Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy. But she had not complained; it was the ordeal of preparation, she said; she had undergone extreme dread and misery of heart and mind, and, under the visitations of her distress, those ecstasies—as she now slowly and tearfully confessed—of desire to see the ghostly and immaterial had returned and strengthened, and to her had come visions and voices, and again and again in her prayers the apparent touch of fingers tracing the braid of her hair, or even smoothing the temples of her head had actually been felt.
None of these things were told to me by Gabrielle until I was effectually improved, and then they became the outpouring of her heart. She had been unwilling to speak of them to father and mother since they would have, beyond any question, regarded them as the symptoms of mental infirmity, and their solicitude might have readily taken the form of some new insistence upon the avocations of the city. Gabrielle, after the death of Blanchette had persisted in her refusal to return to the hospital in Paris, and, after a brief and a little unpleasant disagreement, mother and father permitted her to stay at home. Then came my sickness, when Gabrielle proved most useful, and then by a natural adjustment—for exactly as it had been in the old days of childhood we became inseparable—Gabrielle assumed domestic duties, and our home life was reinstituted and complete.
It was delightful, though the happiness it brought to me was a solemn tenderness of feeling and thought simply. I had brought back from America a small sum of uninvested funds, and when this was carefully invested, with the interest from the moneys held by me in America and with my father's maintenance, our living became, more than ever, free from anxieties, and comfortably luxurious. Nor were we careless of our duties to the less fortunate; the instruction of our parents had always laid emphasis upon the invincible demands of charity in the Christian life, and no one more thoughtfully than they furnished to us examples of its most admirable exercise.
And here I must refer to something now certainly obvious to my reader. The religious faith of our parents was not ours—not Gabrielle's nor mine. Perhaps that had much to do with that felt, though never mentioned, separation—désaccordement, we French would, I think, call it—that latently grew up between our parents and ourselves, dutiful as we always were and loving too. Gabrielle and I were Catholics, and our reversion, as it might be called, had taken place as we approached maturity, when something in our natures responded vitally to the spiritual richness and the sensuous impressions of the Catholic church, while the absence of a Protestant church in St. Choiseul—supplemented by the meeting together of various members in a room, wherein my father often assumed the functions of the preacher—helped to establish our desertion. There was indeed a moment's exasperation over it all, but it was most evanescent, and, yielding to a larger liberality of conviction than most Protestants, our parents were at least contented that their children worshipped God and Christ.
Certainly to Gabrielle the Catholic symposium of saints, and its hierarchy of visible and invisible powers, appealed overwhelmingly. She surrendered to the full harvest of its supernatural offerings, with the gladness, the rapture, of the energumen. Now too that the psychiatric sense or control had started within her nature, she rose to the strange contingency of communication with the dead, with a transcendent joy. No longer thrust upon the abhorrent carnalities of the hospital, graciously as she acknowledged their necessity and kindness, Gabrielle, with me, her emotional companion too, returned to all the quietism of our life in St. Choiseul, and revelled in her exuberance of mystical detachment. It was a partial aberration of mind, I almost now think, despite its wondrous results, accompanied with the enthralled wonderment and pleasure of a temperament poetical and structurally imaginative. Gabrielle became neurotic. Her hospital life and its terrors had something to do with it.
This community of feeling and the gradual development of that unhealthy indulgence in the mediumistic power, Gabrielle now discovered she possessed (which became encouraged through my own solicitations) formed between us a bond of fellowship, that became secretive and masonic. It was not a fortunate circumstance, and yet SEE what marvels flowed from it—at least so I think, and indeed I am not unwilling to protest that it was God's hand! Of course it was my desire to approach Blanchette in her spiritualized state, that led us onward along the mysterious and fascinating path of our strange psychic experiments. And so I come to that illustrious moment when I saw Blanchette in the spirit, when—Mon Dieu, can I ever forget it?—that pale vision of my own Blanchette issued from the darkness, stayed on the threshold of the real for an instant, softly luminous, and yet discrete in form, though the corporeal properties of the dear face I adored, seemed blurred in the haze of an exceeding brightness.
It was probably about six months after Blanchette's death, that I ventured to speak to Gabrielle about the hope I almost treacherously nourished—for the practice is forbidden by the Church—that she might be able to summon Blanchette from the world of spirits. It was towards the evening of a spring day, that just began to intimate the glorious oncoming of the new season's wealth of beauty—a beauty I longed for, for with the reawakening earth, with the fresh laughter of the whole wide sphere of living things, I knew the dead weight of my grief would be lightened. The sunlight, the song of birds, the flowing vesture of the colored earth, would enter and dissolve it, and thus, mellowed into sadness only, it would encumber me no longer with leaden hopelessness. We were standing together at the bottom of the garden, watching the first sproutings of the crocus from beneath a film of sheltered snow, and the cheering warmth of the full sun filled us with the instincts of life. It opened my lips.
"Gabrielle," I said, "I want you to bring Blanchette back to me."
My sister was not surprised; she turned to me with the most natural gesture of willingness, placing her hands upon my shoulders and looking straight into my eyes.
"Yes, Alfred, I will. I have heard Blanchette. But I was afraid to tell you. Twice she has spoken to me, in the night, and once in the brightest daylight, as I stood at the window of my room. Can you stand it? For see Alfred, I feel the power strongly in these spring days, as if the resurrection of life in all these things," she swept her arms outward to the landscape, "brought with it the spirits of the dead; as if they too liked a reprieve from their isolation, and thronged to the earth. Is it not so?"