Yet, I confess, no glamour of any earthly love has
ever entirely dazzled me, — not even hers. Of imperfections,
of mistakes, of sins, I knew she was guilty. I
mosses, and the hush of the rest beneath, so
close to my heart, I cannot forget them. Yet somehow
— I do not know how — the imperfections, the
mistakes, the very sins, bring her nearer to me as the
years slip by, and make her dearer.
My mother was what we call an aristocrat. I do
not like the term, as the term is used. I am sure she
does not now; but I have no other word. She was a
royal-looking woman, and she had the blood of princes
in her veins. Generations back, — how we children
used to reckon the thing over! — she was cradled in a
throne. A miserable race, to be sure, they were, —
the Stuarts; and the most devout genealogist might
deem it dubious honor to own them for great-grandfathers
by innumerable degrees removed. So she used
to tell us, over and over, as a damper on our childish
vanity, looking such a very queen as she spoke, in
every play of feature, and every motion of her hand,
that it was the old story of preachers who did not
practise. The very baby was proud of her. The
beauty of a face, and the elegant repose of a manner,
are influences by no means more unfelt at three years
than at thirty
As insanity will hide itself away, and lie sleeping,
and die out, — while old men are gathered to their
fathers scathless, and young men follow in their footsteps
safe and free, — and start into life, and claim its
own when children's children have forgotten it; as a
bury itself in day-laborers and criminals, unto the
third and fourth generation, and spring then, like a
creation from a chaos, into statesmen and poets and
sculptors; — so, I have sometimes fancied, the better
and truer nature of voluptuaries and tyrants was sifted
down through the years, and purified in our little New
England home, and the essential autocracy of monarchical
blood refined and ennobled, in my mother,
into royalty.
A broad and liberal culture had moulded her; she
knew its worth, in every fibre of her heart; scholarly
parents had blessed her with their legacies of scholarly
mind and name. With the soul of an artist, she
quivered under every grace and every defect; and the
blessing of a beauty as rare as rich had been given
to her. With every instinct of her nature recoiling
from the very shadow of crimes the world winks at,
the family record had been stainless for a generation.
God had indeed blessed her; but the very blessing
was a temptation.
I knew, before she left me, what she might have
been, but for the merciful and tender watch of Him
who was despised and rejected of men. I know, for
she told me, one still night when we were alone together,
how she sometimes shuddered at herself, and
what those daily and hourly struggles between her
nature and her Christianity meant.
I think we were as near to one another as mother
have been talking in such lordly style of those miserable
Jameses and Charleses, I will take the opportunity
to confess that I have inherited my father's
thorough-going democracy, — double measure, pressed
down and running over. She not only pardoned it,
but I think she loved it in me, for his sake.
It was about a year and a half, I think, after he
died, that she sent for Aunt Alice to come to Creston.
“Your aunt loves me,” she said, when she told us in
her quiet way, “and I am so lonely now.”
They had been the only children, and they loved
each other, — how much, I afterwards knew. And
how much they love each other now, I like to think,
— quite freely and fully, and without shadow or doubt
between them, I dare to hope.
A picture of Aunt Alice always hung in mother's
room. It was taken down years ago. I never asked
her where she put it. I remember it, though, quite
well; for mother's sake I am glad I do. For it was a
pleasant face to look upon, and a young, pure, happy
face, — beautiful too, though with none of the regal
beauty crowned by my mother's massive hair, and
pencilled brows. It was a timid, girlish face, with
reverent eyes, and ripe, tremulous lips, — weak lips,
as I remember them. From babyhood, I felt a want
in the face. I had, of course, no capacity to define
it; it was represented to me only by the fact that it
differed from my mother's.
She was teaching school out West when mother
sent for her. I saw the letter. It was just like my
mother: “Alice, I need you. You and I ought to
have but one home now. Will you come?”
I saw, too, a bit of postscript to the answer: “I 'm
not fit that you should love me so, Marie.”
And how mother laughed at it!
When it was all settled, and the waiting weeks became
at last a single day, I hardly knew my mother.
