Title: The Shadowy Third and Other Stories
Author: Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson
Language: English
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[Illustration: “I saw her lift her little arms, and I saw the mother
stoop and gather her to her bosom”]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                  THE SHADOWY THIRD AND OTHER STORIES

                                   BY
                             ELLEN GLASGOW

                              FRONTISPIECE
                                   BY
                        ELENORE PLAISTED ABBOTT

                         GARDEN CITY — NEW YORK
                       DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

------------------------------------------------------------------------

              COPYRIGHT 1899, 1916, 1917, 1920, 1922, 1923
                      BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

           ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION
           INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN

                    PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
               THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

                             First Edition

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                CONTENTS

                           The Shadowy Third
                           Dare’s Gift
                           The Past
                           Whispering Leaves
                           A Point in Morals
                           The Difference
                           Jordan’s End

------------------------------------------------------------------------

                           THE SHADOWY THIRD



                           THE SHADOWY THIRD


When the call came I remember that I turned from the telephone in a
romantic flutter. Though I had spoken only once to the great surgeon,
Roland Maradick, I felt on that December afternoon that to speak to him
only once—to watch him in the operating-room for a single hour—was an
adventure which drained the colour and the excitement from the rest of
life. After all these years of work on typhoid and pneumonia cases, I
can still feel the delicious tremor of my young pulses; I can still see
the winter sunshine slanting through the hospital windows over the white
uniforms of the nurses.

“He didn’t mention me by name. Can there be a mistake?” I stood,
incredulous yet ecstatic, before the superintendent of the hospital.

“No, there isn’t a mistake. I was talking to him before you came down.”
Miss Hemphill’s strong face softened while she looked at me. She was a
big, resolute woman, a distant Canadian relative of my mother’s, and the
kind of nurse I had discovered in the month since I had come up from
Richmond, that Northern hospital boards, if not Northern patients,
appear instinctively to select. From the first, in spite of her
hardness, she had taken a liking—I hesitate to use the word “fancy” for
a preference so impersonal—to her Virginia cousin. After all, it isn’t
every Southern nurse, just out of training, who can boast a kinswoman in
the superintendent of a New York hospital.

“And he made you understand positively that he meant me?” The thing was
so wonderful that I simply couldn’t believe it.

“He asked particularly for the nurse who was with Miss Hudson last week
when he operated. I think he didn’t even remember that you had a name.
When I asked if he meant Miss Randolph, he repeated that he wanted the
nurse who had been with Miss Hudson. She was small, he said, and
cheerful-looking. This, of course, might apply to one or two of the
others, but none of these was with Miss Hudson.”

“Then I suppose it is really true?” My pulses were tingling. “And I am
to be there at six o’clock?”

“Not a minute later. The day nurse goes off duty at that hour, and Mrs.
Maradick is never left by herself for an instant.”

“It is her mind, isn’t it? And that makes it all the stranger that he
should select me, for I have had so few mental cases.”

“So few cases of any kind,” Miss Hemphill was smiling, and when she
smiled I wondered if the other nurses would know her. “By the time you
have gone through the treadmill in New York, Margaret, you will have
lost a good many things besides your inexperience. I wonder how long you
will keep your sympathy and your imagination? After all, wouldn’t you
have made a better novelist than a nurse?”

“I can’t help putting myself into my cases. I suppose one ought not to?”

“It isn’t a question of what one ought to do, but of what one must. When
you are drained of every bit of sympathy and enthusiasm, and have got
nothing in return for it, not even thanks, you will understand why I try
to keep you from wasting yourself.”

“But surely in a case like this—for Doctor Maradick?”

“Oh, well, of course—for Doctor Maradick.” She must have seen that I
implored her confidence, for, after a minute, she let fall carelessly a
gleam of light on the situation: “It is a very sad case when you think
what a charming man and a great surgeon Doctor Maradick is.”

Above the starched collar of my uniform I felt the blood leap in bounds
to my cheeks. “I have spoken to him only once,” I murmured, “but he is
charming, and so kind and handsome, isn’t he?”

“His patients adore him.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve seen that. Everyone hangs on his visits.” Like the
patients and the other nurses, I also had come by delightful, if
imperceptible, degrees to hang on the daily visits of Doctor Maradick.
He was, I suppose, born to be a hero to women. From my first day in his
hospital, from the moment when I watched, through closed shutters, while
he stepped out of his car, I have never doubted that he was assigned to
the great part in the play. If I had been ignorant of his spell—of the
charm he exercised over his hospital—I should have felt it in the
waiting hush, like a drawn breath, which followed his ring at the door
and preceded his imperious footstep on the stairs. My first impression
of him, even after the terrible events of the next year, records a
memory that is both careless and splendid. At that moment, when, gazing
through the chinks in the shutters, I watched him, in his coat of dark
fur, cross the pavement over the pale streaks of sunshine, I knew beyond
any doubt—I knew with a sort of infallible prescience—that my fate was
irretrievably bound up with his in the future. I knew this, I repeat,
though Miss Hemphill would still insist that my foreknowledge was merely
a sentimental gleaning from indiscriminate novels. But it wasn’t only
first love, impressionable as my kinswoman believed me to be. It wasn’t
only the way he looked. Even more than his appearance—more than the
shining dark of his eyes, the silvery brown of his hair, the dusky glow
in his face—even more than his charm and his magnificence, I think, the
beauty and sympathy in his voice won my heart. It was a voice, I heard
someone say afterwards, that ought always to speak poetry.

So you will see why—if you do not understand at the beginning, I can
never hope to make you believe impossible things!—so you will see why I
accepted the call when it came as an imperative summons. I couldn’t have
stayed away after he sent for me. However much I may have tried not to
go, I know that in the end I must have gone. In those days, while I was
still hoping to write novels, I used to talk a great deal about
“destiny” (I have learned since then how silly all such talk is), and I
suppose it was my “destiny” to be caught in the web of Roland Maradick’s
personality. But I am not the first nurse to grow love-sick about a
doctor who never gave her a thought.

“I am glad you got the call, Margaret. It may mean a great deal to you.
Only try not to be too emotional.” I remember that Miss Hemphill was
holding a bit of rose-geranium in her hand while she spoke—one of the
patients had given it to her from a pot she kept in her room, and the
scent of the flower is still in my nostrils—or my memory. Since then—oh,
long since then—I have wondered if she also had been caught in the web.

“I wish I knew more about the case.” I was pressing for light. “Have you
ever seen Mrs. Maradick?”

“Oh, dear, yes. They have been married only a little over a year, and in
the beginning she used to come sometimes to the hospital and wait
outside while the doctor made his visits. She was a very sweet-looking
woman then—not exactly pretty, but fair and slight, with the loveliest
smile, I think, I have ever seen. In those first months she was so much
in love that we used to laugh about it among ourselves. To see her face
light up when the doctor came out of the hospital and crossed the
pavement to his car, was as good as a play. We never tired of watching
her—I wasn’t superintendent then, so I had more time to look out of the
window while I was on day duty. Once or twice she brought her little
girl in to see one of the patients. The child was so much like her that
you would have known them anywhere for mother and daughter.”

I had heard that Mrs. Maradick was a widow, with one child, when she
first met the doctor, and I asked now, still seeking an illumination I
had not found, “There was a great deal of money, wasn’t there?”

“A great fortune. If she hadn’t been so attractive, people would have
said, I suppose, that Doctor Maradick married her for her money. Only,”
she appeared to make an effort of memory, “I believe I’ve heard somehow
that it was all left in trust away from Mrs. Maradick if she married
again. I can’t, to save my life, remember just how it was; but it was a
queer will, I know, and Mrs. Maradick wasn’t to come into the money
unless the child didn’t live to grow up. The pity of it—”

A young nurse came into the office to ask for something—the keys, I
think, of the operating-room, and Miss Hemphill broke off inconclusively
as she hurried out of the door. I was sorry that she left off just when
she did. Poor Mrs. Maradick! Perhaps I was too emotional, but even
before I saw her I had begun to feel her pathos and her strangeness.

My preparations took only a few minutes. In those days I always kept a
suitcase packed and ready for sudden calls; and it was not yet six
o’clock when I turned from Tenth Street into Fifth Avenue, and stopped
for a minute, before ascending the steps, to look at the house in which
Doctor Maradick lived. A fine rain was falling, and I remember thinking,
as I turned the corner, how depressing the weather must be for Mrs.
Maradick. It was an old house, with damp-looking walls (though that may
have been because of the rain) and a spindle-shaped iron railing which
ran up the stone steps to the black door, where I noticed a dim flicker
through the old-fashioned fanlight. Afterwards I discovered that Mrs.
Maradick had been born in the house—her maiden name was Calloran—and
that she had never wanted to live anywhere else. She was a woman—this I
found out when I knew her better—of strong attachments to both persons
and places; and though Doctor Maradick had tried to persuade her to move
uptown after her marriage, she had clung, against his wishes, to the old
house in lower Fifth Avenue. I dare say she was obstinate about it in
spite of her gentleness and her passion for the doctor. Those sweet,
soft women, especially when they have always been rich, are sometimes
amazingly obstinate. I have nursed so many of them since—women with
strong affections and weak intellects—that I have come to recognize the
type as soon as I set eyes upon it.

My ring at the bell was answered after a little delay, and when I
entered the house I saw that the hall was quite dark except for the
waning glow from an open fire which burned in the library. When I gave
my name, and added that I was the night nurse, the servant appeared to
think my humble presence unworthy of illumination. He was an old negro
butler, inherited perhaps from Mrs. Maradick’s mother, who, I learned
afterwards, was from South Carolina; and while he passed me on his way
up the staircase, I heard him vaguely muttering that he “wa’n’t gwinter
tu’n on dem lights twel de chile had done playin’.”

To the right of the hall, the soft glow drew me into the library, and
crossing the threshold timidly, I stooped to dry my wet coat by the
fire. As I bent there, meaning to start up at the first sound of a
footstep, I thought how cosy the room was after the damp walls outside
to which some bared creepers were clinging; and I was watching the
strange shapes and patterns the firelight made on the old Persian rug,
when the lamps of a slowly turning motor flashed on me through the white
shades at the window. Still dazzled by the glare, I looked round in the
dimness and saw a child’s ball of red and blue rubber roll towards me
out of the gloom of the adjoining room. A moment later, while I made a
vain attempt to capture the toy as it spun past me, a little girl darted
airily, with peculiar lightness and grace, through the doorway, and
stopped quickly, as if in surprise at the sight of a stranger. She was a
small child—so small and slight that her footsteps made no sound on the
polished floor of the threshold; and I remember thinking while I looked
at her that she had the gravest and sweetest face I had ever seen. She
couldn’t—I decided this afterwards—have been more than six or seven
years old, yet she stood there with a curious prim dignity, like the
dignity of an elderly person, and gazed up at me with enigmatical eyes.
She was dressed in Scotch plaid, with a bit of red ribbon in her hair,
which was cut in a fringe over her forehead and hung very straight to
her shoulders. Charming as she was, from her uncurled brown hair to the
white socks and black slippers on her little feet, I recall most vividly
the singular look in her eyes, which appeared in the shifting light to
be of an indeterminate colour. For the odd thing about this look was
that it was not the look of childhood at all. It was the look of
profound experience, of bitter knowledge.

“Have you come for your ball?” I asked; but while the friendly question
was still on my lips, I heard the servant returning. In my confusion I
made a second ineffectual grasp at the plaything, which had rolled away
from me into the dusk of the drawing-room. Then, as I raised my head, I
saw that the child also had slipped from the room; and without looking
after her I followed the old negro into the pleasant study above, where
the great surgeon awaited me.

Ten years ago, before hard nursing had taken so much out of me, I
blushed very easily, and I was aware at the moment when I crossed Doctor
Maradick’s study that my cheeks were the colour of peonies. Of course, I
was a fool—no one knows this better than I do—but I had never been
alone, even for an instant, with him before, and the man was more than a
hero to me, he was—there isn’t any reason now why I should blush over
the confession—almost a god. At that age I was mad about the wonders of
surgery, and Roland Maradick in the operating-room was magician enough
to have turned an older and more sensible head than mine. Added to his
great reputation and his marvelous skill, he was, I am sure of this, the
most splendid-looking man, even at forty-five, that one could imagine.
Had he been ungracious—had he been positively rude to me, I should still
have adored him; but when he held out his hand, and greeted me in the
charming way he had with women, I felt that I would have died for him.
It is no wonder that a saying went about the hospital that every woman
he operated on fell in love with him. As for the nurses—well, there
wasn’t a single one of them who had escaped his spell—not even Miss
Hemphill, who could have been scarcely a day under fifty.

“I am glad you could come, Miss Randolph. You were with Miss Hudson last
week when I operated?”

I bowed. To save my life I couldn’t have spoken without blushing the
redder.

“I noticed your bright face at the time. Brightness, I think, is what
Mrs. Maradick needs. She finds her day nurse depressing.” His eyes
rested so kindly upon me that I have suspected since that he was not
entirely unaware of my worship. It was a small thing, heaven knows, to
flatter his vanity—a nurse just out of a training-school—but to some men
no tribute is too insignificant to give pleasure.

“You will do your best, I am sure.” He hesitated an instant—just long
enough for me to perceive the anxiety beneath the genial smile on his
face—and then added gravely, “We wish to avoid, if possible, having to
send her away.”

I could only murmur in response, and after a few carefully chosen words
about his wife’s illness, he rang the bell and directed the maid to take
me upstairs to my room. Not until I was ascending the stairs to the
third storey did it occur to me that he had really told me nothing. I
was as perplexed about the nature of Mrs. Maradick’s malady as I had
been when I entered the house.

I found my room pleasant enough. It had been arranged—at Doctor
Maradick’s request, I think—that I was to sleep in the house, and after
my austere little bed at the hospital, I was agreeably surprised by the
cheerful look of the apartment into which the maid led me. The walls
were papered in roses, and there were curtains of flowered chintz at the
window, which looked down on a small formal garden at the rear of the
house. This the maid told me, for it was too dark for me to distinguish
more than a marble fountain and a fir-tree, which looked old, though I
afterwards learned that it was replanted almost every season.

In ten minutes I had slipped into my uniform and was ready to go to my
patient; but for some reason—to this day I have never found out what it
was that turned her against me at the start—Mrs. Maradick refused to
receive me. While I stood outside her door I heard the day nurse trying
to persuade her to let me come in. It wasn’t any use, however, and in
the end I was obliged to go back to my room and wait until the poor lady
got over her whim and consented to see me. That was long after dinner—it
must have been nearer eleven than ten o’clock—and Miss Peterson was
quite worn out by the time she came for me.

“I’m afraid you’ll have a bad night,” she said as we went downstairs
together. That was her way, I soon saw, to expect the worst of
everything and everybody.

“Does she often keep you up like this?”

“Oh, no, she is usually very considerate. I never knew a sweeter
character. But she still has this hallucination—”

Here again, as in the scene with Doctor Maradick, I felt that the
explanation had only deepened the mystery. Mrs. Maradick’s
hallucination, whatever form it assumed, was evidently a subject for
evasion and subterfuge in the household. It was on the tip of my tongue
to ask, “What is her hallucination?”—but before I could get the words
past my lips we had reached Mrs. Maradick’s door, and Miss Peterson
motioned me to be silent. As the door opened a little way to admit me, I
saw that Mrs. Maradick was already in bed, and that the lights were out
except for a night-lamp burning on a candle-stand beside a book and a
carafe of water.

“I won’t go in with you,” said Miss Peterson in a whisper; and I was on
the point of stepping over the threshold when I saw the little girl, in
the dress of Scotch plaid, slip by me from the dusk of the room into the
electric light of the hall. She held a doll in her arms, and as she went
by she dropped a doll’s work-basket in the doorway. Miss Peterson must
have picked up the toy, for when I turned in a minute to look for it I
found that it was gone. I remember thinking that it was late for a child
to be up—she looked delicate, too—but, after all, it was no business of
mine, and four years in a hospital had taught me never to meddle in
things that do not concern me. There is nothing a nurse learns quicker
than not to try to put the world to rights in a day.

When I crossed the floor to the chair by Mrs. Maradick’s bed, she turned
over on her side and looked at me with the sweetest and saddest smile.

“You are the night nurse,” she said in a gentle voice; and from the
moment she spoke I knew that there was nothing hysterical or violent
about her mania—or hallucination, as they called it. “They told me your
name, but I have forgotten it.”

“Randolph—Margaret Randolph.” I liked her from the start, and I think
she must have seen it.

“You look very young, Miss Randolph.”

“I am twenty-two, but I suppose I don’t look quite my age. People
usually think I am younger.”

For a minute she was silent, and while I settled myself in the chair by
the bed, I thought how strikingly she resembled the little girl I had
seen first in the afternoon, and then leaving her room a few moments
before. They had the same small, heart-shaped faces, coloured ever so
faintly; the same straight, soft hair, between brown and flaxen; and the
same large, grave eyes, set very far apart under arched eyebrows. What
surprised me most, however, was that they both looked at me with that
enigmatical and vaguely wondering expression—only in Mrs. Maradick’s
face the vagueness seemed to change now and then to a definite fear—a
flash, I had almost said, of startled horror.

I sat quite still in my chair, and until the time came for Mrs. Maradick
to take her medicine not a word passed between us. Then, when I bent
over her with the glass in my hand, she raised her head from the pillow
and said in a whisper of suppressed intensity:

“You look kind. I wonder if you could have seen my little girl?”

As I slipped my arm under the pillow I tried to smile cheerfully down on
her. “Yes, I’ve seen her twice. I’d know her anywhere by her likeness to
you.”

A glow shone in her eyes, and I thought how pretty she must have been
before illness took the life and animation out of her features. “Then I
know you’re good.” Her voice was so strained and low that I could barely
hear it. “If you weren’t good you couldn’t have seen her.”

I thought this queer enough, but all I answered was, “She looked
delicate to be sitting up so late.” A quiver passed over her thin
features, and for a minute I thought she was going to burst into tears.
As she had taken the medicine, I put the glass back on the candle-stand,
and bending over the bed, smoothed the straight brown hair, which was as
fine and soft as spun silk, back from her forehead. There was something
about her—I don’t know what it was—that made you love her as soon as she
looked at you.

“She always had that light and airy way, though she was never sick a day
in her life,” she answered calmly after a pause. Then, groping for my
hand, she whispered passionately, “You must not tell him—you must not
tell any one that you have seen her!”

“I must not tell any one?” Again I had the impression that had come to
me first in Doctor Maradick’s study, and afterwards with Miss Peterson
on the staircase, that I was seeking a gleam of light in the midst of
obscurity.

“Are you sure there isn’t any one listening—that there isn’t any one at
the door?” she asked, pushing aside my arm and raising herself on the
pillows.

“Quite, quite sure. They have put out the lights in the hall.”

“And you will not tell him? Promise me that you will not tell him.” The
startled horror flashed from the vague wonder of her expression. “He
doesn’t like her to come back, because he killed her.”

“Because he killed her!” Then it was that light burst on me in a blaze.
So this was Mrs. Maradick’s hallucination! She believed that her child
was dead—the little girl I had seen with my own eyes leaving her room;
and she believed that her husband—the great surgeon we worshipped in the
hospital—had murdered her. No wonder they veiled the dreadful obsession
in mystery! No wonder that even Miss Peterson had not dared to drag the
horrid thing out into the light! It was the kind of hallucination one
simply couldn’t stand having to face.

“There is no use telling people things that nobody believes,” she
resumed slowly, still holding my hand in a grasp that would have hurt me
if her fingers had not been so fragile. “Nobody believes that he killed
her. Nobody believes that she comes back every day to the house. Nobody
believes—and yet you saw her—”

“Yes, I saw her—but why should your husband have killed her?” I spoke
soothingly, as one would speak to a person who was quite mad. Yet she
was not mad, I could have sworn this while I looked at her.

For a moment she moaned inarticulately, as if the horror of her thoughts
were too great to pass into speech. Then she flung out her thin, bare
arm with a wild gesture.

“Because he never loved me!” she said. “He never loved me!”

“But he married you,” I urged gently while I stroked her hair. “If he
hadn’t loved you, why should he have married you?”

“He wanted the money—my little girl’s money. It all goes to him when I
die.”

“But he is rich himself. He must make a fortune from his profession.”

“It isn’t enough. He wanted millions.” She had grown stem and tragic.
“No, he never loved me. He loved someone else from the beginning—before
I knew him.”

It was quite useless, I saw, to reason with her. If she wasn’t mad, she
was in a state of terror and despondency so black that it had almost
crossed the border-line into madness. I thought once that I would go
upstairs and bring the child down from her nursery; but, after a
moment’s hesitation, I realized that Miss Peterson and Doctor Maradick
must have long ago tried all these measures. Clearly, there was nothing
to do except soothe and quiet her as much as I could; and this I did
until she dropped into a light sleep which lasted well into the morning.

