Silence for a brief space, and then a sudden cry—a sharp anguish-stricken cry, as of a broken heart.
‘Who said he was dead and gone, dead and gone years ago? The world wouldn’t look as bright as it does if he were dead. He loved the moonlight. Could you shine, false moon, if he were dead?’ Again a pause, and then a slower, more thoughtful tone, as if doubts disturbed that demented brain. ‘Was it last year he used to come, last year when we were so happy together—last year when——’
A sudden burst of tears interrupted the sentence. The woman’s face fell forward on her folded arms, and the frail body was shaken by her sobs.
Maurice Clissold no longer doubted his visitant’s humanity.
This was real grief, perchance real madness. For a little while he had fancied it a case of somnambulism. But the eyes which he had seen lifted despairingly to that moonlit sky had too much expression for the eyes of a somnambulist.
For a long time—or time that seemed long to Clissold’s mind—the woman knelt by the window, now silent, motionless as an inanimate figure, now talking rapidly to herself, anon invoking that absent one whose broken promises were perhaps the cause of her wandering wits. Never had the young man beheld a more piteous spectacle. It was as if one of Wordsworth’s most pathetic pastorals were here realized. His heart ached at the sound of those heart-broken sighs. This flesh and blood sorrow moved him more deeply than any spectral woe. This was no ghostly revisitant of earth, who acted over agonies dead and gone, but a living, loving woman, who mourned a lost or a faithless lover.
At last, with one farewell look seaward, as if it were along yon moonlit track across the waves she watched for the return of her lover, this new Hero turned from the casement, closed it carefully and quietly, and then slowly left the room. Maurice heard that slipshod foot going slowly along the passage, until the sound dwindled and died in the distance.
He fancied sleep would have been impossible after such a scene as this, but perhaps that over-strained attention of the last hour had exhausted his wakefulness, for he fell off presently into a sound slumber, from which he was only awakened by a friendly voice outside his door saying, ‘Six o’clock, Mr. Clissold. If you want the long round I promised you last night we ought to start at seven.’
‘All right,’ answered Maurice, as gaily as if no uncanny visitor had shortened his slumbers. ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’
He kept his word, and was down in the hall, or family sitting-room, just in time to hear the noisy old eight-day clock strike the half-hour, with a slow and laborious movement of its inward anatomy, as if fast subsiding into dumbness and decrepitude. Mr. Trevanard had breakfasted an hour ago, and gone forth to his haymakers. Mrs. Trevanard was busy about the house, but the old blind grandmother sat in her corner, plying those never-resting needles, just as she had sat, just as she had knitted last night; with no more apparent share or interest in the active life around her than the old clock had.