We used the pronoun that followed in the same breath, for I answered my own question at the same moment as she did:
‘His.’ Our heads nodded involuntarily towards the floor, the dining-room being directly underneath.
And my heart sank, my curiosity died away on the instant, I felt bored. A commonplace haunted house was the last thing in the world to amuse or interest me. The mere thought exasperated, with its suggestions of imagination, overwrought nerves, hysteria, and the rest. Mingled with my other feelings was certainly disappointment. To see a figure or feel a ‘presence,’ and report from day to day strange incidents to each other would be a form of weariness I could never tolerate.
‘But really, Frances,’ I said firmly, after a moment’s pause, ‘it’s too far-fetched, this explanation. A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost stories of early Victorian days.’ And only my positive conviction that there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could. ‘This is not a haunted house, whatever it is,’ I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my hand down upon her odious portfolio.
My sister’s reply revived my curiosity sharply.
‘I was waiting for you to say that. Mabel says exactly the same. He is in it—but it’s something more than that alone, something far bigger and more complicated.’ Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to discuss them with her just then, indeed, if ever.
I merely stared at her and listened. Questions, I felt sure, would be of little use. It was better she should say her thought in her own way.
‘He is one influence, the most recent,’ she went on slowly, and always very calmly, ‘but there are others—deeper layers, as it were—underneath. If his were the only one, something would happen. But nothing ever does happen. The others hinder and prevent—as though each were struggling to predominate.’
I had felt it already myself. The idea was rather horrible. I shivered.
‘That’s what is so ugly about it—that nothing ever happens,’ she said. ‘There is this endless anticipation—always on the dry edge of a result that never materialises. It is torture. Mabel is at her wits’ end, you see. And when she begged me—what I felt about my sketches—I mean——’ She stammered badly as before.