CHAPTER VIII

GABRIELLE'S VISITATION

It was the day after the battle of the Marne that as I lay in a Red-Cross ambulance, one of an endless line making a slow progress to Paris, past packed masses of soldiery, parks of artillery, ammunition vans, hay wagons, meat carts buried in straw, commissariat busses--many of them English, still pasted with placards of coffee-houses, groceries and smoking tobacco, that a letter was brought to me by the orderly attached to our company of wagons. How well I recall his grimed face and the blood-stains on his white surtout! The letter was marked "_urgente_" and also "_par permission de le chef-major de corps d'hôpital_." The young orderly was gay with the pleasure of bringing me a note from home--"_Que vous serez heureux; le mot de la femme et les petites_!" The innocent salutation stabbed deeper than had the sabre of the Teuton giant. My eyes started, and the pang passed. The cheerful greeting was as some taunting whisper hissed in my ears, but--alas--how well meant!--_bien entendu_.

I recognized Gabrielle's hand-writing. I held the letter unopened, and my flaccid nerves scarcely measured its meaning. Ah! it seemed to me now almost a light matter what happened. The horrors and depths of pitiless sufferings I had been through had stunned my susceptibilities, and any added blow fell on a sensorium become rigid, or simply pulseless with shock. At length my hand, mechanically almost, opened the letter, and if it was unsteady it was the tremor of weakness only. My blurred eyes read it as they might have uncertainly read a sign on the street. And yet there was intelligence still remaining in them. My heart beat faster, my eyes closed a moment, while a puny pain like a shooting neuralgic ache, somewhere about my heart too, pierced me, and then my lips moved in a whisper--_Dieu defende_.

But indeed it was with me as with an eye fatigued with flashes, that sees no longer, or sees everything fantastically. I read the letter and laughed. The mild manner of a death--even the death of a father and mother--in their own bed, by its luminous contrast with this manifold Dance of Death in which I had shared, where Death nakedly came out of the air, and shot you, or impaled you, or stifled you, where things worse--_Ah! miserable_--than death happened, seemed almost benignant. It won an enviable distinction. And, for the meaning of it all, the disclosure of Death seemed itself now an admirable escape. Conception with me had become so darkened by excitation, that in the black background of consciousness, the loss of a father or of a mother, created no discernible image.

And yet--a few minutes later, as I read again the letter--crushed into a ball in my hand--a natural recreation of sensibility terrified me by its acute punishments. I cried out in a kind of fury, and then I wept. My nerves went to pieces. I was delirious. That raging tempest of madness lasted three days. I was taken to Paris. There in a well appointed hospital in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, I was treated with the most happy kindness, and there my sister came to see me and to nurse me, and by that incommunicable power of sweetness and sympathy--wherein too lurked the kindred genius of our common parentage--she restored me to sanity, and the broken strained mind was healed and fitted--as it were--together again, and the extinguished candle of reason relit. Those were days of infinite bliss. It was something wonderful indeed to be present and observant of one's own regeneration. Yet so it seemed. A consciousness, feeble and complacent, but always delighted, noted the return of another master-consciousness to the control of its despoiled and scattered properties, and in noting it, was willing to fade itself away, or re-enter its mysterious hidden realm of feeling.

And then I grew to so love Gabrielle. It was a sense of recreation, of absolute reference of a second birth to her power. She assumed a spiritual maternity before my eyes, and enrolled like some nucleal miniature of divinity within my soul. She walked before my seeing eyes an Angel of Grace. My bed lay in a separate room, quite apart from the general dormitory, wherein the crowded cots held the anguished sufferers from the battle fields, now forwarding their daily harvest of wounded, in thicker and thicker bunches. It was an unsolicited privilege but one granted through the benevolent insistence of the superintending surgeon. Its window looked out of the back of the hospital over a broken prospect of high chimneys, peaked walls, and balustraded roofs. Points of color flamed here and there, where jardinieres still bloomed on the window-sills, or where a tricolor, in wreaths of bunting, festooned the near and far piazzas. Dull surfaces of drab rose to parapeted balconies, and in a side-long glimpse I could see the tree-lined boulevard of ----. Above the mingled edges and angles an autumn sky laughed and wept, now flushed with delicate primrose, when the sunset closed the day, and now, for days too, drearily gray with inexpressive and moisture dropping clouds. The room was prettily set with some plain furniture--a bureau and a table covered with green baize, a cuvette and a few chairs. The shining floor, in the light, mirrored the furniture, and in it too were reflected the three pictures that decorated the walls. Gabrielle had put these pictures where they were, and they were all religious. One a Madonna, one a Christ, and the third the new Pope. The walls were faintly _rougeatre_ and from the middle of the ceiling hung an electrolier. That made the place at night gay with light. It seemed to me a little corner of Heaven. Was it not so, after all I had seen and been through? But I felt the sting of self-reproach, when my thoughts traveled back to the desolate comrades on the shell splintered, shrapnel haunted, bullet riddled field, there far away at the front--and not indeed so far away either.

