Thus between the relapses of my sorrow, and the soothing influence of Gabrielle, I leaned more and more upon my sister, and, by a subjection of will and emotion, caught her frame of mind, her tincture of spiritualized enthusiasm. I now come to the very nucleus and meaning, the very heart and life of this story—the longed for confession and explanation which two worlds have waited for, the marvellous tale of a young woman's intervention with the unnumbered dead, and their disembodied re-entrance in the world to stay the earth's destroying plague of War. To tell finally how in the agony of her sublime assumption, to bring this to pass, my sister's soul left her body, and withdrew in the wake of that vast ascension of spirits, to the Eternal Sphere of the Immortals.
I had reached successfully the last stage of convalescence. My recovery had been stubbornly contested by the militant eager sprites of disease which somewhere lurked within me. I had only "come round," as the English say, slowly, with veerings and retreats, that kept Gabrielle miserably anxious. When I was at last able to leave my bed and sit up—sitting up in a Morris chair, most capacious and comfortable—Gabrielle came to me one afternoon, when the white radiance of the glorious day might cancel the unearthly shock and the ghostly melancholy of her story, and almost kneeling at my side repeated her incredible and wondrous confession.
"Alfred, I have something very strange to tell you. Something that has been happening for some time, and seems to grow more frequent as this awful war—cette guerre desesperant—goes on. For it has to do with it—with the war. You want to hear it, surely?"
"Yes," I replied, "Gabrielle, I do indeed. Is it some of the visits again from the other world which we agreed should be discontinued?"
"Yes, Alfred, it is," Gabrielle looked up at me with a scrutiny of wistful, almost beseeching ardor, and as I remained silent she continued, "Alfred, the DEAD come back to me! They speak to me. Oh, more than that, they throng my room, and in my ears sounds the endless wailing of their prayers."
"Prayers?" I repeated, aroused now into a sudden repulsion of these renewed surrenders to the old-time madness.
"Yes, Alfred, Prayers. I do not hear them now in Paris, but at St. Choiseul the night long they have assailed my ears with piteous prayers. I have endured it without confiding it to anyone, the dreadful matter, but I have so wanted to tell you."
"But Gabrielle, why do you surrender to this delusion? It will wear you to death. Ah sister, be very careful. We are alone in this great world now, and you are everything to me. These nightmares will turn your reason, unhinge your strength. Put them all to flight as you did before."
"Ah, Alfred it is different now—much different. Really the old visions were soft and gentle and pleasant, and I accepted them as pictures almost of lovely beings, happy and serene and sympathetic. But these are so dreadful. At first I screamed with terror at them or just shrank into myself and shuddered. I did put them to flight, Alfred. I begged Julie to sleep in the room with me, and then they never came. But just to see what it all meant I tried several times to sleep alone and the things came thicker and faster as the war went on. I resisted my fear, but the misery of these wounded and broken spirits—as it was shown to me—was killing me. I once more drove them all away by getting Julie to come to my room. One night Julie awoke me and said there was someone or something in the room. We started up in the bed, and looked about the room, and then that light you once saw came again, but no figure, just a wonderful shimmering of threads of mellow light, traced through the air of the room, and flowing out of the open window like skeins of smoke caught in a draught. Julie clutched me and cried, and her voice broke the spell—if spell it was—the light vanished and nothing more happened that night."
"How long has this been going on?" I asked in suspense, in half incredulity.