“Every family seems to have,” said Mrs. Winnie. “But, dear me, it made me so uncomfortable—I lay awake all night expecting to see my own father. He had the asthma, you know; and I kept fancying I heard him breathing.”
They had risen and were strolling into the conservatory; and she glanced at the man in armour. “I got to fancying that his ghost might come to see me,” she said. “I don’t think I shall attend any more seances. My husband was told that I promised them some money, and he was furious—he’s afraid it’ll get into the papers.” And Montague shook with inward laughter, picturing what a time the aristocratic and stately old banker must have, trying to keep his wife out of the papers!
Mrs. Winnie turned on the lights in the fountain, and sat by the edge, gazing at her fish. Montague was half expecting her to inquire whether he thought that they had ghosts; but she spared him this, going off on another line.
“I asked Dr. Parry about it,” she said. “Have you met him?”
Dr. Parry was the rector of St. Cecilia’s, the fashionable Fifth Avenue church which most of Montague’s acquaintances attended. “I haven’t been in the city over Sunday yet,” he answered. “But Alice has met him.”
“You must go with me some time,” said she. “But about the ghosts—”
“What did he say?”
“He seemed to be shy of them,” laughed Mrs. Winnie. “He said it had a tendency to lead one into dangerous fields. But oh! I forgot—I asked my swami also, and it didn’t startle him. They are used to ghosts; they believe that souls keep coming back to earth, you know. I think if it was his ghost, I wouldn’t mind seeing it—for he has such beautiful eyes. He gave me a book of Hindu legends—and there was such a sweet story about a young princess who loved in vain, and died of grief; and her soul went into a tigress; and she came in the night-time where her lover lay sleeping by the firelight, and she carried him off into the ghost-world. It was a most creepy thing—I sat out here and read it, and I could imagine the terrible tigress lurking in the shadows, with its stripes shining in the firelight, and its green eyes gleaming. You know that poem—we used to read it in school—’Tiger, tiger, burning bright!’”
It was not very easy for Montague to imagine a tigress in Mrs. Winnie’s conservatory; unless, indeed, one were willing to take the proposition in a metaphorical sense. There are wild creatures which sleep in the heart of man, and which growl now and then, and stir their tawny limbs, and cause one to start and turn cold. Mrs. Winnie wore a dress of filmy softness, trimmed with red flowers which paled beside her own intenser colouring. She had a perfume of her own, with a strange exotic fragrance which touched the chorus of memory as only an odour can. She leaned towards him, speaking eagerly, with her soft white arms lying upon the basin’s rim. So much loveliness could not be gazed at without pain; and a faint trembling passed through Montague, like a breeze across a pool. Perhaps it touched Mrs. Winnie also, for she fell suddenly silent, and her gaze wandered off into the darkness. For a minute or two there was stillness, save for the pulse of the fountain, and the heaving of her bosom keeping time with it.
And then in the morning Oliver inquired, “Where were you, last night?” And when his brother answered, “At Mrs. Winnie’s,” he smiled and said, “Oh!” Then he added, gravely, “Cultivate Mrs. Winnie—you can’t do better at present.”