When I was well enough to trust myself to think about it all again I found that a very little thinking got my temperature up, and my heart hammering in my throat. No use.... I simply couldn’t stand it ... for I’d seen Grace Bridgeworth in crape, weeping over the cable, and yet I’d sat and talked with her sister, on the same sofa—her sister who’d been dead a year!
The circle was a vicious one; I couldn’t break through it. The fact that I was down with fever the next morning might have explained it; yet I couldn’t get away from the clinging reality of the vision. Supposing it was a ghost I had been talking to, and not a mere projection of my fever? Supposing something survived of Mary Pask—enough to cry out to me the unuttered loneliness of a lifetime, to express at last what the living woman had always had to keep dumb and hidden? The thought moved me curiously—in my weakness I lay and wept over it. No end of women were like that, I supposed, and perhaps, after death, if they got their chance they tried to use it.... Old tales and legends floated through my mind; the bride of Corinth, the mediaeval vampire—but what names to attach to the plaintive image of Mary Pask!
My weak mind wandered in and out among these visions and conjectures, and the longer I lived with them the more convinced I became that something which had been Mary Pask had talked with me that night.... I made up my mind, when I was up again, to drive back to the place (in broad daylight, this time), to hunt out the grave in the garden—that “shady corner where the sun never bothers one”—and appease the poor ghost with a few flowers. But the doctors decided otherwise; and perhaps my weak will unknowingly abetted them. At any rate, I yielded to their insistence that I should be driven straight from my hotel to the train for Paris, and thence transshipped, like a piece of luggage, to the Swiss sanatorium they had in view for me. Of course I meant to come back when I was patched up again ... and meanwhile, more and more tenderly, but more intermittently, my thoughts went back from my snow-mountain to that wailing autumn night above the Baie des Trépassés, and the revelation of the dead Mary Pask who was so much more real to me than ever the living one had been.
IV
After all, why should I tell Grace Bridgeworth—ever? I had had a glimpse of things that were really no business of hers. If the revelation had been vouchsafed to me, ought I not to bury it in those deepest depths where the inexplicable and the unforgettable sleep together? And besides, what interest could there be to a woman like Grace in a tale she could neither understand nor believe in? She would just set me down as “queer”—and enough people had done that already. My first object, when I finally did get back to New York, was to convince everybody of my complete return to mental and physical soundness; and into this scheme of evidence my experience with Mary Pask did not seem to fit. All things considered, I would hold my tongue.
But after a while the thought of the grave began to trouble me. I wondered if Grace had ever had a proper grave-stone put on it. The queer neglected look of the house gave me the idea that perhaps she had done nothing—had brushed the whole matter aside, to be attended to when she next went abroad. “Grace forgets,” I heard the poor ghost quaver.... No, decidedly, there could be no harm in putting (tactfully) just that one question about the care of the grave; the more so as I was beginning to reproach myself for not having gone back to see with my own eyes how it was kept....
Grace and Horace welcomed me with all their old friendliness, and I soon slipped into the habit of dropping in on them for a meal when I thought they were likely to be alone. Nevertheless my opportunity didn’t come at once—I had to wait for some weeks. And then one evening, when Horace was dining out and I sat alone with Grace, my glance lit on a photograph of her sister—an old faded photograph which seemed to meet my eyes reproachfully.
“By the way, Grace,” I began with a jerk, “I don’t believe I ever told you: I went down to that little place of ... of your sister’s the day before I had that bad relapse.”
At once her face lit up emotionally. “No, you never told me. How sweet of you to go!” The ready tears overbrimmed her eyes. “I’m so glad you did.” She lowered her voice and added softly: “And did you see her?”
The question sent one of my old shudders over me. I looked with amazement at Mrs. Bridgeworth’s plump face, smiling at me through a veil of painless tears. “I do reproach myself more and more about darling Mary,” she added tremulously. “But tell me—tell me everything.”