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Page 75
As will be readily imagined, the girl became a useful member of the
family. The lost valuables restored and the warnings against mischances
given by her quite balanced her incapacity for peculiar kinds of work.
This incapacity, however, rather increased than diminished; and,
together with her fickle health, which also grew more unsettled, caused
us a great deal of care. The Creston physician--who was a keen man in
his way, for a country doctor--pronounced the case altogether undreamt
of before in Horatio's philosophy, and kept constant notes of it. Some
of these have, I believe, found their way into the medical journals.
After a while there came, like a thief in the night, that which I
suppose was poor Selphar's one unconscious, golden mission in this
world. It came on a quiet summer night, that ended a long trance of a
week's continuance. Mother had gone out into the kitchen to give an
order for breakfast. I heard a few eager words in Selphar's voice, and
then the door shut quickly, and it was an hour before it was opened.
Then my mother came to me without a particle of color in lips or cheek,
and drew me away alone, and told the secret to me.
Selphar had seen Aunt Alice.
We sat down and looked at one another. There was a singular, pinched
look about my mother's mouth.
"Sarah."
"Yes."
"She says"--and then she told me what she said. She had seen Alice
Stuart in a Western town, seven hundred miles away. Among the living,
she desired to be counted of the dead. And that was all.
My mother paced the room three times back and forth, her hands locked.
"Sarah." There was a chill in her voice--it had been such a gentle
voice!--that froze me. "Sarah, the girl is an impostor."
"Mother!"
She paced the room once more, three times, back and forth. "At any rate,
she is a poor, self-deluded creature. How _can_ she see, seven hundred
miles away, a dead woman who has been an angel all these years? Think!
an _angel_, Sarah! So much better than I, and I--I loved--"
Before or since, I never heard my mother speak like that. She broke off
sharply, and froze back into her chilling voice.
"We will say nothing about this, if you please. I do not believe a word
of it."
We said nothing about it but Selphar did. The delusion, if delusion it
were, clung to her, haunted her, pursued her, week after week. To rid
her of it, or to silence her, was impossible. She added no new facts to
her first statement, but insisted that the long-lost dead was yet alive,
with a quiet pertinacity that it was simply impossible to ridicule,
frighten, threaten, or cross-question out of her. Clara was so
thoroughly alarmed that she would not have slept alone for any
mortal--perhaps not for any immortal--considerations. Winthrop and I
talked the matter over often and gravely when we were alone and in quiet
places. Mother's lips were sealed. From the day when Sel made the first
disclosure, she was never heard once to refer to the matter. A
perceptible haughtiness crept into her manner towards the girl. She even
talked of dismissing her, but repented it, and melted into momentary
gentleness. I could have cried over her that night. I was beginning to
understand what a pitiful struggle her life had become, and how alone
she must be in it. She _would_ not believe--she knew not what. She could
not doubt the girl. And with the conflict even her children could not
intermeddle.
To understand the crisis into which she was brought, the reader must
bear in mind our long habit of belief, not only in Selphar's personal
honesty, but in the infallibility of her mysterious power. Indeed, it
had almost ceased to be mysterious to us, from daily familiarity. We had
come to regard it as the curious working of physical disease, had taken
its results as a matter of course, and had ceased, in common with
converted Creston, to doubt the girl's capacity for seeing anything that
she chose to, at any place.
Thus a year worried on. My mother grew sleepless and pallid. She laughed
often, in a nervous, shallow way, as unlike her as a butterfly is unlike
a sunset; and her face settled into an habitual sharpness and hardness
unutterably painful to me.
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