Her manner now was quite simple and matter-of-fact. Her face was quite tearless, and, with hands folded in her lap, she sat quietly looking into his face. He listened in sheer stupefaction. Until that moment no suspicion of the truth had ever flashed upon his mind. As Eustasia spoke, her features seemed to become elfin-like and old, with a set expression of dreary and incurable pain; but she made her avowal without the slightest indication of shame or self-reproach, though her manner, from time to time, was that of one pleading for sympathy and pity.
She continued—
‘You don’t understand me yet, and I guess you never will. I’m not a European, and I haven’t been brought up like other girls. I don’t seem ever to have been quite young. I grew friends with the spirits when I wasn’t old enough to understand, and they seem to have stolen my right heart away, and put another in its place.’
‘Why do you speak of such things as if they were real? You know the whole thing is a trick and a lie.’
‘No, I don’t,’ she answered quickly. ‘I’m not denying that I’ve played tricks with them, just as they’ve played tricks with me; but they’re downright real—they are indeed. First mother used to come to me, when I was very little; then others, and in after-days I saw him; yes, after he was dead. Then sometimes, when they wouldn’t come, Salem helped out the manifestations, that’s all.’
‘For God’s sake, be honest with me!’ cried Bradley. ‘Confess that all these things are simple imposture. That photograph of yourself, for example—do you remember?—the picture your brother left in my room, and which faded away when I breathed upon it?’ She nodded her head again, and laughed strangely.
‘It was a man out West that taught Salem how to do that,’ she replied naïvely.
‘Then it was a trick, as I suspected?’
‘Yes, I guess that was a trick. It was something they used in fixing the likeness, which made it grow invisible after it had been a certain time in contact with the atmospheric air.’
Bradley uttered an impatient exclamation.