The Return Of The Soul Read online

will take Margot away from this housethat her soul remembers, in which its body so long ago was tortured andslain, and she will--she must forget.

  Instinct will sleep once more. It shall be so. I will have it so. I willstrew poppies over her soul. I will take her far away from here, faraway, to places where she will be once more as she has been.

  To-morrow we will go. To-morrow----

  *****

  Ah, that cry! Was it my own? I am suffocating! What was that? The horrorof it! The pen has fallen from my hand. I must have slept; and I havedreamed. In my dream she stole upon me, that white thing! Her velvetyhands were on my throat. The soul stared out from her eyes, the soul ofthe cat! Even her body, her woman's body, seemed to change at the momentof vengeance. She slowly strangled me, and as the breath died from me,and my failing eyes gazed at her, she was no longer woman at all, butsomething lithe and white and soft. Fur enveloped my throat. Those handswere claws. That breath on my face was the breath of an animal. The bodyhad come back to companion the soul in its vengeance, the body of----

  Ah, it was too horrible!

  Can vengeance for the dead bring with it resurrection of the dead?

  Hark! There is a voice calling to me from upstairs.

  "Ronald, are you never coming? I am tired of waiting for you. Ronald!"

  "Yes."

  "Come to me!"

  "And I must go."

  *****

  Just at the glimmer of dawn the first pale shaft of the sun struckacross a bed upon which lay the huddled and distorted corpse of a man.His head was sunk down in the pillows. His eyes, that could not see,stared towards the rising light. And from the open window of the chamberof death a woman in a white wrapper leaned out, watching eagerly withwide blue eyes the birds as they darted to and fro, rested on theclimbing creepers, or circled above the gorge through which the riverran. Her set lips smiled. She looked like one calm, easy, and at peace.Presently an unwary sparrow perched on the trellis beneath the windowjust within her reach. Her white hand darted down softly, closed on thebird. She vanished from the window.

  Can the dead hear? Did he catch the sound of her faint, continuouspurring as she crouched with her prey upon the floor?