“Oh, dear,” cried Miss Minerva Halliday, and ran to her own compartment to plunge back and toss down a cascade of books.
“Hamlet!” she cried, “his father, yes? A Christmas Carol. Four ghosts! Wuthering Heights. Kathy returns, yes? To haunt the snows? Ah, The Turn of the Screw, and …Rebecca! Then—my favorite! The Monkey’s Paw! Which?”
But the Orient ghost said not a Marley word. His eyes were locked, his mouth sewn with icicles.
“Wait!” she cried.
And opened the first book …
Where Hamlet stood on the castle wall and heard his ghost of a father moan, and so she said these words:
“‘Mark me … my hour is almost come … when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames … must render up myself …’”
And then she read:
“‘I am thy father’s spirit, Doomed for a certain term to walk the night …’”
And again:
“‘… if thou didst ever thy dear father love … O, God!… Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder …’”
And yet again:
“‘… Murder most foul …’”
And the train ran in the night as she spoke the last words of Hamlet’s father’s ghost:
“‘… Fare thee well at once …’”
“‘… Adieu, adieu! Remember me.’”
And she repeated:
“‘… remember me!’”
And the Orient ghost quivered. She seized a further book:
“‘… Marley was dead, to begin with …’”
As the Orient train thundered across a twilight bridge above an unseen stream.
Her hands flew like birds.
“‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!’”
Then:
“‘The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped off into the fog—’”
And wasn’t there the faintest echo of a horse’s hooves behind, within the Orient ghost’s mouth?
“‘The beating beating beating, under the floorboards, of the old man’s Tell-tale Heart!’” she cried, softly.
And there! like the leap of a frog. The first pulse of the Orient ghost’s heart in more than an hour.
The Germans down the corridor fired off a cannon of disbelief.
But she poured the medicine: