CHAPTER III

MY RETURN

It is fifteen years today since Blanchette died. I have grown old since then with an age not of years, though by reason of a sister's love, I have been consoled, strengthened, even, and now, in the presence of the world's disaster, succumb to some unutterable conviction that the ends of God have little need of the prayers of men.

After my delirium in San Antonio had passed, I resumed my normal self-possession, though a nervous weakness--since developing into a muscular paralysis--made me at moments inert or half trembling with a deceitful dread that set my heart beating curiously. How well I recall it all; those days of anguish, with the twilight glimmering of joy that I had come in time to see her, and with too a mystical sense of attachment between us both, lasting beyond death, and bathed, as with a consecration, in the bitterest waters of Marah.

I had rushed from San Antonio to New York, and from New York to Havre, and thus, in two weeks, almost exactly, stood halting before the gate of the captain's house in St. Choiseul. The autumn season already had begun to stain the woods with red and yellow, the delicate atmosphere of early fall filled the fair scenes of meadow and hill and clustered homesteads, with ravishing tints. Everything, as I despairingly gazed upon it was so eloquent of beauty and peace and--realization! And what lay in the house before me? I almost fell to my knees in the crushed agony of suspense, but Ah! No! it was not suspense. I _knew_; that psychic power which dwelt in my Gabrielle, which brought to her the myriad voices of the dead in their awful supplications--_Eh bien_, not that now--some of that power was with me too, and every step I went forward to that pitiless revelation of defeat, accompanied the stern record in the thought that hope was delusion. I had met no one; the deserted village was itself a presage.

I looked up at the silent house charming in its vines, flowers, into the walled garden blushing now in the hectic flush of royal gladiolus, up at the empty windows, and above, far above into the depthless blue sky, where we men and women somehow place the everlasting dwelling-place of the Almighty. Almost as I reached the door it opened, and in its frame stood Gabrielle, much changed; I saw that at once, through all my sadness, but solemnly beautiful I thought. My heart leaped towards her; in the fast approaching desolation she, my blessed sister, would save me, lift me up from the terrors of bereavement, not with strength, but with the divine compassion that I felt now visibly abided in her.

Gabrielle opened wide her arms. I caught her in my own, and she whispered in my ear; "Alfred I knew you were here. Before I saw you the _sense_ of it was with me."

"Gabrielle, is there no hope--no hope?" The words choked me like some insurmountable obstruction in my throat.

"Yes Alfred," the voice, always soft and delightful, was just a little tremulous with sympathy, her own deep love. "There may be; the fever has subsided a little, but--Well, come in. Blanchette asks for you so much. Come, the spare room is at the head of the stairs. Be noiseless. I will fix everything."

We ascended the stairs, and I waited outside the closed door with my head pressed against its lintels, murmuring--what were they?--Prayers? Possibly.

It opened softly in a few minutes, and Gabrielle with a gesture of invitation to enter and with her finger on her lips, moved before me into the room. I saw the waiting group at the side of a low wide bed. The captain, erect, still, with features blanched into a pallor that matched his white disordered hair, his figure bent slightly forward as he leaned on his cane, and kept his eyes unchangingly riveted upon the bed, whose occupant I could not see. At the bed-side was the watching doctor, and to him now Gabrielle approached, withdrawing then a little to one side with her head bowed, but with her eyes noting the sick girl whom yet I could not see.

I slipped to my knees with a sudden motion outward, that brought me to the bed-side, and for a moment I stopped there, with my face buried in the coverlid. It had been done; Blanchette knew. The next moment her hand caressed my hair, and the weak stroke penetrated me with such an ageless longing that, do what I would, I shook from head to toe. _Mais courage_; I must be now most calm. Yes, yes, _most calm_. So I wrestled with myself, biting my lips, and forcing to my eyes the haggard smile of reassurance. My hands imprisoned the hand of Blanchette, and slowly raising my head our eyes met.

I did not see what I saw afterwards, the shrunken figure, the hollow cheeks, the paling lips, the slow hideous change of emaciation. No! nothing; only her eyes, and in them shone something so fathomless, so beatific, that it suddenly lifted the intolerable weight of pain, it smote the clouds of misunderstanding or rebellion, and they vanished. It filled my ears with music, in place of groans, it summoned by the wand of a supernatural enchantment unheralded figures of blessing, and in those eyes I read the futurity of our endless happiness.

