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Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium in the night hours until cruel dawn showed them for what they were skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike roofs and chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and cock crow. Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that matter.
He followed the woman's footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen, and each moment the spirit in him grew more insistent, and he whined up at the stars. At last he saw the ship, a wraithlike thing in its piled-up bed of ice, and he stopped. This was his dead-line. He had never gone nearer. But tonight if any one period could be called night he went on.
"Awaken your father!" Her voice was only a whisper. "Take the first available train, at four o'clock this morning. Rush to Calcutta if you would see me!" The wraithlike figure vanished. "Father, Father! Mother is dying!" The terror in my tone aroused him instantly. I sobbed out the fatal tidings. "Never mind that hallucination of yours." Father gave his characteristic negation to a new situation.
Some one laid a cool hand on his forehead, and he lay quiet and smiled contentedly. The room and the people became wraithlike. He saw them still, but he saw through them to a reality of soft meadows and summer skies, from which Mary leaned, resting her hand on his brow. Voices spoke, but muffled, as though by many veils. They talked of various things. "It's the mountain fever," he heard one say.
Only now and then, in a strange, projected, wraithlike effect, the moon ray glinted timidly on the tip of a nickel dial, and, ghostlike, disclosed a human hand. Upstairs, Markel coughed again. Then from the safe a whisper, heavy-breathed as from great exertion: "MISSED IT!" The dial whirled with faint, musical, little metallic clicks; then began to move slowly again, very, very slowly.
He is like a man who, by an ingenious system of cross-lights and reflections, creates a wraithlike image of himself in the mirror, and alleges that it is his soul, though it is really only a misleading and worthless imitation of his body. Will not Plato's accusation of the poet's inferiority to the practical man be made clearest if we stay by Plato's own humble illustration of the three beds?
Nancy had gluten bread made in quantities for the stouter element of her patronage, and in nine cases out of ten she was able to get it served and eaten without protest. Some of her regular patrons began to change weight gradually, a heavy man or two became less heavy, and a wraithlike girl now and then took on a new bloom and substantiality. These were the triumphs for which Nancy lived.
In a few minutes they were standing in a part of the church which would have seemed darker than any other shadow-filled corner but that a dim light burned on a small altar and a clergyman whose white vestments made him look wraithlike and very tall waited before it and after a few moments of solemn silence began to read from the prayer book he held in his hand.
Then the Pope passed slowly down the line, offering his hand to each of us, and radiating a charm so gracious and so human that few failed to respond to the appeal of his engaging personality. There was nothing fleshly about Leo XIII. His body was so frail, so wraithlike, that one almost expected to see through it the magnificent tapestries on the walls.
Pictures I had seen of famine victims passed wraithlike before me. "The next Benares death from starvation is due at once in this hermitage," I thought. Impending doom averted at nine o'clock. Ambrosial summons! In memory that meal is vivid as one of life's perfect hours. Intense absorption yet permitted me to observe that Dyananda ate absent-mindedly. He was apparently above my gross pleasures.
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