There was little fear that this would ever happen, but it was a tender injunction which Grandmother Capers never failed to give.
She returned to her own bed, and fell into another “cat nap,” from which she was roused again, after a brief interval, by hearing Melville breathing deeply and in a manner to startle anybody even less doting than she. Quietly as a mouse, fearing further rebuff, the old lady crept forward until she could peer through the doorway.
Melville was not asleep. He was sitting as nearly upright in bed as he was able to do, and his eyes were fixed upon the open window, and the moonlight which he loved, and which, though against his faithful nurse’s judgment, he insisted should never be shut out by curtains.
The moonlight? Something far whiter and brighter than that. Something which moved up and down, up and down, slowly and monotonously.
Grandmother Capers’s eyes followed her grandson’s, and for the first time in her life she became oblivious to his existence.
Even in modern America there are some houses old enough to have ghostly traditions, and The Snuggery was one of these. On certain nights of the midsummer, when the moon was at its full, “spirits were seen to walk,” through the box-bordered garden-paths; and to sway rhythmically, like folks in “meeting,” above the shaven lawn. These old tales had always been recounted, but it was not until within the last five years, and since the ocean shipwreck which had brought such heart shipwreck to the old homestead, that some voices whispered knowingly how one of these wandering spirits was that of the drowned daughter of the house.
What more fitting, then, than that, on the very first night of their arrival here, the ghost of the children’s mother should revisit the home of her childhood and now of theirs?
Grandmother Capers did not for one instant question the evidence of her senses. She was credulous by nature, and somewhat ignorant, despite her many years, and she remained spellbound where she had paused.
Up and down, up and down, the tall slim creature of the upper air moved, as if blown about by the wind. Grandmother did not have on her spectacles, but she was moderately sharp of vision still; and she was sure that the ghost had long blonde hair and blue eyes. So had Lydia Kinsolving, in the days of her youth.
Then the watcher became conscious that it was not an aimless tossing of ethereal substance that made the light wind’s sport; there was motion, and method in the motion, which seemed strangely familiar to Margaret Capers. Oddly enough, the days of her own youth and belleship recurred to her; days in which she had danced in stately waltzes as unlike the modern ones as grace is unlike awkwardness.