Here Gabrielle nursed me, her pale face and sunken eyes were ominous symptoms of her own failing strength--and here she told me of my parents' deaths. It had a mysterious fore-ordained simplicity, and, as it were, a naturalness. It seemed just a going out, as one would leave a room, or pass through a door, and enter upon the world beyond. Father and mother were stricken with the hand of that hovering paralysis that had followed them for some time, and the achieving blow fell upon them both as they lay in the morning, in their bed, conversing. Even their thoughts had dwelt at that very instant upon the inevitable end, and the light flame of life was snuffed out even as their hands crossed, and the smile of a mutual resignation bathed their faces in hope and confidence.

This news brought to me no added misery--no, no, rather a strange placidity of contentment. For in that region of experience wherein I wandered along the borders of the great darkling ocean of Eternity, I felt the intervening space of life, between this existence and the next, to be of a transient and incomputable narrowness. The luxury of a gentle inanition overcame me, and so unevenly did the spark of life at times flutter in its cage, that I was unaware exactly whether I lived, or had begun to float otherwhere on an uncharted sea.

Slowly everything rectified itself, and then Grief came, and realization, and reproach, and memory started its accusative course, and I bewailed the impotence and forgetfulness of my pallid rectitude. My filial uses had not been energetic enough, nor altogether wakeful. That I knew.

Thus between the relapses of my sorrow, and the soothing influence of Gabrielle, I leaned more and more upon my sister, and, by a subjection of will and emotion, caught her frame of mind, her tincture of spiritualized enthusiasm. I now come to the very nucleus and meaning, the very heart and life of this story--the longed for confession and explanation which two worlds have waited for, the marvellous tale of a young woman's intervention with the unnumbered dead, and their disembodied re-entrance in the world to stay the earth's destroying plague of War. To tell finally how in the agony of her sublime assumption, to bring this to pass, my sister's soul left her body, and withdrew in the wake of that vast ascension of spirits, to the Eternal Sphere of the Immortals.

I had reached successfully the last stage of convalescence. My recovery had been stubbornly contested by the militant eager sprites of disease which somewhere lurked within me. I had only "come round," as the English say, slowly, with veerings and retreats, that kept Gabrielle miserably anxious. When I was at last able to leave my bed and sit up--sitting up in a Morris chair, most capacious and comfortable--Gabrielle came to me one afternoon, when the white radiance of the glorious day might cancel the unearthly shock and the ghostly melancholy of her story, and almost kneeling at my side repeated her incredible and wondrous confession.

"Alfred, I have something very strange to tell you. Something that has been happening for some time, and seems to grow more frequent as this awful war--_cette guerre desesperant_--goes on. For it has to do with it--with the war. You want to hear it, surely?"

"Yes," I replied, "Gabrielle, I do indeed. Is it some of the visits again from the other world which we agreed should be discontinued?"

"Yes, Alfred, it is," Gabrielle looked up at me with a scrutiny of wistful, almost beseeching ardor, and as I remained silent she continued, "Alfred, the DEAD come back to me! They speak to me. Oh, more than that, they throng my room, and in my ears sounds the endless wailing of their prayers."

"Prayers?" I repeated, aroused now into a sudden repulsion of these renewed surrenders to the old-time madness.

"Yes, Alfred, _Prayers_. I do not hear them now in Paris, but at St. Choiseul the night long they have assailed my ears with piteous prayers. I have endured it without confiding it to anyone, the dreadful matter, but I have so wanted to tell you."

