THE “SENSITIVE”

Kathrien, looking down into the firelit room, saw the white-clad boy starting up in triumph with his work.

“Why, Willem!” she cried, dumfounded at sight of the invalid out of bed at such an hour. “What are you doing down there? You ought to ”

“Oh, Miss Kathrien!” exclaimed the child, pointing toward the picture. “Come down, quick!”

“You mustn’t get out of bed like this when you’re ill,” gently reproved Kathrien. “I had a feeling that you weren’t in your room. That is why I came out to look. Come ”

“But, look!” insisted Willem, pointing again at the picture puzzle he had so painstakingly pieced together. “Look, Miss Kathrien!”

“Come, dear!” admonished Kathrien. “You must not play down there. Wait a minute, and I’ll make your bed again. It will be more comfortable for you if it’s made over. Then you must come right upstairs.”

She went to the sick room and set to work with deft speed rearranging the tumbled sheets and smoothing the rumpled pillows. Willem looked down at his disregarded picture and his lip trembled. He gazed about the room in the hope of seeing Peter Grimm. He strained his keen ears for sound of the Dead Man’s gentle, comforting voice.

But Peter Grimm was looking fixedly toward the dining-room door. And in a moment it opened and Mrs. Batholommey bustled in.

“I thought I heard some one call,” observed the rector’s wife for the benefit of any one who might be in the half-lighted room.

Then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she espied Willem.

“Why!” she cackled. “Of all things! You naughty, naughty child! You ought to be in bed and asleep!”

Willem shrank under the rebuke, but a touch of Peter Grimm’s hand and a whispered word of encouragement braced him to reply:

“Old Mynheer Grimm’s come back.”

In the midst of her tirade Mrs. Batholommey stopped, open-mouthed. She stared at the boy in dismay. His face, as well as his voice, was unperturbed. He had stated merely what seemed to him a perfectly natural but very welcome truth. He had supposed she would be pleased, not petrified. He had told her the news in the hope of averting a scolding. But she did not seem to take it in the sense of his simple declaration. So he repeated it.

“Old Mynheer Grimm’s come back, Mrs. Batholommey.”

She gurgled wordlessly, then sputtered:

“What are you talking about, child? ‘Old Mynheer Grimm,’ as you call him, is dead. You know that.”

“No, he isn’t,” stoutly contradicted Willem. “He’s come back. He’s in this room right now. At least,” he added as he glanced about and could not feel the Dead Man’s presence, “at least he was a minute ago. I know, because I’ve been talking to him.”

“Absurd!”

“I’ve been talking to him. He was standing just where you are now.”

Mrs. Batholommey instinctively started. In fact, despite her age and bulk and the fact that she was built for endurance rather than for speed, she jumped high into the air, with an incredible lightness and agility, and came to earth several feet away from the spot Willem had designated.

“At least,” explained the boy, “he seemed to be about there. But he seemed to be everywhere.”

Recovering her smashed self-poise, Mrs. Batholommey frowned with lofty majesty, tempered by womanly concern.

“You are feverish again,” she said. “I hoped you were all over it. You’re light-headed, you poor little fellow.”

Kathrien, the bed being re-made, hurried downstairs to get Willem.

“His mind is wandering,” said Mrs. Batholommey. “He imagines all sorts of ridiculous, impossible things.”

Kathrien dropped into a chair by the fire and gathered the fragile little body into her lap.

“Yes,” went on Mrs. Batholommey, “he is out of his head. I think I’ll run over and get the doctor.”

“You need not trouble to,” said Peter Grimm. “I have sent for him. Though he doesn’t know it. He is coming up the walk.”

The Dead Man turned toward the front door, the old quizzical smile on his lips.

“Come in, Andrew,” he said. “I’m going to give you one more chance at the theory you were wise enough to form and are not wise enough to practise.”

Dr. McPherson entered.

“I thought I’d just drop in for a minute before bedtime,” said he, “to see how Willem ”

“Oh, Doctor!” cried Mrs. Batholommey. “This is providential. I was just coming to get you. Here’s Willem. We found he’d gotten out of bed and wandered down here. He is worse. Much worse. He’s quite delirious.”

“H’m!” commented Dr. McPherson, touching the child’s face and then laying a finger on the fast, light pulse. “He doesn’t look it. He has a slight fever again, but ”

“Oh, he said old Mr. Grimm was here!” bleated Mrs. Batholommey. “Here in this room with him.”

