Kelvin, for his part, was very quiet. He was a conundrum, that man. Once the keenest of sportsmen, he was now for years become an almost sentimental humanitarian—and illogical, of necessity. He would not consent to kill under any circumstances—wilfully, that is to say; but he enjoyed his mutton with the best of us. However, I am not quarrelling with his point of view. He, for one—by his own admission, anyhow—owed a life to “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,” and he would not, from the date of his debt, cross her prerogatives. The same occasion, it appeared, had opened in him an unstanchable vein of superstition, which was wont to gush—bloodily, I might say—in depressing seasons of the mind. It provoked me, on the evening of the present anecdote, to a sort of peevish protest.
“Why the devil,” I said, “are spectral manifestations—at least, according to you fellows—everlastingly morbid and ugly? Are there no gentle disembodied things, who, of their love and pity, would be rather more anxious than the wicked, one would think, to communicate with their survivors?”
“Of course,” said Kelvin; “but their brief sweet little reassurances pass unnoticed. Their forms are insignificant, their voices inarticulate; they can only appeal by symbol, desperately clinging to the earth the while. On the other hand, the world tethers its worldlings by the foot, so that they cannot take flight when they will. There remains, so to speak, too much earth in their composition, and it keeps ’em subject to the laws of gravitation.”
I laughed; then shrugged impatiently.
“What a rasping night it is! The devil take that moth!”
The window was shut, and the persistent whirring and tapping of a big white insect on the glass outside jarred irritably on my nerves.
“Let it in, for goodness’ sake,” I said, “if it will insist on making a holocaust of itself!”
Kelvin had looked up when I first spoke. Now he rose, with shining eyes, and a curious little sigh of the sort that one vents on the receipt of wonderful news coming out of suspense.
“Yes, I’ll open the window,” he said low; and with the word threw up the casement. The moth whizzed in, whizzed round, and settled on his hand. He lifted it, with an odd set smile, into the intimate range of his vision, and scrutinized it intently. Suddenly and quickly, then, as if satisfied about something, he held it away from him.
“Ite missa est!” he murmured, quoting some words of the Mass (he was a Catholic); and the moth fluttered and rose. Now, you may believe it or not; but there was a fire burning on the hearth, and straight for that fire went the moth, and seemed to go up with the smoke into the chimney. I was so astonished that I gasped; but Kelvin appeared serenely unconcerned as he faced round on me.