CHAPTER XII.
TO CALL A SPIRIT FROM THE VASTY DEEP.
It was when the first wild-flowers of the year had passed away, and scarlet columbine and meadow-rue waved lightly in the sunny glades of the woods, and all the world was green—the new and perfect green of June—that one afternoon Caius, at his father's door, met a visitor who was most rarely seen there. It was Farmer Day. He accosted Caius, perhaps a little sheepishly, but with an obvious desire to be civil, for he had a favour to ask which he evidently considered of greater magnitude than Caius did when he heard what it was. Day's wife was ill. The doctor of the locality had said more than once that she would not live many days, but she had gone on living some time, it appeared, since this had been first said. Day did not now call upon Caius as a medical man. His wife had taken a fancy to see him because of his remembered efforts to save her child. Day said apologetically that it was a woman's whim, but he would be obliged if Caius, at his convenience, would call upon her. It spoke much for the long peculiarity and dreariness of Day's domestic life that he evidently believed that this would be a disagreeable thing for Caius to do.
Day went on to the village. Caius strolled off through the warm woods and across the hot cliffs to make this visit.
The woman was not in bed. She was dying of consumption. The fever was flickering in her high-boned cheeks when she opened the door of the desolate farmhouse. She wore a brown calico gown; her abundant black hair was not yet streaked with gray. Caius could not see that she looked much older than she had done upon the evening, years ago, when he had first had reason to observe her closely. He remembered what Josephine had told him—that time had stood still with her since that night: it seemed true in more senses than one. A light of satisfaction showed itself in her dark face when, after a moment's inspection, she realized who he was.
"Come in," she said briefly.
Caius went in, and had reason to regret, as well on his own account as on hers, that she shut the door. To be out in the summer would have been longer life for her, and to have the summer shut out made him realize forcibly that he was alone in the desolate house with a woman whose madness gave her a weird seeming which was almost equivalent to ghostliness.
When one enters a house from which the public has long been excluded and which is the abode of a person of deranged mind, it is perhaps natural to expect, although unconsciously, that the interior arrangements should be very strange. Instead of this, the house, gloomy and sparsely furnished as it was, was clean and in order. It lacked everything to make it pleasant—air, sunshine, and any cheerful token of comfort; but it was only in this dreary negation that it failed; there was no positive fault to be found even with the atmosphere of the kitchen and bare lobby through which he was conducted, and he discovered, to his surprise, that he was to be entertained in a small parlour, which had a round polished centre table, on which lay the usual store of such things as are seen in such parlours all the world over—a Bible, a couple of albums, a woollen mat, and an ornament under a glass case.
Caius sat down, holding his hat in his hand, with an odd feeling that he was acting a part in behaving as if the circumstances were at all ordinary.