“What?” gasped Kathrien.

But the doctor seemed to regard the statement as the most natural thing imaginable.

“In this room?” he repeated in a matter of fact tone. “Well, very possibly he is. There’s nothing so remarkable about that, is there?”

“Nothing remarkable?” squealed Mrs. Batholommey; then, bridling, she scoffed: “Oh, of course. I forgot. You believe in ”

“In fact,” pursued McPherson, getting under weigh with his pet idea, “you’ll remember, both of you, that I told you he and I made a compact to ”

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Batholommey with a shudder. “That absurd, horrible ‘compact’ you told us about! It was positively blasphemous!”

But McPherson was looking speculatively down at Willem, and did not accept nor even hear the challenge to combat.

“I’ve sometimes had the idea,” said he, “that the boy was a ‘sensitive.’ And this evening, I’ve been wondering ”

“No, you haven’t, Andrew,” denied Peter Grimm. “It’s I who have been doing the ‘wondering’; through that Scotch brain of yours. I’m making use of that Spiritualistic hobby of yours because you’re too dense to hear me except through some rarer mortal’s voice.”

“ Wondering,” continued the doctor, “whether perhaps ”

“Yes,” declared Peter Grimm, as McPherson hesitated, “the boy is a ‘sensitive,’ as you call it.”

“I really believe,” declared McPherson, his last doubts vanishing, “that Willem is a ‘sensitive.’ I’m certain of it. And ”

“A ’sensitive’?” queried Kathrien. “What’s that?”

“Well,” reflected the doctor, “it is rather hard to define in simple language. A ‘sensitive’ is what is sometimes known as a ‘medium.’ A human organism so constructed that it can be ‘informed,’ or ‘controlled’ (as the phrases go) by those who are who have er who have passed over.”

He looked apologetically about as if to assure the possibly-present Peter Grimm that he had absolutely no intent of using so non-technical a word as “dead.”

Peter Grimm acknowledged the compliment with a laugh.

“Oh, say it, Andrew! Say it!” he adjured. “There is no ‘death’ and there are no ‘dead,’ as this world understands the words. So one term is as good as another. ‘Dead’ or ‘passed over.’ It’s all one. Neither phrase means anything. Don’t be afraid of offending me.”

“And Willem is like that?” asked Kathrien.

“I am sure of it,” answered McPherson. “Now, Willem ”

“I think I’d better put the boy to bed!” hastily interposed Mrs. Batholommey, coming between the doctor and his proposed “subject.”

“Please!” rapped McPherson. “I propose to find out what ails Willem. That is what I’m here for. And I’ll thank you not to interfere, Mrs. Batholommey. I never break in on your good husband’s pulpit platitudes, and I’ll ask you to show the same courtesy toward me. Now then, Willem ”

“Kathrien,” expostulated Mrs. Batholommey, “you surely aren’t going to permit ?”

A peremptory gesture from McPherson momentarily checked the pendulum of her tongue. Kathrien, too, was very evidently on the doctor’s side.

“Willem,” said McPherson quietly, “you said just now that Mr. Grimm was in this room. What made you think so?”

“The things he said to me,” returned Willem, readily enough.

His simple reply had a galvanic effect on his three hearers.

“Said to you?” bleated Mrs. Batholommey. “Said? Did you say ’said’?”

“Why, Willem!” gasped Kathrien.

“Old Mr. Grimm?” insisted Dr. McPherson. “Willem, you’re certain you mean old Mr. Grimm? Not Frederik?”

“Why, yes,” assented Willem with calm assurance. “Old Mynheer Grimm.”

And now, even Mrs. Batholommey’s awed curiosity dulled her chronic conscience-pains into momentary rest. And, with Kathrien, she sat silent, eager, awaiting the doctor’s next move.

“And,” continued McPherson, “what did Mr. Grimm say to you? Think carefully before you answer.”

“Oh,” replied Willem, in the glorious vagueness of childhood, “lots and lots of things.”

“Oh, really?” mocked Mrs. Batholommey, the disappointing answer freeing her from the grip of awe.

Again McPherson raised a warning hand that balked further comment from her. And he returned to the examination.

“Willem,” said he, “how did Mr. Grimm look?”

“I didn’t see him,” answered the child.

“H’m!” sniffed Mrs. Batholommey.

