The Return of Peter Grimm Part 32

"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 vanis.h.i.+ng, "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--pa.s.sed over."