E. Nesbit - In the Dark - Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit

I don’t know how long I sat there – there was no further sound – and at last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.

‘You fool!’ I said to myself; ‘dead or alive, is she not your darling, your heart’s heart? Would you not go near to die of joy, if she came back to you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives you!’

‘I wish she would come,’ myself answered in words, while every fibre of my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.

I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked at the polished furniture – the commonplace details of an ordinary room. Then I thought of her, lying alone so near me, so quiet under the white sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up and walked across the floor, and turned the door-handle?

As I thought it, I heard – plainly, unmistakably heard – the door of the chamber of death open slowly. I heard slow steps in the passage, slow, heavy steps. I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain hands that felt for the latch.

Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.

I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened – that door on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet dared not turn away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the bed foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its chin. There was a scent of lavender and camphor and white narcissus. Its eyes were wide open, and looked at me with love unspeakable.

I could have shrieked aloud.

My wife spoke. It was the same dear voice that I had loved so to hear, but it was very weak and faint now; and now I trembled as it listened.

‘You aren’t afraid of me, darling, are you, though I am dead? I heard all you said to me when you came, but I couldn’t answer. But now I’ve come back from the dead to tell you. I wasn’t really so bad as you thought me. Elvira had told me she loved Oscar. I only wrote the letter to make it easier for you. I was too proud to tell you when you were so angry, but I am not proud anymore now. You’ll love again now, won’t you, now I am dead. One always forgives dead people.’

The poor ghost’s voice was hollow and faint. Abject terror paralysed me. I could answer nothing.

‘Say you forgive me,’ the thin, monotonous voice went on, ‘say you love me again.’

I had to speak. Coward as I was, I did manage to stammer:

‘Yes; I love you. I have always loved you, God help me.’

The sound of my own voice reassured me, and I ended more firmly than I began. The figure by the bed swayed a little, unsteadily.

‘I suppose,’ she said wearily, ‘you would be afraid, now I am dead, if I came round to you and kissed you?’

She made a movement as though she would have come to me.

Then I did shriek aloud, again and again, and covered my face with all my force. There was a moment’s silence. Then I heard my door close, and then a sound of feet and of voices, and I heard something heavy fall. I disentangled my head from the sheet. My room was empty. Then reason came back to me. I leaped from the bed.

‘Ida, my darling, come back! I am not afraid! I love you. Come back! Come back!’

I sprang to my door and flung it open. Someone was bringing a light along the passage. On the floor, outside the door of the death chamber, was a huddled heap – the corpse, in its grave-clothes. Dead, dead, dead.

She is buried in Mellor churchyard, and there is no stone over her.

Now, whether it was catalepsy, as the doctor said, or whether my love came back, even from the dead, to me who loved her, I shall never know; but this I know, that if I had held out my arms to her as she stood at my bed-foot – if I had said, ‘Yes, even from the grave, my darling – from hell itself, come back, come back to me!’ – if I had had room in my coward’s heart for anything but the unreasoning terror that killed love in that hour, I should not now be here alone. I shrank from her – I feared her – I would not take her to my heart. And now she will not come to me anymore.

Why do I go on living?

You see, there is the child. It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.

The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me was my going back to town on that day. I am a reasonable being; I do not do such things. I was on a bicycling tour with another man. We were far from the mean cares of an unremunerative profession; we were men not fettered by any given address, any pledged date, any preconcerted route. I went to bed weary and cheerful, fell asleep a mere animal – a tired dog after a day’s hunting – and awoke at four in the morning that creature of nerves and fancies which is my other self, and which has driven me to all the follies I have ever kept company with. But even that second self of mine, whining beast and traitor as it is, has never played me such a trick as it played then. Indeed, something in the result of that day’s rash act sets me wondering whether after all it could have been I, or even my other self, who moved in the adventure; whether it was not rather some power outside both of us … but this is a speculation as idle in me as uninteresting to you, and so enough of it.

From four to seven I lay awake, the prey of a growing detestation of bicycling tours, friends, scenery, physical exertion, holidays. By seven o’clock I felt that I would rather perish than spend another day in the society of the other man – an excellent fellow, by the way, and the best of company.

At half-past seven the post came. I saw the postman through my window as I shaved. I went down to get my letters – there were none, naturally.

At breakfast I said: ‘Edmundson, my dear fellow, I am extremely sorry; but my letters this morning compel me to return to town at once.’

‘But I thought,’ said Edmundson – then he stopped, and I saw that he had perceived in time that this was no moment for reminding me that, having left no address, I could have had no letters.

He looked sympathetic, and gave me what there was left of the bacon. I suppose he thought that it was a love affair or some such folly. I let him think so; after all, no love affair but would have seemed wise compared with the blank idiocy of this unseen determination to cut short a delightful holiday and go back to those dusty, stuffy rooms in Gray’s Inn.

After that first and almost pardonable lapse, Edmundson behaved beautifully. I caught the 9.17 train, and by half-past eleven I was climbing my dirty staircase.

I let myself in and waded through a heap of envelopes and wrappered circulars that had drifted in through the letter-box, as dead leaves drift into the areas of houses in squares. All the windows were shut. Dust lay thick on everything. My laundress had evidently chosen this as a good time for her holiday. I wondered idly where she spent it. And now the close, musty smell of the rooms caught at my senses, and I remembered with a positive pang the sweet scent of the earth and the dead leaves in that wood through which, at this very moment, the sensible and fortunate Edmundson would be riding.

The thought of dead leaves reminded me of the heap of correspondence. I glanced through it. Only one of all those letters interested me in the least. It was from my mother:

Elliot’s Bay, Norfolk, 17 th August .

DEAR LAWRENCE: I have wonderful news for you. Your great-uncle Sefton has died, and left you half his immense property. The other half is left to your second cousin Selwyn. You must come home at once. There are heaps of letters here for you, but I dare not send them on, as goodness only knows where you may be. I do wish you would remember to leave an address. I send this to your rooms, in case you have had the forethought to instruct your charwoman to send your letters on to you. It is a most handsome fortune, and I am too happy about your accession to it to scold you as you deserve, but I hope this will be a lesson to you to leave an address when next you go away. Come home at once.