“But why did you say those words just now?” he said, impelled to ask it, though he understood a gesture of Latham’s that forbade all simulation of her strange excitement.
“I don’t know. And I didn’t exactly seem to say them—they said themselves. I don’t know what they mean, or where they come from; but they keep running through my head—I can’t stop them somehow.”
“That’s odd,” Latham remarked, his interest in what seemed to him a unique psychological case out-weighing his fear for the patient, “very odd. I seem to have heard them before too. But I can’t think where. What’s that you have in your hand?”
“Why—why, it’s his paper-weight—Daddy’s.” She held it up and gazed at it intently, as an Indian seer gazes at his crystal. In a moment she spoke again, her voice once more quite changed. “Did you ever read ‘David Copperfield,’ Helen?”
“What?” Latham said, unprofessionally tremulous with surprise and with interest.
“Did you ever read ‘David Copperfield,’ Helen?” the mechanical voice repeated automatically. The girl’s face was white and expressionless as a death mask.
“‘David Copperfield’!” Stephen Pryde exclaimed hoarsely. And as he said it he knew. And Helen knew too. She had readied the light. At that moment Richard Bransby had got his message through. Stephen’s eyes went to the table where the volume lay when he left the room the night his uncle died—then slowly they traveled to the bookcase. In that moment the whole thing was clear to him—as clear as if he had seen his confession shut in the volume, the volume by some one at sometime replaced on its shelf.
And Helen had grasped the meaning of the words she had uttered so oddly, and repeatedly. She shrined the jade god in her hands, and looked raptly at its green and rose surfaces and curves. Then she put it gently down on the table, reverently too, as some devout Catholic might handle and lay down a relic most holy—a relic miraculous and well proven. A dozen lights played and quivered in and out of its multiple indentations and intricate clefts; and the rose-hue petals seemed to quiver and color in response, but the green face of the god was immovable, expressionless, mute. But Latham’s eyes, scalpel-sharp, following Helen’s hands, thought they saw a tiny eidolon star-shaped, yellow and ambient, slip from the deep of the odd little figure, and hover a moment above it significantly, before it broke with a bubble of fiercer light and dissolved in a scintillation of minute flame. And Stephen Pryde, watching only Helen, was sure that a rim of faint haze, impalpable, delicately tinted and living, bordered and framed her.
Richard Bransby had gotten his message through—recorded at the moment of his passing, and held safe ever since in the folds of the toy he had treasured and handled with years-long habit and almost with obsession—or flashed from his heart still living and potent to the soul of his child. Richard Bransby had gotten his message through. And each in their different way knew, received, and accepted it. The old room was strangely cold. But not one of the four waiting and asking felt the smallest sensation of fear—not even Stephen, defeated, convicted.
Helen spoke, and her voice rang clear and assured, the beautiful color creeping back to her face, a great light in her eyes. “Doctor—Hugh—Daddy asked me that very question just before he died.”