"'Can you tell me where he is living? I want to know because he asked me to call on him.'
"'Did he? Then if he asked you to call on him, I should if I was you. You'll find him in Wandsworth Churchyard. That's where he is living now!'
"The policeman's tone was jocular, Ballingall's appearance was against him. Evidently the officer suspected him of some clumsy attempt at invention. But as soon as the words were uttered Ballingall staggered back against the wall, according to his own account, like one stricken with death. He was speechless. The policeman, with a laugh, turned on his heel and left him there. Impelled by some influence which he could not resist, the conscience-haunted vagabond dragged his wearied feet to the churchyard. There among the tombstones he found one which purported to be erected to the memory of Thomas Ossington, who had been interred there some two years previously. While he stared, thunderstruck, at the inscription, Ballingall assured me that Tom Ossington stood at his side, and pointed at it with his finger."
"Tom Ossington stood at his side,
and pointed at it with his
finger." (To face p. 116)
Graham paused. His listeners fidgeted in their seats. It was a second or two before the narrator continued.
"You understand that I am telling you the story precisely as it was told me, without accepting for it any responsibility whatever. I can only assure you that whilst it was being told, I was so completely held, by what I can best describe as the teller's frenzied earnestness, that I accepted his facts precisely as he told them, and it was only after I got away from the glamour of his intensity of self-conviction that I perceived how entirely irreconcilable they were with the teachings of our everyday experience.
"Thenceforward, Ballingall declared that he was never without a feeling that Ossington was somewhere in the intermediate neighbourhood--to use his own word, that he was shadowing him. For the next week or two he lighted upon somewhat better times. He obtained a job at road-cleaning, and in one way or another managed to preserve himself from actual starvation. But, shortly, the luck ran out, and one night he again found himself without a penny with which to buy either food or lodging. He was struggling up Southampton Street, in the Strand, intending to hang about the purlieus of Covent Garden with the faint hope that he might be able to get some sort of job at the dawn of day, when he saw, coming towards him from the market, Tom Ossington. Ballingall shrank back into the doorway, and, while he stood there shivering, Ossington came and planted himself in front of him.
"'Charlie!' he said, 'why didn't you come to Clover Cottage when I told you?'
"Ballingall protested that he looked and spoke just like a rational being--with the little air of impatience which had always been his characteristic; that there was nothing either in his manner or his appearance in any way unusual, and that there was certainly nothing to suggest an apparition. A conversation was carried on between them just as it might have been between an ordinary Jones and Robinson.