By seven o’clock I was worn out—not from work but from the strain on my
sympathy—and I was glad, indeed, when one of the maids came in to bring
me an early cup of coffee. Mrs. Maradick was still sleeping—it was a
mixture of bromide and chloral I had given her—and she did not wake
until Miss Peterson came on duty an hour or two later. Then, when I went
downstairs, I found the dining-room deserted except for the old
housekeeper, who was looking over the silver. Doctor Maradick, she
explained to me presently, had his breakfast served in the morning-room
on the other side of the house.

“And the little girl? Does she take her meals in the nursery?”

She threw me a startled glance. Was it, I questioned afterwards, one of
distrust or apprehension?

“There isn’t any little girl. Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard? No. Why, I saw her only yesterday.” The look she gave me—I was
sure of it now—was full of alarm.

“The little girl—she was the sweetest child I ever saw—died just two
months ago of pneumonia.”

“But she couldn’t have died.” I was a fool to let this out, but the
shock had completely unnerved me. “I tell you I saw her yesterday.”

The alarm in her face deepened. “That is Mrs. Maradick’s trouble. She
believes that she still sees her.”

“But don’t you see her?” I drove the question home bluntly.

“No.” She set her lips tightly. “I never see anything.”

So I had been wrong, after all, and the explanation, when it came, only
accentuated the terror. The child was dead—she had died of pneumonia two
months ago—and yet I had seen her, with my own eyes, playing ball in the
library; I had seen her slipping out of her mother’s room, with her doll
in her arms.

“Is there another child in the house? Could there be a child belonging
to one of the servants?” A gleam had shot through the fog in which I was
groping.

“No, there isn’t any other. The doctors tried bringing one once, but it
threw the poor lady into such a state she almost died of it. Besides,
there wouldn’t be any other child as quiet and sweet-looking as
Dorothea. To see her skipping along in her dress of Scotch plaid used to
make me think of a fairy, though they say that fairies wear nothing but
white or green.”

“Has any one else seen her—the child, I mean—any of the servants?”

“Only old Gabriel, the coloured butler, who came with Mrs. Maradick’s
mother from South Carolina. I’ve heard that negroes often have a kind of
second sight—though I don’t know that that is just what you would call
it. But they seem to believe in the supernatural by instinct, and
Gabriel is so old and doty—he does no work except answer the door-bell
and clean the silver—that nobody pays much attention to anything that he
sees—”

“Is the child’s nursery kept as it used to be?”

“Oh, no. The doctor had all the toys sent to the children’s hospital.
That was a great grief to Mrs. Maradick; but Doctor Brandon thought, and
all the nurses agreed with him, that it was best for her not to be
allowed to keep the room as it was when Dorothea was living.”

“Dorothea? Was that the child’s name?”

“Yes, it means the gift of God, doesn’t it? She was named after the
mother of Mrs. Maradick’s first husband, Mr. Ballard. He was the grave,
quiet kind—not the least like the doctor.”

I wondered if the other dreadful obsession of Mrs. Maradick’s had
drifted down through the nurses or the servants to the housekeeper; but
she said nothing about it, and since she was, I suspected, a garrulous
person, I thought it wiser to assume that the gossip had not reached
her.

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone upstairs
to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous
alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but
from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure almost by
intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough—I have always granted him
that, bitterly as I have felt towards him. It wasn’t his fault that he
lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from
long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a
disease. He was the sort of physician—every nurse will understand what I
mean—who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He
was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn’t talked to
him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that
he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological
manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life—what any one got
out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.

When I reached my room at last, I was so tired that I could barely
remember either the questions Doctor Brandon had asked or the directions
he had given me. I fell asleep, I know, almost as soon as my head
touched the pillow; and the maid who came to inquire if I wanted
luncheon decided to let me finish my nap. In the afternoon, when she
returned with a cup of tea, she found me still heavy and drowsy. Though
I was used to night nursing, I felt as if I had danced from sunset to
daybreak. It was fortunate, I reflected, while I drank my tea, that
every case didn’t wear on one’s sympathies as acutely as Mrs. Maradick’s
hallucination had worn on mine.

Through the day I did not see Doctor Maradick; but at seven o’clock when
I came up from my early dinner on my way to take the place of Miss
Peterson, who had kept on duty an hour later than usual, he met me in
the hall and asked me to come into his study. I thought him handsomer
than ever in his evening clothes, with a white flower in his buttonhole.
He was going to some public dinner, the housekeeper told me, but, then,
he was always going somewhere. I believe he didn’t dine at home a single
evening that winter.

“Did Mrs. Maradick have a good night?” He had closed the door after us,
and turning now with the question, he smiled kindly, as if he wished to
put me at ease in the beginning.

“She slept very well after she took the medicine. I gave her that at
eleven o’clock.”

For a minute he regarded me silently, and I was aware that his
personality—his charm—was focussed upon me. It was almost as if I stood
in the centre of converging rays of light, so vivid was my impression of
him.

“Did she allude in any way to her—to her hallucination?” he asked.

How the warning reached me—what invisible waves of sense-perception
transmitted the message—I have never known; but while I stood there,
facing the splendour of the doctor’s presence, every intuition cautioned
me that the time had come when I must take sides in the household. While
I stayed there I must stand either with Mrs. Maradick or against her.

“She talked quite rationally,” I replied after a moment.

“What did she say?”

“She told me how she was feeling, that she missed her child, and that
she walked a little every day about her room.”

His face changed—how I could not at first determine.

“Have you see Doctor Brandon?”

“He came this morning to give me his directions.”

“He thought her less well to-day. He has advised me to send her to
Rosedale.”

I have never, even in secret, tried to account for Doctor Maradick. He
may have been sincere. I tell only what I know—not what I believe or
imagine—and the human is sometimes as inscrutable, as inexplicable, as
the supernatural.

While he watched me I was conscious of an inner struggle, as if opposing
angels warred somewhere in the depths of my being. When at last I made
my decision, I was acting less from reason, I knew, than in obedience to
the pressure of some secret current of thought. Heaven knows, even then,
the man held me captive while I defied him.

“Doctor Maradick,” I lifted my eyes for the first time frankly to his,
“I believe that your wife is as sane as I am—or as you are.”

He started. “Then she did not talk freely to you?”

“She may be mistaken, unstrung, piteously distressed in mind”—I brought
this out with emphasis—“but she is not—I am willing to stake my future
on it—a fit subject for an asylum. It would be foolish—it would be cruel
to send her to Rosedale.”

“Cruel, you say?” A troubled look crossed his face, and his voice grew
very gentle. “You do not imagine that I could be cruel to her?”

“No, I do not think that.” My voice also had softened.

“We will let things go on as they are. Perhaps Doctor Brandon may have
some other suggestion to make.” He drew out his watch and compared it
with the clock—nervously, I observed, as if his action were a screen for
his discomfiture or perplexity. “I must be going now. We will speak of
this again in the morning.”

But in the morning we did not speak of it, and during the month that I
nursed Mrs. Maradick I was not called again into her husband’s study.
When I met him in the hall or on the staircase, which was seldom, he was
as charming as ever; yet, in spite of his courtesy, I had a persistent
feeling that he had taken my measure on that evening, and that he had no
further use for me.

As the days went by Mrs. Maradick seemed to grow stronger. Never, after
our first night together, had she mentioned the child to me; never had
she alluded by so much as a word to her dreadful charge against her
husband. She was like any woman recovering from a great sorrow, except
that she was sweeter and gentler. It is no wonder that everyone who came
near her loved her; for there was a mysterious loveliness about her like
the mystery of light, not of darkness. She was, I have always thought,
as much of an angel as it is possible for a woman to be on this earth.
And yet, angelic as she was, there were times when it seemed to me that
she both hated and feared her husband. Though he never entered her room
while I was there, and I never heard his name on her lips until an hour
before the end, still I could tell by the look of terror in her face
whenever his step passed down the hall that her very soul shivered at
his approach.

During the whole month I did not see the child again, though one night,
when I came suddenly into Mrs. Maradick’s room, I found a little garden,
such as children make out of pebbles and bits of box, on the
window-sill. I did not mention it to Mrs. Maradick, and a little later,
as the maid lowered the shades, I noticed that the garden had vanished.
Since then I have often wondered if the child were invisible only to the
rest of us, and if her mother still saw her. But there was no way of
finding out except by questioning, and Mrs. Maradick was so well and
patient that I hadn’t the heart to question. Things couldn’t have been
better with her than they were, and I was beginning to tell myself that
she might soon go out for an airing, when the end came so suddenly.

It was a mild January day—the kind of day that brings the foretaste of
spring in the middle of winter, and when I came downstairs in the
afternoon, I stopped a minute by the window at the end of the hall to
look down on the box maze in the garden. There was an old fountain,
bearing two laughing boys in marble, in the centre of the gravelled
walk, and the water, which had been turned on that morning for Mrs.
Maradick’s pleasure, sparkled now like silver as the sunlight splashed
over it. I had never before felt the air quite so soft and springlike in
January; and I thought, as I gazed down on the garden, that it would be
a good idea for Mrs. Maradick to go out and bask for an hour or so in
the sunshine. It seemed strange to me that she was never allowed to get
any fresh air except the air that came through her windows.

When I went into her room, however, I found that she had no wish to go
out. She was sitting, wrapped in shawls, by the open window, which
looked down on the fountain; and as I entered she glanced up from a
little book she was reading. A pot of daffodils stood on the
window-sill—she was very fond of flowers and we tried always to keep
some growing in her room.

“Do you know what I am reading, Miss Randolph?” she asked in her soft
voice; and she read aloud a verse while I went over to the candle-stand
to measure out a dose of medicine.

“‘If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy daffodils, for
bread nourisheth the body, but daffodils delight the soul.’ That is very
beautiful, don’t you think so?”

I said “Yes,” that it was beautiful; and then I asked her if she
wouldn’t go downstairs and walk about in the garden.

“He wouldn’t like it,” she answered; and it was the first time she had
mentioned her husband to me since the night I came to her. “He doesn’t
want me to go out.”

I tried to laugh her out of the idea; but it was no use, and after a few
minutes I gave up and began talking of other things. Even then it did
not occur to me that her fear of Doctor Maradick was anything but a
fancy. I could see, of course, that she wasn’t out of her head; but sane
persons, I knew, sometimes have unaccountable prejudices, and I accepted
her dislike as a mere whim or aversion. I did not understand then and—I
may as well confess this before the end comes—I do not understand any
better to-day. I am writing down the things I actually saw, and I repeat
that I have never had the slightest twist in the direction of the
miraculous.

The afternoon slipped away while we talked—she talked brightly when any
subject came up that interested her—and it was the last hour of day—that
grave, still hour when the movement of life seems to droop and falter
for a few precious minutes—that brought us the thing I had dreaded
silently since my first night in the house. I remember that I had risen
to close the window, and was leaning out for a breath of the mild air,
when there was the sound of steps, consciously softened, in the hall
outside, and Doctor Brandon’s usual knock fell on my ears. Then, before
I could cross the room, the door opened, and the doctor entered with
Miss Peterson. The day nurse, I knew, was a stupid woman; but she had
never appeared to me so stupid, so armoured and encased in her
professional manner, as she did at that moment.

“I am glad to see that you are taking the air.” As Doctor Brandon came
over to the window, I wondered maliciously what devil of contradictions
had made him a distinguished specialist in nervous diseases.

“Who was the other doctor you brought this morning?” asked Mrs. Maradick
gravely; and that was all I ever heard about the visit of the second
alienist.

“Someone who is anxious to cure you.” He dropped into a chair beside her
and patted her hand with his long, pale fingers. “We are so anxious to
cure you that we want to send you away to the country for a fortnight or
so. Miss Peterson has come to help you to get ready, and I’ve kept my
car waiting for you. There couldn’t be a nicer day for a trip, could
there?”

The moment had come at last. I knew at once what he meant, and so did
Mrs. Maradick. A wave of colour flowed and ebbed in her thin cheeks, and
I felt her body quiver when I moved from the window and put my arms on
her shoulders. I was aware again, as I had been aware that evening in
Doctor Maradick’s study, of a current of thought that beat from the air
around into my brain. Though it cost me my career as a nurse and my
reputation for sanity, I knew that I must obey that invisible warning.

“You are going to take me to an asylum,” said Mrs. Maradick.

He made some foolish denial or evasion; but before he had finished I
turned from Mrs. Maradick and faced him impulsively. In a nurse this was
flagrant rebellion, and I realized that the act wrecked my professional
future. Yet I did not care—I did not hesitate. Something stronger than I
was driving me on.

“Doctor Brandon,” I said, “I beg you—I implore you to wait until
to-morrow. There are things I must tell you.”

A queer look came into his face, and I understood, even in my
excitement, that he was mentally deciding in which group he should place
me—to which class of morbid manifestations I must belong.

“Very well, very well, we will hear everything,” he replied soothingly;
but I saw him glance at Miss Peterson, and she went over to the wardrobe
for Mrs. Maradick’s fur coat and hat.

Suddenly, without warning, Mrs. Maradick threw the shawls away from her,
and stood up. “If you send me away,” she said, “I shall never come back.
I shall never live to come back.”

The grey of twilight was just beginning, and while she stood there, in
the dusk of the room, her face shone out as pale and flower-like as the
daffodils on the window-sill. “I cannot go away!” she cried in a sharper
voice. “I cannot, go away from my child!”

I saw her face clearly; I heard her voice; and then—the horror of the
scene sweeps back over me!—I saw the door open slowly and the little
girl run across the room to her mother. I saw the child lift her little
arms, and I saw the mother stoop and gather her to her bosom. So closely
locked were they in that passionate embrace that their forms seemed to
mingle in the gloom that enveloped them.

“After this can you doubt?” I threw out the words almost savagely—and
then, when I turned from the mother and child to Doctor Brandon and Miss
Peterson, I knew breathlessly—oh, there was a shock in the
discovery!—that they were blind to the child. Their blank faces revealed
the consternation of ignorance, not of conviction. They had seen nothing
except the vacant arms of the mother and the swift, erratic gesture with
which she stooped to embrace some invisible presence. Only my vision—and
I have asked myself since if the power of sympathy enabled me to
penetrate the web of material fact and see the spiritual form of the
child—only my vision was not blinded by the clay through which I looked.

“After this can you doubt?” Doctor Brandon had flung my words back to
me. Was it his fault, poor man, if life had granted him only the eyes of
flesh? Was it his fault if he could see only half of the thing there
before him?

But they couldn’t see, and since they couldn’t see I realized that it
was useless to tell them. Within an hour they took Mrs. Maradick to the
asylum; and she went quietly, though when the time came for parting from
me she showed some faint trace of feeling. I remember that at the last,
while we stood on the pavement, she lifted her black veil, which she
wore for the child, and said: “Stay with her, Miss Randolph, as long as
you can. I shall never come back.”

Then she got into the car and was driven off, while I stood looking
after her with a sob in my throat. Dreadful as I felt it to be, I
didn’t, of course, realize the full horror of it, or I couldn’t have
stood there quietly on the pavement. I didn’t realize it, indeed, until
several months afterwards when word came that she had died in the
asylum. I never knew what her illness was, though I vaguely recall that
something was said about “heart failure”—a loose enough term. My own
belief is that she died simply of the terror of life.

To my surprise Doctor Maradick asked me to stay on as his office nurse
after his wife went to Rosedale; and when the news of her death came
there was no suggestion of my leaving. I don’t know to this day why he
wanted me in the house. Perhaps he thought I should have less
opportunity to gossip if I stayed under his roof; perhaps he still
wished to test the power of his charm over me. His vanity was incredible
in so great a man. I have seen him flush with pleasure when people
turned to look at him in the street, and I know that he was not above
playing on the sentimental weakness of his patients. But he was
magnificent, heaven knows! Few men, I imagine, have been the objects of
so many foolish infatuations.

The next summer Doctor Maradick went abroad for two months, and while he
was away I took my vacation in Virginia. When we came back the work was
heavier than ever—his reputation by this time was tremendous—and my days
were so crowded with appointments, and hurried flittings to emergency
cases, that I had scarcely a minute left in which to remember poor Mrs.
Maradick. Since the afternoon when she went to the asylum the child had
not been in the house; and at last I was beginning to persuade myself
that the little figure had been an optical illusion—the effect of
shifting lights in the gloom of the old rooms—not the apparition I had
once believed it to be. It does not take long for a phantom to fade from
the memory—especially when one leads the active and methodical life I
was forced into that winter. Perhaps—who knows?—(I remember telling
myself) the doctors may have been right, after all, and the poor lady
may have actually been out of her mind. With this view of the past, my
judgment of Doctor Maradick insensibly altered. It ended, I think, in my
acquitting him altogether. And then, just as he stood clear and splendid
in my verdict of him, the reversal came so precipitately that I grow
breathless now whenever I try to live it over again. The violence of the
next turn in affairs left me, I often fancy, with a perpetual dizziness
of the imagination.

It was in May that we heard of Mrs. Maradick’s death, and exactly a year
later, on a mild and fragrant afternoon, when the daffodils were
blooming in patches around the old fountain in the garden, the
housekeeper came into the office, where I lingered over some accounts,
to bring me news of the doctor’s approaching marriage.

“It is no more than we might have expected,” she concluded rationally.
“The house must be lonely for him—he is such a sociable man. But I can’t
help feeling,” she brought out slowly after a pause in which I felt a
shiver pass over me, “I can’t help feeling that it is hard for that
other woman to have all the money poor Mrs. Maradick’s first husband
left her.”

“There is a great deal of money, then?” I asked curiously.

“A great deal.” She waved her hand, as if words were futile to express
the sum. “Millions and millions!”

“They will give up this house, of course?”

“That’s done already, my dear. There won’t be a brick left of it by this
time next year. It’s to be pulled down and an apartment-house built on
the ground.”

Again the shiver passed over me. I couldn’t bear to think of Mrs.
Maradick’s old home falling to pieces.

“You didn’t tell me the name of the bride,” I said. “Is she someone he
met while he was in Europe?”

“Dear me, no! She is the very lady he was engaged to before he married
Mrs. Maradick, only she threw him over, so people said, because he
wasn’t rich enough. Then she married some lord or prince from over the
water; but there was a divorce, and now she has turned again to her old
lover. He is rich enough now, I guess, even for her!”

It was all perfectly true, I suppose; it sounded as plausible as a story
out of a newspaper; and yet while she told me I felt, or dreamed that I
felt, a sinister, an impalpable hush in the air. I was nervous, no
doubt; I was shaken by the suddenness with which the housekeeper had
sprung her news on me; but as I sat there I had quite vividly an
impression that the old house was listening—that there was a real, if
invisible, presence somewhere in the room or the garden. Yet, when an
instant afterwards I glanced through the long window which opened down
to the brick terrace, I saw only the faint sunshine over the deserted
garden, with its maze of box, its marble fountain, and its patches of
daffodils.

The housekeeper had gone—one of the servants, I think, came for her—and
I was sitting at my desk when the words of Mrs. Maradick on that last
evening floated into my mind. The daffodils brought her back to me; for
I thought, as I watched them growing, so still and golden in the
sunshine, how she would have enjoyed them. Almost unconsciously I
repeated the verse she had read to me:

“If thou hast two loaves of bread, sell one and buy daffodils”—and it
was at this very instant, while the words were still on my lips, that I
turned my eyes to the box maze, and saw the child skipping rope along
the gravelled path to the fountain.

Quite distinctly, as clear as day, I saw her come, with what children
call the dancing step, between the low box borders to the place where
the daffodils bloomed by the fountain. From her straight brown hair to
her frock of Scotch plaid and her little feet, which twinkled in white
socks and black slippers over the turning rope, she was as real to me as
the ground on which she trod or the laughing marble boys under the
splashing water. Starting up from my chair, I made a single step to the
terrace. If I could only reach her—only speak to her—I felt that I might
at last solve the mystery. But with the first flutter of my dress on the
terrace, the airy little form melted into the quiet dusk of the maze.
Not a breath stirred the daffodils, not a shadow passed over the
sparkling flow of the water; yet, weak and shaken in every nerve, I sat
down on the brick step of the terrace and burst into tears. I must have
known that something terrible would happen before they pulled down Mrs.
Maradick’s home.

The doctor dined out that night. He was with the lady he was going to
marry, the housekeeper told me; and it must have been almost midnight
when I heard him come in and go upstairs to his room. I was downstairs
because I had been unable to sleep, and the book I wanted to finish I
had left that afternoon in the office. The book—I can’t remember what it
was—had seemed to me very exciting when I began it in the morning; but
after the visit of the child I found the romantic novel as dull as a
treatise on nursing. It was impossible for me to follow the lines, and I
was on the point of giving up and going to bed, when Doctor Maradick
opened the front door with his latch-key and went up the staircase.
“There can’t be a bit of truth in it.” I thought over and over again as
I listened to his even step ascending the stairs. “There can’t be a bit
of truth in it.” And yet, though I assured myself that “there couldn’t
be a bit of truth in it,” I shrank, with a creepy sensation, from going
through the house to my room in the third storey. I was tired out after
a hard day, and my nerves must have reacted morbidly to the silence and
the darkness. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be
afraid of the unknown, of the unseen; and while I bent over my book, in
the glare of the electric light, I became conscious presently that I was
straining my senses for some sound in the spacious emptiness of the
rooms overhead. The noise of a passing motor-car in the street jerked me
back from the intense hush of expectancy; and I can recall the wave of
relief that swept over me as I turned to my book again and tried to fix
my distracted mind on its pages.

I was still sitting there when the telephone on my desk rang, with what
seemed to my overwrought nerves a startling abruptness, and the voice of
the superintendent told me hurriedly that Doctor Maradick was needed at
the hospital. I had become so accustomed to these emergency calls in the
night that I felt reassured when I had rung up the doctor in his room
and had heard the hearty sound of his response. He had not yet
undressed, he said, and would come down immediately while I ordered back
his car, which must just have reached the garage.

“I’ll be with you in five minutes!” he called as cheerfully as if I had
summoned him to his wedding.

I heard him cross the floor of his room; and before he could reach the
head of the staircase, I opened the door and went out into the hall in
order that I might turn on the light and have his hat and coat waiting.
The electric button was at the end of the hall, and as I moved towards
it, guided by the glimmer that fell from the landing above, I lifted my
eyes to the staircase, which climbed dimly, with its slender mahogany
balustrade, as far as the third storey. Then it was, at the very moment
when the doctor, humming gaily, began his quick descent of the steps,
that I distinctly saw—I will swear to this on my deathbed—a child’s
skipping-rope lying loosely coiled, as if it had dropped from a careless
little hand, in the bend of the staircase. With a spring I had reached
the electric button, flooding the hall with light; but as I did so,
while my arm was still outstretched behind me, I heard the humming voice
change to a cry of surprise or terror, and the figure on the staircase
tripped heavily and stumbled with groping hands into emptiness. The
scream of warning died in my throat while I watched him pitch forward
down the long flight of stairs to the floor at my feet. Even before I
bent over him, before I wiped the blood from his brow and felt for his
silent heart, I knew that he was dead.

Something—it may have been, as the world believes, a misstep in the
dimness, or it may have been, as I am ready to bear witness, an
invisible judgment—something had killed him at the very moment when he
most wanted to live.



                              DARE’S GIFT


                                Part One

A year has passed, and I am beginning to ask myself if the thing
actually happened? The whole episode, seen in clear perspective, is
obviously incredible. There are, of course, no haunted houses in this
age of science; there are merely hallucinations, neurotic symptoms, and
optical illusions. Any one of these practical diagnoses would, no doubt,
cover the impossible occurrence, from my first view of that dusky sunset
on James River to the erratic behaviour of Mildred during the spring we
spent in Virginia. There is—I admit it readily!—a perfectly rational
explanation of every mystery. Yet, while I assure myself that the
supernatural has been banished, in the evil company of devils, black
plagues, and witches, from this sanitary century, a vision of Dare’s
Gift, amid its clustering cedars under the shadowy arch of the sunset,
rises before me, and my feeble scepticism surrenders to that invincible
spirit of darkness. For once in my life—the ordinary life of a
corporation lawyer in Washington—the impossible really happened.

It was the year after Mildred’s first nervous breakdown, and Drayton,
the great specialist in whose care she had been for some months, advised
me to take her away from Washington until she recovered her health. As a
busy man I couldn’t spend the whole week out of town; but if we could
find a place near enough—somewhere in Virginia! we both exclaimed, I
remember—it would be easy for me to run down once a fortnight. The
thought was with me when Harrison asked me to join him for a week’s
hunting on James River; and it was still in my mind, though less
distinctly, on the evening when I stumbled alone, and for the first
time, on Dare’s Gift.

I had hunted all day—a divine day in October—and at sunset, with a bag
full of partridges, I was returning for the night to Chericoke, where
Harrison kept his bachelor’s house. The sunset had been wonderful; and I
had paused for a moment with my back to the bronze sweep of the land,
when I had a swift impression that the memories of the old river
gathered around me. It was at this instant—I recall even the trivial
detail that my foot caught in a brier as I wheeled quickly about—that I
looked past the sunken wharf on my right, and saw the garden of Dare’s
Gift falling gently from its almost obliterated terraces to the
scalloped edge of the river. Following the steep road, which ran in
curves through a stretch of pines and across an abandoned pasture or
two, I came at last to an iron gate and a grassy walk leading, between
walls of box, to the open lawn planted in elms. With that first glimpse
the Old World charm of the scene held me captive. From the warm red of
its brick walls to the pure Colonial lines of its doorway, and its
curving wings mantled in roses and ivy, the house stood there, splendid
and solitary. The rows of darkened windows sucked in without giving back
the last flare of daylight; the heavy cedars crowding thick up the short
avenue did not stir as the wind blew from the river; and above the
carved pineapple on the roof, a lonely bat was wheeling high against the
red disc of the sun. While I had climbed the rough road, and passed more
slowly between the marvelous walls of the box, I had told myself that
the place must be Mildred’s and mine at any cost. On the upper terrace,
before several crude modern additions to the wings, my enthusiasm
gradually ebbed, though I still asked myself incredulously, “Why have I
never heard of it? To whom does it belong? Has it a name as well known
in Virginia as Shirley or Brandon?” The house was of great age, I knew,
and yet from obvious signs I discovered that it was not too old to be
lived in. Nowhere could I detect a hint of decay or dilapidation. The
sound of cattle bells floated up from a pasture somewhere in the
distance. Through the long grass on the lawn little twisted paths, like
sheep tracks, wound back and forth under the fine old elms, from which a
rain of bronze leaves fell slowly and ceaselessly in the wind. Nearer at
hand, on the upper terrace, a few roses were blooming; and when I passed
between two marble urns on the right of the house, my feet crushed a
garden of “simples” such as our grandmothers used to grow.

As I stepped on the porch I heard a child’s voice on the lawn, and a
moment afterwards a small boy, driving a cow, appeared under the two
cedars at the end of the avenue. At sight of me he flicked the cow with
the hickory switch he held, and bawled, “Ma! thar’s a stranger out here,
an’ I don’t know what he wants.”

At his call the front door opened, and a woman in a calico dress, with a
sunbonnet pushed back from her forehead, came out on the porch.

“Hush yo’ fuss, Eddy!” she remarked authoritatively. “He don’t want
nothin’.” Then, turning to me, she added civilly, “Good evenin’, suh.
You must be the gentleman who is visitin’ over at Chericoke?”

“Yes, I am staying with Mr. Harrison. You know him, of course?”

“Oh, Lordy, yes. Everybody aroun’ here knows Mr. Harrison. His folks
have been here goin’ on mighty near forever. I don’t know what me and my
children would come to if it wa’n’t for him. He is gettin’ me my divorce
now. It’s been three years and mo’ sence Tom deserted me.”

“Divorce?” I had not expected to find this innovation on James River.

“Of course it ain’t the sort of thing anybody would want to come to. But
if a woman in the State ought to have one easy, I reckon it’s me. Tom
went off with another woman—and she my own sister—from this very house—”

“From this house—and, by the way, what is the name of it?”

“Name of what? This place? Why, it’s Dare’s Gift. Didn’t you know it?
Yes, suh, it happened right here in this very house, and that, too, when
we hadn’t been livin’ over here mo’ than three months. After Mr. Duncan
got tired and went away he left us as caretakers, Tom and me, and I
asked Tilly to come and stay with us and help me look after the
children. It came like a lightning stroke to me, for Tom and Tilly had
known each other all their lives, and he’d never taken any particular
notice of her till they moved over here and began to tend the cows
together. She wa’n’t much for beauty, either. I was always the handsome
one of the family—though you mightn’t think it now, to look at me—and
Tom was the sort that never could abide red hair—”

“And you’ve lived at Dare’s Gift ever since?” I was more interested in
the house than in the tenant.

“I didn’t have nowhere else to go, and the house has got to have a
caretaker till it is sold. It ain’t likely that anybody will want to
rent an out-of-the-way place like this—though now that automobiles have
come to stay that don’t make so much difference.”

“Does it still belong to the Dares?”

“Naw, suh; they had to sell it at auction right after the war on account
of mortgages and debts—old Colonel Dare died the very year Lee
surrendered, and Miss Lucy she went off somewhere to strange parts.
Sence their day it has belonged to so many different folks that you
can’t keep account of it. Right now it’s owned by a Mr. Duncan, who
lives out in California. I don’t know that he’ll ever come back here—he
couldn’t get on with the neighbours—and he is trying to sell it. No
wonder, too, a great big place like this, and he ain’t even a
Virginian—”

“I wonder if he would let it for a season?” It was then, while I stood
there in the brooding dusk of the doorway, that the idea of the spring
at Dare’s Gift first occurred to me.

“If you want it, you can have it for ’most nothing, I reckon. Would you
like to step inside and go over the rooms?”

That evening at supper I asked Harrison about Dare’s Gift, and gleaned
the salient facts of its history.

“Strange to say, the place, charming as it is, has never been well known
in Virginia. There’s historical luck, you know, as well as other kinds,
and the Dares—after that first Sir Roderick, who came over in time to
take a stirring part in Bacon’s Rebellion, and, tradition says, to
betray his leader—have never distinguished themselves in the records of
the State. The place itself, by the way, is about a fifth of the
original plantation of three thousand acres, which was given—though I
imagine there was more in that than appears in history—by some Indian
chief of forgotten name to this notorious Sir Roderick. The old chap—Sir
Roderick, I mean—seems to have been something of a fascinator in his
day. Even Governor Berkeley, who hanged half the colony, relented, I
believe, in the case of Sir Roderick, and that unusual clemency gave
rise, I suppose, to the legend of the betrayal. But, however that may
be. Sir Roderick had more miraculous escapes than John Smith himself,
and died at last in his bed at the age of eighty from overeating
cherry-pie.”

“And now the place has passed away from the family?”

“Oh, long ago—though not so long, after all, when one comes to think of
it. When the old Colonel died the year after the war, it was discovered
that he had mortgaged the farm up to the last acre. At that time real
estate on James River wasn’t regarded as a particularly profitable
investment, and under the hammer Dare’s Gift went for a song.”

“Was the Colonel the last of his name?”

“He left a daughter—a belle, too, in her youth, my mother says—but she
died—at least I think she did—only a few months after her father.”

Coffee was served on the veranda, and while I smoked my cigar and sipped
my brandy—Harrison had an excellent wine-cellar—I watched the full moon
shining like a yellow lantern through the diaphanous mist on the river.
Downshore, in the sparkling reach of the water, an immense cloud hung
low over the horizon, and between the cloud and the river a band of
silver light quivered faintly, as if it would go out in an instant.

“It is over there, isn’t it?”—I pointed to the silver light—“Dare’s
Gift, I mean.”

“Yes, it’s somewhere over yonder—five miles away by the river, and
nearly seven by the road.”

“It is the dream of a house, Harrison, and there isn’t too much history
attached to it—nothing that would make a modern beggar ashamed to live
in it.”

“By Jove! so you are thinking of buying it?” Harrison was beaming. “It
is downright ridiculous, I declare, the attraction that place has for
strangers. I never knew a Virginian who wanted it; but you are the third
Yankee of my acquaintance—and I don’t know many—who has fallen in love
with it. I searched the title and drew up the deed for John Duncan
exactly six years ago—though I’d better not boast of that transaction, I
reckon.”

“He still owns it, doesn’t he?”

“He still owns it, and it looks as if he would continue to own it unless
you can be persuaded to buy it. It is hard to find purchasers for these
old places, especially when the roads are uncertain and they happen to
be situated on the James River. We live too rapidly in these days to
want to depend on a river, even on a placid old fellow like the James.”

“Duncan never really lived here, did he?”

“At first he did. He began on quite a royal scale; but, somehow, from
the very start things appeared to go wrong with him. At the outset he
prejudiced the neighbours against him—I never knew exactly why—by
putting on airs, I imagine, and boasting about his money. There is
something in the Virginia blood that resents boasting about money.
However that may be, he hadn’t been here six months before he was at
odds with every living thing in the county, white, black, and
spotted—for even the dogs snarled at him.

“Then his secretary—a chap he had picked up starving in London, and had
trusted absolutely for years—made off with a lot of cash and securities,
and that seemed the last straw in poor Duncan’s ill luck. I believe he
didn’t mind the loss half so much—he refused to prosecute the fellow—as
he minded the betrayal of confidence. He told me, I remember, before he
went away, that it had spoiled Dare’s Gift for him. He said he had a
feeling that the place had come too high; it had cost him his belief in
human nature.”

“Then I imagine he’d be disposed to consider an offer?”

“Oh, there isn’t a doubt of it. But, if I were you, I shouldn’t be too
hasty. Why not rent the place for the spring months? It’s beautiful here
in the spring, and Duncan has left furniture enough to make the house
fairly comfortable.”

“Well, I’ll ask Mildred. Of course Mildred must have the final word in
the matter.”

“As if Mildred’s final word would be anything but a repetition of
yours!” Harrison laughed slyly—for the perfect harmony in which we lived
had been for ten years a pleasant jest among our friends. Harrison had
once classified wives as belonging to two distinct groups—the group of
those who talked and knew nothing about their husbands’ affairs, and the
group of those who knew everything and kept silent. Mildred, he had
added politely, had chosen to belong to the latter division.

The next day I went back to Washington, and Mildred’s first words to me
in the station were, “Why, Harold, you look as if you had bagged all the
game in Virginia!”

“I look as if I had found just the place for you!” When I told her about
my discovery, her charming face sparkled with interest. Never once, not
even during her illness, had she failed to share a single one of my
enthusiasms; never once, in all the years of our marriage, had there
been so much as a shadow between us. To understand the story of Dare’s
Gift, it is necessary to realize at the beginning all that Mildred meant
and means in my life.

Well, to hasten my slow narrative, the negotiations dragged through most
of the winter. At first, Harrison wrote me, Duncan couldn’t be found,
and a little later that he was found, but that he was opposed, from some
inscrutable motive, to the plan of renting Dare’s Gift. He wanted to
sell it outright, and he’d be hanged if he’d do anything less than get
the place clean off his hands. “As sure as I let it”—Harrison sent me
his letter—“there is going to be trouble, and somebody will come down on
me for damages. The damned place has cost me already twice as much as I
paid for it.”

In the end, however—Harrison has a persuasive way—the arrangements were
concluded. “Of course,” Duncan wrote after a long silence, “Dare’s Gift
may be as healthy as heaven. I may quite as easily have contracted this
confounded rheumatism, which makes life a burden, either in Italy or
from too many cocktails. I’ve no reason whatever for my dislike for the
place; none, that is, except the incivility of my neighbours—where, by
the way, did you Virginians manufacture your reputation for manners?—and
my unfortunate episode with Paul Grymes. That, as you remark, might, no
doubt, have occurred anywhere else, and if a man is going to steal he
could have found all the opportunities he wanted in New York or London.
But the fact remains that one can’t help harbouring associations,
pleasant or unpleasant, with the house in which one has lived, and from
start to finish my associations with Dare’s Gift are frankly unpleasant.
If, after all, however, your friend wants the place, and can afford to
pay for his whims—let him have it! I hope to Heaven he’ll be ready to
buy it when his lease has run out. Since he wants it for a hobby, I
suppose one place is as good as another; and I can assure him that by
the time he has owned it for a few years—especially if he undertakes to
improve the motor road up to Richmond—he will regard a taste for Chinese
porcelain as an inexpensive diversion.” Then, as if impelled by a twist
of ironic humour, he added, “He will find the shooting good anyhow.”

By early spring Dare’s Gift was turned over to us—Mildred was satisfied,
if Duncan wasn’t—and on a showery day in April, when drifting clouds
cast faint gauzy shadows over the river, our boat touched at the old
wharf, where carpenters were working, and rested a minute before
steaming on to Chericoke Landing five miles away. The spring was early
that year—or perhaps the spring is always early on James River. I
remember the song of birds in the trees; the veil of bright green over
the distant forests; the broad reach of the river scalloped with silver;
the dappled sunlight on the steep road which climbed from the wharf to
the iron gates; the roving fragrance from lilacs on the lower terrace;
and, surmounting all, the two giant cedars which rose like black crags
against the changeable blue of the sky—I remember these things as
distinctly as if I had seen them this morning.

We entered the wall of box through a living door, and strolled up the
grassy walk from the lawn to the terraced garden. Within the garden the
air was perfumed with a thousand scents—with lilacs, with young box,
with flags and violets and lilies, with aromatic odours from the garden
of “simples,” and with the sharp sweetness of sheep-mint from the mown
grass on the lawn.

“This spring is fine, isn’t it?” As I turned to Mildred with the
question, I saw for the first time that she looked pale and tired—or was
it merely the green light from the box wall that fell over her features?
“The trip has been too much for you. Next time we’ll come by motor.”

“Oh, no, I had a sudden feeling of faintness. It will pass in a minute.
What an adorable place, Harold!”

She was smiling again with her usual brightness, and as we passed from
the box wall to the clear sunshine on the terrace her face quickly
resumed its natural colour. To this day—for Mildred has been strangely
reticent about Dare’s Gift—I do not know whether her pallor was due to
the shade in which we walked or whether, at the instant when I turned to
her, she was visited by some intuitive warning against the house we were
approaching. Even after a year the events of Dare’s Gift are not things
I can talk over with Mildred; and, for my part, the occurrence remains,
like the house in its grove of cedars, wrapped in an impenetrable
mystery. I don’t in the least pretend to know how or why the thing
happened. I only know that it did happen—that it happened, word for word
as I record it. Mildred’s share in it will, I think, never become clear
to me. What she felt, what she imagined, what she believed, I have never
asked her. Whether the doctor’s explanation is history or fiction, I do
not attempt to decide. He is an old man, and old men, since Biblical
times, have seen visions. There were places in his story where it seemed
to me that he got historical data a little mixed—or it may be that his
memory failed him. Yet, in spite of his liking for romance and his
French education, he is without constructive imagination—at least he
says that he is without it—and the secret of Dare’s Gift, if it is not
fact, could have sprung only from the ultimate chaos of imagination.

But I think of these things a year afterwards, and on that April morning
the house stood there in the sunlight, presiding over its grassy
terraces with an air of gracious and intimate hospitality. From the
symbolic pineapple on its sloping roof to the twittering sparrows that
flew in and out of its ivied wings, it reaffirmed that first flawless
impression. Flaws, of course, there were in the fact, yet the
recollection of it to-day—the garnered impression of age, of formal
beauty, of clustering memories—is one of exquisite harmony. We found
later, as Mildred pointed out, architectural absurdities—wanton
excrescences in the modern additions, which had been designed apparently
with the purpose of providing space at the least possible cost of
material and labour. The rooms, when we passed through the fine old
doorway, appeared cramped and poorly lighted; broken pieces of the queer
mullioned window, where the tracery was of wood, not stone, had been
badly repaired, and much of the original detail work of the mantels and
cornices had been blurred by recent disfigurements. But these
discoveries came afterwards. The first view of the place worked like a
magic spell—like an intoxicating perfume—on our senses.

“It is just as if we had stepped into another world,” said Mildred,
looking up at the row of windows, from which the ivy had been carefully
clipped. “I feel as if I had ceased to be myself since I left
Washington.” Then she turned to meet Harrison, who had ridden over to
welcome us.

We spent a charming fortnight together at Dare’s Gift—Mildred happy as a
child in her garden, and I satisfied to lie in the shadow of the box
wall and watch her bloom back to health. At the end of the fortnight I
was summoned to an urgent conference in Washington. Some philanthropic
busybody, employed to nose out corruption, had scented legal game in the
affairs of the Atlantic & Eastern Railroad, and I had been retained as
special counsel by that corporation. The fight would be long, I knew—I
had already thought of it as one of my great cases—and the evidence was
giving me no little anxiety. “It is my last big battle,” I told Mildred,
as I kissed her good-by on the steps. “If I win, Dare’s Gift shall be
your share of the spoils; if I lose—well. I’ll be like any other general
who has met a better man in the field.”

“Don’t hurry back, and don’t worry about me. I am quite happy here.”

“I shan’t worry, but all the same I don’t like leaving you. Remember, if
you need advice or help about anything, Harrison is always at hand.”

“Yes, I’ll remember.”

With this assurance I left her standing in the sunshine, with the
windows of the house staring vacantly down on her.

When I try now to recall the next month, I can bring back merely a
turmoil of legal wrangles. I contrived in the midst of it all to spend
two Sundays with Mildred, but I remember nothing of them except the
blessed wave of rest that swept over me as I lay on the grass under the
elms. On my second visit I saw that she was looking badly, though when I
commented on her pallor and the darkened circles under her eyes, she
laughed and put my anxious questions aside.

“Oh, I’ve lost sleep, that’s all,” she answered, vaguely, with a swift
glance at the house. “Did you ever think how many sounds there are in
the country that keep one awake?”

As the day went on I noticed, too, that she had grown restless, and once
or twice while I was going over my case with her—I always talked over my
cases with Mildred because it helped to clarify my opinions—she returned
with irritation to some obscure legal point I had passed over. The
flutter of her movements—so unlike my calm Mildred—disturbed me more
than I confessed to her, and I made up my mind before night that I would
consult Drayton when I went back to Washington. Though she had always
been sensitive and impressionable, I had never seen her until that
second Sunday in a condition of feverish excitability.

In the morning she was so much better that by the time I reached
Washington I forgot my determination to call on her physician. My work
was heavy that week—the case was developing into a a direct attack upon
the management of the road—and in seeking evidence to rebut the charges
of illegal rebates to the American Steel Company, I stumbled by accident
upon a mass of damaging records. It was a clear case of somebody having
blundered—or the records would not have been left for me to discover—and
with disturbed thoughts I went down for my third visit to Dare’s Gift.
It was in my mind to draw out of the case, if an honourable way could be
found, and I could barely wait until dinner was over before I unburdened
my conscience to Mildred.

“The question has come to one of personal honesty.” I remember that I
was emphatic.

“I’ve nosed out something real enough this time. There is material for a
dozen investigations in Dowling’s transactions alone.”

The exposure of the Atlantic & Eastern Railroad is public property by
this time, and I needn’t resurrect the dry bones of that deplorable
scandal. I lost the case, as everyone knows; but all that concerns me in
it to-day is the talk I had with Mildred on the darkening terrace at
Dare’s Gift. It was a reckless talk, when one comes to think of it. I
said, I know, a great deal that I ought to have kept to myself; but,
after all, she is my wife; I had learned in ten years that I could trust
her discretion, and there was more than a river between us and the
Atlantic & Eastern Railroad.

Well, the sum of it is that I talked foolishly, and went to bed feeling
justified in my folly. Afterwards I recalled that Mildred had been very
quiet, though whenever I paused she questioned me closely, with a flash
of irritation as if she were impatient of my slowness or my lack of
lucidity. At the end she flared out for a moment into the excitement I
had noticed the week before; but at the time I was so engrossed in my
own affairs that this scarcely struck me as unnatural. Not until the
blow fell did I recall the hectic flush in her face and the quivering
sound of her voice, as if she were trying not to break down and weep.

It was long before either of us got to sleep that night, and Mildred
moaned a little under her breath as she sank into unconsciousness. She
was not well, I knew, and I resolved again that I would see Drayton as
soon as I reached Washington. Then, just before falling asleep, I became
acutely aware of all the noises of the country which Mildred said had
kept her awake—of the chirping of the crickets in the fireplace, of the
fluttering of swallows in the chimney, of the sawing of innumerable
insects in the night outside, of the croaking of frogs in the marshes,
of the distant solitary hooting of an owl, of the whispering sound of
wind in the leaves, of the stealthy movement of a myriad creeping lives
in the ivy. Through the open window the moonlight fell in a milk-white
flood, and in the darkness the old house seemed to speak with a thousand
voices. As I dropped off I had a confused sensation—less a perception
than an apprehension—that all these voices were urging me to
something—somewhere—

The next day I was busy with a mass of evidence—dull stuff, I remember.
Harrison rode over for luncheon, and not until late afternoon, when I
strolled out, with my hands full of papers, for a cup of tea on the
terrace, did I have a chance to see Mildred alone. Then I noticed that
she was breathing quickly, as if from a hurried walk. “Did you go to
meet the boat, Mildred?”

“No, I’ve been nowhere—nowhere. I’ve been on the lawn all day,” she
answered sharply—so sharply that I looked at her in surprise.

In the ten years that I had lived with her I had never before seen her
irritated without cause—Mildred’s disposition, I had once said, was as
flawless as her profile—and I had for the first time in my life that
baffled sensation which comes to men whose perfectly normal wives reveal
flashes of abnormal psychology. Mildred wasn’t Mildred, that was the
upshot of my conclusions; and, hang it all! I didn’t know any more than
Adam what was the matter with her. There were lines around her eyes, and
her sweet mouth had taken an edge of bitterness.

“Aren’t you well, dear?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m perfectly well,” she replied, in a shaking voice, “only I wish
you would leave me alone!” And then she burst into tears.

While I was trying to comfort her the servant came with the tea things,
and she kept him about some trivial orders until the big touring-car of
one of our neighbours rushed up the drive and halted under the terrace.

In the morning Harrison motored up to Richmond with me, and on the way
he spoke gravely of Mildred.

“Your wife isn’t looking well, Beckwith. I shouldn’t wonder if she were
a bit seedy—and if I were you I’d get a doctor to look at her. There is
a good man down at Chericoke Landing—old Pelham Lakeby. I don’t care if
he did get his training in France half a century ago; he knows more than
your half-baked modern scientists.”

“I’ll speak to Drayton this very day,” I answered, ignoring his
suggestion of the physician. “You have seen more of Mildred this last
month than I have. How long have you noticed that she isn’t herself?”

“A couple of weeks. She is usually so jolly, you know.” Harrison had
played with Mildred in his childhood. “Yes, I shouldn’t lose any time
over the doctor. Though, of course, it may be only the spring,” he
added, reassuringly.

“I’ll drop by Drayton’s office on my way uptown,” I replied, more
alarmed by Harrison’s manner than I had been by Mildred’s condition.

But Drayton was not in his office, and his assistant told me that the
great specialist would not return to town until the end of the week. It
was impossible for me to discuss Mildred with the earnest young man who
discoursed so eloquently of the experiments in the Neurological
Institute, and I left without mentioning her, after making an
appointment for Saturday morning. Even if the consultation delayed my
return to Dare’s Gift until the afternoon, I was determined to see
Drayton, and, if possible, take him back with me.

Mildred’s last nervous breakdown had been too serious for me to neglect
this warning.

I was still worrying over that case—wondering if I could find a way to
draw out of it—when the catastrophe overtook me. It was on Saturday
morning, I remember, and after a reassuring talk with Drayton, who had
promised to run down to Dare’s Gift for the coming week-end, I was
hurrying to catch the noon train for Richmond. As I passed through the
station, one of the _Observer’s_ sensational “war extras” caught my eye,
and I stopped for an instant to buy the paper before I hastened through
the gate to the train. Not until we had started, and I had gone back to
the dining-car, did I unfold the pink sheets and spread them out on the
table before me. Then, while the waiter hung over me for the order, I
felt the headlines on the front page slowly burn themselves into my
brain—for, instead of the news of the great French drive I was
expecting, there flashed back at me, in large type, the name of the
opposing counsel in the case against the Atlantic & Eastern. The
_Observer’s_ “extra” battened not on the war this time, but on the gross
scandal of the railroad; and the front page of the paper was devoted to
a personal interview with Herbert Tremaine, the great Tremaine, that
philanthropic busybody who had first scented corruption. It was all
there, every ugly detail—every secret proof of the illegal transactions
on which I had stumbled. It was all there, phrase for phrase, as I alone
could have told it—as I alone, in my folly, had told it to Mildred. The
Atlantic & Eastern had been betrayed, not privately, not secretly, but
in large type in the public print of a sensational newspaper. And not
only the road! I also had been betrayed—betrayed so wantonly, so
irrationally, that it was like an incident out of melodrama. It was
conceivable that the simple facts might have leaked out through other
channels, but the phrases, the very words of Tremaine’s interview, were
mine.

The train had started; I couldn’t have turned back even if I had wanted
to do so. I was bound to go on, and some intuition told me that the
mystery lay at the end of my journey. Mildred had talked indiscreetly to
someone, but to whom? Not to Harrison, surely! Harrison, I knew, I could
count on, and yet whom had she seen except Harrison? After my first
shock the absurdity of the thing made me laugh aloud. It was all as
ridiculous, I realized, as it was disastrous! It might, so easily not
have happened. If only I hadn’t stumbled on those accursed records! If
only I had kept my mouth shut about them! If only Mildred had not talked
unwisely to someone! But I wonder if there was ever a tragedy so
inevitable that the victim, in looking back, could not see a hundred
ways, great or small, of avoiding or preventing it?—a hundred trivial
incidents which, falling differently, might have transformed the event
into pure comedy?

The journey was unmitigated torment. In Richmond the car did not meet
me, and I wasted half an hour in looking for a motor to take me to
Dare’s Gift. When at last I got off, the road was rougher than ever,
plowed into heavy furrows after the recent rains, and filled with
mud-holes from which it seemed we should never emerge. By the time we
puffed exhaustedly up the rocky road from the river’s edge, and ran into
the avenue, I had worked myself into a state of nervous apprehension
bordering on panic. I don’t know what I expected, but I think I
shouldn’t have been surprised if Dare’s Gift had lain in ruins before
me. Had I found the house levelled to ashes by a divine visitation, I
believe I should have accepted the occurrence as within the bounds of
natural phenomena.

But everything—even the young peacocks on the lawn—was just as I had
left it. The sun, setting in a golden ball over the pineapple on the
roof, appeared as unchangeable, while it hung there in the glittering
sky, as if it were made of metal. From the somber dusk of the wings,
where the ivy lay like a black shadow, the clear front of the house,
with its formal doorway and its mullioned windows, shone with an intense
brightness, the last beams of sunshine lingering there before they faded
into the profound gloom of the cedars. The same scents of roses and sage
and mown grass and sheepmint hung about me; the same sounds—the croaking
of frogs and the sawing of katydids—floated up from the low grounds; the
very books I had been reading lay on one of the tables on the terrace,
and the front door still stood ajar as if it had not closed since I
passed through it.

I dashed up the steps, and in the hall Mildred’s maid met me. “Mrs.
Beckwith was so bad that we sent for the doctor—the one Mr. Harrison
recommended. I don’t know what it is, sir, but she doesn’t seem like
herself. She talks as if she were quite out of her head.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He didn’t tell me. Mr. Harrison saw him. He—the doctor, I mean—has sent
a nurse, and he is coming again in the morning. But she isn’t herself,
Mr. Beckwith. She says she doesn’t want you to come to her—”

“Mildred!” I had already sprung past the woman, calling the beloved name
aloud as I ran up the stairs.

In her chamber, standing very straight, with hard eyes, Mildred met me.
“I had to do it, Harold,” she said coldly—so coldly that my outstretched
arms fell to my sides. “I had to tell all I knew.”

“You mean you told Tremaine—you wrote to him—you, Mildred?”

“I wrote to him—I had to write. I couldn’t keep it back any longer. No,
don’t touch me. You must not touch me. I had to do it. I would do it
again.”

Then it was, while she stood there, straight and hard, and rejoiced
because she had betrayed me—then it was that I knew that Mildred’s mind
was unhinged.

“I had to do it. I would do it again,” she repeated, pushing me from
her.

                                Part Two

All night I sat by Mildred’s bedside, and in the morning, without having
slept, I went downstairs to meet Harrison and the doctor.

“You must get her away, Beckwith,” began Harrison with a curious,
suppressed excitement. “Dr. Lakeby says she will be all right again as
soon as she gets back to Washington.”

“But I brought her away from Washington because Drayton said it was not
good for her.”

“I know, I know.” His tone was sharp, “But it’s different now. Dr.
Lakeby wants you to take her back as soon as you can.”

The old doctor was silent while Harrison spoke, and it was only after I
had agreed to take Mildred away to-morrow that he murmured something
about “bromide and chloral,” and vanished up the staircase. He impressed
me then as a very old man—old not so much in years as in experience, as
if, living there in that flat and remote country, he had exhausted all
human desires. A leg was missing, I saw, and Harrison explained that the
doctor had been dangerously wounded in the battle of Seven Pines, and
had been obliged after that to leave the army and take up again the
practice of medicine.

“You had better get some rest,” Harrison said, as he parted from me. “It
is all right about Mildred, and nothing else matters. The doctor will
see you in the afternoon, when you have had some sleep, and have a talk
with you. He can explain things better than I can.”

Some hours later, after a profound slumber, which lasted well into the
afternoon, I waited for the doctor by the tea-table, which had been laid
out on the upper terrace. It was a perfect afternoon—a serene and
cloudless afternoon in early summer. All the brightness of the day
gathered on the white porch and the red walls, while the clustering
shadows slipped slowly over the box garden to the lawn and the river.

I was sitting there, with a book I had not even attempted to read, when
the doctor joined me; and while I rose to shake hands with him I
received again the impression of weariness, of pathos and
disappointment, which his face had given me in the morning. He was like
sun-dried fruit, I thought, fruit that has ripened and dried under the
open sky, not withered in tissue paper.

Declining my offer of tea, he sat down in one of the wicker chairs,
selecting, I noticed, the least comfortable among them, and filled his
pipe from a worn leather pouch.

“She will sleep all night,” he said; “I am giving her bromide every
three hours, and to-morrow you will be able to take her away. In a week
she will be herself again. These nervous natures yield quickest to the
influence, but they recover quickest also. In a little while this
illness, as you choose to call it, will have left no mark upon her. She
may even have forgotten it. I have known this to happen.”

“You have known this to happen?” I edged my chair nearer.

“They all succumb to it—the neurotic temperament soonest, the phlegmatic
one later—but they all succumb to it in the end. The spirit of the place
is too strong for them. They surrender to the thought of the house—to
the psychic force of its memories—”

“There are memories, then? Things have happened here?”

“All old houses have memories, I suppose. Did you ever stop to wonder
about the thoughts that must have gathered within walls like these?—to
wonder about the impressions that must have lodged in the bricks, in the
crevices, in the timber and the masonry? Have you ever stopped to think
that these multiplied impressions might create a current of thought—a
mental atmosphere—an inscrutable power of suggestion?”

“Even when one is ignorant? When one does not know the story?”

“She may have heard scraps of it from the servants—who knows? One can
never tell how traditions are kept alive. Many things have been
whispered about Dare’s Gift; some of these whispers may have reached
her. Even without her knowledge she may have absorbed the suggestion;
and some day, with that suggestion in her mind, she may have gazed too
long at the sunshine on these marble urns before she turned back into
the haunted rooms where she lived. After all, we know so little, so
pitifully little about these things. We have only touched, we
physicians, the outer edges of psychology. The rest lies in darkness—”

I jerked him up sharply. “The house, then, is haunted?”

For a moment he hesitated. “The house is saturated with a thought. It is
haunted by treachery.”

“You mean something happened here?”

“I mean—” He bent forward, groping for the right word, while his gaze
sought the river, where a golden web of mist hung midway between sky and
water. “I am an old man, and I have lived long enough to see every act
merely as the husk of an idea. The act dies; it decays like the body,
but the idea is immortal. The thing that happened at Dare’s Gift was
over fifty years ago, but the thought of it still lives—still utters its
profound and terrible message. The house is a shell, and if one listens
long enough one can hear in its heart the low murmur of the past—of that
past which is but a single wave of the great sea of human experience—”

“But the story?” I was becoming impatient of his theories. After all, if
Mildred was the victim of some phantasmal hypnosis, I was anxious to
meet the ghost who had hypnotized her. Even Drayton, I reflected, keen
as he was about the fact of mental suggestion, would never have regarded
seriously the suggestion of a phantom. And the house looked so
peaceful—so hospitable in the afternoon light.

“The story? Oh, I am coming to that—but of late the story has meant so
little to me beside the idea. I like to stop by the way. I am getting
old, and an amble suits me better than too brisk a trot—particularly in
this weather—”

Yes, he was getting old. I lit a fresh cigarette and waited impatiently.
After all, this ghost that he rambled about was real enough to destroy
me, and my nerves were quivering like harp-strings.

“Well, I came into the story—I was in the very thick of it, by accident,
if there is such a thing as accident in this world of incomprehensible
laws. The Incomprehensible! That has always seemed to me the supreme
fact of life, the one truth overshadowing all others—the truth that we
know nothing. We nibble at the edges of the mystery, and the great
Reality—the Incomprehensible—is still untouched, undiscovered. It
unfolds hour by hour, day by day, creating, enslaving, killing us, while
we painfully gnaw off—what? A crumb or two, a grain from that vastness
which envelops us, which remains impenetrable—”

Again he broke off, and again I jerked him back from his reverie.

“As I have said, I was placed, by an act of Providence, or of chance, in
the very heart of the tragedy. I was with Lucy Dare on the day, the
unforgettable day, when she made her choice—her heroic or devilish
choice, according to the way one has been educated. In Europe a thousand
years ago such an act committed for the sake of religion would have made
her a saint; in New England, a few centuries past, it would have
entitled her to a respectable position in history—the little history of
New England. But Lucy Dare was a Virginian, and in Virginia—except in
the brief, exalted Virginia of the Confederacy—the personal loyalties
have always been esteemed beyond the impersonal. I cannot imagine us as
a people canonizing a woman who sacrificed the human ties for the
superhuman—even for the divine. I cannot imagine it, I repeat; and so
Lucy Dare—though she rose to greatness in that one instant of
sacrifice—has not even a name among us to-day. I doubt if you can find a
child in the State who has ever heard of her—or a grown man, outside of
this neighbourhood, who could give you a single fact of her history. She
is as completely forgotten as Sir Roderick, who betrayed Bacon—she is
forgotten because the thing she did, though it might have made a Greek
tragedy, was alien to the temperament of the people among whom she
lived. Her tremendous sacrifice failed to arrest the imagination of her
time. After all, the sublime cannot touch us unless it is akin to our
ideal; and though Lucy Dare was sublime, according to the moral code of
the Romans, she was a stranger to the racial soul of the South. Her
memory died because it was the bloom of an hour—because there was
nothing in the soil of her age for it to thrive on. She missed her time;
she is one of the mute inglorious heroines of history; and yet, born in
another century, she might have stood side by side with Antigone—” For
an instant he paused. “But she has always seemed to me diabolical,” he
added.

“What she did, then, was so terrible that it has haunted the house ever
since?” I asked again, for, wrapped in memories, he had lost the thread
of his story.

“What she did was so terrible that the house has never forgotten. The
thought in Lucy Dare’s mind during those hours while she made her choice
has left an ineffaceable impression on the things that surrounded her.
She created in the horror of that hour an unseen environment more real,
because more spiritual, than the material fact of the house. You won’t
believe this, of course—if people believed in the unseen as in the seen,
would life be what it is?”

The afternoon light slept on the river; the birds were mute in the
elm-trees; from the garden of herbs at the end of the terrace an
aromatic fragrance rose like invisible incense.

“To understand it all, you must remember that the South was dominated,
was possessed by an idea—the idea of the Confederacy. It was an exalted
idea—supremely vivid, supremely romantic—but, after all, it was only an
idea. It existed nowhere within the bounds of the actual unless the
souls of its devoted people may be regarded as actual. But it is the
dream, not the actuality, that commands the noblest devotion, the
completest self-sacrifice. It is the dream, the ideal, that has ruled
mankind from the beginning.

“I saw a great deal of the Dares that year. It was a lonely life I led
after I lost my leg at Seven Pines, and dropped out of the army, and, as
you may imagine, a country doctor’s practice in wartimes was far from
lucrative. Our one comfort was that we were all poor, that we were all
starving together; and the Dares—there were only two of them, father and
daughter—were as poor as the rest of us. They had given their last coin
to the government—had poured their last bushel of meal into the sacks of
the army. I can imagine the superb gesture with which Lucy Dare flung
her dearest heirloom—her one remaining brooch or pin—into the bare
coffers of the Confederacy. She was a small woman, pretty rather than
beautiful—not the least heroic in build—yet I wager that she was heroic
enough on that occasion. She was a strange soul, though I never so much
as suspected her strangeness while I knew her—while she moved among us
with her small oval face, her gentle blue eyes, her smoothly banded
hair, which shone like satin in the sunlight. Beauty she must have had
in a way, though I confess a natural preference for queenly women; I
dare say I should have preferred Octavia to Cleopatra, who, they tell
me, was small and slight. But Lucy Dare wasn’t the sort to blind your
eyes when you first looked at her. Her charm was like a fragrance rather
than a colour—a subtle fragrance that steals into the senses and is the
last thing a man ever forgets. I knew half a dozen men who would have
died for her—and yet she gave them nothing, nothing, barely a smile. She
appeared cold—she who was destined to flame to life in an act. I can see
her distinctly as she looked then, in that last year—grave, still, with
the curious, unearthly loveliness that comes to pretty women who are
underfed—who are slowly starving for bread and meat, for bodily
nourishment. She had the look of one dedicated—as ethereal as a saint,
and yet I never saw it at the time; I only remember it now, after fifty
years, when I think of her. Starvation, when it is slow, not quick—when
it means, not acute hunger, but merely lack of the right food, of the
blood-making, nerve-building elements—starvation like this often plays
strange pranks with one. The visions of the saints, the glories of
martyrdom, come to the underfed, the anaemic. Can you recall one of the
saints—the genuine sort—whose regular diet was roast beef and ale?

