I left the lawn and moved in the white light and silence along the road,
aimless and sorrowing. Suddenly I heard the voice of my poor husband in
exclamations of astonishment, with that of my son in reassurance and
dissuasion; and there by the shadow of a group of trees they stood—near,
so near! Their faces were toward me, the eyes of the elder man fixed
upon mine. He saw me—at last, at last, he saw me! In the consciousness
of that, my terror fled as a cruel dream. The death-spell was broken:
Love had conquered Law! Mad with exultation I shouted—I _must_ have
shouted, “He sees, he sees: he will understand!” Then, controlling
myself, I moved forward, smiling and consciously beautiful, to offer
myself to his arms, to comfort him with endearments, and, with my son’s
hand in mine, to speak words that should restore the broken bonds between
the living and the dead.
Alas! alas! his face went white with fear, his eyes were as those of a
hunted animal. He backed away from me, as I advanced, and at last turned
and fled into the wood—whither, it is not given to me to know.
To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never been able to impart a
sense of my presence. Soon he, too, must pass to this Life Invisible and
be lost to me forever.
A DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH
“I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians—men of science, as
you are pleased to be called,” said Hawver, replying to an accusation
that had not been made. “Some of you—only a few, I confess—believe in
the immortality of the soul, and in apparitions which you have not the
honesty to call ghosts. I go no further than a conviction that the
living are sometimes seen where they are not, but have been—where they
have lived so long, perhaps so intensely, as to have left their impress
on everything about them. I know, indeed, that one’s environment may be
so affected by one’s personality as to yield, long afterward, an image of
one’s self to the eyes of another. Doubtless the impressing personality
has to be the right kind of personality as the perceiving eyes have to be
the right kind of eyes—mine, for example.”
“Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to the wrong kind of
brain,” said Dr. Frayley, smiling.
“Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified; that is about the
reply that I supposed you would have the civility to make.”
“Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is a good deal to say,
don’t you think? Perhaps you will not mind the trouble of saying how you
learned.”
“You will call it an hallucination,” Hawver said, “but that does not
matter.” And he told the story.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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