She was so full of fitful moods, and little fantastic
jokes! such a flush on her cheeks too, as she ran to
the window every five minutes, like a child! I remember
how we went all over the house together, she
and I, to see that everything looked neat, and bright,
and welcome. And how we lingered in the guestroom,
to put the little finishing touches to its stillness,
and coolness, and coseyness. The best spread was on
the bed, and the white folds smoothed as only mother's
fingers could smooth them; the curtain freshly washed,
and looped with its crimson cord; the blinds drawn,
cool and green; the late afternoon sunlight slanting
through, in flecks upon the floor. There were flowers,
too, upon the table. I remember they were all white,
— lilies of the valley, I think; and the vase of Parian
marble, itself a solitary lily, unfolding stainless leaves.
Over the mantle she had hung the finest picture in the
house, — an “Ecce Homo,” and an exquisite engraving.
It used to hang in grandmother's room in the old
house. We children wondered a little that she took it
upstairs.
“I want your aunt to feel at home, and see home
things,” she said. “I wish I could think of something
more to make it pleasant in here.”
Just as we left the room she turned and looked into
it. “Pleasant, is n't it? I am so glad, Sarah,” her
eyes dimming a little. “She 's a very dear sister to
me.”
She stepped in again to raise a stem of the lilies that
had fallen from the vase and lay like wax upon the
table, then she shut the door and came away.
That door was shut just so for years; the lonely bars
of sunlight flecked the solitude of the room, and the
lilies faded on the table. We children passed it with
hushed footfall, and shrank from it at twilight, as from
a room that held the dead. But into it we never
went.
Mother was tired out that afternoon; for she had
been on her feet all day, busied in her loving cares to
make our simple home as pleasant and as welcome as
home could be. But yet she stopped to dress us in our
Sunday clothes, — and it was no sinecure to dress three
persistently undressable children; Winthrop was a host
in himself. “Auntie must see us look our prettiest,”
she said.
She was a sight for an artist when she came down.
She had taken off her widow's cap and coiled her
heavy hair low in her neck, and she always looked
like a queen in that lustreless black silk. I do not
know why these little things should have made such
now. I remember how she looked, framed there in
the doorway, while we were watching for the coach,
— the late light ebbing in golden tides over the grass
at her feet, and touching her face now and then through
the branches of trees, her head bent a little, with eager,
parted lips, and the girlish color on her cheeks, her hand
shading her eyes as they strained for a sight of the
lumbering coach. She must have been a magnificent
woman when she was young, — not unlike, I have
heard it said, to that far-off ancestress whose name she
bore, and whose sorrowful story has made her sorrowful
beauty immortal. Somewhere abroad there is a
reclining statue of Queen Mary, to which, when my
mother stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong
that the by-standers clustered about her, whispering
curiously. “Ah, mon Dieu!” said a little Frenchman
aloud, “c'est une résurrection.”
We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and
Winthrop and I; for the spirit of her own excitement
had made us completely wild. Winthrop's scream of
delight, when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught
the first sight of the old yellow coach, might have
been heard a quarter of a mile.
“Coming?” said mother, nervously, and stepped
out to the gate, full in the sunlight that crowned her
like royal gold.
The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.
“Why, she has n't come!” All the eager color
speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly
into the house.
Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the
others, — I was the oldest, and she was used to make
a sort of confidence between us, instinctively, as it
seemed, and often quite forgetting how very few my
years were. “Sarah, I don't understand. You think
she might have lost the train? But Alice is so punctual.
Alice never lost a train. And she said she
would come.” And then, a while after, “I don't
understand.”
It was not like my mother to worry. The next day
the coach lumbered up and rattled past, and did not
stop, — and the next, and the next.
“We shall have a letter,” mother said, her eyes
saddening every afternoon. But we had no letter.
And another day went by, and another.
“She is sick,” we said; and mother wrote to her,
and watched for the lumbering coach, and grew silent
day by day. But to the letter there was no answer.
Ten days passed. Mother came to me one afternoon
to ask for her pen, which I had borrowed. Something
in her face troubled me vaguely.
“What are you going to do, mother?”
“Write to your aunt's boarding-place. I can't bear
this any longer.” She spoke sharply. She had
already grown unlike herself.
She wrote, and asked for an answer by return of
mail.
It was on a Wednesday, I remember, that we looked
for it. I came home early from school. Mother was
sewing at the parlor window, her eyes wandering from
her work, up the road. It was an ugly day. It had
rained drearily from eight o'clock till two, and closed
in suffocating mist, creeping and dense and chill. It
gave me a childish fancy of long-closed tombs and lowland
graveyards, as I walked home in it.
