Such is the curious law regulating the action of human nerves, and making them dependent upon the mood of the mind to which they are attached, that an event which to a normal consciousness is fraught with ghostly terror, to a consciousness already strained beyond the breaking point, appears as something natural and ordinary. It is one of the privileges of mania, that those thus afflicted should be freed from the normal oppression of human terror. A madman would take a ghost into his arms.
On this occasion, however, the most normal nerves would have suffered no shock from the figure that presented itself in the entrance when the door was fully opened. A young girl, pale and breathless, rushed impulsively into the cemetery, and catching sight of Andersen at once, hastened straight to him across the grave-mounds.
“I was coming back from the village,” she gasped, preventing him with a trembling pressure of her hand from rising from his seat, and casting herself down beside him, “and I met Mr. Clavering. He told me you had gone off somewhere and I guessed at once it was to Dead Man’s Lane. I said nothing to him, but as soon as he had left me, I ran nearly all the way to the cottage. The gentleman there told me to follow you. He said it was on his conscience that he had advised you to come up here. He said he was just making up his mind to come on after you, but he thought it was better for me to come. So here I am! James—dear James—you are not really ill are you? They frightened me, those two, by what they said. They seemed to be afraid that you would hurt yourself if you went off alone. But you wouldn’t James dear, would you? You would think of me a little?”
She knelt at his side and tenderly pushed back the hair from his brow. “Oh I love you so!” she murmured, “I love you so! It would kill me if anything dreadful happened to you.” She pressed his head passionately against her breast, hardly conscious in her emotion of the burning heat of his forehead as it touched her skin.
“You will think of me a little!” she pleaded, “you will take care of yourself for my sake, Jim?”
She held him thus, pressed tightly against her, for several seconds, while her bosom rose and fell in quick spasms of convulsive pity. She had torn off her hat in her agitation, and flung it heedlessly down at her feet, and a heavy tress of her thick auburn hair—colourless now as the night itself—fell loosely upon her bowed neck. The fading light from the sky above them seemed to concentrate itself upon the ivory pallor of her clasped fingers and the dead-white glimmer of her impassioned face. She might have risen out of one of the graves that surrounded them, so ghostly in the gloom did her figure look.
The stone-carver freed himself at length, and took her hands in his own. The shock of the girl’s emotion had quieted his own fever. From the touch of her flesh he seemed to have derived a new and rational calm.
“Little Ninsy!” he whispered. “Little Ninsy! It is not I, but you, who are ill. Have you been up, and about, many days? I didn’t know it! I’ve had troubles of my own.” He passed his hand across his forehead. “I’ve had dreams, dreams and fancies! I’m afraid I’ve made a fool of myself, and frightened all sorts of people. I think I must have been saying a lot of silly things today. My head feels still queer. It’s hurt me so much lately, my head! And I’ve heard voices, voices that wouldn’t stop.”
“Oh James, my darling, my darling!” cried the girl, in a great passion of relief. “I knew what they said wasn’t true. I knew you would speak gently to me, and be your old self. Love me, James! Love me as you used to in the old days.”
She rose to her feet and pulled him up upon his. Then with a passionate abandonment she flung her arms round him and pressed him to her, clinging to him with all her force and trembling as she clung.