CHAPTER XLIV: CHRISTMAS NIGHT
In the slow weeks that followed my Grandmother's death I never came face to face with my own sorrow. My brain told me the sorrow was there, but my will, reinforced by a numbness that possessed my spirit, forbade my facing or feeling it. Never did I dare to summon the vision. It was mockery. It had been a mockery all through.
But the soul lives on, leaves death behind, is the same for ever: can we not be together still, Robbie on the other side of death, Mary on this? The notion came fearfully at first, then boldlier. Dare I try to discover? Does God permit us to love across the grave?—Even so, in my innermost heart, I knew that a love which could bridge the gulf would still be a love not quite completed, since not completed and perfected between us both together here on earth.—Could I then bring him back to life? Instinct intimated and Prayer confirmed. On Christmas Night, now two or three weeks ahead, I would seek him just as before. Till then I must possess my soul in emptiness.
The literal loneliness of the dead house helped to hush my spirit. There were still some years of the lease of Number Eight to run; I decided for the present to live on there, absolutely alone. With Grandmother's and Aunt Jael's income—all of which save a small legacy to Aunt Martha from the former came to me—added to the little fortune that Great-Uncle John had left me, I was now a young woman of independent means. How different was realization from anticipation. Money could buy me everything, save the only thing in heaven or earth I wanted. Independence liberated me to roam throughout the world, and I remained desolate in this mournful forbidding house, the slave of my sick heart's memories and desires. Sister Briggs continued to come in for the mornings, to help me with the housework and in the kitchen. I had no plans, and, if Christmas failed me, no hopes. I was in a kind of spiritual stupor; I was but half alive. I had nothing to live for, and no hope to seek from death. Death, and then some other existence: but always life—always a Me.
There was, however, at moments, a certain mystical freedom of spirit in this cloistral utter loneliness. After about half-past one, when she had washed up the dinner things, I knew that I was rid of Sister Briggs until the morrow, and I could fill the desolate house with myself. I would wander from empty room to empty room, sit for half-an-hour here, half-an-hour there, pray, read, talk to myself, meditate, most often do nothing at all.
Aunt Jael's front parlour I still shunned, except when the blinds were up and in the broadest daylight, for Benamuckee's eyes could still move, his face still leer. A heathen image, which men in savage forests have worshipped and sacrificed to, can never be quite inanimate wood or stone. The Devil is alive in his likenesses on earth.
The sound of my own voice in the silent echoing rooms brought me time after time to the verge of the old Expectation. I would shout, cry aloud; till the mystery of self was almost discovered, and I ceased praying to God. He was too near.
One day the noise of shouts and supplications brought the next-door neighbour—that same clergyman who that far-off vinous day had been drawn by Aunt Jael's agonies—knocking at the door.