Did you know that you were giving me to one whose thoughts, opinions, feelings are the very opposite of your own? This is the great, important question I am trying to put to you—in my mind—for it is no use to cry out to you, you cannot hear me. Oh! it is important, most important! For why should you have educated me so carefully in the common sense conformity of actualities, if you meant me to adopt the ordinary myths which he believes? He tells me you knew his opinions, that he concealed nothing from you. He cannot lie. So I am to think that you felt a secret dissatisfaction with your own explanations of the awful mysteries of human life and the universe, and preferred I should adopt the blind weaving of human fancies they call faith—religion. Can it be? Can it be? I cannot, cannot understand you.
I have sought your spirit everywhere—by your grave, in your favourite haunts, in your room. I have knelt and grovelled, imploring you to give me one sign, to comfort me with a passing breath. No! no! I have felt nothing—but a blank—a silence—death!...
Still, you, or what remains of you, may be dimly impressed with my burning, fiery thoughts; so I concentrate them and write them down. If Thought in Matter can communicate with disembodied Thought, the moment may come when you will in some way become acquainted with these sentences.
So I will tell you how the fulfilling of your will has come about.
I could not sleep last night—no, not last night, the night after your burial. In the morning—(fancy, that was only yesterday morning, though it seems so far away it might have been fifty years ago!)—I had no courage left. I could not see him. I sent Mammy Mervyn to tell him so. When she came back I asked her what he said. She answered, “Nothing.” I said: “He must have said something.” She said: “No. He bowed his head, and answered some question James had just asked him.”
Somehow, this silence rebuked me, and I felt I was not behaving with due respect to your chosen heir, for that is what he really is. So all day long I tried to nerve myself for what I had to do, which was to tell him I could not accept the sacrifice of himself, but that I was ready and glad to place myself in the position of his younger sister, as you had placed him in the position of an eldest—indeed, an only son. This would be very hard to say truthfully, feeling, as I do, that to be his own wife is the greatest happiness that any living woman on the face of this earth can possibly attain. When evening came, I could not face him. I felt worn out. I sent him a little note, telling him I would see him to-morrow morning (this morning); and locking myself into my room, went to bed and tried to sleep.
Sleep was impossible. The night was chill, I knew, though I was hot. The moonlight would not be shut out. I heard the quarters chime, the hours strike, the noises in the house cease one by one, till the last door up above shut softly, and the house had its night hush on, which, when you and I were reading together late, you used to call its “nightcap.” Only that last night that we were trying to find out something of the separate will-power, commonly called “the human soul,” you said, “We must wait till the house has put on its nightcap;” and when the hush came, you laid down your long pipe, and with that peculiar smile which meant work, you said, “Come along!”
Then, as I lay tossing, eleven struck, and a thought came to me as a lightning flash.
There is an old notion that midnight or thereabouts is the time when disembodied spirit-essence can manifest itself in some way; and, as you have often seriously said to me, there is always at least a spark of fire underlying the dense smoke of these popular fallacies.
I had not tried to find you in the dead of night yet! I got up, put on a winter dressing-gown, wrapped my head in a veil, and, going softly downstairs, went out into the pinewood.