I tried to keep the younger children quiet when we
went in, mother was so nervous. As the early, uncanny
twilight fell, we grouped around her timidly.
A dull sense of awe and mystery clung to the night,
and clung to her watching face, and clung even then
to that closed room upstairs where the lilies were
fading.
Mother sat leaning her head upon her hand, the
outline of her face dim in the dusk against the falling
curtain. She was sitting so when we heard the first
rumble of the distant coach-wheels. At the sound,
she folded her hands in her lap and stirred a little, rose
slowly from her chair, and sat down again.
“Sarah.”
I crept up to her. At the near sight of her face, I
was so frightened I could have cried.
“Sarah, you may go out and get the letter. I — I
can't.”
I went slowly out at the door and down the walk.
was there against the window-pane, white in the
gathering gloom.
It seems to me that my older and less sensitive years
have never known such a night. The world was
stifling in a deluge of gray, cold mists, unstirred by a
breath of air. A robin with feathers all ruffled, and
head hidden, sat on the gate-post, and chirped a little
mournful chirp, like a creature dying in a vacuum.
The very daisy that nodded and drooped in the grass
at my feet seemed to be gasping for breath. The
neighbor's house, not forty paces across the street, was
invisible. I remember the sensation it gave me, as I
struggled to find its outlines, of a world washed out,
like the figures I washed out on my slate. As I
trudged, half frightened, into the road, and the fog
closed about me, it seemed to my childish superstition
like a horde of long-imprisoned ghosts let loose, and
angry. The distant sound of the coach, which I could
not see, added to the fancy.
The coach turned the corner presently. On a clear
day I could see the brass buttons on the driver's coat at
that distance. There was nothing visible now of the
whole dark structure but the two lamps in front, like
the eyes of some evil thing, glaring and defiant, borne
with swift motion down upon me by a power utterly
unseen, — it had a curious effect. Even at this time,
I confess I do not like to see a lighted carriage driven
through a fog.
I summoned all my little courage, and piped out the
driver's name, standing there in the road.
He remed up his horses with a shout, — he had
nearly driven over me. After some searching, he discovered
the small object cowering down in the mist,
handed me a letter, with a muttered oath at being intercepted
on such a night, and lumbered on and out
of sight in three rods.
I went slowly into the house. Mother had lighted
a lamp, and stood at the parlor door. She did not
come into the hall to meet me.
She took the letter and went to the light, holding it
with the seal unbroken. She might have stood so two
minutes.
“Why don't you read, mamma?” spoke up Winthrop.
I hushed him.
She opened it then, read it, laid it down upon the
table, and went out of the room without a word. I
had not seen her face. We heard her go upstairs and
shut the door.
She had left the letter open there before us. After
a little awed silence, Clara broke out into sobs. I
went up and read the few and simple lines.
Aunt Alice had left for Creston on the appointed day.
Mother spent that night in the closed room where
the lilies had drooped and died. Clara and I heard
her pacing the floor till we cried ourselves to sleep.
When we woke in the morning, she was pacing it
still.
Weeks wore into months, and the months became
many years. More than that we never knew. Some
inquiry revealed the fact, after a while, that a slight
accident had occurred, upon the Erie Railroad, to the
train which she should have taken. There was some
disabling, but no deaths, the conductor had supposed.
The car had fallen into the water. She might not
have been missed when the half-drowned passengers
were all drawn out.
So mother added a little crape to her widow's weeds,
the key of the closed room lay henceforth in her
drawer, and all things went on as before. To her
children my mother was never gloomy, — it was not
her way. No shadow of household affliction was
placed like a skeleton confronting our uncomprehending
joy. Of what those weeks and months and years
were to her — a widow, and quite uncomforted in
their dark places by any human love — she gave no
sign. We thought her a shade paler, perhaps. We
found her often alone with her little Bible. Sometimes,
on the Sabbath, we missed her, and knew that she
had gone into that closed room. But she was just as
tender with us in our little faults and sorrows, as merry
with us in our plays, as eager in our gayest plans, as
she had always been. As she had always been, — our
mother.
And so the years slipped from her and from us.
Winthrop went into business in Boston; he never
took to his books, and mother was too wise to push
He was her only boy, and she would have chosen for
him the profession of his father and grandfather.
