"Why, it is my ivory portrait!" exclaimed Ida. "How did you come by it?
What do you mean about my leaving the world? Something strange has happened to me, I know, but did I die? I don"t remember dying. Oh, can"t somebody explain what has happened to me?"
The dazed look which had disappeared from her face since her recognition of the village and the homestead had come back, and her last words were a bitter cry that went to the hearts of the listeners.
Now, all the time they had been in the carriage, Paul had been trying to think of some mode of setting her relationship to Miss Ludington in a light so clear that she must comprehend it, for it was evident that the confused explanations at Mrs. Legrand"s had availed little, if anything, to that end. Unless this could be done she seemed likely to remain indefinitely in this dazed mental state, which must be so exquisitely painful to her, and was scarcely less so to them.
"If you will listen to me patiently," he said, "I will try to explain.
You know that some strange thing has happened to you, and you must expect to find the explanation as strange as the thing itself; but it is not hard to understand."
Ida"s eyes were fixed on him with the expression of one listening for her life.
"Do you remember being a little girl of nine or ten years old?" he asked.
"Oh, yes!" she answered. "I remember that perfectly well."
"You are now a young woman," he went on. "Where is that little girl whom you remember? What has become of her?"
"Why, I don"t know," replied Ida. "I suppose she is somewhere in me."
"But you don"t look like a little girl, or think or act or feel like one.
How can she be in you?"
"Where else could she be?" replied Ida.
"Oh, there is no lack of room for her," said Paul; "the universe is big enough for all the souls that ever lived in it. Suppose, now, you believed her to be still alive as a spirit, just as she was, still alive somewhere in the land of spirits, not transformed into the young lady that you are at all, you understand, for that would only be another way of saying that she was dead, but just as she was, a child, with a child"s loves, a child"s thoughts, a child"s feelings, and a child"s face--can you suppose such a thing, just as an effort of imagination?"
"Oh, yes!" said Ida; "I can suppose that."
"Well, then," said Paul, "suppose also that you remembered this little girl very tenderly, and longed to look on her face again, although knowing that she was a spirit now. Suppose that you went to a woman having a mysterious power to call up the spirits of the departed, and suppose that she called up the spirit of this child-self of yours, and that you recognized it, and suppose that just at that moment the woman died, and her earthly life was transferred to the spirit of the child, so that instead of being a spirit, she became again a living child, but unable to recognize you who loved her so well, because when she lived on earth, you, of course, had not yet come into existence. Suppose you brought this child home with you----"
"What do you mean?" interrupted Ida, with dilating eyes. "Am I----"
"You are to that woman," broke in Paul, indicating Miss Ludington, "what the child would have been to you. You are bound to her by the same tie by which that little girl would have been bound to you. She remembers and loves you as you would remember and love that child; but you do not know her any more than that child would know you. You both share the name of Ida Ludington, according to the usage of men as to names; but I think there is no danger of your being confounded with each other, either in your own eyes or those of lookers-on."
Ida had at last comprehended. The piercing look, expressive of mingled attraction and repulsion, which she fixed upon Miss Ludington, left no doubt of that. It implied alarm, mistrust, and something that was almost defiance, yet with hints of a possible tenderness.
It was such a look as a daughter, stolen from her cradle and grown to maidenhood among strangers, might fix upon the woman claiming to be her mother, except that not only was Miss Ludington a stranger to Ida, but the relation which she claimed to sustain to her was one that had never before been realized between living persons on earth, however it might be, in heaven.
"Do you understand?" said Paul.
"I--think--I--do. But how--strange--it is!" she replied, in lingering tones, her gaze continuing to rest, as if fascinated, upon Miss Ludington.
The latter"s face expressed a great elation, an impa.s.sioned tenderness held in check through fear of terrifying its object.
"I do not wonder it seems strange," she said, very softly. "You have yet no evidence as to who I am. I remember you--oh, how well!--but you cannot remember me, nor is there any instinct answering to memory by which you can recognize me. You have a right to require that I should prove that I am what I claim to be; that I am also Ida Ludington; that I am your later self. Do not fear, my darling. I shall be able to convince you very soon."
She made Ida sit down, and then went to an ancient secretary, that stood in a corner of the room, and unlocked a drawer, the key to which she always carried on her person.
Paul remembered from the time he was a little boy seeing her open this drawer on Sunday afternoons and cry over the keepsakes which it contained.
She took out now a bundle of letters, a piece of ribbon, a locket, a bunch of faded flowers, and a few other trifles, and brought them to Ida.
Paul left the room on tiptoe. This was a scene where a third person, one might almost say a second person, would be an interloper.
When, a long time after, he returned, Miss Ludington was sitting in the chair where Ida had been sitting, smiling and crying, and the girl, with eyes that shone like stars, was bending over her, and kissing the tears away.
The night was now almost spent, and the early dawn of midsummer, peering through the windows, and already dimming the lights, warned them that the day would soon be at hand.
"You shall have your own bedroom," said Miss Ludington. The face of the old lady was flushed, and her high-pitched and tremulous voice betrayed an exhilaration like that of intoxication. "You will excuse me for having cluttered it up with my things; to-morrow I will take them away. You see I had not dared hope you would come back to me. I had expected to go to you."
"I and you--you and I." The girl repeated the words after her, slowly, as if trying to grasp their full meaning as she uttered them. Then a sudden terror leaped into her eyes, and she cried shudderingly: "Oh, how strange it is!"
"You do not doubt it? You do not doubt it still?" exclaimed Miss Ludington, in anguished tones.
"No, no!" said the girl, recovering herself with an evident effort. "I cannot doubt it. I do not," and she threw her aims about Miss Ludington"s neck in an embrace in which, nevertheless, a subtle shrinking still mingled with the impulse of tenderness which had overcome it.
When presently Miss Ludington and Ida went upstairs together, the latter, with eager, unhesitating step, led the way through a complexity of roundabout pa.s.sages, and past many other doors, to that of the chamber which had been the common possession of the girl and the woman. Miss Ludington followed her, wondering, yet not wondering.
"It seems so strange to see you so familiar with this house," she said, with a little hysterical laugh, "and yet, of course, I know it is not strange."
"No," replied the girl, looking at her with a certain astonishment, "I should think not. It would be strange, indeed, if I were not familiar here. The only strange thing is to feel that I am not at home here, that I am a guest in this house."
"You are not a guest," exclaimed Miss Ludington, hurriedly, for she saw the dazed look coming again into the girl"s eyes. "You shall be mistress here. Paul and I ask nothing better than to be your servants."
To pa.s.s from the waking to the dreaming state is in general to exchange a prosaic and matter-of-fact world for one of fantastic improbabilities; but it is safe to a.s.sume that the three persons who fell asleep beneath Miss Ludington"s roof that morning, just as the birds began to twitter, encountered in dreamland no experiences so strange as those which they had pa.s.sed through with their eyes open the previous evening.
CHAPTER IX.
The day following, Paul was downstairs before either Ida or Miss Ludington. He was sitting on the piazza, which was connected with the sitting-room by low windows opening like doors, when he heard a scream, and Ellen, the housemaid, who had been busy in the sitting-room, ran out upon the piazza with a face like a sheet.
"What"s the matter?" he demanded.
"Sure I saw a ghost!" gasped Ellen. "I was on a chair dusting the picture, as I always does mornings, an" I looked up, an" there in the door stood the very same girl that"s in the picture, kind of smiling like. And so I give a yell an" run."
As she spoke Ida stepped out upon the piazza, and precipitately sheltering herself behind Paul, Ellen whispered, "Sure there she is now!"
On seeing that, instead of sharing her terror, he cordially greeted the ghost, the girl"s face showed such comical bewilderment that Ida smiled and Paul laughed outright.
"This is no ghost, Ellen. This lady is Miss Ida Ludington, a relative of Miss Ludington"s, who came to live here last night."
"I hope ye"ll not mind me takin" ye for a ghost, miss," said Ellen, confusedly; "but sure ye are the livin" image of the picture, and me not knowin" anybody was in the house more than the family;" and she disappeared to tell her story in the kitchen.
Ida"s appearance was noticeably calmer than the night before. There was, indeed, no indication of excitement in her manner. Paul inquired how she had slept.