I moved my head towards her, and despite the restraining hand of the doctor kissed her lips, slowly, slowly, that the lingering embrace might fill her soul with confidence, and against her heated cheeks I swept my lips again and again. It was over. Our tryst was kept. Gabrielle called me gently, and Blanchette fell from me in a fainting spell, while the doctor firmly lifted me up to my feet, and the captain caught my unsteady body.

And--we had not spoken in that transient interval of surrender--thus mutely with the deep intelligence of an uttermost love we were married, and in that restraint unrepiningly, with an entire joy, I have lived and _live_. Some symptoms of that psychic erethism which possessed Gabrielle were also born in me, and before my eyes even now sweeps the vision of my Blanchette, and in the night her voice fills my ears, and her hand caresses my forehead. But later it was through Gabrielle that I summoned her to me, and in this way grew the apparent supersensual power of my sister to materialize the ghostly denizens of the Hereafter, and install them, as it were, in matter before the physical eye.

Blanchette's burial was itself a poem, so sweet, so tender, so rich in the love of friends, and in the graces of both religion and of nature. The day was divinely rare. Everywhere was the blessed soft, gently warming sunshine, and the last flowers of the autumn woke to the summery touch, and bloomed again. From the doorway of her home the little procession filed, bearing, on the unshrinking shoulders of eight villagers, the coffin, draped in white and enjeweled with blooms. Before it went the wavering line of altar boys, singing in thin sopranos, and the robed Padre--Father Antoine--grave and noble, and behind it the captain and I walked, our hands clasped together. Although the captain moved forward erectly, I felt the nervous pressures of his hand, tightening and relaxing, and for a moment now and then he leaned upon me. _Mais--le brave garçon_--he never flinched, and if his heart was near the breaking point, no one knew. Behind him walked Gabrielle and father--mother was in the church waiting with the congregation--and then Privat Deschat and Sebastien Quintado, and then the long file of friends followed, old and young, who had loved Blanchette for her goodness, her prettiness, her kindness, her grace of being and of sympathy.

They came from far and near; they were men and women, girls and boys, some carrying candles, some wreaths, some little crosses of Easter palms which they would throw in the grave, or on it. The altar boys carried lighted candles, and the air was so still that the almost invisible wisps of flames rose straight upward, and were revealed by the undulous smoke that sprang from their tips as the candles wavered in the hands of the acolytes. Slowly we moved on--somehow I seemed half unconscious, and yet most sensitive to the day's supreme charm--the shrill chanting of the boys, mingled almost indistinguishably in my ears with the murmurous hum of belated cicadas, the slow rustling of footsteps before and behind me, the occasional whisper of the vacantly stirred foliage in the trees, the distant pipings of birds, and the far-off wail of some wandering or bereaved dog.

It was a dream almost, and ever and anon, like some spiritual effluence, the fragrance of the dying season from the field, the distant woods, the savory banks of the meadow-streams, invaded and enmeshed my feelings, with a strange fervor of complacency, as though I followed, not the dead body of my love, but was on my way to meet her elsewhere. So indeed it seemed to me in the little church, where all the frail magnificence our little church could summon for her funeral was so loyally displayed, and where the soft voiced father spoke with the brave and cordial accent of confidence, that Blanchette Bleu-Pistache was most surely now in Paradise. Then I felt my own soul leaving me amid the tapestries and lights, and upward with her, hand in hand, I was hastening to fields of asphodel and unbroken choirs of the celestial, and that then I swooned sideways, and for an instant the captain held me, when the reverberant senses returned, with the rush of whirring sounds, and I was myself again.

Blanchette was buried in our church-yard, somewhat towards its western wall, where the ivy clung late in the winter to the stones, where a tall Lombardy poplar planted too against the wall, stood like some impossibly gigantic sentinel, and where afterwards indeed the flowers that I watered, in an agony of trust that Blanchette knew I kept thus alive within me the imperishable union of our hearts--spread the sweet wantonness of abundant color and perfume above her, flowers that when they died in the autumn's cold and the winter's searing frosts and snows, were replenished with others plucked from the conservatory of our home, and placed under the white cross like some herbal sacrifice.

Ah--_c'est assez_--I must not linger on the great sorrow, though in the inextinguishable pain that I feel at moments over its recall, a hidden selfishness as of a satiety of suffering prevails to force me to write and write. But I have forgotten and my wandering thought obscures my whole purpose. It is Gabrielle that all this grievous remembrance leads to, and she who has ended the awful WAR, is the theme of this most wonderful experience, I have essayed to tell so imperfectly.

