“If the mother had not already lost her power by using ridicule,” she confessed meekly.
“Yes, you never should have laughed. Why did you, I wonder?”
An expression came into her eyes that I knew to be invariably with hysterical temperaments the precursor of tears. She looked round to make sure no one was listening.
“George,” she whispered, and into the dusk of that September evening passed some shadow between us that left behind an atmosphere of sudden and inexplicable chill, “George, I wish—I wish it was quite clear to me that it really is all make-believe, I mean—”
“What do you mean?” I said, with a severity that was assumed to hide my own uneasiness. But the tears came the same instant in a flood that made any intelligent explanation out of the question.
The terror of the mother for her own blood burst forth.
“I’m frightened—horribly frightened,” she said between the sobs.
“I’ll go up and see the child myself,” I said comfortingly at length when the storm had subsided. “I’ll run up to the nursery. You mustn’t be alarmed. Aileen’s all right. I think I can help you in the matter a good deal.”
II
In the nursery as usual Aileen was alone. I found her sitting by the open window, an empty chair opposite to her. She was staring at it—into it, but it is not easy to describe the certainty she managed to convey that there was some one sitting in that chair, talking with her. It was her manner that did it. She rose quickly, with a start as I came in, and made a half gesture in the direction of the empty chair as though to shake hands, then corrected her self quickly, and gave a friendly little nod of farewell or dismissal—then turned towards me. Incredible as it must sound, that chair looked at once slightly other wise. It was empty.
“Aileen, what in the world are you up to?”
“You know, uncle,” she replied, without hesitation.
“Oh, rather! I know!” I said, trying to get into her mood so as later to get her out of it, “because I do the same thing with the people in my own stories. I talk to them too—”
She came up to my side, as though it were a matter of life and death.
“But do they answer?”
I realized the overwhelming sincerity, even the seriousness, of the question to her mind. The shadow evoked downstairs by my cousin had followed me up here. It touched me on the shoulder.
“Unless they answer,” I told her, “they are not really alive, and the story hangs fire when people read it.”
She watched me very closely a moment as we leaned out of the open window where the rich perfume of the Portuguese laurels came up from the lawns below. The proximity of the child brought a distinct atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere charged with suggestions, almost with faint pictures, as of things I had once known. I had often felt this before, and did not altogether welcome it, for the pictures seemed framed in some emotional setting that in variably escaped my analysis. I understood in a vague way what it was about the child that made her mother afraid. There flashed across me a fugitive sensation, utterly elusive yet painfully real, that she knew moments of suffering by rights she ought not to have known. Bizarre and unreasonable as the conception was, it was convincing. And it touched a profound sympathy in me.
Aileen undoubtedly was aware of this sympathy.
“It’s Philip that talks to me most of the time,” she volunteered, “and he’s always, always explaining—but never quite finishes.”
“Explaining what, dear little Child of the Moon?” I urged gently, giving her a name she used to love when she was smaller.
“Why he couldn’t come in time to save me, of course,” she said. “You see, they cut off both his hands.”
I shall never forget the sensation these words of a child’s mental adventure caused me, nor the kind of bitter reality they forced into me that they were true, and not merely a detail of some attempted rescue of a “Princess in a Tower.” A vivid rush of thought seemed to focus my consciousness upon my own two wrists, as though I felt the pain of the operation she mentioned, and with a swift instinct that slipped into action before I could control it, I had hidden both hands from her sight in my coat pockets.
“And what else does ‘Philip’ tell you?” I asked gently.
Her face flushed. Tears came into her eyes, then fled away again lest they should fall from their softlycoloured nests.
“That he loved me so awfully,” she replied; “and that he loved me to the very end, and that all his life after I was gone, and after they cut his hands off, he did nothing but pray for me—from the end of the world where he went to hide—”
I shook myself free with an effort from the enveloping atmosphere of tragedy, realizing that her imagination must be driven along brighter channels and that my duty must precede my interest.
“But you must get Philip to tell you all his funny and jolly adventures, too,” I said, “the ones he had, you know, when his hands grew again—”
The expression that came into her face literally froze my blood.
“That’s only making-up stories,” she said icily. “They never did grow again. There were no happy or funny adventures.”
I cast about in my mind for an inspiration how to help her mind into more wholesome ways of invention. I realized more than ever before the profundity of my affection for this strange, fatherless child, and how I would give my whole soul if I could help her and teach her joy. It was a real love that swept me, rooted in things deeper than I realized.
But, before the right word was given me to speak, I felt her nestle up against my side, and heard her utter the very phrase that for some time I had been dreading in the secret places of my soul she would utter. The sentence seemed to shake me within. I knew a hurried, passing moment of unspeakable pain that is utterly beyond me to reason about.
“You know,” was what she said, “because it’s you who are Philip!”
And the way she said it—so quietly, the words touched somehow with a gentle though compassion ate scorn, yet made golden by a burning love that filled her little person to the brim—robbed me momentarily of all power of speech. I could only bend down and put my arm about her and kiss her head that came up barely to the level of my chin. I swear I loved that child as I never loved any other human being.