“Well, I have said that Lucy Dare was a strange soul, and she was,
though to this day I don’t know how much of her strangeness was the
result of improper nourishment, of too little blood to the brain. Be
that as it may, she seems to me when I look back on her to have been one
of those women whose characters are shaped entirely by external
events—who are the playthings of circumstance. There are many such
women. They move among us in obscurity—reserved, passive,
commonplace—and we never suspect the spark of fire in their natures
until it flares up at the touch of the unexpected. In ordinary
circumstances Lucy Dare would have been ordinary, submissive, feminine,
domestic; she adored children. That she possessed a stronger will than
the average Southern girl, brought up in the conventional manner, none
of us—least of all I, myself—ever imagined. She was, of course,
intoxicated, obsessed, with the idea of the Confederacy; but, then, so
were all of us. There wasn’t anything unusual or abnormal in that
exalted illusion. It was the common property of our generation....

“Like most non-combatants, the Dares were extremists, and I, who had got
rid of a little of my bad blood when I lost my leg, used to regret
sometimes that the Colonel—I never knew where he got his title—was too
old to do a share of the actual fighting. There is nothing that takes
the fever out of one so quickly as a fight; and in the army I had never
met a hint of this concentrated, vitriolic bitterness towards the enemy.
Why, I’ve seen the Colonel, sitting here on this terrace, and crippled
to the knees with gout, grow purple in the face if I spoke so much as a
good word for the climate of the North. For him, and for the girl, too,
the Lord had drawn a divine circle round the Confederacy. Everything
inside of that circle was perfection; everything outside of it was evil.
Well, that was fifty years ago, and his hate is all dust now; yet I can
sit here, where he used to brood on this terrace, sipping his blackberry
wine—I can sit here and remember it all as if it were yesterday. The
place has changed so little, except for Duncan’s grotesque additions to
the wings, that one can scarcely believe all these years have passed
over it. Many an afternoon just like this I’ve sat here, while the
Colonel nodded and Lucy knitted for the soldiers, and watched these same
shadows creep down the terrace and that mist of light—it looks just as
it used to—hang there over the James. Even the smell from those herbs
hasn’t changed. Lucy used to keep her little garden at the end of the
terrace, for she was fond of making essences and beauty lotions. I used
to give her all the prescriptions I could find in old books I read—and
I’ve heard people say that she owed her wonderful white skin to the
concoctions she brewed from shrubs and herbs. I couldn’t convince them
that lack of meat, not lotions, was responsible for the pallor—pallor
was all the fashion then—that they admired and envied.”

He stopped a minute, just long enough to refill his pipe, while I
glanced with fresh interest at the garden of herbs.

“It was a March day when it happened,” he went on presently; “cloudless,
mild, with the taste and smell of spring in the air. I had been at
Dare’s Gift almost every day for a year. We had suffered together,
hoped, feared, and wept together, hungered and sacrificed together. We
had felt together the divine, invincible sway of an idea.

“Stop for a minute and picture to yourself what it is to be of a war and
yet not in it; to live in imagination until the mind becomes inflamed
with the vision; to have no outlet for the passion that consumes one
except the outlet of thought. Add to this the fact that we really knew
nothing. We were as far away from the truth, stranded here on our river,
as if we had been anchored in a canal on Mars. Two men—one crippled, one
too old to fight—and a girl—and the three living for a country which in
a few weeks would be nothing—would be nowhere—not on any map of the
world....

“When I look back now it seems to me incredible that at that time any
persons in the Confederacy should have been ignorant of its want of
resources. Yet remember we lived apart, remote, unvisited, out of touch
with realities, thinking the one thought. We believed in the ultimate
triumph of the South with that indomitable belief which is rooted not in
reason, but in emotion. To believe had become an act of religion; to
doubt was rank infidelity. So we sat there in our little world, the
world of unrealities, bounded by the river and the garden, and talked
from noon till sunset about our illusion—not daring to look a single
naked fact in the face—talking of plenty when there were no crops in the
ground and no flour in the storeroom, prophesying victory while the
Confederacy was in her death-struggle. Folly! All folly, and yet I am
sure even now that we were sincere, that we believed the nonsense we
were uttering. We believed, I have said, because to doubt would have
been far too horrible. Hemmed in by the river and the garden, there
wasn’t anything left for us to do—since we couldn’t fight—but believe.
Someone has said, or ought to have said, that faith is the last refuge
of the inefficient. The twin devils of famine and despair were at work
in the country, and we sat there—we three, on this damned terrace—and
prophesied about the second president of the Confederacy. We agreed, I
remember, that Lee would be the next president. And all the time, a few
miles away, the demoralization of defeat was abroad, was around us, was
in the air....

“It was a March afternoon when Lucy sent for me, and while I walked up
the drive—there was not a horse left among us, and I made all my rounds
on foot—I noticed that patches of spring flowers were blooming in the
long grass on the lawn. The air was as soft as May, and in the woods at
the back of the house buds of maple-trees ran like a flame. There were,
I remember, leaves—dead leaves, last year’s leaves—everywhere, as if, in
the demoralization of panic, the place had been forgotten, had been
untouched since autumn. I remember rotting leaves that gave like moss
underfoot; dried leaves that stirred and murmured as one walked over
them; black leaves, brown leaves, wine-coloured leaves, and the still
glossy leaves of the evergreens. But they were everywhere—in the road,
over the grass on the lawn, beside the steps, piled in wind-drifts
against the walls of the house.

“On the terrace, wrapped in shawls, the old Colonel was sitting; and he
called out excitedly, ‘Are you bringing news of a victory?’ Victory!
when the whole country had been scraped with a fine-tooth comb for
provisions.

“‘No, I bring no news except that Mrs. Morson has just heard of the
death of her youngest son in Petersburg. Gangrene, they say. The truth
is the men are so ill-nourished that the smallest scratch turns to
gangrene—’

“‘Well, it won’t be for long—not for long. Let Lee and Johnston get
together and things will go our way with a rush. A victory or two, and
the enemy will be asking for terms of peace before the summer is over.’

“A lock of his silver-white hair had fallen over his forehead, and
pushing it back with his clawlike hand, he peered up at me with his
little nearsighted eyes, which were of a peculiar burning blackness,
like the eyes of some small enraged animal. I can see him now as vividly
as if I had left him only an hour ago, and yet it is fifty years since
then—fifty years filled with memories and with forgetfulness. Behind him
the warm red of the bricks glowed as the sunshine fell, sprinkled with
shadows, through the elm boughs. Even the soft wind was too much for
him, for he shivered occasionally in his blanket shawls, and coughed the
dry, hacking cough which had troubled him for a year. He was a shell of
a man—a shell vitalized and animated by an immense, an indestructible
illusion. While he sat there, sipping his blackberry wine, with his
little fiery dark eyes searching the river in hope of something that
would end his interminable expectancy, there was about him a fitful
sombre gleam of romance. For him the external world, the actual truth of
things, had vanished—all of it, that is, except the shawl that wrapped
him and the glass of blackberry wine he sipped. He had died already to
the material fact, but he lived intensely, vividly, profoundly, in the
idea. It was the idea that nourished him, that gave him his one hold on
reality.

“‘It was Lucy who sent for you,’ said the old man presently. ‘She has
been on the upper veranda all day overlooking something—the sunning of
winter clothes, I think. She wants to see you about one of the
servants—a sick child, Nancy’s child, in the quarters.’

“‘Then I’ll find her,’ I answered readily, for I had, I confess, a mild
curiosity to find out why Lucy had sent for me.

“She was alone on the upper veranda, and I noticed that she closed her
Bible and laid it aside as I stepped through the long window that opened
from the end of the hall. Her face, usually so pale, glowed now with a
wan illumination, like ivory before the flame of a lamp. In this
illumination her eyes, beneath delicately pencilled eyebrows, looked
unnaturally large and brilliant, and so deeply, so angelically blue that
they made me think of the Biblical heaven of my childhood. Her beauty,
which had never struck me sharply before, pierced through me. But it was
her fate—her misfortune perhaps—to appear commonplace, to pass
unrecognized, until the fire shot from her soul.

“‘No, I want to see you about myself, not about one of the servants.’

“At my first question she had risen and held out her hand—a white, thin
hand, small and frail as a child’s.

“‘You are not well, then?’ I had known from the first that her starved
look meant something.

“‘It isn’t that; I am quite well.’ She paused a moment, and then looked
at me with a clear shining gaze. ‘I have had a letter,’ she said.

“‘A letter?’ I have realized since how dull I must have seemed to her in
that moment of excitement, of exaltation.

“‘You didn’t know. I forgot that you didn’t know that I was once
engaged—long ago—before the beginning of the war. I cared a great
deal—we both cared a great deal, but he was not one of us; he was on the
other side—and when the war came, of course there was no question. We
broke it off; we had to break it off. How could it have been possible to
do otherwise?’

“‘How, indeed!’ I murmured; and I had a vision of the old man downstairs
on the terrace, of the intrepid and absurd old man.

“‘My first duty is to my country,’ she went on after a minute, and the
words might have been spoken by her father. ‘There has been no thought
of anything else in my mind since the beginning of the war. Even if
peace comes I can never feel the same again—I can never forget that he
has been a part of all we have suffered—of the thing that has made us
suffer. I could never forget—I can never forgive.’

“Her words sound strange now, you think, after fifty years; but on that
day, in this house surrounded by dead leaves, inhabited by an
inextinguishable ideal—in this county, where the spirit had fed on the
body until the impoverished brain reacted to transcendent visions—in
this place, at that time, they were natural enough. Scarcely a woman of
the South but would have uttered them from her soul. In every age one
ideal enthralls the imagination of mankind; it is in the air; it
subjugates the will; it enchants the emotions. Well, in the South fifty
years ago this ideal was patriotism; and the passion of patriotism,
which bloomed like some red flower, the flower of carnage, over the
land, had grown in Lucy Dare’s soul into an exotic blossom.

“Yet even to-day, after fifty years, I cannot get over the impression
she made upon me of a woman who was, in the essence of her nature, thin
and colourless. I may have been wrong. Perhaps I never knew her. It is
not easy to judge people, especially women, who wear a mask by instinct.
What I thought lack of character, of personality, may have been merely
reticence; but again and again there comes back to me the thought that
she never said or did a thing—except the one terrible thing—that one
could remember. There was nothing remarkable that one could point to
about her. I cannot recall either her smile or her voice, though both
were sweet, no doubt, as the smile and the voice of a Southern woman
would be. Until that morning on the upper veranda I had not noticed that
her eyes were wonderful. She was like a shadow, a phantom, that attains
in one supreme instant, by one immortal gesture, union with reality.
Even I remember her only by that one lurid flash.

“‘And you say you have had a letter?’

“‘It was brought by one of the old servants—Jacob, the one who used to
wait on him when he stayed here. He was a prisoner. A few days ago he
escaped. He asked me to see him—and I told him to come. He wishes to see
me once again before he goes North—for ever—’ She spoke in gasps in a
dry voice. Never once did she mention his name. Long afterwards I
remembered that I had never heard his name spoken. Even to-day I do not
know it. He also was a shadow, a phantom—a part of the encompassing
unreality.

“‘And he will come here?’

“For a moment she hesitated; then she spoke quite simply, knowing that
she could trust me.

“‘He is here. He is in the chamber beyond.’ She pointed to one of the
long windows that gave on the veranda. ‘The blue chamber at the front.’

“I remember that I made a step towards the window when her voice
arrested me. ‘Don’t go in. He is resting. He is very tired and hungry.’

“‘You didn’t send for me, then, to see him?’

“‘I sent for you to be with father. I knew you would help me—that you
would keep him from suspecting. He must not know, of course. He must be
kept quiet.’

“‘I will stay with him,’ I answered, and then, ‘Is that all you wish to
say to me?’

“‘That is all. It is only for a day or two. He will go on in a little
while, and I can never see him again. I do not wish to see him again.’

“I turned away, crossed the veranda, entered the hall, walked the length
of it, and descended the staircase. The sun was going down in a
ball—just as it will begin to go down in a few minutes—and as I
descended the stairs I saw it through the mullioned window over the
door—huge and red and round above the black cloud of the cedars.

“The old man was still on the terrace. I wondered vaguely why the
servants had not brought him indoors; and then, as I stepped over the
threshold, I saw that a company of soldiers—Confederates—had crossed the
lawn and were already gathering about the house. The commanding
officer—I was shaking hands with him presently—was a Dare, a distant
cousin of the Colonel’s, one of those excitable, nervous, and slightly
theatrical natures who become utterly demoralized under the spell of any
violent emotion. He had been wounded at least a dozen times, and his
lean, sallow, still handsome features had the greenish look which I had
learned to associate with chronic malaria.

“When I look back now I can see it all as a part of the general
disorganization—of the fever, the malnutrition, the complete
demoralization of panic. I know now that each man of us was facing in
his soul defeat and despair; and that we—each one of us—had gone mad
with the thought of it. In a little while, after the certainty of
failure had come to us, we met it quietly—we braced our souls for the
issue; but in those last weeks defeat had all the horror, all the insane
terror of a nightmare, and all the vividness. The thought was like a
delusion from which we fled, and which no flight could put farther away
from us.

“Have you ever lived, I wonder, from day to day in that ever-present and
unchanging sense of unreality, as if the moment before you were but an
imaginary experience which must dissolve and evaporate before the touch
of an actual event? Well, that was the sensation I had felt for days,
weeks, months, and it swept over me again while I stood there, shaking
hands with the Colonel’s cousin, on the terrace. The soldiers, in their
ragged uniforms, appeared as visionary as the world in which we had been
living. I think now that they were as ignorant as we were of the things
that had happened—that were happening day by day to the army. The truth
is that it was impossible for a single one of us to believe that our
heroic army could be beaten even by unseen powers—even by hunger and
death.

“‘And you say he was a prisoner?’ It was the old man’s quavering voice,
and it sounded avid for news, for certainty.

“‘Caught in disguise. Then he slipped through our fingers.’ The cousin’s
tone was querulous, as if he were irritated by loss of sleep or of food.
‘Nobody knows how it happened. Nobody ever knows. But he has found out
things that will ruin us. He has plans. He has learned things that mean
the fall of Richmond if he escapes.’

“Since then I have wondered how much they sincerely believed—how much
was simply the hallucination of fever, of desperation? Were they trying
to bully themselves by violence into hoping? Or had they honestly
convinced themselves that victory was still possible? If one only
repeats a phrase often and emphatically enough one comes in time to
believe it; and they had talked so long of that coming triumph, of the
established Confederacy, that it had ceased to be, for them at least,
merely a phrase. It wasn’t the first occasion in life when I had seen
words bullied—yes, literally bullied into beliefs.

“Well, looking back now after fifty years, you see, of course, the
weakness of it all, the futility. At that instant, when all was lost,
how could any plans, any plotting have ruined us? It seems irrational
enough now—a dream, a shadow, that belief—and yet not one of us but
would have given our lives for it. In order to understand you must
remember that we were, one and all, victims of an idea—of a divine
frenzy.

“‘And we are lost—the Confederacy is lost, you say, if he escapes?’

“It was Lucy’s voice; and turning quickly, I saw that she was standing
in the doorway. She must have followed me closely. It was possible that
she had overheard every word of the conversation.

“‘If Lucy knows anything, she will tell you. There is no need to search
the house,’ quavered the old man, ‘she is my daughter.’

“‘Of course we wouldn’t search the house—not Dare’s Gift,’ said the
cousin. He was excited, famished, malarial, but he was a gentleman,
every inch of him.

“He talked on rapidly, giving details of the capture, the escape, the
pursuit. It was all rather confused. I think he must have frightfully
exaggerated the incident. Nothing could have been more unreal than it
sounded. And he was just out of a hospital—was suffering still, I could
see, from malaria. While he drank his blackberry wine—the best the house
had to offer—I remember wishing that I had a good dose of quinine and
whiskey to give him.

“The narrative lasted a long time; I think he was glad of a rest and of
the blackberry wine and biscuits. Lucy had gone to fetch food for the
soldiers; but after she had brought it she sat down in her accustomed
chair by the old man’s side and bent her head over her knitting. She was
a wonderful knitter. During all the years of the war I seldom saw her
without her ball of yam and her needles—the long wooden kind that the
women used at that time. Even after the dusk fell in the evenings the
click of her needles sounded in the darkness.

“‘And if he escapes it will mean the capture of Richmond?’ she asked
once again when the story was finished. There was no hint of excitement
in her manner. Her voice was perfectly toneless. To this day I have no
idea what she felt—what she was thinking.

“‘If he gets away it is the ruin of us—but he won’t get away. We’ll find
him before morning.’

“Rising from his chair, he turned to shake hands with the old man before
descending the steps. ‘We’ve got to go on now. I shouldn’t have stopped
if we hadn’t been half starved. You’ve done us a world of good, Cousin
Lucy. I reckon you’d give your last crust to the soldiers?’

“‘She’d give more than that,’ quavered the old man. ‘You’d give more
than that, wouldn’t you, Lucy?’

“‘Yes, I’d give more than that,’ repeated the girl quietly, so quietly
that it came as a shock to me—like a throb of actual pain in the midst
of a nightmare—when she rose to her feet and added, without a movement,
without a gesture, ‘You must not go, Cousin George. He is upstairs in
the blue chamber at the front of the house.’

“For an instant surprise held me speechless, transfixed, incredulous;
and in that instant I saw a face—a white face of horror and
disbelief—look down on us from one of the side-windows of the blue
chamber. Then, in a rush it seemed to me the soldiers were everywhere,
swarming over the terrace, into the hall, surrounding the house. I had
never imagined that a small body of men in uniforms, even ragged
uniforms, could so possess and obscure one’s surroundings. The three of
us waited there—Lucy had sat down again and taken up her knitting—for
what seemed hours, or an eternity. We were still waiting—though, for
once, I noticed, the needles did not click in her fingers—when a single
shot, followed by a volley, rang out from the rear of the house, from
the veranda that looked down on the grove of oaks and the kitchen.

“Rising, I left them—the old man and the girl—and passed from the
terrace down the little walk which led to the back. As I reached the
lower veranda one of the soldiers ran into me.

“‘I was coming after you,’ he said, and I observed that his excitement
had left him. ‘We brought him down while he was trying to jump from the
veranda. He is there now on the grass.’

“The man on the grass was quite dead, shot through the heart; and while
I bent over to wipe the blood from his lips, I saw him for the first
time distinctly. A young face, hardly more than a boy—twenty-five at the
most. Handsome, too, in a poetic and dreamy way; just the face, I
thought, that a woman might have fallen in love with. He had dark hair,
I remember, though his features have long ago faded from my memory. What
will never fade, what I shall never forget, is the look he wore—the look
he was still wearing when we laid him in the old graveyard next day—a
look of mingled surprise, disbelief, terror, and indignation.

“I had done all that I could, which was nothing, and rising to my feet,
I saw for the first time that Lucy had joined me. She was standing
perfectly motionless. Her knitting was still in her hands, but the light
had gone from her face, and she looked old—old and gray—beside the
glowing youth of her lover. For a moment her eyes held me while she
spoke as quietly as she had spoken to the soldiers on the terrace.

“‘I had to do it,’ she said. ‘I would do it again.’”

Suddenly, like the cessation of running water, or of wind in the
tree-tops, the doctor’s voice ceased. For a long pause we stared in
silence at the sunset; then, without looking at me, he added slowly:

“Three weeks later Lee surrendered and the Confederacy was over.”

                  *       *       *       *       *

The sun had slipped, as if by magic, behind the tops of the cedars, and
dusk fell quickly, like a heavy shadow, over the terrace. In the dimness
a piercing sweetness floated up from the garden of herbs, and it seemed
to me that in a minute the twilight was saturated with fragrance. Then I
heard the cry of a solitary whippoorwill in the graveyard, and it
sounded so near that I started.

“So she died of the futility, and her unhappy ghost haunts the house?”

“No, she is not dead. It is not her ghost; it is the memory of her act
that has haunted the house. Lucy Dare is still living. I saw her a few
months ago.”

“You saw her? You spoke to her after all these years?”

He had refilled his pipe, and the smell of it gave me a comfortable
assurance that I was living here, now, in the present. A moment ago I
had shivered as if the hand of the past, reaching from the open door at
my back, had touched my shoulder.

“I was in Richmond. My friend Beverly, an old classmate, had asked me up
for a week-end, and on Saturday afternoon, before motoring into the
country for supper, we started out to make a few calls which had been
left over from the morning. For a doctor, a busy doctor, he had always
seemed to me to possess unlimited leisure, so I was not surprised when a
single visit sometimes stretched over twenty-five minutes. We had
stopped several times, and I confess that I was getting a little
impatient when he remarked abruptly while he turned his car into a shady
street,

“‘There is only one more. If you don’t mind, I’d like you to see her.
She is a friend of yours, I believe.’

“Before us, as the car stopped, I saw a red-brick house, very large,
with green shutters, and over the wide door, which stood open, a sign
reading ‘St. Luke’s Church Home.’ Several old ladies sat, half asleep,
on the long veranda; a clergyman, with a prayer-book in his hand, was
just leaving; a few pots of red geraniums stood on little green-wicker
stands; and from the hall, through which floated the smell of freshly
baked bread, there came the music of a victrola—sacred music, I
remember. Not one of these details escaped me. It was as if every
trivial impression was stamped indelibly in my memory by the shock of
the next instant.