"But Gabrielle, why do you surrender to this delusion? It will wear you to death. Ah sister, be very careful. We are alone in this great world now, and you are everything to me. These nightmares will turn your reason, unhinge your strength. Put them all to flight as you did before."

"Ah, Alfred it is different now--much different. Really the old visions were soft and gentle and pleasant, and I accepted them as pictures almost of lovely beings, happy and serene and sympathetic. But these are so dreadful. At first I screamed with terror at them or just shrank into myself and shuddered. I did put them to flight, Alfred. I begged Julie to sleep in the room with me, and then they never came. But just to see what it all meant I tried several times to sleep alone and the things came thicker and faster as the war went on. I resisted my fear, but the misery of these wounded and broken spirits--as it was shown to me--was killing me. I once more drove them all away by getting Julie to come to my room. One night Julie awoke me and said there was someone or something in the room. We started up in the bed, and looked about the room, and then that light you once saw came again, but no figure, just a wonderful shimmering of threads of mellow light, traced through the air of the room, and flowing out of the open window like skeins of smoke caught in a draught. Julie clutched me and cried, and her voice broke the spell--if spell it was--the light vanished and nothing more happened that night."

"How long has this been going on?" I asked in suspense, in half incredulity.

"It began after the first days of the war. But at first the voices were indistinct, and the visions vague and shadowy. I did not mind that. I thought it would wear off, and the spirits go away. They did for a while, but after the battle of Mons suddenly at night I saw an awful picture, not the battle field, but the ascending shades drifting upward from it like innumerable specks of vapor. Ah Alfred, how shall I describe it? I seemed to be carried there. It was a dream, and yet it was full of reality to me, and the ground, the wrecked villages, the streets strewn with the dead and dying, were all half hidden; sometimes in the dream altogether erased, by the multitudes of the shades going on, and on, and on, up and up, and up, in smoky masses, with faces and limbs spectral and ghostly, like some vast current of fog shaped into human forms."

"Well," I groaned, "what next?"

"I awoke, and there was nothing--nothing--but an hour later the voices were resumed and they murmured and murmured, and words now and then were understood, like 'Have Mercy'--'Oh God my wife'--'My home,' and then furious words like blasphemies. Ah Alfred, it was terrible," and the woman hid her face in my lap and shook convulsively.

"Gabrielle, my sister, how have you gone through with all this misery? Our father and mother dead, and these horrible visitations! I must get well quickly and together we will go to St. Choiseul, and then I can see for myself if such things can be."

"Can be, Alfred? You do not doubt me, do you? I am indeed telling you the very truth, and you will wound me to the heart if you think that I have been deluded, or am deceiving you."

Her loving, tender eyes were filled with the tears of remonstrance. I seized her arms, and brought her to my breast, and embraced and kissed her, whispering with all the devotion of my soul, "No Gabrielle, I know that these things have, in their way, happened, and that your tired senses and strained nerves may have actually created them, worn out as we all are with this grievous trial. And the _Prayers_, darling. What were they when they were intelligible? Could you make them out--tell me."

"At first I could only recognize them as supplications by the imploring voices, and then later they often became distinguishable as short cries for help and mercy, and deliverance, and then short staccato calls, as if from madness, insanity, brutality, unrighteousness. Lately and here in Paris I have not heard them, and I control myself better--" the last words were spoken by my sister hesitatingly, or at least slowly, as if she felt unwilling to utter them. I noticed the indecision at once.

"What is it, Gabrielle--your control? Have you yielded to the old temptation--the feeling that you wished to summon the DEAD?"

"Alfred," the voice was very low, and Gabrielle cast her eyes down, as if depressed by some unwonted shame of contrition; "Alfred, although I say that I exert no power to open the communications with the spirit world, yet I believe that in some unconscious way I actually summon these to me. Watching myself in the voluntary movements of my mind, I detect at times that without my volition, my mind assumes the mediumistic poise, as the books say. I am ashamed of it, and I think it is wicked. That makes me dread these visions for, perhaps, they are simply satanic. Oh what shall I do?"

Poor girl, worn out with service, beaten to the earth with sorrow, and now devitalized, unwillingly surrendering herself to the--to me--abhorrent power she seemed endowed with, to materialize the dead, and converse with the other side of the veil of life! The refuge of my partnership with her of these secrets was an immense relief. I gathered together my strength, and forced the laugh to my lips, and the merry words to my lips also, for her sake. Thus, with a deepening mutual absorption in each other, brother and sister grew inseparable in feeling and in thought and in affections.