After Blanchette's death I stayed with the captain for some months, until a grave disease struck me down almost to death's door, which indeed I craved to open and to close behind me. It was a nervous fever, from which I have never quite recovered, as it left me with recurrent fits of weakness and a debility of energy quite unlike my former self. The captain adopted an orphan girl, who was like an incarnation of his daughter, and who infinitely blessed him, with a similar gentleness and sanity and beauty.

Gabrielle and myself became again closely knit together in sympathy. She had nursed me in my sickness, and she read to me in my convalescence, and then she told me of the harsh and repulsive life of the hospital; how its penury of grace afflicted her, and the physical destitution of the hideously sick had overcome her with an irrepressible repulsion, and the half savage nakedness of exposures and surgery had thrown her into momentary spasms of despairing melancholy. But she had not complained; it was the ordeal of preparation, she said; she had undergone extreme dread and misery of heart and mind, and, under the visitations of her distress, those ecstasies--as she now slowly and tearfully confessed--of desire to see the ghostly and immaterial had returned and strengthened, and to her had come visions and voices, and again and again in her prayers the apparent touch of fingers tracing the braid of her hair, or even smoothing the temples of her head had actually been felt.

None of these things were told to me by Gabrielle until I was effectually improved, and then they became the outpouring of her heart. She had been unwilling to speak of them to father and mother since they would have, beyond any question, regarded them as the symptoms of mental infirmity, and their solicitude might have readily taken the form of some new insistence upon the avocations of the city. Gabrielle, after the death of Blanchette had persisted in her refusal to return to the hospital in Paris, and, after a brief and a little unpleasant disagreement, mother and father permitted her to stay at home. Then came my sickness, when Gabrielle proved most useful, and then by a natural adjustment--for exactly as it had been in the old days of childhood we became inseparable--Gabrielle assumed domestic duties, and our home life was reinstituted and complete.

It was delightful, though the happiness it brought to me was a solemn tenderness of feeling and thought simply. I had brought back from America a small sum of uninvested funds, and when this was carefully invested, with the interest from the moneys held by me in America and with my father's maintenance, our living became, more than ever, free from anxieties, and comfortably luxurious. Nor were we careless of our duties to the less fortunate; the instruction of our parents had always laid emphasis upon the invincible demands of charity in the Christian life, and no one more thoughtfully than they furnished to us examples of its most admirable exercise.

And here I must refer to something now certainly obvious to my reader. The religious faith of our parents was not ours--not Gabrielle's nor mine. Perhaps that had much to do with that felt, though never mentioned, separation--_désaccordement_, we French would, I think, call it--that latently grew up between our parents and ourselves, dutiful as we always were and loving too. Gabrielle and I were Catholics, and our reversion, as it might be called, had taken place as we approached maturity, when something in our natures responded vitally to the spiritual richness and the sensuous impressions of the Catholic church, while the absence of a Protestant church in St. Choiseul--supplemented by the meeting together of various members in a room, wherein my father often assumed the functions of the preacher--helped to establish our desertion. There was indeed a moment's exasperation over it all, but it was most evanescent, and, yielding to a larger liberality of conviction than most Protestants, our parents were at least contented that their children worshipped God and Christ.

Certainly to Gabrielle the Catholic symposium of saints, and its hierarchy of visible and invisible powers, appealed overwhelmingly. She surrendered to the full harvest of its supernatural offerings, with the gladness, the rapture, of the energumen. Now too that the psychiatric sense or control had started within her nature, she rose to the strange contingency of communication with the dead, with a transcendent joy. No longer thrust upon the abhorrent carnalities of the hospital, graciously as she acknowledged their necessity and kindness, Gabrielle, with me, her emotional companion too, returned to all the quietism of our life in St. Choiseul, and revelled in her exuberance of mystical detachment. It was a partial aberration of mind, I almost now think, despite its wondrous results, accompanied with the enthralled wonderment and pleasure of a temperament poetical and structurally imaginative. Gabrielle became neurotic. Her hospital life and its terrors had something to do with it.

This community of feeling and the gradual development of that unhealthy indulgence in the mediumistic power, Gabrielle now discovered she possessed (which became encouraged through my own solicitations) formed between us a bond of fellowship, that became secretive and masonic. It was not a fortunate circumstance, and yet SEE what marvels flowed from it--at least so I think, and indeed I am not unwilling to protest that it was God's hand! Of course it was my desire to approach Blanchette in her spiritualized state, that led us onward along the mysterious and fascinating path of our strange psychic experiments. And so I come to that illustrious moment when I saw Blanchette in the spirit, when--_Mon Dieu_, can I ever forget it?--that pale vision of my own Blanchette issued from the darkness, stayed on the threshold of the real for an instant, softly luminous, and yet discrete in form, though the corporeal properties of the dear face I adored, seemed blurred in the haze of an exceeding brightness.

