“Hang her!” burst out Vavasour. Then he controlled himself, and said soothingly: “After all, dearest, there is nothing to be jealous of——”
“I jealous! And of that——” I was beginning, but Vavasour went on:
“After all, she is only a disembodied astral entity with whom I became acquainted—through my fifth principle, which is usually well developed—in the days when I moved in Spiritualistic society. She was, when living—for she died long before I was born—a young lady of very good family. I believe her father was a clergyman ... and I will not deny that I encouraged her visits.”
“Discourage them from this day!” I said firmly. “Neither think of her nor dream of her again, or I will have a separation.”
“I will keep her, as much as possible, out of my waking thoughts,” said poor Vavasour, trying to soothe me; “but a man cannot control his dreams, and she pervades mine in a manner which, even before our engagement, my pet, I began to find annoying. However, if she really is, as she has told me, a lady by birth and breeding, she will understand”—he raised his voice as though she were there and he intended her to hear—“that I am now a married man, and from this moment desire to have no further communication with her. Any suitable provision it is in my power to make——”
He ceased, probably feeling the difficulty he would have in explaining the matter to his lawyers; and it seemed to me that a faint mocking sniggle, or rather the auricular impression of it, echoed his words. Then, after some more desultory conversation, we fell soundly asleep. An hour may have passed when the same chilly sensation as of a damp draft blowing across the bed roused me. I rubbed my cheek and opened my eyes. They met the pale, impertinent smile of the hateful Katie, who was installed in her old post beside Vavasour’s end of the bolster.
“You see,” she said, in the same soundless way, and with a knowing little nod of triumph, “it is no use. He is dreaming of me again!”
“Wake up!” I screamed, snatching the pillow from under my husband’s head and madly hurling it at the shameless intruder. This time Vavasour was almost snappish at being disturbed. Daylight surprised us in the middle of our first connubial quarrel. The following night brought a repetition of the whole thing, and so on, da capo, until it became plain to us, to our mutual disgust, that the more Vavasour strove to banish Katie from his dreams, the more persistently she cropped up in them. She was the most ill-bred and obstinate of astrals—Vavasour and I the most miserable of newly-married people. A dozen times in a night I would be roused by that cold draft upon my cheek, would open my eyes and see that pale, phosphorescent, outline perched by Vavasour’s pillow—nine times out of the dozen would be driven to frenzy by the possessive air and cynical smile of the spook. And although Vavasour’s former regard for her was now converted into hatred, he found the thought of her continually invading his waking mind at the most unwelcome seasons. She had begun to appear to both of us by day as well as by night when our poisoned honeymoon came to an end, and we returned to town to occupy the house which Vavasour had taken and furnished in Sloane Street. I need only mention that Katie accompanied us.
Insufficient sleep and mental worry had by this time thoroughly soured my temper no less than Vavasour’s. When I charged him with secretly encouraging the presence I had learned to hate, he rudely told me to think as I liked! He implored my pardon for this brutality afterwards upon his knees, and with the passage of time I learned to endure the presence of his attendant shade with patience. When she nocturnally hovered by the side of my sleeping spouse, or in constituence no less filmy than a whiff of cigarette-smoke, appeared at his elbow in the face of day, I saw her plainly, and at these moments she would favor me with a significant contraction of the eyelid, which was, to say the least of it, unbecoming in a spirit who had been a clergyman’s daughter. After one of these experiences it was that the idea which I afterwards carried into execution occurred to me.
I began by taking in a few numbers of a psychological publication entitled The Spirit-Lamp. Then I formed the acquaintance of Madame Blavant, the renowned Professoress of Spiritualism and Theosophy. Everybody has heard of Madame, many people have read her works, some have heard her lecture. I had heard her lecture. She was a lady with a strong determined voice and strong determined features. She wore her plentiful gray hair piled in sibylline coils on the top of her head, and—when she lectured—appeared in a white Oriental silk robe that fell around her tall gaunt figure in imposing folds. This robe was replaced by one of black satin when she held her séances. At other times, in the seclusion of her study, she was draped in an ample gown of Indian chintz innocent of cut, but yet imposing. She smiled upon my new-born desire for psychic instruction, and when I had subscribed for a course of ten private séances at so many guineas a piece she smiled more.