Clara and I graduated in our white dresses and blue
ribbons, like other girls, and came home to mother,
crochet-work, and Tennyson. Just about here is the
proper place to begin my story.
I mean that about here our old and long-tried cook,
Bathsheba, who had been an heirloom in the family,
suddenly fell in love with the older sexton, who had
rung the passing-bell for every soul who died in the
village for forty years, and took it into her head to
marry him, and desert our kitchen for his little brown
house under the hill.
So it came about that we hunted the township for a
handmaiden; and it also came about that our inquiring
steps led us to the poor-house. A stout, not over-brilliant-looking
girl, about twelve years of age, was
to be had for her board and clothes, and such schooling
as we could give her, — in country fashion to be
“bound out” till she should be eighteen. The economy
of the arrangement decided in her favor; for, in
spite of our grand descent and grander notions, we
were poor enough, after father died, and the education
of three children had made no small gap in our little
principal, and she came.
Her name was a singular one, — Selphar. It
always savored too nearly of brimstone to please me.
I used to call her Sel, “for short.” She was a good,
large features, and limp, tow-colored curls. They
used to hang straight down about her eyes, and were
never otherwise than perfectly smooth. She proved
to be of good temper, which is worth quite as much as
brains in a servant, as honest as the daylight, dull
enough at her books, but a good, plodding worker, if
you marked out every step of the way for her beforehand.
I do not think she would ever have discovered
the laws of gravitation; but she might have jumped
off a precipice to prove them, if she had been bidden.
Until she was seventeen, she was precisely like any
other rather stupid girl; never given to novel-reading
or fancies; never frightened by the dark or ghoststories;
proving herself warmly attached to us, after
a while, and rousing in us, in return, the kindly interest
naturally felt for a faithful servant; but she was
not in any respect uncommon, — quite far from it, —
except in the circumstance that she never told a falsehood.
At seventeen she had a violent attack of diphtheria,
and her life hung by a thread. Mother was as tender
and unwearying in her care of her as the girl's own
mother might have been.
From that time, I believe, Sel was immovable in her
faith in her mistress's divinity. Under such nursing
as she had, she slowly recovered, but her old, stolid
strength never came back to her. Severe headaches
became of frequent occurrence. Her stout, muscular
in many ways that, though the diphtheria itself
was quite out of her system, it had left her thoroughly
diseased. Strange fits of silence came over her; her
volubility had been the greatest objection we had to
her hitherto. Her face began to wear a troubled look.
She was often found in places where she had stolen
away to be alone.
One morning she slept late in her little garret-chamber,
and we did not call her. The girl had gone
upstairs the night before crying with the pain in her
temples, and mother, who was always thoughtful of
her servants, said it was a pity to wake her, and, as
there were only three of us, we might get our own
breakfast for once. While we were at work together
in the kitchen, Clara heard her kitten mewing out in
the snow, and went to the door to let her in. The
creature, possessed by some sudden frolic, darted away
behind the well-curb. Clara was always a bit of a
romp, and, with never a thought of her daintily slippered
feet, she flung her trailing dress over one arm
and was off over the three-inch snow. The cat led
her a brisk chase, and she came in flushed and panting,
and pretty, her little feet drenched, and the tip
of a Maltese tail just visible above a great bundle she
had made of her apron.
“Why!” said mother, “you have lost your ear-ring.”
Clara dropped the kitten with unceremonious haste
and the corners of her mouth went down into her
dimpled chin.
“They 're the ones Winthrop sent, of all things in
the world!”
“You 'd better put on your rubbers, and have a
hunt out-doors,” said mother.
We hunted out-doors, — on the steps, on the well-boards,
in the wood-shed, in the snow; Clara looked
down the well till her nose and fingers were blue, but
the ear-ring was not to be found. We hunted indoors,
under the stove and the chairs and the table,
in every possible and impossible nook, cranny, and
crevice, but gave up the search in despair. It was a
pretty trinket, — a leaf of delicately wrought gold,
with a pearl dew-drop on it, — very becoming to
Clara, and the first present Winthrop had sent her
from his earnings. If she had been a little younger
she would have cried. She came very near it as it
was, I suspect, for when she went after the plates she
stayed in the cupboard long enough to set two tables.
When we were half through breakfast, Selphar
came down, blushing, and frightened half out of her
wits, her apologies tumbling over each other with
such skill as to render each one unintelligible, and
evidently undecided in her own mind whether she
was to be hung or burnt at the stake.
