So ended the haunted life!
But the doctors discussed the subject learnedly, and her nervous thrills or involuntary tremors were accounted for by one who asserted 'that such an emotion was producible in persons of a certain nervous diathesis by the approach alike of an unseen spirit or the impingement of an electric fluid evolved by the superior will of another.'
It was urged by some that anything supernatural could only be seen by a person who was under an extraordinary exaltation of the sensuous perceptions, and certainly this was not the case with either Desmond, Vane, or Chute; thus it was deemed doubly strange that such men as they should have seen this singular and terrible presence, when she, whose system was of the most refined and delicate nature, and rendered more spiritual by her sinking health, should only have felt that something unseen was near her, until, perhaps, that fatal night.
What miracle, diablerie, or spiritualistic horror was this? speculated all, when the story came to be sifted around the couch whereon the dead Ida lay, like a marble statue, with her skin soft and pale as a white camellia leaf.
Can it be, they asked, that 'his solicitude cannot rest with his bones,' far away in that Indian grave where Trevor Chute had laid him? Was that grave not deep enough to hide him, that his spiritual essence—if essence it is—comes here?
It was a dark and sorrowful Christmas Eve at Carnaby Court; guests who came to be gay, and to rejoice in the festivities of the joyous season, departed in quick succession.
Jerry Vane never quite recovered the death of Ida or the manner of it, and some time elapsed before the gallant heart of Trevor Chute got the better of the shock of that night; but he could never forget the expression of the dead eyes that seemed to have looked again into his!
He could recall the fierce and sudden excitement of finding himself face to face with his first tiger in India, and putting the contents of both barrels into him, just as the monster was in the act of tearing down the shrieking mahout from his perch behind the ears of his shikaree elephant in a jungle where the twisted branches had to be torn aside at every step; and the nearly similar emotion with which he speared his first wild hog—an old boar, but too likely to turn like an envenomed devil when hard pressed and the pace grew hot; he could recall its glistening bristles that were like blue steel, its red eyes, and its fierce white tusks, as he whetted them in his dying wrath against a peepul tree; he could recall, too, the shock of the first bullet that took him in the arm, the vague terror of a barbed arrow that pierced his thigh, and which, for all he knew, might be poisoned; but never was mortal shock or emotion equal to the horror that burst upon him that night in the drawing-room of Carnaby Court, when a grasp of iron seemed to tighten round his heart, 'when the hair of his flesh stood up,' the light went out of his eyes, and he sank into oblivion.
* * * * *
Brighter times come anon.