Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy by Rudyard Kipling Page B

that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the history of the past month.
    â€˜But I am in Simla,’ I kept repeating to myself. ‘I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla, and there are no ghosts here. It’s unreasonable of that woman to pretend there are. Whycouldn’t Agnes have left me alone? I never did her any harm. It might just as well have been me as Agnes. Only I’d never come back on purpose to kill her. Why can’t I be left alone – left alone and happy?’
    It was high noon when I first awoke: and the sun was low in the sky before I slept – slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to feel further pain.
    Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherlegh told me in the morning that he had received an answer from Mr Mannering, and that, thanks to his (Heatherlegh’s) friendly offices, the story of my affliction had travelled through the length and breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied.
    â€˜And that’s rather more than you deserve,’ he concluded pleasantly, ‘though the Lord knows you’ve been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind; we’ll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon.’
    I declined firmly to be cured. ‘You’ve been much too good to me already, old man,’ said I, ‘but I don’t think I need trouble you further.’
    In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherlegh could do would lighten the burden that had been laid upon me.
    With that knowledge came also a sense of hopeless, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world; and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have been singled out for so hideous a fate. This mood would in time give place to another where it seemed that the rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows; that Kitty was a ghost; that Mannering, Heatherlegh, and all the other men and women I knew were all ghosts; and the great, grey hills themselves but vain shadows devised to torture me. From mood to mood I tossed backwards and forwards for seven weary days; my body growing daily stronger and stronger, until the bed-room looking-glass told me that I had returned to everyday life, and was as other men once more. Curiously enough, my face showed no signs of the struggle I had gone through.It waspaleindeed,butasexpressionlessandcommon-place as ever. I had expected some permanent alteration – visible evidence of the disease that was eating me away. I found nothing.
    On the 15th of May I left Heatherlegh’s house at eleven o’clock in the morning; and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the Club. There I found that every man knew my story as told by Heatherlegh, and was, in clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive. Nevertheless I recognised that for the rest of my natural life I should be among, but not of, my fellows; and I envied very bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I lunched at the Club, and at four o’clock wandered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope of meeting Kitty. Close to the Band-stand the black and white liveries joined me; and I heard Mrs Wessington’s old appeal at my side. I had been expecting this ever since I came out; and was only surprised at her delay. The phantom rickshaw and I went side by side along the Chota Simla road in silence. Close to the bazar, Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay me the compliment of quickening her pace; though the rainy afternoon had served for an excuse.
    So Kitty and her companion, and I and my ghostly Light-o’-Love, crept round Jakko in couples. The road was streaming with water; the pines dripped like roof-pipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of fine, driving rain. Two or three times I found myself saying