It was almost three weeks later that I was permitted to leave the hospital, and return with my sister to St. Choiseul. It was a return strangely mingling the accents of sorrow, with the notes of a sudden joy. The autumn lights were beautiful, and the darkening vineyards, and the striped hop poles, the yet radiant gladiolus and the glancing lustres of the streams, the long peaceful perspectives, unsullied by war, the romantic cluster of the ivy coated ruins of the chateau towards Briois, the winding road, the straight sentinel line of poplars, and the unchanged village--empty and silent perhaps--crowning the slow ascent, bathed in the soft atmosphere of dewy sweetness--_Mon Dieu_, it almost made me swoon away with ecstacy!

And here at our doorway, was the little circle, Père Antoine, Père Grandin, the _Capitaine_, and Privat Deschat, Hortense, and Julie, and the pale faded loveliness of the orphan girl, Dora, but no father or mother was there. The tears rose to my eyes; it was impossible to check their almost unnoticed flow.

I fell into their arms. I kissed them all. I was half swooning with the pain of my affection.

"My son, how good it is to see you again, the vampire has not swallowed you up--_Dieu soit benit_;" that was Père Antoine.

"Ah Alfred, you see the plague has not touched us yet--the desecrating fiends were near. Yes, they were seen east of Briois--foraging, And you? Well? You look grave. Ah! it is not a time for smiles;" that was Père Grandin.

"Alfred, where are the Boches now? Where? _Ma foi_ it is not this time as it was in '70. You shall tell us all. It is _un histoire magnifique_. The flag is supreme;" that was the _Capitaine_.

"_Maître_ Alfred, you must not leave us again. _Souvenez vous_--I will make the _galette aux amandes chaque jour_? Eh? You will not go away again?" that was Hortense.

They all laughed a little. But Hortense wiped her eyes with her broad apron.

"Ah Gabrielle, we have been unhappy without you--all of us. Never, _never_, shall you go away again--OR--you take me with you, and the _Capitaine_;" that was Dora, and her pallid face, with the serious eyes, haunted now always with sorrow, the expressive index of her life's tragedy, flushed ever so slightly, and her arms were flung about my sister's neck, and she was caught again by Gabrielle, in her own blessed arms of reassurance and protection.

"Well Alfred, we are all traveling the same road together now. Death walks at everyone's side. But they who have died on the battlefield, they have sown in their own ashes the seeds of Redemption." And the speaker's voice rose, so that we felt startled at its suddenness. "They will yet fight as avenging spirits. They are about us now. When Heaven is too full of them they will descend, and destroy the enemy. _La Patrie_ is Eternal;" _that_ was Privat Deschat.

This last apostrophe awkwardly dampened the moment's happiness, and we went into the house slowly and silently, as if to the summons of an obsequy. When Deschat mentioned the descending spirits I saw Gabrielle quail and draw Dora to her side in a trembling spasm of alarm.

Slowly we entered the house. I shuddered in a momentary realization that its master and mistress were no longer sanctioning its hospitality. But how peaceful and comforting it all was! I felt embraced by the manifold tendernesses of form and picture and color and furnishment. Around the table of the dining room that evening in the cheerful splendor of the old oil lamp, with the shadows, grotesquely friendly, moving over the walls, we sat together, while Hortense and Julie outdid themselves in overloading the table with _les pièces precieuses de la cuisine_. I hardly dared to taste these delicacies. It seemed a profanation. Those suffering patient men at the front, so often almost starving! It was an impiety against patriotism to feast so lavishly.

I touched almost nothing, buried in sombre memories. The regalement was darkened by my abrupt disillusionment, and I could not easily rehearse my experience. I begged them to excuse me--another time I would go through it all, but just then--Ah surely they understood. There were so many reasons for hesitation, for suspense, for silence. They were most sympathetic, and I, who was to have been the _raconteur_, sat now almost moodily amongst them, and listened to the news of the neighborhood, as one and the other kept up the trivial narration.

