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Page 11
"What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Slater, regarding her friend with
astonishment.
Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so
odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are
the mummies of the girls who came before us. It is easier, as well as far
sweeter, for me to believe that our youth is somewhere immortal, than
that it has been withered, shrivelled, desiccated into our old age. Oh,
no, my dear, Paradise is not merely a garden of withered flowers! We
shall find the rose and lily of our life blooming there."
The hours had slipped away unnoticed as the friends talked together, and
now the lengthening shadows on the school-room floor recalled Miss
Ludington to the present, and to the duties of a hostess.
As they walked slowly across the green toward the homestead, she told her
friend more fully of this belief in the immortality of past selves which
had so recently come to her, and especially how it had quite taken away
the melancholy with which she had all her life before looked back upon
her youth. Mrs. Slater listened in silence.
"Where on earth did you get that portrait?" she exclaimed, as Miss
Ludington, after taking her on a tour through the house before tea,
brought her into the sitting-room.
"Whom does it remind you of?" asked Miss Ludington.
"I know whom it reminds me of," replied Mrs. Slater; "but how it ever got
here is what puzzles me."
"I thought you would recognize it," said Miss Ludington, with a pleased
smile. "I suppose you think it odd you should never have seen it,
considering whom it is of?"
"I do, certainly," replied Mrs. Slater.
"You see," explained Miss Ludington, "I did not have it painted till
after I left Hilton. You remember that little ivory portrait of myself at
seventeen, which I thought so much of after I lost my looks? Well, this
portrait I had enlarged from that. I have always believed that it was
very like, but you don't know what a reassurance it is to me to have you
recognize it so instantly."
At the tea-table Paul appeared, and was introduced to Mrs. Slater, who
regarded him with considerable interest. Miss Ludington had informed her
that he was her cousin and heir, and had told her something of his
romantic devotion to the Ida of the picture. Paul, who from Miss
Ludington had learned all there was to be known about the persons and
places of old Hilton, entered with much interest into the conversation of
the ladies on the subject, and after tea accompanied them in their stroll
through that part of the village which they had not inspected before.
When they returned to the house it was quite dark, and they had lights in
the sitting-room, and refreshments were served. Mrs. Slater's eyes were
frequently drawn toward the picture over the fireplace, and some
reference of hers to the immortelles in which it was framed, turned the
conversation upon the subject that Miss Ludington and she had been
discussing in the school-house.
Mrs. Slater, whose conversation showed her to be a woman of no great
culture, but unusual force of character and intelligence, expressed
herself as interested in the idea of the immortality of past selves, but
decidedly sceptical. Paul grew eloquent in maintaining its truth and
reasonableness, and, indeed, that it was the only intelligible theory of
immortality that was possible. The idea that the same soul successively
animated infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and maturity, was, he
argued, but a modification of the curious East Indian dream of
metempsychosis, according to which every soul is supposed to inhabit in
turn innumerable bodies.
"You almost persuade me," said Mrs. Slater, at last. "But I never heard
of the spirit of anybody's past self appearing to them. If there are such
spirits, why have they never manifested themselves? Nobody every heard of
the spirit of one's past self appearing at a spiritualist seance, for
instance."
"There is one evidence among others," replied Paul. "that spiritualism is
a fraud. The mediums merely follow the vulgar superstition in the kind of
spirits that they claim to produce."
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