“But, Willem,” urged McPherson, “you must have seen something.”

“I I thought I saw his hat on the peg,” hesitated the boy.

All eyes turned involuntarily and in some fear toward the hat-rack.

“No,” went on Willem, looking at the vacant peg, “it’s gone now.”

“Doctor,” remonstrated Mrs. Batholommey, impatiently, “this is so silly! It ”

“I wonder,” whispered Kathrien to McPherson over the boy’s head, “I wonder if he really did do you think ?”

She did not finish the sentence. A growing look of disappointment and troubled doubt on McPherson’s grim face made her reluctant to voice the question that her mind had formed.

“Willem!” said the Dead Man earnestly, pointing towards the pieced-together picture as he spoke. “Look! Show it to her!”

“Look!” echoed Willem, pointing in turn to the photograph. “Look, Miss Kathrien! That’s what I wanted to show you when you called to me to go to bed.”

“Why!” exclaimed Kathrien, following the direction of the eager little finger. “It’s his mother! It’s Anne Marie!”

“His mother!” echoed Mrs. Batholommey, focussing her near-sighted eyes on the likeness. “Why, so it is! Well, of all things! I didn’t know you’d heard from Anne Marie.”

“We haven’t,” said Kathrien.

“Then how did the photograph get into the house?”

“I don’t know,” answered the girl. “I never saw the picture before. It is none we’ve had. How strange! We’ve all been waiting for news of Anne Marie. Even her own mother doesn’t know where she is, and hasn’t heard from her in years. Or or maybe Marta has received the picture since I ”

“I’ll ask her,” said Mrs. Batholommey, all eagerness now that something tangible was before her.

She bustled off into the kitchen in search of the old housekeeper.

“If Marta didn’t get it,” mused Kathrien, her face strained with puzzling thoughts, “who did have this picture? And why weren’t the rest of us told? Every one knew how eager we were for news of Anne Marie. And who tore up the picture? Did you, Willem?”

“No!” declared the boy. “It was lying here, torn. I mended it.”

“But,” persisted Kathrien, “there’s been no one at this desk, except Frederik. Except Frederik,” she repeated, half under her breath.

Mrs. Batholommey came back from her kitchen interview, bubbling with importance.

“No,” she announced, “Marta hasn’t heard a word from Anne Marie. And only a few minutes ago she asked Frederik if any message had come. And he said, no, there hadn’t.”

“I wonder,” suggested Kathrien, “if there was any message with the photograph.”

“I remember,” volunteered Mrs. Batholommey, “one of the letters that came for poor old Mr. Grimm was in a blue envelope and felt as if it had a photograph in it. I put it with some others in the desk and I told Frederik about it this evening.”

Kathrien glanced over the desk and at the floor around it in search of further clues. She saw, in the jardiniere, the charred remnants of a letter and pointed it out to the others. She drew from the debris the unburned corner of a blue envelope.

“That’s the one!” cried Mrs. Batholommey. “That’s it! The same colour.”

“You say the envelope was addressed to my uncle?”

“Yes. It gave me such a turn to see those letters all addressed to a man who wasn’t alive to ”

“Oh, what does it all mean?” cried the girl.

“We are going to find out,” said McPherson with sudden determination. “Kathrien, draw those window shades close. I want the room darkened as much as possible.”

“Oh, Doctor,” protested Mrs. Batholommey as Kathrien hastened to obey, “you’re surely not going to ?”

“Be quiet. You needn’t stay unless you want to.”

“Oh, I’ll stay. It’s my duty. But I don’t approve. Please understand that.”

Kathrien had returned to her place by the fire and had lifted Willem back on her lap. The doctor, gazing into space, said in a low, reverential tone:

“Peter Grimm! If you have come back to us, if you are in this room if this boy has spoken truly, give us some sign, some indication ”

“Why, Andrew, I can’t,” answered the Dead Man. “Not to you. I have, to the boy. I can’t make you hear me, Andrew. The obstacles are too strong for me.”

“Peter Grimm,” went on the doctor after a moment of dead silence, “if you cannot make your presence known to me and I realise there must be great difficulties will you try to send your message by Willem? I presume you have a message?”

Another space of tense silence.

“Well, Peter,” resumed McPherson patiently, “I am waiting. We are all waiting.”

“Then stop talking and listen to Willem,” ordered Peter Grimm.

