She murmured something about Abraham’s bosom, and the “time of salvation not being forever,” as I tried to pass her.  Then a half gesture that she made stopped me.  There was something more she wished to say—­to ask.  She looked up furtively.  In her eyes I saw the “woman” peering out through fear.

“Per’aps, sir.” she faltered, as though lightning must strike her dead, “per’aps, would you think, a drop of cold water, given in His name, might moisten—?”

But I stopped her, for the foolish talk had lasted long enough.  “Of course,” I exclaimed, “of course.  For God is love, remember, and love means charity, tolerance, sympathy, and sparing others pain,” and I hurried past her, determined to end the outrageous conversation for which yet I knew myself entirely to blame.  Behind me, she stood stock-still for several minutes, half bewildered, half alarmed, as I suspected.  I caught the fragment of another sentence, one word of it, rather—­“punishment”—­but the rest escaped me.  Her arrogance and condescending tolerance exasperated me, while I was at the same time secretly pleased that I might have touched some string of remorse or sympathy in her after all.  Her belief was iron; she dared not let it go; yet somewhere underneath there lurked the germ of a wholesome revulsion.  She would help “them”—­if she dared.  Her question proved it.

Half ashamed of myself, I turned and crossed the hail quickly lest I should be tempted to say more, and in me was a disagreeable sensation as though I had just left the Incurable Ward of some great hospital.  A reaction caught me as of nausea.  Ugh!  I wanted such people cleansed by fire.  They seemed to me as centers of contamination whose vicious thoughts flowed out to stain God’s glorious world.  I saw myself, Frances, Mabel too especially, on the rack, while that odious figure of cruelty and darkness stood over us and ordered the awful handles turned in order that we might be “saved”—­forced, that is, to think and believe exactly as she thought and believed.

I found relief for my somewhat childish indignation by letting myself loose upon the organ then.  The flood of Bach and Beethoven brought back the sense of proportion.  It proved, however, at the same time that there had been this growth of distortion in me, and that it had been provided apparently by my closer contact—­for the first time—­with that funereal personality, the woman who, like her master, believed that all holding views of God that differed from her own, must be damned eternally.  It gave me, moreover, some faint clue perhaps, though a clue I was unequal of following up, to the nature of the strife and terror and frustrate influence in the house.  That housekeeper had to do with it.  She kept it alive.  Her thought was like a spell she waved above her mistress’s head.

Chapter VII

That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my door, and before I could answer, Frances stood beside my bed.  She had switched on the light as she came in.  Her hair fell straggling over her dressing gown.  Her face was deathly pale, its expression so distraught it was almost haggard.