“I see you think I’m out of my head, and no wonder. I behave like a madman. But I’m not mad at all; I wish I could think I were. This shuddering—it won’t last—but I tell you, Drayton, when you see a man of my health and strength stricken this way in two days, you may believe it would have driven many a man to madness, or to suicide——”
“Let me pour it out for you; your hand shakes so. I can give you some splendid French cognac, if you’d prefer it? Well. Hadn’t you better lie down?”
“Come, I can control myself, now—I will!” said Calbot, through his teeth, and putting a strong constraint upon himself. For about a minute he kept silent, the blood gradually coming into his cheeks and the nervous twitchings growing less frequent.
“That’s better,” said I, encouragingly. “You don’t look so much as though you’d seen a ghost, now. How is that Chancery case of yours getting on?”
“A ghost? You speak lightly enough, and I suppose your idea of a ghost is some conventional bogey such as children are scared with. We laugh at such things—heaven knows why! An evil, sin-breathing spirit, coming from hell to take vengeance, for some dead and buried wrong, upon living men and women—what is there laughable in that?”
“Really, Calbot,” I said, with a smile—a rather uneasy smile, be it admitted—“I never laughed at a ghost, for the simple reason that I never saw one to laugh at.”
“You never saw one, and you mean to hint, I suppose, that there are none to see?”
“Well,” returned I, still maintaining a precarious grimace, “I’m not a spiritualist, you know——”
“Nor I,” interrupted Calbot, in a lower and quieter tone than he had yet used. He took a chair, and, sitting down close in front of me, bent forward and whispered in my ear: “But I saw the soul of a dead man yesterday; and this afternoon I saw it again, and chased it from the Burleighs’ house in Mayfair, along the Strand, and through the heart of London, to its grave in St. G——’s churchyard. I copied the inscription on the stone: it is a very old one, as you will see by the date.”