“It 's no matter at all,” said mother, kindly; “I
knew you felt sick last night. I should have called
you if I had needed you.”
Having set the girl at her ease, as only she could
do, she went on with her breakfast, and we forgot all
about her. She stayed, however, in the room to wait
on the table. It was afterwards remembered that she
had not been out of our sight since she came down
the garret-stairs. Also, that her room looked out
upon the opposite side of the house from that on
which the well-curb stood.
“Why, look at Sel!” said Clara, suddenly, “she
has her eyes shut.”
The girl was just passing the toast. Mother spoke
to her. “Selphar, what is the matter?”
“I don't know.”
“Why don't you open your eyes?”
“I can't.”
“Hand the salt to Miss Sarah.”
She took it up and brought it round the table to
me, with perfect precision.
“Sel, how you act!” said Clara, petulantly. “Of
course you saw.”
“Yes 'm, I saw,” said the girl in a puzzled way,
“but my eyes are shut, Miss Clara.”
“Tight?”
“Tight.”
Whatever this freak meant, we thought best to
take no notice of it. My mother told her, somewhat
gravely, that she might sit down until she was
wanted, and we returned to our conversation about
the ear-ring.
“Why!” said Sel, with a little jump, “I see your
ear-ring, Miss Clara, — the one with a white drop on
the leaf. It 's out by the well.”
The girl was sitting with her back to the window,
her eyes, to all appearance, tightly closed.
“It 's on the right-hand side, under the snow, between
the well and the wood-pile. Why, don't you
see?”
Clara began to look frightened, mother displeased.
“Selphar,” she said, “this is nonsense. It is impossible
for you to see through the walls of two rooms
and a wood-shed.”
“May I go and get it?” said the girl, quietly.
“Sel,” said Clara, “on your word and honor, are
your eyes shut perfectly tight?”
“If they ain't, Miss Clara, then they never was.”
Sel never told a lie. We looked at each other, and
let her go. I followed her out and kept my eyes on
her closed lids. She did not once raise them; nor did
they tremble, as lids will tremble, if only partially
closed.
She walked without the slightest hesitation directly
to the well-curb, to the spot which she had mentioned,
stooped down, and brushed away the three-inch fall
of snow. The ear-ring lay there, where it had sunk
in falling. She picked it up, carried it in, and gave it
to Clara.
That Clara had the thing on when she started after
her kitten, there could be no doubt. She and I both
of the house, could not have seen it drop, was also
settled. That she, with her eyes closed and her back
to the window, had seen through three walls and
through three inches of snow, at a distance of fifty
feet, was an inference.
“I don't believe it!” said my mother, “it 's some
nonsensical mistake.” Clara looked a little pale, and
I laughed.
We watched her carefully through the day. Her
eyes remained tightly closed. She understood all that
was said to her, answered correctly, but did not seem
inclined to talk. She went about her work as usual,
and performed it without a mistake. It could not be
seen that she groped at all with her hands to feel her
way, as is the case with the blind. On the contrary,
she touched everything with her usual decision. It
was impossible to believe, without seeing them, that
her eyes were closed.
We tied a handkerchief tightly over them; see
through it or below it she could not, if she had tried.
We then sent her into the parlor, with orders to bring
from the book-case two Bibles which had been given
as prizes to Clara and me at school, when we were
children. The books were of precisely the same size,
color, and texture. Our names in gilt letters were
printed upon the binding. We followed her in, and
watched her narrowly. She went directly to the
book-case, laid her hands upon the books at once,
them from hand to hand several times, and turned
them with the gilt lettering downwards upon her
lap.
“Now, Selphar, which is Miss Sarah's?”
The girl quietly took mine up. The experiment
was repeated and varied again and again. In every
case the result was the same. She made no mistake.
It was no guess-work. All this was done with the
bandage tightly drawn about her eyes. She did not
see those letters with them.
That evening we were sitting quietly in the dining-room.
Selphar sat a little apart with her sewing, her
eyes still closed. We kept her with us, and kept her
in sight. The parlor, which was a long room, was
between us and the front of the house. The distance
was so great that we had often thought, if prowlers
were to come around at night, how impossible it
would be to hear them. The curtains and shutters
were closely drawn. Sel was sitting by the fire.
Suddenly she turned pale, dropped her sewing, and
sprang from her chair.
