“Just here is where I knelt down, and asked him to forgive me. That was after — I’d been carrying on with some fellow I’d met at a dance, and he had found me out. I cried and cried as if my heart would break, and at last he came and put his hand upon my head — when I set myself to do it, and stuck at it, I could twist him round my finger! — and he began to stroke my hair — I’d lovely hair then, no woman ever had lovelier, and he was always one to stroke it when I’d let him! — and he said, ‘My girl, how often shall I have to forgive you?’ Listen! Can’t you hear him saying it now? Can’t you see the ghost?”
She went to where the modest sideboard stood.
“This is where we had our sideboard too — it was a bigger one than this; all our things were good. I was standing here, leaning against it just like this, the first time he saw me drunk. He’d been out all the evening on some sort of business, and I’d been left in the house alone with the girl, and I hadn’t liked it, and I’d been sulking. And at last I got to the whisky and I started to drink, drink, drink. I always had been fond of drink long before that, but I’d never let him find it out. But that time I was that sulky I didn’t seem to care, and by the time I might have cared I couldn’t care — I was too far gone. I had to keep on drinking. There wasn’t much in the bottle; when I got to the end of it I started on another. Then I got to the sideboard, and stood leaning over it, lolly fashion, booze, booze, boozing. All of a sudden the door opened, and he came into the room. I turned to have a look at him, the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other. Directly I got clear of the sideboard I went flop on the floor, and the bottle and the glass went with me, and there I had to lie. He rushed towards me, and as soon as he had had a look at me he saw how it was. Then he fell on his knees at my side, and put his hands up to his face, and began to cry. My God, how he did cry! — not like me. His sobs seemed tearing him to pieces, and his life’s blood seemed coming from him with every tear. Drunk as I was, it made me cry to hear him. Listen! Can’t you hear him crying now? Can’t you see the ghost?”
The woman’s words and manner were so realistic, and despite — or perhaps because of — her seeming frenzy, she had such an eerie capacity of conjuring up the picture as her memory painted it, that Madge listened spellbound. She was as incapable of interrupting the other’s flow of language as if the conscience haunted wretch had cast on her some strange enchantment.
The sea of visions went to the table, and, bending over it, beckoned to Madge to draw closer. As if she found the invitation irresistible, Madge approached. The woman’s outstretched finger pointed to a particular place about the centre of one side of the table. Her excitement all at once subsided; her voice grew softer. Her manner became more human, more womanly.
“See! — this is where my little baby died — my little child — the only one I ever had. It was a girl; we called it Lily — my name’s Lily”— she glanced up with a grin, as if conscious of how grotesquely inappropriate, in her case, such a name was now; “it was such a little thing — I didn’t want it when it came. I never was fond of children, and I wasn’t one to play the mother. But, when it did come, it got hold of me somehow — yes, it did! it did! I was fond of it, in my way. As for him, he worshipped it; it was baby, baby, baby! all the time. I was nowhere. It made me wild to hear him, and to see the way that he went on. We fell out because I would have it brought up by hand. He wanted me to let it have my milk — but I wouldn’t have it. I wasn’t going to be any baby’s slave — not likely! I don’t think he ever forgave me that. Then he was always at me because he said I neglected it; and that made me worse than ever: I wasn’t going to have a crying brat thrust down my throat at every turn, and so I told him. ‘Why isn’t there a place in which they bring up babies so that they needn’t worry their mothers?’ I wanted to know. When I said that, how he did look at me, and how he went on! I thought he would have killed me — but I didn’t care. He did his share of all the nursing that baby ever had — and perhaps a little more.”
Again the woman laughed.
“At last the little thing went wrong. It always was small; it never seemed to grow — except thin. It was the queerest looking little mite, with a serious face like a parson’s, and great big eyes which seemed to go right through you, as if it was looking at something which nobody but itself could see. He would have it that it got worse and worse, but he was always making such a fuss that I said he was making a fool of the child. The doctor came and came, but I was pretty often out, and when I wasn’t I didn’t always choose to see him, so I only heard what he cared to tell me — and I didn’t believe the half of that.
“One night I went to a masked ball with Mrs. Sutton — she was a larky one, she was, and led her husband a pretty dance. It was latish when I came back; I hadn’t enjoyed myself one bit, and left in a temper and came off home by myself I let myself in at the front door, and when I came into this room, on the table just here”— she pointed with her finger —“there was a pillow, and on the pillow was the baby, and he was kneeling on the floor in front, his elbows on the table, and his face on his hands, and the tears streaming down his cheeks as if they’d never stop. I’d been to the ball as a ballet girl — though he hadn’t known it, and I hadn’t meant that he should, but the sight took me so aback that, without thinking, I dropped my cloak and stood before him just as I was. ‘What’s the matter now?’ I cried; ‘what’s the child down here at this time of the night for?’ I expected that he’d let fly at me, and perhaps send me packing out of the house right there and then. But, instead, he just glanced my way as if he hardly saw me, or wanted to, and said, ‘Baby’s dying.’ When he said that, it was as if he had run something right into my heart. ‘Dying,’ I cried, ‘stuff!’ I ran to the table and bent over the pillow. I had never seen anybody dying before, and knew nothing at all about it, but directly I looked at it, I seemed to know that what he said was true, and that the child was dying. My heart stopped beating — I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move, I could only stare like a creature who had lost her wits — it was as if a hand had been stretched right out of Heaven to strike me a blow. There he was on one side of the table — and there was me leaning right over the other, both of us motionless, neither of us speaking a word; and there was the baby lying on the pillow between us, stiller than we were. How long we stopped like that I don’t know; it seemed to me as if it was hours — but I daresay it was only a few minutes. All at once the baby — my baby — gave a little movement with its little arms — a sort of trembling. He moved his arm, and put one of his fingers into its tiny hand; the baby seemed to fasten on to it. ‘Give it one of your fingers,’ he said, sobbing as if his heart would break. ‘It’ll like to feel your finger as it goes!’ Hardly knowing what I was doing, I stretched out one of my fingers; it was the first finger of my right hand — this one.” She held up the finger in question in its ragged casing. “And I put it in the mite’s wee hand. It took it — yes, it took it. It closed its fingers right round it, and gave it quite a squeeze — yes, quite a squeeze. Then it loosened its hold. It was dead. Dead upon the pillow. — And it’s there now. Can’t you see it lying on the pillow, with a smile on its face? a smile! Can’t you see the ghost?”
Stooping, the woman made pretence to kiss the lips of some one who was lying just beneath her. It might have been that to her the thing was no pretence, and that, as in a vision, the dead lips did indeed touch hers. Then, drawing herself erect again, she broke into another of her discordant laughs. Throwing out her arms on either side of her, she exclaimed in strident tones:
“Ghosts! Ghosts! The place is full of them — I see them everywhere. I touch them, hear them all the time. They’ve been with me all through the years, wherever I’ve been — and where haven’t I been? My God — in heaven and hell! crowds and crowds of them, more and more as the years went on. And do you think that I can’t see them here — in their house, and mine! Can’t you see them too?”
Madge replied between set lips — she had been forming her own conclusions while the woman raved:
“No, I do not see