“This is the way I brought you in, Lady Alice; and I can promise to find your way no farther than to the spot where I found you. Indeed, I shall have some difficulty even in that, for I groped my way there for the first time this night or morning—whichever it may be.”
“It is past midnight, but not morning yet,” she replied; “I always know by my sensations. But there is another way from your room, of course?”
“There is; but we should have to pass the housekeeper’s door, and she sleeps but lightly.”
“Are we near the housekeeper’s room? Perhaps I could walk alone. I fear it would surprise none of the household to see, or even to meet me. They would say—‘It is only Lady Alice.’ Yet I cannot tell you how I shrink from being seen by them. No—I will try the way I came, if you do not mind accompanying me.”
This conversation passed between us in hurried words, and in a low tone. It was scarcely finished when we found ourselves at the foot of the staircase. Lady Alice trembled a good deal, and drew my plaid close around her. We ascended, and with little difficulty found the corridor. When we left it, she was, as I had expected, rather bewildered as to the right direction; but at last, after looking into several of the rooms, empty all, except for stray articles of ancient furniture, she said, as she entered one, and, taking the candle out of my hand, held it above her head—
“Ah, yes! I am right at last; this is the haunted room: I know my way now.”
By the dim light I caught only a darkling glimpse of a large room, apparently quite furnished; but how, except from the general feeling of antiquity and mustiness, I could not tell. Little did I think then what memories—sorrowful and old now as the ghosts that along with them haunt that old chamber, but no more faded than they—would ere long find their being and take their abode in that ancient room, to forsake it never, never more—the ghosts and the memories flitting together through the spectral moonlight, and weaving strange mystic dances in and out of the storied windows and the tapestried walls. At the door of this room she expressed her wish to leave me, asking me to follow to the spot where she should put down the light, that I might take it back; adding—“I hope you are not afraid of being left so near the haunted room.” Then, with a smile that made me strong enough to meet all the ghosts in or out of Hades, she turned, went on a few paces, and disappeared. The light, however, remained; and, advancing, I found the candle, with my plaid and slippers, deposited on the third or fourth step down a short flight, in a passage at right angles to that she had left. I took them up, made my way back to my room, lay down on the couch on which she had lain so shortly before, and neither went to bed nor slept that night. Before the morning I had fully entered that phase of individual development commonly called love; of which the real nature is as great a mystery to me now, as at any period previous to its evolution in myself.
I will not linger on the weary fortnight that passed before I even saw her again. I could teach, but not learn. My duties were not irksome to me, because they kept me near her; but my thoughts were beyond my control. It was not love only, but anxiety also, lest she were ill from the adventures of that night, that caused my distress. As the days went on, and no chance word about her reached me, I felt the soul within me beginning to droop. In vain, at night, I tried to read, in my own room. Nothing could fix my attention. I read and re-read the same page again and again; but although I seemed to understand every word and phrase as I read, I found when I had reached the close of the paragraph, that there lingered in my mind no ghost of the idea embodied in the words. It was just what one experiences in attempting to read when half-asleep. I tried Euclid, and fared a little better with that. A very simple equation I found I could manage, but when I attempted a more complex one—one in which a little imagination, or something bordering upon it, was necessary to find out the undefined object for which to substitute the unknown symbol, that it might be dealt with by thought—I found that the necessary power of concentrating was itself a missing factor.
But it is foolish to dwell upon an individual variety of an almost universal stage in the life-fever.