“Robbers, robbers!” she cried. “Don't you see?
they 're getting in the east parlor window! There 's
three of 'em, and a lantern. They 've just opened
the window, — hurry, hurry!”
“I believe the girl is insane,” said mother, decidedly.
Nevertheless, she put out the light, opened the
parlor door noiselessly, and went in.
The east window was open. There was a quick
vision of three men and a dark lantern. Then Clara
screamed, and it disappeared. We went to the window,
and saw the men running down the street. The
snow the next morning was found trodden down under
the window, and their footprints were traced out to
the road.
When we went back to the other room, Selphar
was standing in the middle of it, a puzzled, frightened
look on her face, her eyes wide open.
“Selphar,” said my mother, a little suspiciously,
“how did you know the robbers were there?”
“Robbers!” said the girl, aghast.
She knew nothing of the robbers. She knew nothing
of the ear-ring. She remembered nothing that
had happened since she went up the garret-stairs to
bed, the night before. And, as I said, the girl was as
honest as the sunlight. When we told her what had
happened, she burst into terrified tears.
For some time after this there was no return of the
“tantrums,” as Selphar had called the condition, whatever
it was. I began to get up vague theories of a
trance state. But mother said, “Nonsense!” and
Clara was too much frightened to reason at all about
the matter.
One Sunday morning Sel complained of a headache.
There was service that evening, and we all
went to church. Mother let Sel take the empty seat
in the carryall beside her.
It was very dark when we started to come home.
But Creston was a safe old Orthodox town, the roads
were filled with returning church-goers like ourselves,
and mother drove like a man. A darker night I think
I have never seen. Literally, we could not see a hand
before our eyes. We met a carriage on a narrow road,
and the horses' heads touched, before either driver had
seen the other.
Selphar had been quite silent during the drive. I
leaned forward, looked closely into her face, and could
dimly see through the darkness that her eyes were
closed.
“Why!” she said at last, “see those gloves!”
“Where?”
“Down in the ditch; we passed them before I
spoke. I see them on a blackberry-bush; they 've
got little brass buttons on the wrist.”
Three rods past now, and we could not see our
horse's head.
“Selphar,” said my mother, quickly, “what is the
matter with you?”
“If you please, ma'am, I don't know,” replied the
girl, hanging her head. “May I get out and bring
'em to you?”
Prince was reined up, and Sel got out. She went
so far back, that, though we strained our eyes to do it,
we could not see her. In about two minutes she came
up, a pair of gentleman's gloves in her hand. They
were rolled together, were of cloth so black that on a
small brass buttons at the wrist.
Mother took them without a word.
The story leaked out somehow, and spread all over
town. It raised a great hue and cry. Four or five
antediluvian ladies declared at once that we were
nothing more nor less than a family of “them
spirituous mediums,” and seriously proposed to expel
mother from the prayer-meeting. Masculine Creston
did worse. It smiled a pitying smile, and pronounced
the whole thing the fancy of “sacred women-folks.”
I could endure with calmness any slander upon earth
but that. I bore it a number of weeks, till at last,
driven by despair, I sent for Winthrop, and stated the
case to him in a condition of suppressed fury. He
very politely bit back an incredulous smile, and said
he should be very happy to see her perform. The
answer was somewhat dubious. I accepted it in
silent suspicion.
He came on a Saturday noon. That afternoon we
attended en masse one of those refined inquisitions
commonly known as picnics, and Winthrop lost his
pocket-knife. Selphar, of course, kept house at home.
When we returned, Winthrop made some careless
reference to his loss in her presence, and thought no
more of it. About half an hour after, we observed
that she was washing the dishes with her eyes shut.
The condition had not been upon her five minutes before
she dropped the spoon suddenly into the water,
Mr. Winthrop's knife somewhere under a stone, and
wanted to get it.” It was fully two miles to the picnic
grounds, and nearly dark. Winthrop followed the
girl, unknown to her, and kept her in sight. She
went rapidly, and without the slightest hesitation or
search, to an out-of-the-way gully down by the pond,
where Winthrop afterwards remembered having gone
to cut some willow-twigs for the girls, parted a thick
cluster of bushes, lifted a large, loose stone under
which the knife had rolled, and picked it up. She
returned it to Winthrop, quietly, and hurried away
about her work to avoid being thanked.
