Everything spoke of him. There was not a room that had not legends to tell and memories to revive. Sometimes on these mornings of early spring she went by herself into his dressing-room, and remained there for a long while. It was a large comfortable room, beautifully neat and clean, smelling of lavender; with two spacious walnut wardrobes, a big writing-table, and chairs covered in newly-washed chintz—a room that seemed to have been occupied quite recently and to be waiting for some one to use it again to-morrow. She opened the latticed casements more widely to let in more air and sunlight, and stood looking down into the little garden, and thought of him, dreamed of him. In imagination she could hear him down below on the terrace, banging away at the cook’s box as he and the electrician mended it—a splendid grey-haired giant, full of power and will. In imagination she could see him moving along the grass path between the crocuses and daffodils—a child dressed in black velvet and white lace; a child with a man’s great soul already developing in him, careless of rain and storm, incapable of petty fears, daring and yet loving nature.
Sometimes she played with his things, rearranging the writing materials in the small cabinet on the table, or she opened the wardrobes, and fetching out the old-fashioned garments, shook them, brushed them, refolded them. This made him seem more certainly alive. These things were not a dead man’s property.
“But he shan’t wear them again,” she said to herself. “We’ll make a bonfire of them. It is absurd not to have got rid of them ages ago. I won’t have him looking as he did that last Christmas, in this horrid little black coat. No, we’ll have a bonfire.”
At night when Mr. Dyke had gone to bed and all the house was shuttered and barred, she sat alone by the dying embers in the oak parlour, or stood looking into the round mirrors as if almost expecting that they would show a reflection of something more than emptiness behind her. She had then a feeling of vagueness and unreality, and it seemed to her that she too was acting. What was it all about—this tightening of the throat, this beating of the heart, this hot dull aching of the brain? Why had she begun to pace the room, like a tragedy queen, with clenched hands and wild eyes? Pretence? There was no real necessity for these exaggerated poses in order to shew an empty room and a vacant chair the ravages of mental agony.
“Courage, Emmie. Sit down. Don’t walk about.”
Who said that? She stood listening and trembling. No one, of course. But it was what he would have said, had he been here. The place was not really haunted. There are no ghosts—and if there were ghosts they must be ghosts of the dead not of the living. No one had spoken. She had merely supplied ordinary words to an ordinary thought.
She sat down on one side of the hearth and looked at the big deep chair on the other side of it. She had found him sitting there that Christmas eve long after she herself had gone upstairs, long after midnight. She had come down again. The fire had burnt itself out, the hearth was cold, and he was so completely lost in thought that he did not hear her slippered footfall. She had known then that she must let him go, that she could not keep him with her, that the sacrifice was inevitable.
“Tony,” she had said, “this is disgraceful of you. What do you mean by staying down here, hours after you ought to have been in bed?”
“If it comes to that,” he said, shaking off his reverie and speaking gaily, “why haven’t you gone to bed yourself?”