Page:Quartette - Kipling (1885).djvu/112

 said I, "will you put back your hood and tell me what it all means?" The hood dropped noiselessly, as one of the coolies passed through me to adjust it; and I was face to face with my dead and buried mistress. She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her alive; carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand; and the same card-case in her left. (Good God! a woman eight months dead with a card case!) I had to pin myself down to the multiplication table and to lay both hands on the stone parapet of the road to assure myself that that at least was real.

"Agnes," I repeated, "for pity's sake tell me what it all means." Mrs. Wessington leant forward, with that odd quick turn of the head I used to know so well, and spoke.

If my story had not already so madly overleaped the bounds of all human belief I should apologize my readers now. As I know that none of them—no, not even Kitty, for whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct—will believe me, I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief's as I might walk by the side of any living woman's 'rickshaw, deep in conversation. The second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon me, and like the Prince in Tennyson's poem, I "seemed to move amid a world of ghosts." There had been a garden party at the Commander-in-Chief's, and we two joined the crowd of homeward bound gay-dressed loungers. As I saw them then, it seemed that they were the shadows—impalpable fantastic shadows that divided for Mrs. Wessington's 'rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot—indeed, I dare not—tell. Heatherlegh's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been "mashing a brain-eye-and-stomach chimæra." It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvellously dear experience. Could it be possible, I wondered, that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed with my own neglect and cruelty?

I met Kitty on the homeward road—a shadow among shadows.

If I were to describe all the incidents of the next fortnight in their order, my story would never come to an end; and your patience would be exhausted. Morning after morning and evening after evening, the ghostly 'rickshaw and I used to wander about Simla together. Wherever I went, there the four black and