The doctor involuntarily glanced at the boy. Willem’s wide-open eyes were glazed like a sleep-walker’s. The hands that had been folded in his lap now hung limply at his sides. His lips parted, and droning, mechanical, lifeless words came from between them.

“There was Anne Marie and me and the Other One,” said he.

“What Other One?” asked McPherson, speaking in a low, emotionless voice so as not to break in on the thought current.

“The man that came there,” droned the boy.

“What man?”

“The man that made Anne Marie cry.”

“What man made Anne Marie cry?”

“I I can’t remember,” returned the boy, a hesitant note of trouble creeping into his dead voice.

“Yes, you can,” prompted Peter Grimm. “You can remember, Willem. You’re afraid!”

“So you do remember the time when you were with Anne Marie?” whispered Kathrien as the lad hesitated. “You always told me you didn’t. Doctor, I have the strangest feeling. A feeling that all this somehow concerns me, and that I must sift it to the bottom. Think, Willem. Who was it that came and went at the house where you lived with Anne Marie?”

“That is what I asked you, Willem,” said Peter Grimm.

“That is what he asked me,” replied Willem mechanically.

“Who?” demanded McPherson. “Who asked you that question, Willem?”

“Mynheer Grimm.”

“When?”

“Just now.”

“Just now!” cried Kathrien and Mrs. Batholommey in a breath.

“S-sh!” admonished the doctor. “So you both asked the same question, eh? The man that came to see ?”

“It can’t be possible,” expostulated Mrs. Batholommey, “that the boy has any idea what he is talking about.”

A glare from McPherson silenced her. Then the doctor asked:

“What did you tell Mr. Grimm, Willem?”

The boy hesitated.

“Better make haste,” adjured the Dead Man, “Frederik is coming back.”

Willem, with a shudder, glanced fearfully toward the outer door.

“Why does he do that?” wondered Kathrien. “He looked that way at the door when he spoke of ‘the Other One.’ Why should he?”

“He’s afraid,” answered Peter Grimm.

“I’m afraid,” echoed Willem.

Kathrien gathered him more closely in her warm young arms and whispered soothingly to him. The fear died out of his eyes.

“You’re not afraid, any more?” she reassured him.

“N-no,” he faltered, “but oh, please don’t let Mynheer Frederik come back, Miss Kathrien! Please, don’t! Because because then I’ll be afraid again. I know I will.”

McPherson whistled low and long. A light was beginning to break upon his shrewd Scotch brain.

“Willem!” pleaded the Dead Man. “Willem!”

“Yes, sir,” answered the boy.

“You must say I am very unhappy.”

“He is very unhappy,” repeated Willem, parrot-like.

“Why is he unhappy?” demanded McPherson. “Ask him?”

“Why are you unhappy, Mynheer Grimm?” droned the boy.

“On account of Kathrien’s future,” replied Peter Grimm.

“What?” questioned Willem, who did not quite understand the meaning of the words “account” and “future.”

“To-morrow ” began the Dead Man.

“To-morrow ” droned Willem.

“Kathrien’s ” continued Peter Grimm.

“Your ” said the boy, glancing at Kathrien.

“Kathrien’s?” asked the doctor. “Is he speaking about Kathrien?”

“What is it, Willem?” begged the girl. “What about me, to-morrow?”

“Kathrien must not marry Frederik,” said Peter Grimm, as if teaching a simple lesson to a very stupid pupil.

“Kathrien ” began the boy, then flinching, and once more glancing fearfully over his shoulder toward the door, he whimpered:

“Oh, I must not say that!”

“Say what, Willem?” urged McPherson.

“What what he wanted me to say!”

“Kathrien must not marry Frederik Grimm,” repeated the Dead Man. “Say it, Willem?”

“Speak up, Willem,” exhorted McPherson. “Don’t be scared. No one will hurt you.”

“Oh, yes,” denied Willem, in terror, “he will. I don’t want to say his name! Because because ”

“Why won’t you tell his name?” insisted McPherson.

“Hurry, Willem! Hurry!” begged the Dead Man.

“Oh,” wailed Willem, with another terrified glance at the door, “I’m afraid! I’m afraid! He’ll make Anne Marie cry again. And me! And me!”

“Why are you afraid of him?” asked Kathrien. “Was Frederik the man that came to see Anne Marie ?”

“Kathrien!” primly reproved Mrs. Batholommey.

Kathrien caught hold of the boy’s hand as he rose, shaking, to his feet. She knelt before him.