“In the centre of the large, smoothly shaven lawn an old woman was
sitting on a wooden bench under an ailantus-tree which was in blossom.
As we approached her, I saw that her figure was shapeless, and that her
eyes, of a faded blue, had the vacant and listless expression of the old
who have ceased to think, who have ceased even to wonder or regret. So
unlike was she to anything I had ever imagined Lucy Dare could become,
that not until my friend called her name and she glanced up from the
muffler she was knitting—the omnipresent dun-coloured muffler for the
war relief associations—not until then did I recognize her.

“‘I have brought an old friend to see you, Miss Lucy.’

“She looked up, smiled slightly, and after greeting me pleasantly,
relapsed into silence. I remembered that the Lucy Dare I had known was
never much of a talker.

“Dropping on the bench at her side, my friend began asking her about her
sciatica, and, to my surprise, she became almost animated. Yes, the pain
in her hip was better—far better than it had been for weeks. The new
medicine had done her a great deal of good; but her fingers were getting
rheumatic. She found trouble holding her needles. She couldn’t knit as
fast as she used to.

“Unfolding the end of the muffler, she held it out to us. ‘I have
managed to do twenty of these since Christmas. I’ve promised fifty to
the War Relief Association by autumn, and if my fingers don’t get stiff
I can easily do them.’

“The sunshine falling through the ailantus-tree powdered with dusty gold
her shapeless, relaxed figure and the dun-coloured wool of the muffler.
While she talked her fingers flew with the click of the needles—older
fingers than they had been at Dare’s Gift, heavier, stiffer, a little
knotted in the joints. As I watched her the old familiar sense of
strangeness, of encompassing and hostile mystery, stole over me.

“When we rose to go she looked up, and, without pausing for an instant
in her knitting, said, gravely, ‘It gives me something to do, this work
for the Allies. It helps to pass the time, and in an Old Ladies’ Home
one has so much time on one’s hands.’

“Then, as we parted from her, she dropped her eyes again to her needles.
Looking back at the gate, I saw that she still sat there in the faint
sunshine knitting—knitting—”

“And you think she has forgotten?”

He hesitated, as if gathering his thoughts. “I was with her when she
came back from the shock—from the illness that followed—and she had
forgotten. Yes, she has forgotten, but the house has remembered.”

Pushing back his chair, he rose unsteadily on his crutch, and stood
staring across the twilight which was spangled with fireflies. While I
waited I heard again the loud cry of the whippoorwill.

“Well, what could one expect?” he asked, presently. “She had drained the
whole of experience in an instant, and there was left to her only the
empty and withered husks of the hours. She had felt too much ever to
feel again. After all,” he added slowly, “it is the high moments that
make a life, and the flat ones that fill the years.”



                                THE PAST


I had no sooner entered the house than I knew something was wrong.
Though I had never been in so splendid a place before—it was one of
those big houses just off Fifth Avenue—I had a suspicion from the first
that the magnificence covered a secret disturbance. I was always quick
to receive impressions, and when the black iron doors swung together
behind me, I felt as if I were shut inside a prison.

When I gave my name and explained that I was the new secretary, I was
delivered into the charge of an elderly lady’s-maid, who looked as if
she had been crying. Without speaking a word, though she nodded kindly
enough, she led me down the hall, and then up a flight of stairs at the
back of the house to a pleasant bedroom in the third storey. There was a
great deal of sunshine, and the walls, which were painted a soft yellow,
made the room very cheerful. It would be a comfortable place to sit in
when I was not working, I thought, while the sad-faced maid stood
watching me remove my wraps and hat.

“If you are not tired, Mrs. Vanderbridge would like to dictate a few
letters,” she said presently, and they were the first words she had
spoken.

“I am not a bit tired. Will you take me to her?” One of the reasons, I
knew, which had decided Mrs. Vanderbridge to engage me was the
remarkable similarity of our handwriting. We were both Southerners, and
though she was now famous on two continents for her beauty, I couldn’t
forget that she had got her early education at the little academy for
young ladies in Fredericksburg. This was a bond of sympathy in my
thoughts at least, and, heaven knows, I needed to remember it while I
followed the maid down the narrow stairs and along the wide hall to the
front of the house.

In looking back after a year, I can recall every detail of that first
meeting. Though it was barely four o’clock, the electric lamps were
turned on in the hall, and I can still see the mellow light that shone
over the staircase and lay in pools on the old pink rugs, which were so
soft and fine that I felt as if I were walking on flowers. I remember
the sound of music from a room somewhere on the first floor, and the
scent of lilies and hyacinths that drifted from the conservatory. I
remember it all, every note of music, every whiff of fragrance; but most
vividly I remember Mrs. Vanderbridge as she looked round, when the door
opened, from the wood fire into which she had been gazing.

Her eyes caught me first. They were so wonderful that for a moment I
couldn’t see anything else; then I took in slowly the dark red of her
hair, the clear pallor of her skin, and the long, flowing lines of her
figure in a tea-gown of blue silk. There was a white bearskin rug under
her feet, and while she stood there before the wood fire, she looked as
if she had absorbed the beauty and colour of the house as a crystal vase
absorbs the light. Only when she spoke to me, and I went nearer, did I
detect the heaviness beneath her eyes and the nervous quiver of her
mouth, which drooped a little at the corners. Tired and worn as she was,
I never saw her afterwards—not even when she was dressed for the
opera—look quite so lovely, so much like an exquisite flower, as she did
on that first afternoon. When I knew her better, I discovered that she
was a changeable beauty; there were days when all the colour seemed to
go out of her, and she looked dull and haggard; but at her best no one
I’ve ever seen could compare with her.

She asked me a few questions, and though she was pleasant and kind, I
knew that she scarcely listened to my responses. While I sat down at the
desk and dipped my pen into the ink, she flung herself on the couch
before the fire with a movement which struck me as hopeless. I saw her
feet tap the white fur rug, while she plucked nervously at the lace on
the end of one of the gold-coloured sofa pillows. For an instant the
thought flashed through my mind that she had been taking something—a
drug of some sort—and that she was suffering now from the effects of it.
Then she looked at me steadily, almost as if she were reading my
thoughts, and I knew that I was wrong. Her large radiant eyes were as
innocent as a child’s.

She dictated a few notes—all declining invitations—and then, while I
still waited pen in hand, she sat up on the couch with one of her quick
movements, and said in a low voice, “I am not dining out to-night, Miss
Wrenn. I am not well enough.”

“I am sorry for that.” It was all I could think of to say, for I did not
understand why she should have told me.

“If you don’t mind, I should like you to come down to dinner. There will
be only Mr. Vanderbridge and myself.”

“Of course I will come if you wish it.” I couldn’t very well refuse to
do what she asked me, yet I told myself, while I answered, that if I had
known she expected me to make one of the family, I should never, not
even at twice the salary, have taken the place. It didn’t take me a
minute to go over my slender wardrobe in my mind and realize that I had
nothing to wear that would look well enough.

“I can see you don’t like it,” she added after a moment, almost
wistfully, “but it won’t be often. It is only when we are dining alone.”

This, I thought, was even queerer than the request—or command—for I knew
from her tone, just as plainly as if she had told me in words, that she
did not wish to dine alone with her husband.

“I am ready to help you in any way—in any way that I can,” I replied,
and I was so deeply moved by her appeal that my voice broke in spite of
my effort to control it. After my lonely life I dare say I should have
loved any one who really needed me, and from the first moment that I
read the appeal in Mrs. Vanderbridge’s face I felt that I was willing to
work my fingers to the bone for her. Nothing that she asked of me was
too much when she asked it in that voice, with that look.

“I am glad you are nice,” she said, and for the first time she smiled—a
charming, girlish smile with a hint of archness. “We shall get on
beautifully, I know, because I can talk to you. My last secretary was
English, and I frightened her almost to death whenever I tried to talk
to her.” Then her tone grew serious. “You won’t mind dining with us.
Roger—Mr. Vanderbridge—is the most charming man in the world.”

“Is that his picture?”

“Yes, the one in the Florentine frame. The other is my brother. Do you
think we are alike?”

“Since you’ve told me, I notice a likeness.”

Already I had picked up the Florentine frame from the desk, and was
eagerly searching the features of Mr. Vanderbridge. It was an arresting
face, dark, thoughtful, strangely appealing, and picturesque—though this
may have been due, of course, to the photographer. The more I looked at
it, the more there grew upon me an uncanny feeling of familiarity; but
not until the next day, while I was still trying to account for the
impression that I had seen the picture before, did there flash into my
mind the memory of an old portrait of a Florentine nobleman in a loan
collection last winter. I can’t remember the name of the painter—I am
not sure that it was known—but this photograph might have been taken
from the painting. There was the same imaginative sadness in both faces,
the same haunting beauty of feature, and one surmised that there must be
the same rich darkness of colouring. The only striking difference was
that the man in the photograph looked much older than the original of
the portrait, and I remembered that the lady who had engaged me was the
second wife of Mr. Vanderbridge and some ten or fifteen years younger, I
had heard, than her husband.

“Have you ever seen a more wonderful face?” asked Mrs. Vanderbridge.
“Doesn’t he look as if he might have been painted by Titian?”

“Is he really so handsome as that?”

“He is a little older and sadder, that is all. When we were married it
was exactly like him.” For an instant she hesitated and then broke out
almost bitterly, “Isn’t that a face any woman might fall in love with, a
face any woman—living or dead—would not be willing to give up?”

Poor child, I could see that she was overwrought and needed someone to
talk to, but it seemed queer to me that she should speak so frankly to a
stranger. I wondered why any one so rich and so beautiful should ever be
unhappy—for I had been schooled by poverty to believe that money is the
first essential of happiness—and yet her unhappiness was as evident as
her beauty, or the luxury that enveloped her. At that instant I felt
that I hated Mr. Vanderbridge, for whatever the secret tragedy of their
marriage might be, I instinctively knew that the fault was not on the
side of the wife. She was as sweet and winning as if she were still the
reigning beauty in the academy for young ladies. I knew with a knowledge
deeper than any conviction that she was not to blame, and if she wasn’t
to blame, then who under heaven could be at fault except her husband?

In a few minutes a friend came in to tea, and I went upstairs to my
room, and unpacked the blue taffeta dress I had bought for my sister’s
wedding. I was still doubtfully regarding it when there was a knock at
my door, and the maid with the sad face came in to bring me a pot of
tea. After she had placed the tray on the table, she stood nervously
twisting a napkin in her hands while she waited for me to leave my
unpacking and sit down in the easy chair she had drawn up under the
lamp.

“How do you think Mrs. Vanderbridge is looking?” she asked abruptly in a
voice that held a breathless note of suspense. Her nervousness and the
queer look in her face made me stare at her sharply. This was a house, I
was beginning to feel, where everybody, from the mistress down, wanted
to question me. Even the silent maid had found voice for interrogation.

“I think her the loveliest person I’ve ever seen,” I answered after a
moment’s hesitation. There couldn’t be any harm in telling her how much
I admired her mistress.

“Yes, she is lovely—everyone thinks so—and her nature is as sweet as her
face.” She was becoming loquacious. “I have never had a lady who was so
sweet and kind. She hasn’t always been rich, and that may be the reason
she never seems to grow hard and selfish, the reason she spends so much
of her life thinking of other people. It’s been six years now, ever
since her marriage, that I’ve lived with her, and in all that time I’ve
never had a cross word from her.”

“One can see that. With everything she has she ought to be as happy as
the day is long.”

“She ought to be.” Her voice dropped, and I saw her glance suspiciously
at the door, which she had closed when she entered. “She ought to be,
but she isn’t. I have never seen any one so unhappy as she has been of
late—ever since last summer. I suppose I oughtn’t to talk about it, but
I’ve kept it to myself so long that I feel as if it was killing me. If
she was my own sister, I couldn’t be any fonder of her, and yet I have
to see her suffer day after day, and not say a word—not even to her. She
isn’t the sort of lady you could speak to about a thing like that.”

She broke down, and dropping on the rug at my feet, hid her face in her
hands. It was plain that she was suffering acutely, and while I patted
her shoulder, I thought what a wonderful mistress Mrs. Vanderbridge must
be to have attached a servant to her so strongly.

“You must remember that I am a stranger in the house, that I scarcely
know her, that I’ve never so much as laid eyes on her husband,” I said
wamingly, for I’ve always avoided, as far as possible, the confidences
of servants.

“But you look as if you could be trusted.” The maid’s nerves, as well as
the mistress’s, were on edge, I could see. “And she needs somebody who
can help her. She needs a real friend—somebody who will stand by her no
matter what happens.” Again, as in the room downstairs, there flashed
through my mind the suspicion that I had got into a place where people
took drugs or drink—or were all out of their minds. I had heard of such
houses.

“How can I help her? She won’t confide in me, and even if she did, what
could I do for her?”

“You can stand by and watch. You can come between her and harm—if you
see it.” She had risen from the floor and stood wiping her reddened eyes
on the napkin. “I don’t know what it is, but I know it is there. I feel
it even when I can’t see it.”

Yes, they were all out of their minds; there couldn’t be any other
explanation. The whole episode was incredible. It was the kind of thing,
I kept telling myself, that did not happen. Even in a book nobody could
believe it.

“But her husband? He is the one who must protect her.”

She gave me a blighting look. “He would if he could. He isn’t to
blame—you mustn’t think that. He is one of the best men in the world,
but he can’t help her. He can’t help her because he doesn’t know. He
doesn’t see it.”

A bell rang somewhere, and catching up the tea-tray, she paused just
long enough to throw me a pleading word, “Stand between her and harm, if
you see it.”

When she had gone I locked the door after her, and turned on all the
lights in the room. Was there really a tragic mystery in the house, or
were they all mad, as I had first imagined? The feeling of apprehension,
of vague uneasiness, which had come to me when I entered the iron doors,
swept over me in a wave while I sat there in the soft glow of the shaded
electric light. Something was wrong. Somebody was making that lovely
woman unhappy, and who, in the name of reason, could this somebody be
except her husband? Yet the maid had spoken of him as “one of the best
men in the world,” and it was impossible to doubt the tearful sincerity
of her voice. Well, the riddle was too much for me. I gave it up at last
with a sigh—dreading the hour that would call me downstairs to meet Mr.
Vanderbridge. I felt in every nerve and fibre of my body that I should
hate him the moment I looked at him.

But at eight o’clock, when I went reluctantly downstairs, I had a
surprise. Nothing could have been kinder than the way Mr. Vanderbridge
greeted me, and I could tell as soon as I met his eyes that there wasn’t
anything vicious or violent in his nature. He reminded me more than ever
of the portrait in the loan collection, and though he was so much older
than the Florentine nobleman, he had the same thoughtful look. Of course
I am not an artist, but I have always tried, in my way, to be a reader
of personality; and it didn’t take a particularly keen observer to
discern the character and intellect in Mr. Vanderbridge’s face. Even now
I remember it as the noblest face I have ever seen; and unless I had
possessed at least a shade of penetration, I doubt if I should have
detected the melancholy. For it was only when he was thinking deeply
that this sadness seemed to spread like a veil over his features. At
other times he was cheerful and even gay in his manner; and his rich
dark eyes would light up now and then with irrepressible humour. From
the way he looked at his wife I could tell that there was no lack of
love or tenderness on his side any more than there was on hers. It was
obvious that he was still as much in love with her as he had been before
his marriage, and my immediate perception of this only deepened the
mystery that enveloped them. If the fault wasn’t his and wasn’t hers,
then who was responsible for the shadow that hung over the house?

For the shadow was there. I could feel it, vague and dark, while we
talked about the war and the remote possibilities of peace in the
spring. Mrs. Vanderbridge looked young and lovely in her gown of white
satin with pearls on her bosom, but her violet eyes were almost black in
the candlelight, and I had a curious feeling that this blackness was the
colour of thought. Something troubled her to despair, yet I was as
positive as I could be of anything I had ever been told that she had
breathed no word of this anxiety or distress to her husband. Devoted as
they were, a nameless dread, fear, or apprehension divided them. It was
the thing I had felt from the moment I entered the house; the thing I
had heard in the tearful voice of the maid. One could scarcely call it
horror, because it was too vague, too impalpable, for so vivid a name;
yet, after all these quiet months, horror is the only word I can think
of that in any way expresses the emotion which pervaded the house.

I had never seen so beautiful a dinner table, and I was gazing with
pleasure at the damask and glass and silver—there was a silver basket of
chrysanthemums, I remember, in the centre of the table—when I noticed a
nervous movement of Mrs. Vanderbridge’s head, and saw her glance hastily
towards the door and the staircase beyond. We had been talking
animatedly, and as Mrs. Vanderbridge turned away, I had just made a
remark to her husband, who appeared to have fallen into a sudden fit of
abstraction, and was gazing thoughtfully over his soup-plate at the
white and yellow chrysanthemums. It occurred to me, while I watched him,
that he was probably absorbed in some financial problem, and I regretted
that I had been so careless as to speak to him. To my surprise, however,
he replied immediately in a natural tone, and I saw, or imagined that I
saw, Mrs. Vanderbridge throw me a glance of gratitude and relief. I
can’t remember what we were talking about, but I recall perfectly that
the conversation kept up pleasantly, without a break, until dinner was
almost half over. The roast had been served, and I was in the act of
helping myself to potatoes, when I became aware that Mr. Vanderbridge
had again fallen into his reverie. This time he scarcely seemed to hear
his wife’s voice when she spoke to him, and I watched the sadness cloud
his face while he continued to stare straight ahead of him with a look
that was almost yearning in its intensity.

Again I saw Mrs. Vanderbridge, with her nervous gesture, glance in the
direction of the hall, and to my amazement, as she did so, a woman’s
figure glided noiselessly over the old Persian rug at the door, and
entered the dining-room. I was wondering why no one spoke to her, why
she spoke to no one, when I saw her sink into a chair on the other side
of Mr. Vanderbridge and unfold her napkin. She was quite young, younger
even than Mrs. Vanderbridge, and though she was not really beautiful,
she was the most graceful creature I had ever imagined. Her dress was of
grey stuff, softer and more clinging than silk, and of a peculiar misty
texture and colour, and her parted hair lay like twilight on either side
of her forehead. She was not like any one I had ever seen before—she
appeared so much frailer, so much more elusive, as if she would vanish
if you touched her. I can’t describe, even months afterwards, the
singular way in which she attracted and repelled me.

At first I glanced inquiringly at Mrs. Vanderbridge, hoping that she
would introduce me, but she went on talking rapidly in an intense,
quivering voice, without noticing the presence of her guest by so much
as the lifting of her eyelashes. Mr. Vanderbridge still sat there,
silent and detached, and all the time the eyes of the stranger—starry
eyes with a mist over them—looked straight through me at the tapestried
wall at my back. I knew she didn’t see me and that it wouldn’t have made
the slightest difference to her if she had seen me. In spite of her
grace and her girlishness I did not like her, and I felt that this
aversion was not on my side alone. I do not know how I received the
impression that she hated Mrs. Vanderbridge—never once had she glanced
in her direction—yet I was aware, from the moment of her entrance, that
she was bristling with animosity, though animosity is too strong a word
for the resentful spite, like the jealous rage of a spoiled child, which
gleamed now and then in her eyes. I couldn’t think of her as wicked any
more than I could think of a bad child as wicked. She was merely wilful
and undisciplined and—I hardly know how to convey what I mean—elfish.

After her entrance the dinner dragged on heavily.

Mrs. Vanderbridge still kept up her nervous chatter, but nobody
listened, for I was too embarrassed to pay any attention to what she
said, and Mr. Vanderbridge had never recovered from his abstraction. He
was like a man in a dream, not observing a thing that happened before
him, while the strange woman sat there in the candlelight with her
curious look of vagueness and unreality. To my astonishment not even the
servants appeared to notice her, and though she had unfolded her napkin
when she sat down, she wasn’t served with either the roast or the salad.
Once or twice, particularly when a new course was served, I glanced at
Mrs. Vanderbridge to see if she would rectify the mistake, but she kept
her gaze fixed on her plate. It was just as if there were a conspiracy
to ignore the presence of the stranger, though she had been, from the
moment of her entrance, the dominant figure at the table. You tried to
pretend she wasn’t there, and yet you knew—you knew vividly that she was
gazing insolently straight through you.

The dinner lasted, it seemed, for hours, and you may imagine my relief
when at last Mrs. Vanderbridge rose and led the way back into the
drawing-room. At first I thought the stranger would follow us, but when
I glanced round from the hall she was still sitting there beside Mr.
Vanderbridge, who was smoking a cigar with his coffee.

“Usually he takes his coffee with me,” said Mrs. Vanderbridge, “but
to-night he has things to think over.”

“I thought he seemed absent-minded.”