“Then Philip is going to teach you all sorts of jolly adventures with his new hands,” I remember saying, with blundering good intention, “because he’s no longer sad, and is full of fun, and loves you twice as much as ever!”
And I caught her up and carried her down the long stairs of the house out into the garden, where we joined the dogs and romped together until the face of the motherly Kempster at an upper window shouted down something stupid about bed-time, supper, or the rest of it, and Aileen, flushed yet with brighter eyes, ran into the house and, turning at the door, showed me her odd little face wreathed in smiles and laughter.
* * * *
For a long time I paced to and fro with a cigar between the box hedges of the old-time garden, thinking of the child and her queer imaginings, and of the profoundly moving and disquieting sensations she stirred in me at the same time. Her face flitted by my side through the shadows. She was not pretty, properly speaking, but her appearance possessed an original charm that appealed to me strongly. Her head was big and in some way old-fashioned; her eyes, dark but not large, were placed close together, and she had a wide mouth that was certainly not beautiful. But the look of distressed and yearning passion that sometimes swept over these features, not otherwise prepossessing, changed her look into sudden beauty, a beauty of the soul, a soul that knew suffering and was acquainted with grief. This, at least, is the way my own mind saw the child, and therefore the only way I can hope to make others see her. Were I a painter I might put her upon canvas in some imaginary portrait and call it, perhaps, “Reincarnation”—for I have never seen any thing in child-life that impressed me so vividly with that odd idea of an old soul come back to the world in a new young
body—a new Suit of Clothes.
But when I talked with my cousin after dinner, and consoled her with the assurance that Aileen was gifted with an unusually vivid imagination which time and ourselves must train to some more practical end—while I said all this, and more besides, two sentences the child had made use of kept ringing in my head. One—when she told me with merciless perception that I was only “making-up” stories; and the other, when she had informed me with that quiet rush of certainty and conviction that “Philip” was—myself.
III
A big-game expedition of some months put an end temporarily to my avuncular responsibilities; at least so far as action was concerned, for there were certain memories that held curiously vivid among all the absorbing turmoil of our camp life. Often, lying awake in my tent at night, or even following the tracks of our prey through the jungle, these pictures would jump out upon me and claim attention. Aileen’s little face of suffering would come between me and the sight of my rifle; or her assurance that I was the “Philip” of her imagination would attack me with an accent of reality that seemed queer enough until I analyzed it away. And more than once I found myself thinking of her dark and serious countenance when she told how “Philip” had loved her to the end, and would have saved her if they had not cut off his hands. My own Imagination, it seemed, was weaving the details of her child’s invention into a story, for I never could think of this latter detail without positively experiencing a sensation of smarting pain in my wrists…!
When I returned to England in the spring they had moved, I found, into a house by the sea, a tumbled-down old rookery of a building my cousin’s father had rarely occupied during his lifetime, nor she been able to let since it had passed into her possession. An urgent letter summoned me thither, and I travelled down the very day after my arrival to the bleak Norfolk coast with a sense of foreboding in my heart that increased almost to a presentiment when the cab entered the long drive and I recognized the grey and gloomy walls of the old mansion. The sea air swept the gardens with its salt wash, and the moan of the surf was audible even up to the windows.
“I wonder what possessed her to come here?” was the first thought in my mind. “Surely the last place in the world to bring a morbid or too-sensitive child to!” My further dread that something had happened to the little child I loved so tenderly was partly dispelled, however, when my cousin met me at the door with open arms and smiling face, though the welcome I soon found, was chiefly due to the relief she gained from my presence. Something had happened to little Aileen, though not the final disaster that I dreaded. She had suffered from nervous attacks of so serious a character during my absence that the doctor had insisted upon sea air, and my cousin, not with the best judgment, had seized upon the idea of making the old house serve the purpose. She had made a wing habitable for a few weeks; she hoped the entire change of scene would fill the little girl’s mind with new and happier ideas. Instead—the result had been exactly the reverse. The child had wept copiously and hysterically the moment she set eyes on the old walls and smelt the odour of the sea.
But before we had been talking ten minutes there was a cry and a sound of rushing footsteps, and a scampering figure, with dark, flying hair, had dived headlong into my arms, and Aileen was sobbing—
“Oh, you’ve come, you’ve come at last! I am so awfully glad. I thought it would be the same as before, and you’d get caught.” She ran from me next and kissed her mother, laughing with pleasure through her tears, and was gone from the room as quickly as she had come.
I caught my cousin’s glance of frightened amazement.
“Now isn’t that odd?” she exclaimed in a hushed voice. “Isn’t that odd? Those are the tears of happiness,—the first time I’ve seen her smile since we came here last week.”
But it rather nettled me, I think. “Why odd?” I asked. “Aileen loves me, it’s delightful to—”
“Not that, not that!” she said quickly. “It’s odd, I meant, she should have found you out so soon. She didn’t even know you were back in England, and I’d sent her off to play on the sands with Kempster and the dogs so as to be sure of an opportunity of telling you everything before you saw her.”
“You see, she knew perfectly well you were here—the instant you came.”
