She had enclosed in her letter to me a note for them which I gave to Clémentine, who read it and passed it on. One after another they scanned its meagre lines in silence. I saw that Ludovic’s hand was shaking. When he had finished he closed his eyes for a moment and his head jerked forward. I noticed in the light of the lamp how white he had grown in the last year, and how the yellow tint of his pallor had deepened. Clémentine said looking at me—“It is not intelligible. Perhaps you can explain.” And I was given the sheet of paper covered with Jane’s large careless scrawl:
“Dear Friends,” I read, “I am not coming back. I am here alone with the ghost of my Aunt Patty in the house where I lived as a child. It is a wooden house with a verandah at the back. There are snow-drifts on the verandah. I am trying to find out what it has all been about—my life, I mean. If I believed that I would understand over there on the other side of death, then perhaps I would not be bound to stay here now, but I know that Ludovic is right, and that the hope of eternal punishment like that of immortal bliss and satisfied knowledge is just the fiction of our vanity. My punishment is on me now, since among other things I have to give you up.
“Jane.”
They had cried out at me when I told them, but after reading the letter they were silent. It was as if they had been brushed by the wings of some strange fearful messenger from another world, as if some departed spirit were present. We might all have been sitting in the dark with invisible clammy hands touching our hair, so nervous had we become. The fall of a charred log in the fireplace made us jump.
Felix forced a laugh. “The ghost of her Aunt Patty,” he mocked dismally. “Now what does she mean by that?”
“Her Aunt Patty was the person who took care of her as a child. Miss Patience Forbes her name was. She seems to have been a remarkable character. Jane often spoke of her.”
My words only added to their mystification. An old maid in America, dead now, a remarkable character. What had she to do with them? What power had she over their brilliant courageous Jane? Were they nothing that they could be replaced by the wraith of an old puritan spinster?
The room seemed to grow chilly. Some one put a fresh log on the fire. A little fitful wind was whimpering at the windows. Now and then a gust of rain pattered against the glass with a light rapid sound like finger-tips tapping. Felix had wandered away down the long dim room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as he stood with his back to us, and his nose close to the packed shelves of books against the farther wall. The tiny gilt letterings on the old bindings glimmered faintly in the lamplight. He seemed to be searching among all those little dim signs for an explanation. Far away beyond the network of gardens and old muffling houses one heard from some distant street the hoot of a motor. From the translucent depths of gleaming glass cabinets the small mute mysterious figures of jewelled heathen gods and little bronze Buddhas and curious carved jade monsters looked out at us as if through sheets of water.
Under the aged shadowy eaves of that room, full of strange old symbols and rare books and still rarer manuscripts, where so many ideas and faiths and records had been sifted, examined and relegated to dusty recesses, its occupants remained silent, staring at the new disturbing object of their mystification. Clémentine, tucked into a corner of the sofa, her boyish head that she dyed such a bad colour, on her hand, scrutinized the tip of her foot that she held high as if for better observation, in one of her characteristic angular attitudes. Her slipper dangled loose from her toe; now and then she gave it a jerk of annoyance.
They tried to take in the meaning of what they had read. The emotional content of that scrawled page was so strange to them as to appear almost shocking. They were rather frightened. Here indeed their philosophy of laughter broke down, for they loved Jane and could not make fun of her superstitions.
“We were never hard on her. We treated her gently.”