"Gabrielle," I answered, now aroused and almost terrified, "stay here. Are you quite well? The morning must soon break. Rest on my bed. We will watch it out. And—and—perhaps Gabrielle it will be best for us to leave this strange, bewitched place." My voice was loud. Its very loudness seemed to reassure her.
She released my arms, and controlling herself sank into the armchair I had risen from. She pressed her hands to her brows and her eyes closed. A moment later she opened them, looked steadfastly at me, then turned, without rising, and looked about the room in a dazed scrutiny, as if searching for something. Her wandering eyes returned to my face. I bent suddenly in surprise towards her. She was smiling. The staggering fancy crossed my mind that Gabrielle might have lost her reason. Anguish and despair and sympathy had spread madness and dementia throughout France already, that I knew.
"Alfred they have gone; how wonderful! Your loud words cleared the room of the crowding host. Alfred it was a host. I felt their presence before I woke. But they come like air; they vanish as darkness vanishes at the touch of day."
"Gabrielle, no more of it now. No. Rest. Sleep. I will sit up and read. I have letters to write to men at the front, in the trenches whom I know, who know me, who expect to hear from me. I have packed a wagon-load of things for these brave boys, and it goes to the front tomorrow. I wish I could go with it. But—"
"No Alfred—O! No!—not now! Do not leave me. Some strange powers are working, and in the voices I have heard I feel the approach of a vast spiritual finale."
"Why, Gabrielle, what do you mean? Stay. No more of it tonight. My brusqueness has chased them away. If a little noise scares these mockers, I can always furnish that."
I laughed and chided my sister for her seriousness. But Gabrielle rebuked me. I rebuked myself. A strange oppressive and yet merciful theory was shaping itself in my mind. I apprehended that a mysterious supernatural power might be summoned to end the war. And—Yes, so I thought—Gabrielle might be its protagonist and avatar.
I helped my sister to my bed, and when she again had regained her cheerfulness, and welcome sleep—that chrism of the Almighty to vexed hearts and minds—closed her eyes, I resumed my work. The silence was the very enclosure of the grave. But then it was like the grave in nothing else. The spring air, dewy, warm, perfumed, entered the room, and once or twice when I looked out of the window the shimmering stars shone in a velvet night over a world buried in slumber. All of the gentle twitterings and murmurs of the night seemed stilled. I think I fell asleep myself, for I awoke with a strange, a most benumbing sense of confinement, of restraint that I could not define, but perhaps was most easily compared to an immersion in some high pressure atmosphere. I felt suffocated. I sprang to my feet. The lamp was flickering as if about to go out, but its light fell on my watch, which recorded the hour as 2:30 past midnight. Someone stood at my side. I felt the presence, as we instinctively do—a cognition like a telepathy. It was Gabrielle again. Her face was pale and her eyes gazed, as if in a spell, upon the space above my head; her hands gropingly rested now on my arm. I waited for her to speak, and almost immediately the flickering flame of the lamp expired. We were in darkness.
But we were not alone. Some kinesthetic sense made me aware of beings, entities, existencies, about me. I yielded to the impression that a peculiar nervous excitation, a thrilled expectancy, as though the next instant some miracle of strangeness would befall me, was due to this influence of an invisible flood of spirits, or souls, or what you will, that had invaded the room. It was Gabrielle's voice that spoke in my ears, it was her arms again that encircled my neck.