“Come in, come in,” she fluted, cocking her white untidy head on one side and rolling her bulging blue eyes at me. The horrible thing was that she still practised the same arts, all the childish wiles of a clumsy capering coquetry. I felt her pull on my sleeve and it drew me in her wake like a steel cable.
The room she led me into was—well, “unchanged” is the term generally used in such cases. For as a rule, after people die, things are tidied up, furniture is sold, remembrances are despatched to the family. But some morbid piety (or Grace’s instructions, perhaps) had kept this room looking exactly as I supposed it had in Miss Pask’s lifetime. I wasn’t in the mood for noting details; but in the faint dabble of moving candle-light I was half aware of bedraggled cushions, odds and ends of copper pots, and a jar holding a faded branch of some late-flowering shrub. A real Mary Pask “interior”!
The white figure flitted spectrally to the chimney-piece, lit two more candles, and set down the third on a table. I hadn’t supposed I was superstitious—but those three candles! Hardly knowing what I did, I hurriedly bent and blew one out. Her laugh sounded behind me.
“Three candles—you still mind that sort of thing? I’ve got beyond all that, you know,” she chuckled. “Such a comfort ... such a sense of freedom....” A fresh shiver joined the others already coursing over me.
“Come and sit down by me,” she entreated, sinking to a sofa. “It’s such an age since I’ve seen a living being!”
Her choice of terms was certainly strange, and as she leaned back on the white slippery sofa and beckoned me with one of those unburied hands my impulse was to turn and run. But her old face, hovering there in the candle-light, with the unnaturally red cheeks like varnished apples and the blue eyes swimming in vague kindliness, seemed to appeal to me against my cowardice, to remind me that, dead or alive, Mary Pask would never harm a fly.
“Do sit down!” she repeated, and I took the other corner of the sofa.
“It’s so wonderfully good of you—I suppose Grace asked you to come?” She laughed again—her conversation had always been punctuated by rambling laughter. “It’s an event—quite an event! I’ve had so few visitors since my death, you see.”
Another bucketful of cold water ran over me; but I looked at her resolutely, and again the innocence of her face disarmed me.
I cleared my throat and spoke—with a huge panting effort, as if I had been heaving up a grave-stone. “You live here alone?” I brought out.