“You noticed it, then?” She turned to me with her straightforward
glance. “I always wonder how much strangers notice. He hasn’t been well
of late, and he has these spells of depression. Nerves are dreadful
things, aren’t they?”

I laughed. “So I’ve heard, but I’ve never been able to afford them.”

“Well, they do cost a great deal, don’t they?” She had a trick of ending
her sentences with a question. “I hope your room is comfortable, and
that you don’t feel timid about being alone on that floor. If you
haven’t nerves, you can’t get nervous, can you?”

“No, I can’t get nervous.” Yet while I spoke, I was conscious of a
shiver deep down in me, as if my senses reacted again to the dread that
permeated the atmosphere.

As soon as I could, I escaped to my room, and I was sitting there over a
book, when the maid—her name was Hopkins, I had discovered—came in on
the pretext of inquiring if I had everything I needed. One of the
innumerable servants had already turned down my bed, so when Hopkins
appeared at the door, I suspected at once that there was a hidden motive
underlying her ostensible purpose.

“Mrs. Vanderbridge told me to look after you,” she began. “She is afraid
you will be lonely until you learn the way of things.”

“No, I’m not lonely,” I answered. “I’ve never had time to be lonely.”

“I used to be like that; but time hangs heavy on my hands now. That’s
why I’ve taken to knitting.” She held out a grey yarn muffler. “I had an
operation a year ago, and since then Mrs. Vanderbridge has had another
maid—a French one—to sit up for her at night and undress her. She is
always so fearful of overtaxing us, though there isn’t really enough
work for two lady’s-maids, because she is so thoughtful that she never
gives any trouble if she can help it.”

“It must be nice to be rich,” I said idly, as I turned a page of my
book. Then I added almost before I realized what I was saying, “The
other lady doesn’t look as if she had so much money.”

Her face turned paler if that were possible, and for a minute I thought
she was going to faint. “The other lady?”

“I mean the one who came down late to dinner—the one in the grey dress.
She wore no jewels, and her dress wasn’t low in the neck.”

“Then you saw her?” There was a curious flicker in her face as if her
pallor came and went. “We were at the table when she came in. Has Mr.
Vanderbridge a secretary who lives in the house?”

“No, he hasn’t a secretary except at his office. When he wants one at
the house, he telephones to his office.”

“I wondered why she came, for she didn’t eat any dinner, and nobody
spoke to her—not even Mr. Vanderbridge.”

“Oh, he never speaks to her. Thank God, it hasn’t come to that yet.”

“Then why does she come? It must be dreadful to be treated like that,
and before the servants, too. Does she come often?”

“There are months and months when she doesn’t. I can always tell by the
way Mrs. Vanderbridge picks up. You wouldn’t know her, she is so full of
life—the very picture of happiness. Then one evening she—the Other One,
I mean—comes back again, just as she did to-night, just as she did last
summer, and it all begins over from the beginning.”

“But can’t they keep her out—the Other One? Why do they let her in?”

“Mrs. Vanderbridge tries hard. She tries all she can every minute. You
saw her to-night?”

“And Mr. Vanderbridge? Can’t he help her?”

She shook her head with an ominous gesture. “He doesn’t know.”

“He doesn’t know she is there? Why, she was close by him. She never took
her eyes off him except when she was staring through me at the wall.”

“Oh, he knows she is there, but not in that way. He doesn’t know that
any one else knows.”

I gave it up, and after a minute she said in a suppressed voice, “It
seems strange that you should have seen her. I never have.”

“But you know all about her.”

“I know and I don’t know. Mrs. Vanderbridge lets things drop
sometimes—she gets ill and feverish very easily—but she never tells me
anything outright. She isn’t that sort.”

“Haven’t the servants told you about her—the Other One?”

At this, I thought, she seemed startled. “Oh, they don’t know anything
to tell. They feel that something is wrong; that is why they never stay
longer than a week or two—we’ve had eight butlers since autumn—but they
never see what it is.”

She stooped to pick up the ball of yarn which had rolled under my chair.
“If the time ever comes when you can stand between them, you will do
it?” she asked.

“Between Mrs. Vanderbridge and the Other One?”

Her look answered me.

“You think, then, that she means harm to her?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows—but she is lulling her.”

The clock struck ten, and I returned to my book with a yawn, while
Hopkins gathered up her work and went out, after wishing me a formal
goodnight. The odd part about our secret conferences was that as soon as
they were over, we began to pretend so elaborately to each other that
they had never been.

“I’ll tell Mrs. Vanderbridge that you are very comfortable,” was the
last remark Hopkins made before she sidled out of the door and left me
alone with the mystery. It was one of those situations—I am obliged to
repeat this over and over—that was too preposterous for me to believe in
even while I was surrounded and overwhelmed by its reality. I didn’t
dare face what I thought, I didn’t dare face even what I felt; but I
went to bed shivering in a warm room, while I resolved passionately that
if the chance ever came to me I would stand between Mrs. Vanderbridge
and this unknown evil that threatened her.

In the morning Mrs. Vanderbridge went out shopping, and I did not see
her until the evening, when she passed me on the staircase as she was
going out to dinner and the opera. She was radiant in blue velvet, with
diamonds in her hair and at her throat, and I wondered again how any one
so lovely could ever be troubled.

“I hope you had a pleasant day, Miss Wrenn,” she said kindly. “I have
been too busy to get off any letters, but to-morrow we shall begin
early.” Then, as if from an afterthought, she looked back and added,
“There are some new novels in my sitting-room. You might care to look
over them.”

When she had gone, I went upstairs to the sitting-room and turned over
the books, but I couldn’t, to save my life, force an interest in printed
romances after meeting Mrs. Vanderbridge and remembering the mystery
that surrounded her. I wondered if “the Other One,” as Hopkins called
her, lived in the house, and I was still wondering this when the maid
came in and began putting the table to rights.

“Do they dine out often?” I asked.

“They used to, but since Mr. Vanderbridge hasn’t been so well, Mrs.
Vanderbridge doesn’t like to go without him. She only went to-night
because he begged her to.”

She had barely finished speaking when the door opened, and Mr.
Vanderbridge came in and sat down in one of the big velvet chairs before
the wood fire. He had not noticed us, for one of his moods was upon him,
and I was about to slip out as noiselessly as I could when I saw that
the Other One was standing in the patch of firelight on the hearthrug. I
had not seen her come in, and Hopkins evidently was still unaware of her
presence, for while I was watching, I saw the maid turn towards her with
a fresh log for the fire. At the moment it occurred to me that Hopkins
must be either blind or drunk, for without hesitating in her advance,
she moved on the stranger, holding the huge hickory log out in front of
her. Then, before I could utter a sound or stretch out a hand to stop
her, I saw her walk straight through the grey figure and carefully place
the log on the andirons.

So she isn’t real, after all, she is merely a phantom, I found myself
thinking, as I fled from the room, and hurried along the hall to the
staircase. She is only a ghost, and nobody believes in ghosts any
longer. She is something that I know doesn’t exist, yet even, though she
can’t possibly be, I can swear that I have seen her. My nerves were so
shaken by the discovery that as soon as I reached my room I sank in a
heap on the rug, and it was here that Hopkins found me a little later
when she came to bring me an extra blanket.

“You looked so upset I thought you might have seen something,” she said.
“Did anything happen while you were in the room?”

“She was there all the time—every blessed minute. You walked right
through her when you put the log on the fire. Is it possible that you
didn’t see her?”

“No, I didn’t see anything out of the way.” She was plainly frightened.
“Where was she standing?”

“On the hearthrug in front of Mr. Vanderbridge. To reach the fire you
had to walk straight through her, for she didn’t move. She didn’t give
way an inch.”

“Oh, she never gives way. She never gives way living or dead.”

This was more than human nature could stand. “In heaven’s name,” I cried
irritably, “who is she?”

“Don’t you know?” She appeared genuinely surprised. “Why, she is the
other Mrs. Vanderbridge. She died fifteen years ago, just a year after
they were married, and people say a scandal was hushed up about her,
which he never knew. She isn’t a good sort, that’s what I think of her,
though they say he almost worshipped her.”

“And she still has this hold on him?”

“He can’t shake it off, that’s what’s the matter with him, and if it
goes on, he will end his days in an asylum. You see, she was very young,
scarcely more than a girl, and he got the idea in his head that it was
marrying him that killed her. If you want to know what I think, I
believe she puts it there for a purpose.”

“You mean—?” I was so completely at sea that I couldn’t frame a rational
question.

“I mean she haunts him purposely in order to drive him out of his mind.
She was always that sort, jealous and exacting, the kind that clutches
and strangles a man, and I’ve often thought, though I’ve no head for
speculation, that we carry into the next world the traits and feelings
that have got the better of us in this one. It seems to me only common
sense to believe that we’re obliged to work them off somewhere until we
are free of them. That is the way my first lady used to talk, anyhow,
and I’ve never found anybody that could give me a more sensible idea.”

“And isn’t there any way to stop it? What has Mrs. Vanderbridge done?”

“Oh, she can’t do anything now. It has got beyond her, though she has
had doctor after doctor, and tried everything she could think of. But,
you see, she is handicapped because she can’t mention it to her husband.
He doesn’t know that she knows.”

“And she won’t tell him?”

“She is the sort that would die first—just the opposite from the Other
One—for she leaves him free, she never clutches and strangles. It isn’t
her way.” For a moment she hesitated, and then added grimly—“I’ve
wondered if you could do anything?”

“If I could? Why, I am a perfect stranger to them all.”

“That’s why I’ve been thinking it. Now, if you could corner her some
day—the Other One—and tell her up and down to her face what you think of
her.”

The idea was so ludicrous that it made me laugh in spite of my shaken
nerves. “They would fancy me out of my wits! Imagine stopping an
apparition and telling it what you think of it!”

“Then you might try talking it over with Mrs. Vanderbridge. It would
help her to know that you see her also.”

But the next morning, when I went down to Mrs. Vanderbridge’s room, I
found that she was too ill to see me. At noon a trained nurse came on
the case, and for a week we took our meals together in the morning-room
upstairs. She appeared competent enough, but I am sure that she didn’t
so much as suspect that there was anything wrong in the house except the
influenza which had attacked Mrs. Vanderbridge the night of the opera.
Never once during that week did I catch a glimpse of the Other One,
though I felt her presence whenever I left my room and passed through
the hall below. I knew all the time as well as if I had seen her that
she was hidden there, watching, watching—

At the end of the week Mrs. Vanderbridge sent for me to write some
letters, and when I went into her room, I found her lying on the couch
with a tea-table in front of her. She asked me to make the tea because
she was still so weak, and I saw that she looked flushed and feverish,
and that her eyes were unnaturally large and bright. I hoped she
wouldn’t talk to me, because people in that state are apt to talk too
much and then to blame the listener; but I had hardly taken my seat at
the tea-table before she said in a hoarse voice—the cold had settled on
her chest:

“Miss Wrenn, I have wanted to ask you ever since the other evening—did
you—did you see anything unusual at dinner? From your face when you came
out I thought—I thought—”

I met this squarely. “That I might have? Yes, I did see something.”

“You saw her?”

“I saw a woman come in and sit down at the table, and I wondered why no
one served her. I saw her quite distinctly.”

“A small woman, thin and pale, in a grey dress?”

“She was so vague and—and misty, you know what I mean, that it is hard
to describe her; but I should know her again anywhere. She wore her hair
parted and drawn down over her ears. It was very dark and fine—as fine
as spun silk.”

We were speaking in low voices, and unconsciously we had moved closer
together while my idle hands left the tea things.

“Then you know,” she said earnestly, “that she really comes—that I am
not out of my mind—that it is not an hallucination?”

“I know that I saw her. I would swear to it. But doesn’t Mr.
Vanderbridge see her also?”

“Not as we see her. He thinks that she is in his mind only.” Then, after
an uncomfortable silence, she added suddenly, “She is really a thought,
you know. She is his thought of her—but he doesn’t know that she is
visible to the rest of us.”

“And he brings her back by thinking of her?” She leaned nearer while a
quiver passed over her features and the flush deepened in her cheeks.
“That is the only way she comes back—the only way she has the power to
come back—as a thought. There are months and months when she leaves us
in peace because he is thinking of other things, but of late, since his
illness, she has been with him almost constantly.” A sob broke from her,
and she buried her face in her hands. “I suppose she is always trying to
come—only she is too vague—and hasn’t any form that we can see except
when he thinks of her as she used to look when she was alive. His
thought of her is like that, hurt and tragic and revengeful. You see, he
feels that he ruined her life because she died when the child was
coming—a month before it would have been born.”

“And if he were to see her differently, would she change? Would she
cease to be revengeful if he stopped thinking her so?”

“God only knows. I’ve wondered and wondered how I might move her to
pity.”

“Then you feel that she is really there? That she exists outside of his
mind?”

“How can I tell? What do any of us know of the world beyond? She exists
as much as I exist to you or you to me. Isn’t thought all that there
is—all that we know?”

This was deeper than I could follow; but in order not to appear stupid,
I murmured sympathetically, “And does she make him unhappy when she
comes?”

“She is killing him—and me. I believe that is why she does it.”

“Are you sure that she could stay away? When he thinks of her isn’t she
obliged to come back?”

“Oh, I’ve asked that question over and over! In spite of his calling her
so unconsciously, I believe she comes of her own will. I have always the
feeling—it has never left me for an instant—that she could appear
differently if she would. I have studied her for years until I know her
like a book, and though she is only an apparition, I am perfectly
positive that she wills evil to us both. Don’t you think he would change
that if he could? Don’t you think he would make her kind instead of
vindictive if he had the power?”

“But if he could remember her as loving and tender?”

“I don’t know. I give it up—but it is killing me.”

It _was_ killing her. As the days passed I began to realize that she had
spoken the truth. I watched her bloom fade slowly and her lovely
features grow pinched and thin like the features of a starved person.
The harder she fought the apparition, the more I saw that the battle was
a losing one, and that she was only wasting her strength. So impalpable
yet so pervasive was the enemy that it was like fighting a poisonous
odour. There was nothing to wrestle with, and yet there was everything.
The struggle was wearing her out—was, as she had said, actually “killing
her”; but the physician who dosed her daily with drugs—there was need
now of a physician—had not the faintest idea of the malady he was
treating. In those dreadful days I think that even Mr. Vanderbridge
hadn’t a suspicion of the truth. The past was with him so constantly—he
was so steeped in the memories of it—that the present was scarcely more
than a dream to him. It was, you see, a reversal of the natural order of
things; the thought had become more vivid to his perceptions than any
object. The phantom had been victorious so far, and he was like a man
recovering from the effects of a narcotic. He was only half awake, only
half alive to the events through which he lived and the people who
surrounded him. Oh, I realize that I am telling my story badly!—that I
am slurring over the significant interludes! My mind has dealt so long
with external details that I have almost forgotten the words that
express invisible things. Though the phantom in the house was more real
to me than the bread I ate or the floor on which I trod, I can give you
no impression of the atmosphere in which we lived day after day—of the
suspense, of the dread of something we could not define, of the brooding
horror that seemed to lurk in the shadows of the firelight, of the
feeling always, day and night, that some unseen person was watching us.
How Mrs. Vanderbridge stood it without losing her mind, I have never
known; and even now I am not sure that she could have kept her reason if
the end had not come when it did. That I accidentally brought it about
is one of the things in my life I am most thankful to remember.

It was an afternoon in late winter, and I had just come up from
luncheon, when Mrs. Vanderbridge asked me to empty an old desk in one of
the upstairs rooms. “I am sending all the furniture in that room away,”
she said; “it was bought in a bad period, and I want to clear it out and
make room for the lovely things we picked up in Italy. There is nothing
in the desk worth saving except some old letters from Mr. Vanderbridge’s
mother before her marriage.”

I was glad that she could think of anything so practical as furniture,
and it was with relief that I followed her into the dim, rather musty
room over the library, where the windows were all tightly closed. Years
ago, Hopkins had once told me, the first Mrs. Vanderbridge had used this
room for a while, and after her death her husband had been in the habit
of shutting himself up alone here in the evenings. This, I inferred, was
the secret reason why my employer was sending the furniture away. She
had resolved to clear the house of every association with the past.

For a few minutes we sorted the letters in the drawers of the desk, and
then, as I expected, Mrs. Vanderbridge became suddenly bored by the task
she had undertaken. She was subject to these nervous reactions, and I
was prepared for them even when they seized her so spasmodically. I
remember that she was in the very act of glancing over an old letter
when she rose impatiently, tossed it into the fire unread, and picked up
a magazine she had thrown down on a chair.

“Go over them by yourself, Miss Wrenn,” she said, and it was
characteristic of her nature that she should assume my trustworthiness.
“If anything seems worth saving you can file it—but I’d rather die than
have to wade through all this.”

They were mostly personal letters, and while I went on, carefully filing
them, I thought how absurd it was of people to preserve so many papers
that were entirely without value. Mr. Vanderbridge I had imagined to be
a methodical man, and yet the disorder of the desk produced a painful
effect on my systematic temperament. The drawers were filled with
letters evidently unsorted, for now and then I came upon a mass of
business receipts and acknowledgments crammed in among wedding
invitations or letters from some elderly lady, who wrote interminable
pale epistles in the finest and most feminine of Italian hands. That a
man of Mr. Vanderbridge’s wealth and position should have been so
careless about his correspondence amazed me until I recalled the dark
hints Hopkins had dropped in some of her midnight conversations. Was it
possible that he had actually lost his reason for months after the death
of his first wife, during that year when he had shut himself alone with
her memory? The question was still in my mind when my eyes fell on the
envelope in my hand, and I saw that it was addressed to Mrs. Roger
Vanderbridge. So this explained, in a measure at least, the carelessness
and the disorder! The desk was not his, but hers, and after her death he
had used it only during those desperate months when he barely opened a
letter. What he had done in those long evenings when he sat alone here
it was beyond me to imagine. Was it any wonder that the brooding should
have permanently unbalanced his mind?

At the end of an hour I had sorted and filed the papers, with the
intention of asking Mrs. Vanderbridge if she wished me to destroy the
ones that seemed to be unimportant. The letters she had instructed me to
keep had not come to my hand, and I was about to give up the search for
them, when, in shaking the lock of one of the drawers, the door of a
secret compartment fell open, and I discovered a dark object, which
crumbled and dropped apart when I touched it. Bending nearer, I saw that
the crumbled mass had once been a bunch of flowers, and that a streamer
of purple ribbon still held together the frail structure of wire and
stems. In this drawer someone had hidden a sacred treasure, and moved by
a sense of romance and adventure, I gathered the dust tenderly in tissue
paper, and prepared to take it downstairs to Mrs. Vanderbridge. It was
not until then that some letters tied loosely together with a silver
cord caught my eye, and while I picked them up, I remember thinking that
they must be the ones for which I had been looking so long. Then, as the
cord broke in my grasp and I gathered the letters from the lid of the
desk, a word or two flashed back at me through the torn edges of the
envelopes, and I realized that they were love letters written, I
surmised, some fifteen years ago, by Mr. Vanderbridge to his first wife.

“It may hurt her to see them,” I thought, “but I don’t dare destroy
them. There is nothing I can do except give them to her.”

As I left the room, carrying the letters and the ashes of the flowers,
the idea of taking them to the husband instead of to the wife flashed
through my mind. Then—I think it was some jealous feeling about the
phantom that decided me—I quickened my steps to a run down the
staircase.

“They would bring her back. He would think of her more than ever,” I
told myself, “so he shall never see them. He shall never see them if I
can prevent it.” I believe it occurred to me that Mrs. Vanderbridge
would be generous enough to give them to him—she was capable of rising
above her jealousy, I knew—but I determined that she shouldn’t do it
until I had reasoned it out with her. “If anything on earth would bring
back the Other One for good, it would be his seeing these old letters,”
I repeated as I hastened down the hall.

Mrs. Vanderbridge was lying on the couch before the fire, and I noticed
at once that she had been crying. The drawn look in her sweet face went
to my heart, and I felt that I would do anything in the world to comfort
her. Though she had a book in her hand, I could see that she had not
been reading. The electric lamp on the table by her side was already
lighted, leaving the rest of the room in shadow, for it was a grey day
with a biting edge of snow in the air. It was all very charming in the
soft light; but as soon as I entered I had a feeling of oppression that
made me want to run out into the wind. If you have ever lived in a
haunted house—a house pervaded by an unforgettable past—you will
understand the sensation of melancholy that crept over me the minute the
shadows began to fall. It was not in myself—of this I am sure, for I
have naturally a cheerful temperament—it was in the space that
surrounded us and the air we breathed.

I explained to her about the letters, and then, kneeling on the rug in
front of her, I emptied the dust of the flowers into the fire. There
was, though I hate to confess it, a vindictive pleasure in watching it
melt into the flames; and at the moment I believe I could have burned
the apparition as thankfully. The more I saw of the Other One, the more
I found myself accepting Hopkins’s judgment of her. Yes, her behaviour,
living and dead, proved that she was not “a good sort.”