How the Uhlans had been seen by little Mimette Collot prancing along a highway toward Cabrelet, how the thunders from the constant attrition eastward, between the armies, had kept them all awake at night; how the English soldiers had visited them and they had turned their pantries inside out to welcome and refresh them; how a _taube_ had wheeled and droned above them, like some colossal bumble bee, and how it dropped one bomb in a pasturage, and had killed a young mother cow and her calf; how good Mother Webbe--she at the crossroads where you go east toward Landrecies and Mons--had given a young English soldier on a motorcycle a full glass of _vin de prunes_, and he had fallen from his cycle along the roadside "dead-drunk"--_un ivrogne jusque mort_--; the dear soul had thought it was only _vin ordinaire_; how the men had deserted the country-side to enlist, and the old men and the women, the boys and girls, had taken their places; how the Diligence had a woman driver now, and how she dressed in man's clothes, and how bitter she was with the horses, just to seem more mannish--_comme un homme_.

They told how the troops had filled the roads moving eastward, and with them the long files of ambulances, of ammunition vans, of cannon carriages; how when the news came of our victory the church bells were rung, bonfires were made in the streets, and processions of boys and girls went up and down the roads singing the Marseillaise.

But somehow the spirit of our reunion dragged and drooped, and I suppose it was all my fault. The oppression of despair had seized me. I could not escape a sense of doom, not exactly my own, or the country's, but some vague awfulness of desolation, approaching with black pestilence--breathing power, to desecrate and ravage the earth. It kept me dumb. And all of this uneasy and ungracious apathy or morose grief, had developed since I entered the house--where at first the happiness of refuge seemed so inexpressible.

When I bade them "Good night," I said some stumbling words about my disappointment with myself, and promised to make amends. I needed rest. My body and soul, my mind were ill at ease. And so they left me, that clear star-lit night as the rising wind, threatening frosts or snow, rocketed upward with gusty roars from the house-tops, and rushed away with a wail that almost sounded to me as the incorporeal echo of those ravenous moans and cries, those palpitating shrieks, that I had heard sweep across the battlefield, and that, as the hours waned died away in death.

* * * * *

I recovered my strength but slowly, and there were recurrent lapses into periods of frightful depression, nervousness, and I fear irritability, that tried the devoted soul of Gabrielle, who remained unchanged in her devotion, and unceasing in her soothing ministrations. We often talked about the strange apparitions, and the voices, and the weaving and winnowed lights, but there was no return to Gabrielle of these visitations. She had gained in strength, her old time loveliness of face bloomed again, and, delighted with my companionship, she withheld--if indeed they assaulted her at all, or essayed to--the disembodied souls. Gabrielle was utterly transparent and confessed everything. I know that for at least seven months, there literally was no return of the manifestations. Because they seemed to have vanished entirely we permitted ourselves to talk them over freely, and it amused me. The terrifying thought though often arose, in the minds of both of us, that the discharged multitudes of spirits, shot almost into eternity, clung to the earth. Their gathering increasing shades haunted the loved earth, and their affections, somehow still retained for the living, nursed in them a rising anger at the continuance of the slaughters.

For the war went on; west and east the perpetual deluge of shells and shrapnel and bullets, the surges of poisonous gases, the savagery of assassination, and the cruelty of the bayonet, were emptying homes, thinning the ranks, and draining the country of its best, its strongest, men. And now came the trench lines; the insinuating deep gutters in the earth, worming themselves this way and that, here in unutterable perplexity of entrance and exit, there more simple, running on with occasional dug-outs and bomb-proof dungeons, cellar-like dismal caverns of darkness, humidity, and sickness. Stuck in them at various intervals were the platoons of shooting men, the hunters after other men's lives, quick, almost instinctive in their scent of opportunity, almost wolfish in their ample placidity of intention to take those other men's lives, if they could reach them. The long lines of subterranean fortification, stretching, with irregular intervals of defenselessness, like broad gaps in a strong fence, swept over fields, and up hills, and over rivers, and through villages, junketed ever and anon with ruins, shattered homes, or burrowing like the entrails of a corrupting cancer under churches, and massing hither and thither, in coils of black and muddy gashes, like the redoubled and tangled intestines of an animal.