“Willem!” she implored. “Was Frederik the man who came to see Anne Marie? Tell me!”

“Surely,” expostulated Mrs. Batholommey in pious horror, “surely, Kathrien, you don’t believe ?”

“I have thought of a great many things this evening,” replied Kathrien, vibrant with excitement, yet instinctively lowering her voice so as not to break in on Willem’s semi-trance. “Little things that I’ve never noticed before. I’m putting them together. Just as Willem put that picture together. And I must know who the Other One was.”

“Hurry, Willem!” exhorted the Dead Man. “Hurry! Frederik is listening at the door.”

The announcement brought Willem around with a gasp toward the door. He stared at its panels, quaking, aghast.

“I won’t say any more!” he whimpered, pointing at the door. “He’s there!”

“Who was the man, Willem?” entreated McPherson. “Come, lad! Out with it!”

“Quick, Willem!” supplemented Peter Grimm.

Kathrien, acting on an unexplained impulse as Willem stared terror-stricken at the door, hastened toward the vestibule.

“No! No!” shrieked the boy in anguished falsetto as he divined what she was about to do. “Please, please don’t! Don’t! Don’t let him in. I’m afraid of him. He made Anne Marie cry.”

But Kathrien’s hand was already at the latch. She threw the outer door wide open. Frederik Grimm stood on the threshold, his head still a little forward. His ear had evidently been pressed close to the panel.

“You’re sure Frederik’s the man?” almost shouted McPherson.

“I won’t tell! I won’t tell! I won’t tell!” screamed the boy, taking one look at Frederik, then tearing loose from McPherson’s restraining hand and dashing up the stairs.

“I must go to bed now,” sobbed Willem from the gallery above. “He told me to.”

He ran into his own room and shut the door quickly behind him.

“You’re a good boy, Willem!” Peter Grimm called approvingly after him.

The cloud of grief was gone from the Dead Man’s face, leaving it wondrously bright and young. With no trace of anxiety, he turned to witness the consummation of his labours.

Frederik Grimm was standing, nerveless, dazed, where Kathrien’s impulsive opening of the door had disclosed him. Dully, he stared from one to another of the three who confronted him. It was Kathrien who first spoke. Pointing toward the photograph that still lay on the desk, she said:

“Frederik, you have heard from Anne Marie.”

His lips parted in denial. Then he saw the picture, started slightly, and lapsed into a sullen silence.

“You have had a letter from her,” pursued Kathrien. “You burned it. And you tore that picture so that we would not recognise it. Why did you tell Marta that you had had no message no news? You told her so, since that letter and photograph came. You went to Anne Marie’s home, too. Why did you tell me you had never seen her since she left here? Why did you lie to me? Why do you hate her child?”

Frederik made one dogged effort to regain what he had so bewilderingly lost.

“Are are you going to believe what that brat says?” he muttered.

“No,” retorted Kathrien. “But I’m going to find out for myself. I am going to find out where Anne Marie is before I marry you. And I am going to learn the truth from her. Willem may be right or wrong in what he thinks he remembers. But I am going to find out, past all doubt, what Anne Marie was to you. And, if what I think is true ”

“It is true,” interposed McPherson. “It is true, Kathrien. I believe we got that message direct.”

“Andrew is right, Katje,” prompted the Dead Man. “Believe him.”

“Yes!” cried Kathrien, as if in reply. “It is true. I believe Oom Peter was in this room to-night!”

“What?” blurted Frederik. “You saw him, too?”

His unguarded query was lost in Mrs. Batholommey’s gasp of:

“Oh, Kathrien, that’s quite impossible. It was only a coincidence that ”

“I don’t care what any one else may think,” rushed on Kathrien, swept along upon the wave of a strange exultation that bore her far out of her wonted timid self. “People have the right to think for themselves. I believe Oom Peter has been here, to-night!”

“I am here, Katje,” breathed the Dead Man.

“I believe he is here, now!” declared Kathrien, her eyes aglow, and her face flushed. “He is here. Oh, Oom Peter!” she cried, her arms stretched wide in appeal, her face alight, her voice rising like that of a prophetess of old. “Oom Peter, if you can hear me now, give me back my promise! Give it back to me or I’ll take it back!”

“I did give it back to you, dear,” answered Peter Grimm happily. “But, oh, what a time I’ve had putting it across!”