CHAPTER XXI.
A CHILD'S CREED.
"I was born, sir, when the crab was ascending and my affairs go backwards."—Congreve.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy."—Wordsworth.
Thorold Chaytor was not an imaginative man; he was neither emotional nor impressionable, and more than once lately he had puzzled himself over the singular persistency with which his long-lost brother Tristram haunted him. For the last two or three years he had hardly thought of him, but now, as he crossed the bridge of an evening, little tricks of speech and long-forgotten scenes would recur to his memory; but he never spoke of this to Joanna.
"Poor old Trist, I hope nothing has happened to him," he said to himself one evening, when the impression of his brother's presence had been so unusually strong that the familiar face had seemed as though it had been limned against the darkness. And then he thought sadly, and shuddered at the thought, how it was a well-known psychological fact that people at the point of death had often appeared, or rather seemed to appear, to some relative or friend.
"Of course, it is only animal magnetism—the transmission of thought—the influence of one mind over another," he thought—"a strong wave-beat of sympathy. But I should not have thought that I was the man for that sort of experience." And then he put this latch-key into the door, and let himself in.
As he hung up his hat on its accustomed peg, he was aware of an unusual silence in the house. The parlour door was not opened, and there was no Joanna, with her irritating question, "Is that you, Thorold?" Neither did he hear her soft, gliding footsteps overhead.
"Perhaps she has gone to the Red House after all," he said to himself. And the thought of an evening of blissful solitude pleased him well. But as he entered the sitting-room, he started. There were no preparations for the evening meal. The tea-things were still on the table, and, to his intense surprise, a child—actually a child—was fast asleep on the couch by the fire.