The Return of the Soul | Page 3

into words. Why
cannot men leave life alone? Why will they catch it by the throat and
wring its secrets from it? To respect reserve is one of the first instincts
of the gentleman; and life is full of reserve.
It is getting very late. I thought I heard a step in the house just now. I
wonder--I wonder if she is asleep. I wish I knew. Day after day passed
by. My grandmother seemed to be failing, but almost imperceptibly.
She evidently loved to have me near to her. Like most old dying people,
in her mind she frantically clutched at life, that could give to her
nothing more; and I believe she grew to regard me as the
personification of all that was leaving her. My vitality warmed her. She
extended her hands to my flaming hearthfire. She seemed trying to live
in my life, and at length became afraid to let me out of her sight. One
day she said to me, in her quavering, ugly voice--old voices are so ugly,
like hideous echoes:
"Ronald, I could never die while you were in the room. So long as you
are with me, where I can touch you, I shall live."

And she put out her white, corrugated hand, and fondled my warm
boy's hand.
How I longed to push her hand away, and get out into the sunlight and
the air, and hear young voices, the voices of the morning, not of the
twilight, and be away from wrinkled Death, that seemed sitting on the
doorstep of that house huddled up like a beggar, waiting for the door to
be opened!
I was bored till I grew malignant. I confess it. And, feeling malignant, I
began to long more and more passionately to vent myself on someone
or something. I looked at the cat, which, as usual, was sitting before the
fire.
Animals have intuitions as keen as those of a woman, keener than those
of a man. They inherit an instinct of fear of those who hate them from a
long line of ancestors who have suffered at the hands of cruel men.
They can tell by a look, by a motion, by the tone of a voice, whether to
expect from anyone kindness or malignity. The cat had purred
complacently on the first day of my arrival, and had hunched up her
white, furry back towards my hand, and had smiled with her calm,
light-blue eyes. Now, when I approached her, she seemed to gather
herself together and to make herself small. She shrank from me. There
was--as I fancied--a dawning comprehension, a dawning terror in her
blue eyes. She always sat very close to my grandmother now, as if she
sought protection, and she watched me as if she were watching for an
intention which she apprehended to grow in my mind.
And the intention came.
For, as the days went on, and my grandmother still lived, I began to
grow desperate. My holiday time was over now, but my parents wrote
telling me to stay where I was, and not to think of returning to school.
My grandmother had caused a letter to be sent to them in which she
said that she could not part from me, and added that my parents would
never have cause to regret interrupting my education for a time. "He
will be paid in full for every moment he loses," she wrote, referring to
me.

It seemed a strange taste in her to care so much for a boy, but she had
never loved women, and I was handsome, and she liked handsome
faces. The brutality in my nature was not written upon my features. I
had smiling, frank brown eyes, a lithe young figure, a gay boy's voice.
My movements were quick, and I have always been told that my
gestures were never awkward, my demeanour was never unfinished, as
is the case so often with lads at school. Outwardly I was attractive; and
the old woman, who had married two husbands merely for their looks,
delighted in feeling that she had the power to retain me by her side at
an age when most boys avoid old people as if they were the pestilence.
And then I pretended to love her, and obeyed all her insufferably
tiresome behests. But I longed to wreak vengeance upon her all the
same. My dearest friend, the fellow with whom I was to have spent my
holidays, was leaving at the end of this term which I was missing. He
wrote to me furious letters, urging me to come back, and reproaching
me for my selfishness and lack of affection.
Each time I received one I looked at the cat, and the cat shrank nearer
to my grandmother's chair.
It never