I observed that, after this incident, masculine Creston
became more respectful.
Of several peculiarities in this development of the
girl I made at the time careful memoranda, and the
exactness of these can be relied upon.
1. She herself, so far from attempting to bring on
these trance states, or taking any pride therein, was
intensely troubled and mortified by them, — would run
out of the room, if she felt them coming on in the
presence of visitors.
2. They were apt to be preceded by severe headaches,
but came often without any warning.
3. She never, in any instance, recalled anything
that happened during the trance, after it was passed.
4. She was powerfully and unpleasantly affected by
electricity from a battery, or acting in milder forms.
arms into hot water; the effect was to paralyze them
at once.
5. Space proved to be no impediment to her vision.
She has been known to follow the acts, words, and
expressions of countenance of members of the family
hundreds of miles away, with accuracy as was afterwards
proved by comparing notes as to time.
6. The girl's eyes, after her trances became habitual,
assumed, and always retained, the most singular expression
I ever saw on any face. They were oblong
and narrow, and set back in her head like the eyes of
a snake. They were not — smile if you will, O practical
and incredulous reader! but they were not —
human eyes. The eyes of Elsie Venner are the only
eyes I can think of as at all like them. The most
horrible circumstance about them — a circumstance
that always made me shudder, familiar as I was with
it — was, that, though turned fully on you, they never
looked at you. Something behind them or out of them
did the seeing, not they.
7. She not only saw substance, but soul. She has
repeatedly told me my thoughts when they were upon
subjects to which she could not by any possibility have
had the slightest clew.
8. We were never able to detect a shadow of deceit
about her.
9. The clairvoyance never failed in any instance to
be correct, so far as we were able to trace it.
As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful
member of the family. The lost valuables restored
and the warnings against mischances given by her
quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of
work. This incapacity, however, rather increased
than diminished, and, together with her fickle health,
which also grew more unsettled, caused us a great
deal of care. The Creston physician — who was a
keen man in his way, for a country doctor — pronounced
the case altogether undreamt of before in
Horatio's philosophy, and kept constant notes of it.
Some of these have, I believe, found their way into
the medical journals.
After a while there came, like a thief in the night,
that which I suppose was poor Selphar's one unconscious,
golden mission in this world. It came on a
quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a
week's continuance. Mother had gone out into the
kitchen to give an order for breakfast. I heard a few
eager words in Selphar's voice, and then the door shut
quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.
Then my mother came to me without a particle of
color in lips or cheek, and drew me away alone, and
told the secret to me.
Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.
We sat down and looked at one another. There
was a singular, pinched look about my mother's mouth.
“Sarah.”
“Yes.”
“She says” — and then she told me what she said.
She had seen Alice Stuart in a Western town, seven
hundred miles away. Among the living, she desired
to be counted of the dead. And that was all.
My mother paced the room three times back and
forth, her hands locked.
“Sarah.” There was a chill in her voice — it had
been such a gentle voice! — that froze me. “Sarah,
the girl is an impostor.”
“Mother!”
She paced the room once more, three times, back
and forth. “At any rate, she is a poor, self-deluded
creature. How can she see, seven hundred miles
away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these
years? Think! an angel, Sarah! So much better
than I, and I — I loved —”
Before or since, I never heard my mother speak
like that. She broke off sharply, and froze back into
her chilling voice.
“We will say nothing about this, if you please. I
do not believe a word of it.”
We said nothing about it, but Selphar did. The
delusion, if delusion it were, clung to her, haunted her,
pursued her, week after week. To rid her of it, or to
silence her, was impossible. She added no new facts to
her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead
was yet alive, with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply
impossible to ridicule, frighten, threaten, or cross-question
out of her. Clara was so thoroughly alarmed
perhaps not for any immortal — considerations. Winthrop
and I talked the matter over often and gravely
when we were alone and in quiet places. Mother's
lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the
first disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to
the matter. A perceptible haughtiness crept into her
manner towards the girl. She even talked of dismissing
her, but repented it, and melted into momentary
gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I
was beginning to understand what a pitiful struggle
her life had become, and how alone she must be in it.
She would not believe — she knew not what. She
could not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even
her children could not intermeddle.
To understand the crisis into which she was brought,
the reader must bear in mind our long habit of belief,
not only in Selphar's personal honesty, but in the infallibility
of her mysterious power. Indeed, it had
almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity.
