“Because her nature is double, as is mine,” answered the old man. “Dorothy, like her sisters and mother, passed out of this life more than a hundred and fifty years ago.”
“And did the same causes operate to bring her back to earth?”
Ah Ben became more serious than ever as he answered: “You have touched upon the sorest point of all, and one which requires further elucidation. Sudden and unnatural death has a retarding tendency upon the spirit's progress; but where one has caused his own destruction, the evil resulting is incalculable. I was a suicide; and ten thousand times over had I better have borne all the ills that earth could heap upon me, than have stooped to such folly. For in what has it resulted? A prolonged mental agony, such as you can never conceive; for I have no home in heaven nor earth, but am forced to wander amid the shadows of each world, unrecognized by those either above or below me. Here I am shunned upon every hand, and, as you saw for yourself, I was equally avoided in Levachan. But that is not all; in the ignorance and selfishness of my grief, I yearned for my lost ones with a solicitude, a consuming fierceness and power of will which insanity only can equal. By nature I was intense; and even had I not committed the fatal act, my vitality would have burned itself away with the awful concentration of feeling. But it must be remembered that I was not the only sufferer from this pitiful lack of self-control. The stronger desires and emotions of the living influence the dead--I use the words in their common acceptation for the sake of convenience--and here is where I caused such incalculable injury to my own child; for Dorothy, having entered the spirit world with inferior powers of resistance, fell under the spell I had wrought, and joined me in the haunting of this old house. Here, Mr. Henley, am I, a suicide, justly deserving the punishment I receive; but there is my child, as innocent as the air of heaven, forced to suffer with me, and it is no small part of my chastisement to realize this fact. People fly from us as they would from pestilence, both in this world and the other, although many of the dwellers in the higher state, from their greater knowledge and loftier development, simply avoid us. And we can not criticise their action in either world, for we are not adapted to either state. We are outcasts.”