“But there’s nothing in that,” I asserted. “Children know things just as animals do. She scented her favourite uncle from the shore like a dog!”
And I laughed in her face.
That laugh perhaps was a mistake on my part. Its well-meant cheerfulness was possibly overdone. Even to myself it did not ring quite true.
“I do believe you are in league with her—against me,” was the remark that greeted it, accompanied by an increase of that expression of fear in the eyes I had divined the moment we met upon the doorstep. Finding nothing genuine to say in reply, I kissed the top of her head.
In due course, after the tea things had been removed, I learned the exact state of affairs, and even making due allowance for my cousin’s excited exaggerations, there were things that seemed to me inexplicable enough on any ground of normal explanation. Slight as the details may seem when set down seriatim, their cumulative effect upon my own mind touched an impressive and disagreeable climax that I did my best to conceal from outward betrayal. As I sat in the great shadowy room, listening to my cousin’s jerky description of “childish” things, it was borne in upon me that they might well have the profoundest possible significance. I watched her eager, frightened face, lit only by the flickering flames the sharp spring evening made necessary, and thought of the subject of our conversation flitting about the dreary halls and corridors of the huge old building, a little figure of tragedy, laughing, crying and dreaming in a world entirely her own—and there stirred in me an unwelcome recognition of those mutinous and dishevelled forces that lie but thinly screened behind the commonplace details of life and that now seemed ready to burst forth and play their mysterious rôle before our very eyes.
“Tell me exactly what has happened,” I urged, with decision but sympathy.
“There’s so little, when it’s put into words, George; but—well, the thing that first upset me was that she—knew the whole place, though she’s never been here before. She knew every passage and staircase, many of them that I did not know myself; she showed us an underground passage to the sea, that father himself didn’t know; and she actually drew a scrawl of the house as it used to be three hundred years ago when the other wing was standing where the copper beeches grow now. It’s accurate, too.”
It seemed impossible to explain to a person of my cousin’s temperament the theories of pre-natal memory and the like, or the possibility of her own knowledge being communicated telepathically to the brain of her own daughter. I said therefore very little, but listened with an uneasiness that grew horribly.
“She found her way about the gardens instantly, as if she had played in them all her life; and she keeps drawing figures of people—men and women—in old costumes, the sort of thing our ancestors wore, you know—”
“Well, well, well!” I interrupted impatiently; “what can be more natural? She is old enough to have seen pictures she can remember enough to copy—?”
“Of course,” she resumed calmly, but with a calmness due to the terror that ate her very soul and swallowed up all minor emotions; “of course, but one of the faces she gets is—a portrait.”
She rose suddenly and came closer to me across the big stone hearth, lowering her voice to a whisper, “George,” she whispered, “it’s the very image of that awful—de Lorne!”
The announcement, I admit, gave me a thrill, for that particular ancestor on my father’s side had largely influenced my boyhood imagination by the accounts of his cruelty wickedness in days gone by. But I think now the shiver that ran down my back was due to the thought of my little Aileen practising her memory and pencil upon so vile an object. That, and my cousin’s pale visage of alarm, combined to shake me. I said, however, what seemed wis
e and reasonable at the moment.
“You’ll be claiming next, Theresa, that the house is haunted,” I suggested.
She shrugged her shoulders with an indifference that was very eloquent of the strength of this other more substantial terror.
“That would be so easy to deal with,” she said, without even looking up. “A ghost stays in one place. Aileen could hardly take it about with her.”
I think we both enjoyed the pause that followed. It gave me time to collect my forces for what I knew was coming. It gave her time to get her further facts into some pretence of coherence.
“I told you about the belt?” she asked at length, weakly, and as though unutterable things she longed to dis own forced the question to her unwilling lips.
The sentence shot into me like the thrust of a naked sword.… I shook my head.
“Well, even a year or two ago she had that strange dislike of wearing a belt with her frocks. ‘We thought it was a whim, and did not humour her. Belts are necessary, you know, George,” she tried to smile feebly. “But now it has come to such a point that I’ve had to give in.”
“She dislikes a belt round her waist, you mean?” I asked, fighting a sudden inexplicable spasm in my he art.
“It makes her scream. The moment anything encloses her waist she sets up such a hubbub, and struggles so, and hides away, and I’ve been obliged to yield.”
“But really, Theresa—!”
“She declares it fastens her in, and she will never get free again, and all kinds of other things. Oh, her fear is dreadful, poor child. Her face gets that sort of awful grey, don’t you know? Even Kempster, who if anything is too firm, had to give in.”
“And what else, pray?” I disliked hearing these details intensely. It made me ache with a kind of anger that I could not at once relieve the child’s pain.
“The way she spoke to me after Dr. Hale had left—you know how awfully kind and gentle he is, and how Aileen likes him and even plays with him and sits on his knee? Well, he was talking about her diet, regulating it and so forth, teasing her that she mustn’t eat this and that, and the rest of it, when she turned that horrid grey again and jumped oft his knee with her scream—that thin wailing scream she has that goes through me like a knife, George—and flew to the nursery and locked herself in with—what do you think?—with all the bread, apples, cold meat and other eatables she could find!”