We had come to regard it as the curious
working of physical disease, had taken its results as a
matter of course, and had ceased, in common with
converted Creston, to doubt the girl's capacity for
seeing anything that she chose to, at any place.
Thus a year worried on. My mother grew sleepless
and pallid. She laughed often, in a nervous,
shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike a
sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness
and hardness unutterably painful to me.
Once only I ventured to break into the silence of
the haunting thought that, she knew and we knew,
was never escaped by either. “Mother, it would do
no harm for Winthrop to go out West, and —”
She interrupted me sternly: “Sarah, I had not
thought you capable of such childish supersition. I
wish that girl and her nonsense had never come into
this house!” — turning sharply away, and out of the
room.
But year and struggle ended. They ended at last,
as I had prayed every night and morning of it that
they should end. Mother came into my room one
night, locked the door behind her, and walking over
to the window, stood with her face turned from me,
and softly spoke my name.
But that was all, for a little while. Then, — “Sick
and in suffering, Sarah! The girl, — she may be right;
God Almighty knows! Sick and in suffering, you
see! I am going — I think.” Then her voice broke.
Creston put on its spectacles and looked wise on
learning, the next day, that Mrs. Dugald had taken
the earliest morning train for the West, on sudden
and important business. It was precisely what
Creston expected, and just like the Dugalds for all the
world, — gone to hunt up material for that genealogical
book, or map, or tree, or something, that they thought
nobody knew they were going to publish. O yes,
Creston understood it perfectly.
Space forbids me to relate in detail the clews which
Her trances, just at this time, were somewhat
scarce and fragmentary, and the information she had
professed to give had come in snatches and very imperfectly,
— the trance being apt to end suddenly at
the moment when some important question was pending,
and then, of course, all memory of what she had
said, or was about to say, was gone. The names and
appearance of persons and places necessary to the
search had, however, been given with sufficient distinctness
to serve as a guide in my mother's rather
chimerical undertaking. I suppose ninety-nine persons
out of a hundred would have thought her a candidate
for the State Lunatic Asylum. Exactly what
she herself expected, hoped, or feared, I think it doubtful
if she knew. I confess to a condition of simple
bewilderment, when she was fairly gone, and Clara and
I were left alone with Selphar's ghostly eyes forever
on us. One night I had to lock the poor thing into
her garret-room before I could sleep.
Just three weeks from the day on which mother
started for the West, the coach rattled up to the door,
and two women, arm in arm, came slowly up the
walk. The one, erect, royal, with her great steadfast
eyes alight; the other, bent and worn, gray-haired
and shallow and dumb, crawling feebly through the
golden afternoon sunshine, as the ghost of a glorious
life might crawl back to its grave.
Mother threw open the door, and stood there like a
is too tired to talk just now. By and by she will be
glad to see you.”
We took her gently upstairs, into the room where
the lilies were mouldering to dust, and laid her down
upon the bed. She closed her eyes wearily, turned
her face over to the wall, and said no word.
What was the story of those tired eyes I never asked
and I never knew. Once, as I passed the room, I saw,
— and have always been glad that I saw, — through
the open door, the two women lying with their arms
about each other's neck, as they used to do when
they were children together, and above them, still
and watchful, the wounded Face that had waited
there so many years for this.
She lingered weakly there, within the restful room,
for seven days, and then one morning we found her
with her eyes upon the thorn-crowned Face, her own
quite still and smiling.
A little funeral train wound away one night behind
the church, and left her down among those red-cup
mosses that opened in so few months again to cradle
the sister who had loved her. Her name only, by
mother's orders, marked the headstone.
I have given you facts. Explain them as you will.
I do not attempt it, for the simple reason that I
cannot.
A word must be said as to the fate of poor Sel,
gradually more frequent and erratic, till she became
so thoroughly diseased in mind and body as to be
entirely unfitted for household work, and, in short,
nothing but an encumbrance. We kept her, however,
for the sake of charity, and should have done so till
her poor, tormented life wore itself out; but after the
advent of a new servant, and my mother's death, she
conceived the idea that she was a burden, cried over
it a few weeks, and at last, one bitter winter's night, she
disappeared. We did not give up all search for her for
years, but nothing was ever heard from her. He, I
hope, who permitted life to be such a terrible mystery
to her, has cared for her somehow, and kindly and
well.
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