It was probably about six months after Blanchette's death, that I ventured to speak to Gabrielle about the hope I almost treacherously nourished--for the practice is forbidden by the Church--that she might be able to summon Blanchette from the world of spirits. It was towards the evening of a spring day, that just began to intimate the glorious oncoming of the new season's wealth of beauty--a beauty I longed for, for with the reawakening earth, with the fresh laughter of the whole wide sphere of living things, I knew the dead weight of my grief would be lightened. The sunlight, the song of birds, the flowing vesture of the colored earth, would enter and dissolve it, and thus, mellowed into sadness only, it would encumber me no longer with leaden hopelessness. We were standing together at the bottom of the garden, watching the first sproutings of the crocus from beneath a film of sheltered snow, and the cheering warmth of the full sun filled us with the instincts of life. It opened my lips.

"Gabrielle," I said, "I want you to bring Blanchette back to me."

My sister was not surprised; she turned to me with the most natural gesture of willingness, placing her hands upon my shoulders and looking straight into my eyes.

"Yes, Alfred, I will. I have heard Blanchette. But I was afraid to tell you. Twice she has spoken to me, in the night, and once in the brightest daylight, as I stood at the window of my room. Can you stand it? For _see_ Alfred, I feel the power strongly in these spring days, as if the resurrection of life in all these things," she swept her arms outward to the landscape, "brought with it the spirits of the dead; as if they too liked a reprieve from their isolation, and thronged to the earth. Is it not so?"

"Oh! Gabrielle what has Blanchette said to you? Was it in words? Gabrielle, Gabrielle, it cannot be. Do not fool me with mere fancies."

Gabrielle smiled, a smile, as it were, of commiseration at my doubt, for now indeed she lived, I do believe, in a mingled world of things that we call real, and things that we call unreal, and _to her_ they were almost the same.

"I do not fool you Alfred. Why should I? It is so simple and it is so true. See."

She left me, beckoning for me to follow her. She walked to a walnut tree, a low precarious sapling which had furtively pushed its way upward into some semblance of a tree, and leaned against its slender trunk, with her eyes pressed upon her crossed hands. I stood irresolute, half expectant, half miserably self-reproachful. Suddenly Gabrielle spoke. Her voice was itself strange, very distinct but chilled into a sepulchral gravity.

"It is all very dim, yellow and blue clouds float up and down, and here and there a figure moves, and there are voices, and now a great light--too bright--too bright--it shatters all!"

Her voice had risen to a tone louder than conversation, and she had raised her head with a quick upward movement, as if it had been jerked backward. Almost instantly she turned again to me, her face blanched, and her eyes just a little wild and strained, with no recognition in them. The oddness passed almost as quickly as it came, and Gabrielle smiled, and shook her head apologetically, and for one moment we watched each other with curiosity. But Gabrielle was quite herself, and coming close to me, she whispered:

"No Alfred it is not hard. You saw that I pierced the unseen; though, as it most usually happens when in the open, or with others, the pictures are confused and the voices difficult. I cannot make them out. But we shall try tonight together. Hold my hand and wish your wish, and let our minds--our souls--call for _her_ and she will come. O! I am certain!"

"Gabrielle, I think this is not wise. You must cast off this inclination, and banish all of these impressions. Is it not a dangerous habit? Are you not afraid that it may unhinge your reason? And yet--Ah! how well you know, Gabrielle, that if I could only just be quite certain that Blanchette waits--waits. And then _but once_! Yes but once! Gabrielle," I caught her by the shoulders, and held her imprisoned, so that our eyes gazed into each other's, mine with a scrutiny that was half anger, half solicitude, and hers with an intense affection.

"Gabrielle--this must end. You hear me. _End._ Call Blanchette if you can. I will help you--and then--Let it all go. Cure your temperament, banish these hallucinations. I know I have been guilty in listening to you, but now--after Blanchette--after Blanchette--" the words left my lips wearily, as if the next alternative were feared most by me; "after Blanchette, no more of it. It is wrong, it is a diabolical procedure, mixed up with nonsense and disease. _Stop it._" How extravagant are our inconsistencies. I admonished Gabrielle, but I was not unwilling myself to stoop to the indulgence that might bring me a glimpse--no matter how fraught with deception, with the danger of madness, of the worse consequences of physical deterioration, even of religious apostacy, if only a glimpse of her I had made eternally the lode-star of my life, now and hereafter; if only a glimpse, might be vouch-safed.