Here went on the daily work of murder, helped by the batteries, and at propitious moments intensified into the uttermost diabolism by the whine, scream, and tear of shells, the detonations of shrapnel, and the thudding din of cannon, the whipping, ping-pong hiss of bullets. And following that splenetic outburst the sudden bolt forward of regiments of men might follow; headlong charges, frenzied rushes, dashes through a hail of shot, men tumbling this way and that, wounded, dying, dead, and then the ferocity of bodily collision with stabs from bayonets, and slashes from swords and all in a tense silence, save for the oppressed suspiration, the swish of brushing bodies pinned to each other, a momentary cry of pain, smothered objurgations.

Over the wavering line of lethal burrows, high in the air, swung or raced the bird-like combatants of the French and the Germans, their shadows sometimes thrown upon a cloud, sometimes drifting over the ground in a grotesque patch--a mere spot perhaps--of gray. Thus the mortal combat sullied the pure air with its disorder. Up to those armed fliers rose the stark stenches of the earth--the smell of unburied corpses--and their eagle eyes looked down upon long stretches of torn mud flats, ploughed by missiles, dreary plains of desolation, beaten into a black and brown hideousness of confused holes and gaping rents, gouged out hillsides, heaped mounds of fantastic earth, stippled everywhere with the half hidden bodies of the dead.

From Ostend to Arras, from Arras to Maubeuge, from Maubeuge to Vouzier, the indented, buried, smoking furrows of human explosives stretched its weary length, concealing armies; hiding, in its ambuscades and pits and mines, volcanoes of ammunition, a vast aneurism draining two nations of their life and substance. What was a half stifled combat here in the east in Galicia and in Poland was a fiercer conflict, and from there as from here--in the west--each hour sent to some home the stab of bereavement.

I could not return to my work. Recurrent chills and nervous breakdowns, constantly augmented by the horrible agony of this insufferable crime, kept my mind weakened, my body helpless.

It was a little more than seven months after the repulse of the invaders at the Battle of the Marne, that the strange symptoms of the spirit visitation that had troubled Gabrielle returned with appalling violence. The spring about St. Choiseul had filled the hills and the valleys with a wonderful beauty, more entrancing because the season had prevailed with rain, and this had imbued the skies with a fascinating vaporousness, which, suffused with sunlight, made the picture about us in the lowlands so lovely in its grace and clinging softness of light and shades. This sweet peacefulness made the horrid nightmare of the war, only a few miles away, more unbearable and hateful. How often that spring Gabrielle and I sat out on the porch late into the night, amid the renewed fragrance of the flowers, the rising chorus of the insect and tree life, murmuring in field and stream and wood and along the grassy edges of the highway, talking over the miseries of our dear land! Gabrielle had worn herself to skin and bone--as the English say--with her work in the hospital at Paris, and now together, both melancholy and disabled, we lingered long in thoughtful communion on what the meaning and upshot of this unwearied struggle might be.

Perhaps it was about the middle of April, 1915, that late at night--it might have been after midnight--as I read in my room some late reports and personal letters from the front, my door--the one leading from my room into Gabrielle's, opened, and my sister appeared at the entrance, in her night dress. In her face was a wild, startled look, as of one who had been surprised in her sleep by some awful dream, and yet trembled under the malign shock.

"Gabrielle," I cried, myself moved to the outcry by her famished, stricken, hunted look, "What is it? Are you ill?"

She did not answer at once, but stole towards me with a wavering stealthiness, as of one escaping from a pursuer. When she was at my side--I had leaped to my feet in consternation and alarm--she flung her arms around my neck, and in a choking whisper, that half audible mixture of breathing and utterance which betokens physical and nervous exhaustion, said:

"Alfred, the spirits are here again, and they crowd my room; they are filling this room now. Don't you feel them? Have you seen, felt, heard nothing? They are the ghosts of the slain--I know it, for they tell me so, and their faces are so imploring--They ask me to stop the war. They tell me--" her voice grew stronger, and in the rush of her emotion and excitement the words followed faster and faster, but still her voice was a whisper only--"They tell me I can help. And O! Alfred their cry for Mercy is piteous. They feel the pain of those who have lost them--whom they have lost too. A voice came to my ears, clear and calm: 'Help us! Help us! Our sadness is yours. We wished to live. Death for us is wrong--too soon--too soon--too soon;' and then it died away, like a fading bell-note, far, far away. And Alfred the voice sounded to me like Sebastien's. O! Alfred there are others too--and some--" she shuddered in my arms, and clasped me convulsively, as if the pain of the recollection were too great to bear.

