Chapter 55

CHAPTER LV

He had told her, the first evening she ever spent at Gardencourt,
that if she should live to suffer enough she might some day see
the ghost with which the old house was duly provided. She
apparently had fulfilled the necessary condition; for the next
morning, in the cold, faint dawn, she knew that a spirit was
standing by her bed. She had lain down without undressing, it
being her belief that Ralph would not outlast the night. She had
no inclination to sleep; she was waiting, and such waiting was
wakeful. But she closed her eyes; she believed that as the night
wore on she should hear a knock at her door. She heard no knock,
but at the time the darkness began vaguely to grow grey she
started up from her pillow as abruptly as if she had received a
summons. It seemed to her for an instant that he was standing
there--a vague, hovering figure in the vagueness of the room. She
stared a moment; she saw his white face--his kind eyes; then she
saw there was nothing. She was not afraid; she was only sure. She
quitted the place and in her certainty passed through dark
corridors and down a flight of oaken steps that shone in the
vague light of a hall-window. Outside Ralph's door she stopped a
moment, listening, but she seemed to hear only the hush that
filled it. She opened the door with a hand as gentle as if she
were lifting a veil from the face of the dead, and saw Mrs.
Touchett sitting motionless and upright beside the couch of her
son, with one of his hands in her own. The doctor was on the
other side, with poor Ralph's further wrist resting in his
professional fingers. The two nurses were at the foot between
them. Mrs. Touchett took no notice of Isabel, but the doctor
looked at her very hard; then he gently placed Ralph's hand in a
proper position, close beside him. The nurse looked at her very
hard too, and no one said a word; but Isabel only looked at what
she had come to see. It was fairer than Ralph had ever been in
life, and there was a strange resemblance to the face of his
father, which, six years before, she had seen lying on the same
pillow. She went to her aunt and put her arm around her; and Mrs.
Touchett, who as a general thing neither invited nor enjoyed
caresses, submitted for a moment to this one, rising, as might
be, to take it. But she was stiff and dry-eyed; her acute white
face was terrible.

"Dear Aunt Lydia," Isabel murmured.

"Go and thank God you've no child," said Mrs. Touchett,
disengaging herself.

Three days after this a considerable number of people found time,
at the height of the London "season," to take a morning train
down to a quiet station in Berkshire and spend half an hour in a
small grey church which stood within an easy