_Mais pourquoi Non_--was I so wrong? What indeed has happened? Ah I know Gabrielle is--_arretez vous, pauvre barbouilleur, pas encore_--Go on with your story. It is Gabrielle speaking.

"Brother, you do not know what you are asking me. It is impossible--it would rob me of life, for I should not know then whether to really live in this world and to die in the other, or to leave you and mother, and father and home here, and to live the more glorious life beyond. Now I live in both worlds. Yes truly--in the mornings the clouds of angels waken me, through the nights my bed-side is covered with the spread haloes of the dead, and in my ears sound the sweetest whispers, and salutations of the saints. Throughout the day, if I only shut my eyes, and ask for their appearing, the visions continue, and even my face is brushed by fairy hands, or my lips feel the imprint of unseen, unknown faces."

My sister's face shone with an interior illumination, impossible to describe, and as she talked to me I felt the astonishment that might come to one who converses with some incarnate spirit. It did appeal to my sympathy, for I lived now myself half immersed in the daily contemplation of another world; it met my own anticipations vividly, and I could not condemn, nor evade its fascination. But I wondered and so questioned her more closely.

"Gabrielle, how can all this be? You have never said such things to me before, as if you were moving in a spirit-land with your feet in this world, and your head lifted above the stars. What does it mean? I knew something, but this tumult--_fourmillement_--of apparitions I knew nothing of."

"No, Alfred, I know you did not, though it has often been on my tongue to let you know how the visitations multiplied. I think, Alfred, it really is, as St. Paul says, that we are encompassed by a cloud of witnesses, or this world is itself unreal, and the realities are elsewhere; perhaps that everything about us, could we for an instant strip them of their appearances, would be something else--you see?--_something else_, and this atmosphere," she lifted her hand upward, shook it rapidly, causing little puffs of air against my face, "was loaded with currents of the dead!"

We both got up and walked slowly towards the house.

"Of course you have said nothing of any of these things to mother or father?" I queried.

"Ah, Alfred, I could not. They would not understand, and then why--why should I?"

After a pause: "Alfred, it will do no harm. Do not think me mad, or deluded, or--or--unbalanced, as they say, even. I cannot make it plain perhaps--but this I know--_they_ are there--_they_, the spirits--" and she waved her hand up and down--"and when I call them they come, and they come when I do not call."

She was almost laughing now, and studying her attentively I could not see any of those symptoms in feature, or eyes, or voice, or manner, that betray to the alienist the disordered brain. Gabrielle never to me looked lovelier.

The next moment as we entered the hall-way I caught her arm and turned her abruptly to myself; "Gabrielle, show me Blanchette."

Her arms were about my neck in a trice, and she spoke in my ear; "Yes, Alfred, tonight, in the library. Come. It will be my seance--and _yours_ too. Our spirits are in tune. We will roll back the visible and see the invisible. The substantial shall become the transubstantial, and the diverse, one."

This language was the only indication, at the moment, that I possibly could have regarded as idiotic--in the common sense--and I was half inclined to believe that Gabrielle--not without fun and humour--meant to bewilder me with it, as a joke.

Would I come? "Yes certainly," and so I left her, wonderingly, as I passed to my room, recalling that utterly impossible fiction in an English book written by an artist, called, as I remember it, _The Martian_. I shuddered a little when I closed the door of my room, and sank back in an easy chair, to grapple with a now peculiar problem. Should Gabrielle be permitted to live in this world of spiritual essences, and apparitions any longer?

I think that I was not disinclined to live in it myself, but with me the material stringency of affairs was unmistakable, and I did, spasmodically at least, revolt against this extreme spiritualism. I hunted along my book-shelves, and found the Martian book, and chasing through its pages I stopped at this incomprehensible passage:

"For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception."

And then came the intolerable fancy of these Martian souls getting into the bodies of animals, and into men and women, and how the particular Martia influenced the divine Englishman, and made him write wonderful transforming books, and he thought of a life

"where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth."

I fell into a stupor of meditation. Might not Blanchette do such things for me? Her image sprang to my eyes, her voice sounded in my ears, her arms embraced me, the very fragrance of her person enchanted my nostrils, and then, as the stupor passed, and the dying day sent the broad beams of the sun full into my face, I rose, and, feeling with a sudden particularity of certitude, the absolute hopelessness of fancies, of dreams, of anything but _work_, with my own life broken at its very beginning, and the overshadowing pall of an unforgettable disaster shrouding it from corner to corner, I sank to my couch, and, stretched along its length, wept bitterly.