“Yes, I know. It sounds very natural as you put it. But, Mr. North, it is more than that. How shall I explain it? My mind is in touch somehow with another mind. It is like a conscious and quiet effortless telepathy. Thoughts, feelings, they pass between us without any words being necessary. It is another mind than mine which thinks, ‘It will be better to put that field down in lucerne this year,’ when I had been thinking of oats. But I catch the thought, and might not he catch mine? In the same way I feel when he is pleased; that is the most certain of all.”
Roger North shook his head.
“Such telepathy might be possible if he were alive,” he said. “We have much to learn on those lines. But there was no doubt as to his fate. He was killed instantaneously at Albert.”
“You do not think any communication possible after death?”
There was a pause before North answered.
“Science has no evidence of it.”
“I could not help wondering,” said Ruth diffidently, and feeling as it were for her words, “whether this method by which what he thinks or wishes about Thorpe seems to come to me might not possibly be the method used for communication on some other plane in the place of speech. Words are by no means a very good medium for expressing our thoughts, do you think?”
“Very inadequate indeed,” agreed North. He got up as he spoke, and passed behind her, ostensibly to knock the ashes out of his pipe against the window-sill. When he came back to his chair he did not continue the line of conversation.
“You asked me to tell you something of my friend, Dick Carey,” he said as he sat down. “And at any rate what you have told me gives you, I feel, the right to ask. There isn’t much to tell. We were at school and college together. Charterhouse and Trinity. And we knocked about the world a good bit together till I married. Then he took Thorpe and settled down to farming. He loved the place, as you have discovered. And he loved all beasts and birds. A wonderful chap with horses, clever too on other lines, which isn’t always the case. A great reader and a bit of a musician. He went to France with Kitchener’s first hundred thousand, and he lived through two years of that hell. He wasn’t decorated, or mentioned in dispatches, but I saw the men he commanded, and cared for, and fought with. They knew. They knew what one of them called ‘the splendid best’ of him. Oh well! I suppose he was like many another we lost out there, but for me, when he died, it was as if a light had gone out and all the world was a darker place.”
“Thank you,” said Ruth quite simply, yet the words said much.