Mrs. Lister seemed suddenly to repent her vehemence.
"That he was alienated from us," said she. "Isn't that enough? And I shall never get over grieving for him. If he had done as my father wished he might have been here with us yet, and not be lying in his grave!"
"But he did live intensely. He probably got more happiness out of a day than ordinary mortals get out of a month. And you must learn not to grieve. It's unnatural. You have Richard and all your friends—and me!"
Mrs. Lister was slow to take comfort. For several days she did little but wander round the quiet house. It dawned upon her presently that the house was unusually quiet and that she had seen little of Richard since Commencement. In the thought of him she found at last her accustomed consolation. He was normal; he would give her no hours of misery as Basil had. He would do just what she wanted him to do—he was darling—even to think of him healed.
But where was Richard? Probably at Thomasina's. Mrs. Lister put on her bonnet and walked thither.
Richard was not there, and Thomasina in her trying way would talk of nothing but his musical talent. She had an annoying fashion of assuming that people agreed with her. When Mrs. Lister reached home, Richard had not come.
During the absence of his wife, Dr. Lister had visited the third story and looked through some of Basil's belongings. In the bottom of his little trunk lay his books, his tiny Euripides and his Æschylus with their poor print and their many notes. How strange it was to think of these books as the pocket companions of a young man! How mad to pick quarrels with any young man who went thus companioned!
The old bureau in which Mrs. Lister kept Basil's clothing was locked. From it came still a faint, indeterminate, sickening odor of disinfectants, and more faintly still that of tobacco. In the corner stood his stick, that stick which he had doubtless carried with him into the Ragged Mountains. Dr. Lister saw him suddenly, his cane held aloft like a banner, his eyes shining. He felt a chilling sensation along his spine. Then he smiled. Thus traditions of haunted rooms were established. The boy was dead, dead. Dr. Lister said the word aloud. The shrine was empty, deserted, forlorn.
For a long time he sat by the window in the dim, hot room. He meant to shake off the vague, uncanny sensations which he felt; he said to himself that he was too sober and too old for any such nonsense as this.
But while he sat still, his eyes now on the smooth white bed, now on a faded picture of Basil's mother above the bed, now on the bureau with its linen cover and its beadwork pincushion, his heart began to throb. He remembered a picture of Basil somewhere in the house, a picture brighter, younger, less severe than the one in the family album; he must ask Mary Alcestis to find it for him. He saw the boy, eager, alert, with a sort of strangeness about him as his sister had said, the unnatural product of this puritanic household in which he was set to grow. He did not like regular meals—even Dr. Lister had hated them in his youth. He had not liked to go to bed when other people went or to get up when they got up. Did any boy ever like it in the history of the world? His father had once or twice punished him—"corporally." A portrait of Dr. Everman hung in the library—it was difficult to fancy that delicate hand clutching a weapon, especially a weapon brandished over his own flesh and blood!