"Gabrielle," I answered, now aroused and almost terrified, "stay here. Are you quite well? The morning must soon break. Rest on my bed. We will watch it out. And--and--perhaps Gabrielle it will be best for us to leave this strange, bewitched place." My voice was loud. Its very loudness seemed to reassure her.

She released my arms, and controlling herself sank into the armchair I had risen from. She pressed her hands to her brows and her eyes closed. A moment later she opened them, looked steadfastly at me, then turned, without rising, and looked about the room in a dazed scrutiny, as if searching for something. Her wandering eyes returned to my face. I bent suddenly in surprise towards her. She was smiling. The staggering fancy crossed my mind that Gabrielle might have lost her reason. Anguish and despair and sympathy had spread madness and dementia throughout France already, that I knew.

"Alfred they have gone; how wonderful! Your loud words cleared the room of the crowding host. Alfred it _was_ a host. I felt their presence before I woke. But they come like air; they vanish as darkness vanishes at the touch of day."

"Gabrielle, no more of it now. No. Rest. Sleep. I will sit up and read. I have letters to write to men at the front, in the trenches whom I know, who know me, who expect to hear from me. I have packed a wagon-load of things for these brave boys, and it goes to the front tomorrow. I wish I could go with it. But--"

"No Alfred--O! No!--not now! Do not leave me. Some strange powers are working, and in the voices I have heard I feel the approach of a vast spiritual finale."

"Why, Gabrielle, what do you mean? Stay. No more of it tonight. My brusqueness has chased them away. If a little noise scares these mockers, I can always furnish that."

I laughed and chided my sister for her seriousness. But Gabrielle rebuked me. I rebuked myself. A strange oppressive and yet merciful theory was shaping itself in my mind. I apprehended that a mysterious supernatural power might be summoned to end the war. And--Yes, so I thought--Gabrielle might be its protagonist and avatar.

I helped my sister to my bed, and when she again had regained her cheerfulness, and welcome sleep--that chrism of the Almighty to vexed hearts and minds--closed her eyes, I resumed my work. The silence was the very enclosure of the grave. But then it was like the grave in nothing else. The spring air, dewy, warm, perfumed, entered the room, and once or twice when I looked out of the window the shimmering stars shone in a velvet night over a world buried in slumber. All of the gentle twitterings and murmurs of the night seemed stilled. I think I fell asleep myself, for I awoke with a strange, a most benumbing sense of confinement, of restraint that I could not define, but perhaps was most easily compared to an immersion in some high pressure atmosphere. I felt suffocated. I sprang to my feet. The lamp was flickering as if about to go out, but its light fell on my watch, which recorded the hour as 2:30 past midnight. Someone stood at my side. I felt the presence, as we instinctively do--a cognition like a telepathy. It was Gabrielle again. Her face was pale and her eyes gazed, as if in a spell, upon the space above my head; her hands gropingly rested now on my arm. I waited for her to speak, and almost immediately the flickering flame of the lamp expired. We were in darkness.

But we were not _alone_. Some kinesthetic sense made me aware of beings, entities, existencies, about me. I yielded to the impression that a peculiar nervous excitation, a thrilled expectancy, as though the next instant some miracle of strangeness would befall me, was due to this influence of an invisible flood of spirits, or souls, or what you will, that had invaded the room. It was Gabrielle's voice that spoke in my ears, it was her arms again that encircled my neck.

"Alfred, again! They are all about us; and Alfred," the voice sank to a whisper, "the spirit of Sebastien Quintado is here too."

I could not restrain the impetuous cry that broke from my lips. Perhaps, were it rightly interpreted, it was fear, the sudden effort to restore some balance of sanity in the madness of a nightmare, that forced this outburst. I only knew that I almost shouted:

"Gabrielle, Gabrielle! You have gone mad." I sprang to the lamp and relit it. The pale lights of morning were streaking the sky, and the vocal welcome of Nature was breaking out from myriad throats in the wide jubilation of the spring's resurrection.

Gabrielle was on her knees before me with her face bowed within her embracing hands. I raised her up, and we walked together to the window in silence. Upon us both fell the overwhelming consciousness that our home had become a _rendez-vous for the spirits of the slain_. _It was haunted. But to what end?_