My eyes were still on the flames when a sound from Mrs.
Vanderbridge—half a sigh, half a sob—made me turn quickly and look up at
her.

“But this isn’t his handwriting,” she said in a puzzled tone. “They are
love letters, and they are to her—but they are not from him.” For a
moment or two she was silent, and I heard the pages rustle in her hands
as she turned them impatiently. “They are not from him,” she repeated
presently, with an exultant ring in her voice. “They are written after
her marriage, but they are from another man.” She was as sternly tragic
as an avenging fate. “She wasn’t faithful to him while she lived. She
wasn’t faithful to him even while he was hers—”

With a spring I had risen from my knees and was bending over her.

“Then you can save him from her. You can win him back! You have only to
show him the letters, and he will believe.”

“Yes, I have only to show him the letters.” She was looking beyond me
into the dusky shadows of the firelight, as if she saw the Other One
standing there before her. “I have only to show him the letters,” I knew
now that she was not speaking to me, “and he will believe.”

“Her power over him will be broken,” I cried out. “He will think of her
differently. Oh, don’t you see? Can’t you see? It is the only way to
make him think of her differently. It is the only way to break for ever
the thought that draws her back to him.”

“Yes, I see, it is the only way,” she said slowly; and the words were
still on her lips when the door opened and Mr. Vanderbridge entered.

“I came for a cup of tea,” he began, and added with playful tenderness,
“What is the only way?” It was the crucial moment, I realized—it was the
hour of destiny for these two—and while he sank wearily into a chair, I
looked imploringly at his wife and then at the letters lying scattered
loosely about her. If I had had my will I should have flung them at him
with a violence which would have startled him out of his lethargy.
Violence, I felt, was what he needed—violence, a storm, tears,
reproaches—all the things he would never get from his wife.

For a minute or two she sat there, with the letters before her, and
watched him with her thoughtful and tender gaze. I knew from her face,
so lovely and yet so sad, that she was looking again at invisible
things—at the soul of the man she loved, not at the body. She saw him,
detached and spiritualized, and she saw also the Other One—for while we
waited I became slowly aware of the apparition in the firelight—of the
white face and the cloudy hair and the look of animosity and bitterness
in the eyes. Never before had I been so profoundly convinced of the
malignant will veiled by that thin figure. It was as if the visible form
were only a spiral of grey smoke covering a sinister purpose.

“The only way,” said Mrs. Vanderbridge, “is to fight fairly even when
one fights evil.” Her voice was like a bell, and as she spoke, she rose
from the couch and stood there in her glowing beauty confronting the
pale ghost of the past. There was a light about her that was almost
unearthly—the light of triumph. The radiance of it blinded me for an
instant. It was like a flame, clearing the atmosphere of all that was
evil, of all that was poisonous and deadly. She was looking directly at
the phantom, and there was no hate in her voice—there was only a great
pity, a great sorrow and sweetness.

“I can’t fight you that way,” she said, and I knew that for the first
time she had swept aside subterfuge and evasion, and was speaking
straight to the presence before her. “After all, you are dead and I am
living, and I cannot fight you that way. I give up everything. I give
him back to you. Nothing is mine that I cannot win and keep fairly.
Nothing is mine that belongs really to you.”

Then, while Mr. Vanderbridge rose, with a start of fear, and came
towards her, she bent quickly, and flung the letters into the fire. When
he would have stooped to gather the unburned pages, her lovely flowing
body curved between his hands and the flames; and so transparent, so
ethereal she looked, that I saw—or imagined that I saw—the firelight
shine through her. “The only way, my dear, is the right way,” she said
softly.

The next instant—I don’t know to this day how or when it began—I was
aware that the apparition had drawn nearer, and that the dread and fear,
the evil purpose, were no longer a part of her. I saw her clearly for a
moment—saw her as I had never seen her before—young and gentle and—yes,
this is the only word for it—loving. It was just as if a curse had
turned into a blessing, for, while she stood there, I had a curious
sensation of being enfolded in a kind of spiritual glow and comfort—only
words are useless to describe the feeling because it wasn’t in the least
like anything else I had ever known in my life. It was light without
heat, glow without light—and yet it was none of these things. The
nearest I can come to it is to call it a sense of blessedness—of
blessedness that made you at peace with everything you had once hated.

Not until afterwards did I realize that it was the victory of good over
evil. Not until afterwards did I discover that Mrs. Vanderbridge had
triumphed over the past in the only way that she could triumph. She had
won, not by resisting, but by accepting; not by violence, but by
gentleness; not by grasping, but by renouncing. Oh, long, long
afterwards, I knew that she had robbed the phantom of power over her by
robbing it of hatred. She had changed the thought of the past, in that
lay her victory.

At the moment I did not understand this. I did not understand it even
when I looked again for the apparition in the firelight, and saw that it
had vanished. There was nothing there—nothing except the pleasant
flicker of light and shadow on the old Persian rug.



                           WHISPERING LEAVES


                                 PART I

It was fifteen years ago to-day; yet I can still see that road
stretching through vine-like shadows into the spring landscape.

Though I was never in Virginia before, I had been brought up on the
traditions of my mother’s old home on the Rappahannock; and when the
invitation came to spend a week with my unknown cousins, the Blantons,
at Whispering Leaves, I was filled with a delightful sense of expectancy
and adventure. None of my family had ever seen the present owner of the
place—one Pelham Blanton, a man of middle age, who was, as far as we
were aware, without a history. All I knew of him was that his first wife
had died at the birth of a child about seven years before, and that
immediately afterward he had married one of his neighbours, a common
person, my mother insisted, though she had heard nothing of the second
wife except that her name before her marriage was Twine. Whether the
child of the first wife had lived or not we did not know, for the
letters from the family had stopped, and we had no further news of the
place until I wrote from Richmond asking permission to visit the house
in which my mother and so many of my grandmothers were born.

The spring came early that year. When I descended from the train into
the green and gold of the afternoon, I felt almost as if I were stepping
back into some old summer. An ancient family carriage, drawn by two
drowsy black horses with flowing tails, was waiting for me under a
blossoming locust tree; and as soon as my foot touched the ground I was
greeted affectionately by the coloured driver, who still called my
mother “Miss Effie.” He was an imposing, ceremonious old man, very
nearly as black as the horses, with a mass of white hair, which is
unusual in a negro, and a gay bandanna handkerchief crossed over his
chest. After an unconscionable wait for the mail, he brought the
dilapidated leather pouch from the office, and tossed it on the floor of
the carriage. A minute later, as he mounted over the wheel to his seat,
he glanced back at me and remarked in an encouraging tone, “dar ain’
nuttin’ to hinder us now.”

“How far is it to Whispering Leaves, Uncle Moab?”

The old negro pondered the question while he flicked the reins over the
broad swaying backs of the horses. He was so long in replying that,
thinking he had forgotten to answer, I repeated the words more
distinctly.

“Can you tell me how far it is to Whispering Leaves?”

At this he turned and looked back at me over his shoulder. “I reckon
hit’s sum un like ten miles, or mebbe hit’s gwine on twelve,” he
responded.

“When did you leave there?”

Again there was a long silence while we jogged sleepily out of the
deeply shaded streets of the little village. “I ain’ been dar dis
mawnin’, Miss Effie,” he answered at last.

“Why, I thought you lived there?”

I was so accustomed by this time to the slowness of his responses that I
waited patiently until he brought out with hesitation, “I use’ ter.”

“Then you are no longer the family coachman?”

He shook his head above the bandanna handkerchief, and I could see his
deep perplexity written in the brown creases of his neck. “Yas’m. I’se
still de driver.”

“But how can you be if you don’t live on the place?”

“One er dem w’ite sarvants brungs de car’ige down ter de creek, en I
tecks en drives hit along de road,” he replied. “I goes dar in de
daytime,” he added impressively after a minute. “Dar’s some un um ain’
never set foot dar sence we all moved off, but I ain’ skeered er
nuttin’, sweet Jesus, in de daytime.”

“Do you mean that all the old servants moved off together?”

“Yas’m. Ev’y last one un um. Dey’s all w’ite folks dar now.”

“When did that happen?”

But, as I was beginning to discover, time and space are the flimsiest
abstractions in the imagination of the negro. “Hit wuz a long time ago.
Miss Effie,” replied Uncle Moab. “Pell, he wa’n much mo’n a baby den. He
wuz jes’ in dresses, en he’s done been in breeches now fur a pa’cel er
Christmas times.”

“Pell? Is that the child of the first Mrs. Blanton?”

“Yas’m. He’s Miss Clarissa’s chile. Miss Hannah Twine, she’s got a heap
er chillun; dar’s two pa’cel er twins en den de baby dat wuz bo’n las’
winter. But Pell, he ain’t ’er chile.”

I was beginning to see light. “Then Pell must be about seven years old,
and you moved off the place while he was still in short dresses. That
must have been just four or five years ago.”

“Dat’s hit, honey, dat’s hit.”

“And all the coloured servants moved away at the same time?”

“De same day. Dar wa’nt er one un um lef dar by sundown.”

“And they’ve had to have white servants ever since?”

“Dey’s all w’ite ones dat stays on atter sundown. De coloured folks dey
goes back in de daytime, but dey don’t stay on twell supper. Naw’m, dar
ain’ noner dem but de w’ite folks dat stays on ter git supper.”

While I questioned him the drowsy horses trotted slowly through the sun
and shadow on the dun-coloured road. The air was fragrant with mingled
wood scents and honeysuckle. A sky of flowerlike blue shone overhead.
Now and then a redbird, flying low, darted across the road, and far off
in the trees there was the sound of a joyous chorus.

“I never saw so many redbirds, Uncle Moab.”

“Yas’m. Dar sutney is er plenty er dem dis yeah. Hit’s a bird yeah, sho
nuff. Hit pears ter me like I cyarn’ put my foot outside er my do’ dat I
don’t moughty near step on er robin, en I ain’ never hearn tell er sech
er number uv blue jays. De blue jay he’s de meanest bird dat ever wuz,
but he sutney is got er heap er sense. He knows jes ez well on w’ich
side his bread is buttered ez ef’n he wuz sho nuff folks. Hi! Don’ you
begin ter study ’bout birds twel you git to W’is-perin’ Leaves. Hit
seems dat ar place wuz jes made ter drive folks bird crazy. Dey’s
ev’ry-whar’ dose birds. De wrens en de phœbes dey’s in de po’ch, en de
swallows dey’s in de chimleys, en de res’ un um is calling ter you en
pesterin’ de life outer you in de trees.”

Well, I liked birds! If there were nothing more dangerous than birds at
Whispering Leaves, I could be happy there.

While we jogged on there crept over me the feeling of restlessness, of
wistful yet indefinable desire, which is the very essence of spring. My
thoughts had been brushed for an instant by that magic spirit of beauty;
and I saw the wide landscape, with its flushed meadows sinking into the
grapelike bloom of the distance, as if it were a part, not of the actual
world, but of a universe painted on air, as transparent as the faintly
coloured shadows across the road. In the thick woods on the left
delicate green appeared to rise and fall like the foam of the sea.
Accustomed as I was to the late northern season, there was an
intoxication in this spring which was as flowery as June. A bird year,
the old coachman had called it; but a miraculous spring it seemed to me,
with its bright soft winds, as sweet as honey, and its far, serene sky.
And from the fragrant woods and rosy meadows there floated always the
joyous piping of invisible birds; of birds hidden in low thickets; of
birds high in the misty woods; of birds by the silver stream in the
pasture; of birds flying swiftly into the impalpable shadows.

“I thought birds were quiet in the afternoon, Uncle Moab?”

“Dey ain’ never quiet heah, honey. Dey chatters even in de night time.
Dey don’ hoi’ dere tongues fur nuttin’, not even w’en de snow is on de
groun’.”

Gradually, after what seemed to me to be hours of that monotonous pace,
the light on the road faded slowly to a delicate primrose. The sun was
setting beyond the rich woods on the horizon, and a thin clear veil,
like silver tissue, was dropping over the spring landscape. Presently,
as we came under the gloom of arching boughs, the old negro turned the
heads of the horses and scrambled down from the coachman’s seat.

“I ain’ gwine no furder den dis, Miss Effie,” he explained; and then, as
the gate swung open, I saw that a young white man had run forward to
unfasten it. When the old negro, with a pull at his front lock, had
shuffled off in the direction of the sunset, the young man made a bound
into the driver’s seat and jerked up the reins.

“Does Uncle Moab live near here?” I inquired. “About a mile up the road,
miss. Mr. Blanton gave him the cabin at the fork when he moved away.”

“I wonder why he moved?”

The young man broke into a cheery laugh. “When a darkey once gets a
notion in his head, the only way to get it out is with an ax,” he
retorted; and a minute later he added: “I reckon you don’t know much
about the darkeys up North?”

“Very little,” I conceded, and we drove on in silence.

The road into which we had turned was a narrow private way, very steep
and rocky, which led between rotting “worm” fences and neglected fields
to a dense avenue of cedars on the brow of the hill. As we went on, I
wondered why the fields so near the house should be abandoned. The
remains of last year’s harvest still strewed the ragged furrows, and
against the skyline on the top of the hill there was a desolate row of
corn stubble. Presently, as the carriage jolted over the rocky road, I
heard the sound of barking, or, as it seemed to me at that sombre hour,
the kind of baying to which hounds give voice on moonlit nights. Then,
when we reached the high ground at last, I found that two black and
yellow hounds were sitting amid the naked cornstalks and barking at our
approach.

“Won’t these fields be planted this year?” I asked in surprise.

“We can’t get any of the darkeys to work here,” replied the driver.
“They are too near the house.”

As we came to the brow of the hill the dogs ran to meet us, and then,
after a few barks of welcome, turned and padded on noiselessly beside
the horses. Between us and the beginning of the cedar avenue there was a
clear space of road, and when we reached this the veil over the sunset
parted suddenly like a curtain, and a glow, which I can compare to
nothing except clouded amber, suffused the horizon and the abandoned
cornfields. In this glow I discerned the gigantic shape of an old
mulberry tree near the avenue; and the next instant I made out, amid the
foliage on the high boughs, the lightly poised figure of a little boy in
a blue cotton suit, with a mass of streaming ruddy curls.

“Why, he might slip and fall,” I thought; and the words had scarcely
formed themselves in my mind, when the little figure turned sharply, as
if in terror, and uttered a cry of alarm.

“Mammy, I am falling!” he called out, as his feet slipped from the
bough.

I had already made a spring from the carriage, with the sunset dazzling
my eyes, when an old negro woman emerged swiftly from the underbrush by
the fence, and caught the child in her arms. In that instant of terror,
while my eyes were still filled with the sunset, I observed only that
the woman was tall and straight like an Indian, and that her face,
framed in a red turban, was as brown and wrinkled as a November leaf.
Then, as she placed the child on his feet, I saw that her features were
irradiated, by a passion of tenderness which gave it a strange glow like
the burning light of the sunset.

“You saved his life!” I started to cry; but before I could utter the
words she vanished into the shadow of the mulberry tree, and left the
boy standing alone in the road.

“You might have been killed,”! said sternly as I reached him, for I was
still trembling from the fright he had given me.

The boy looked up with a strange elfin glee—there is no other word for
it—in his face. “I knew Mammy would catch me,” he responded defiantly.

“Suppose she hadn’t been here?” As I spoke I looked about me for the old
negress.

At this the child laughed shrilly, with a sound that was like the ironic
mirth of an old man. “She is always where I am,” he replied.

He was a queer child, I thought as I gazed at him, ugly and pinched, and
yet with a charm which I felt from the first moment my eyes fell on him.
There was a defiant shyness in his manner, and his little face, under
the flaming curls, was too thin and pale for healthy childhood. But, in
spite of his strangeness, I had never in my life been so strongly
attracted, so completely drawn, to a child.

“You must be Pell!” I exclaimed, after a pause in which I had watched
him in silence.

He stared at me critically. “Yes, I am Pell. How did you know?”

“Oh, I’ve heard about you. Uncle Moab told me on the way over.”

At the name of Uncle Moab his face grew less blank and hard. “Where is
he?” he asked, turning to the driver. “I was going down to the gate to
meet him. I want him to mend my kite.”

“Uncle Moab went on to his cabin,” answered the young man, and I noticed
that he subdued his tone as he might have done to an ill person or a
startled colt.

“Then I’ll go after him,” replied the child. “I am not afraid.”

With a bound he started down the steep road, running in restless leaps,
with his bright curls blown out like an aureole round his head. The two
black and yellow hounds, jumping up from the stubble, followed, as
noiseless as shadows, on his trail; and in a few minutes the three
shapes melted into the obscurity of the fields.

When I was in the carriage again I remarked inquiringly to the driver:
“For a delicate child he does not appear to be timid.”

“Not out of doors. He is never afraid out of doors. In the house they
have a good deal of trouble with him.”

“Do the other children look so thin and pale?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. The other children are healthy enough. They don’t get on
well with this one, and that’s why he stays out of the house whenever
they’ll let him, even when it is raining. Pell is the child of the first
Mrs. Blanton.”

“Yes, I know. Were you here in her time?”

“No, I came afterward. The year the darkeys moved away. But anybody can
see how different she must have been from this one, who is the daughter
of old Mr. Twine, the miller. She kept house for Mr. Blanton after his
first wife died.” This was news to me, for I was absolutely ignorant of
the family circumstances. I was eager to learn more of the story; but I
could not gossip about my relatives with a stranger, so I said merely,

“Then she brought up the child—Pell, I mean?” Though the driver’s back
was turned to me, I could see by the stubborn shake of his head that my
question had aroused an unpleasant train of reflections. “No, Pell’s
mammy took care of him until he was five years old. She had nursed his
mother before him. I reckon she belonged to the family of the first Mrs.
Blanton and came to Whispering Leaves with the bride. I never saw her.
She died before my time here; but they say that as long as the old woman
lived Pell never knew what it was to miss his mother. Mammy Rhody—that
was her name—had promised the first Mrs. Blanton when she was dying that
she would never let the child out of her sight; and they say she kept
her promise to the dead as long as she lived. Whenever you saw Pell
there was Mammy Rhody, sure enough, with her eyes on him. She slept in
the room with him, and she always stood behind his high chair when they
had him down to the table. Darkeys are like that, I reckon. A vow’s a
vow. When she swore she’d never take her eyes off him, she meant just
what she said.”

“The child must miss her terribly?”

Again I saw that stubborn shake of his head. “The queer part is that the
boy insists she ain’t dead. Nothing they can do to him—Mrs. Blanton has
talked to him by the hour—will make him admit that Mammy Rhody is dead.
He says she plays with him just as she used to, and that all these birds
you hear about Whispering Leaves are the ones that she tamed for him.
Birds! Well, there never was, they say, such a hand with birds as Mammy
Rhody. She could tame anything going from an eagle to a wren, I’ve
heard, and some of the darkeys have got the notion that the woods about
here are still full of the ghosts of Mammy Rhody’s pets. They say it
ain’t natural for birds to call in and out of season as they do around
Whispering Leaves.”

“And does Pell believe this also?”

“Nobody knows, ma’am, just how much Pell believes. They’ve tried to stop
all that foolishness because it turns the heads of the darkeys.

“You can’t get one of them to stay on the place after sunset, not for
love or money. It all started with the way Pell goes about talking to
himself. Holy Moses! I ain’t skeery myself, ma’am, for a big fellow like
me, but it gives me the creeps sometimes when I watch that child playing
by himself in the shrubbery and hear him talking to somebody that ain’t
there. He does the queerest things, too, just like climbing out on that
high limb and calling out to his mammy that he was going to fall.”

“He might have been badly hurt if somebody hadn’t caught him,” I said.

The driver laughed politely, as if I had made a poor joke which he
accepted on faith though he missed the humour. “He goes on pretending
like that all the time,” he returned.

“But the old coloured woman, the one who caught him? Who is she?” I
asked.

At this the man turned sharply, letting the reins fall on the backs of
the horses. “The old coloured woman?” he repeated inquiringly.

“I mean the tall one in the black dress, with the white apron and the
red turban on her head.” There was a slight asperity in my tone, for it
seemed to me the man was incredibly stupid.

The blankness—or was it suspicion?—in his face deepened. “I don’t know.
I didn’t see anybody,” he answered presently.

Turning his head away from me again, he gathered up the reins and urged
the horses with a clucking noise into the long avenue of cedars.

Dusk, dusk, dusk. As we drove on rapidly beneath the high, closely woven
arch of the cedars, I was conscious again of a deep intuitive feeling
that the world in which I moved was as unreal as the surroundings in a
dream. Dreamlike, too, were my own sensations as I passed into that
greenish twilight which shut out the light of the afterglow. Feathery
branches edged with brighter green brushed my cheeks like the wings of a
bird; and though I knew it must be only my fancy, I seemed to hear a
hundred jubilant notes in the enchanted gloom of the trees.

Presently, as if the thought were suggested by that imaginary music, I
found myself returning to the old negress. Surely, if she had merely
hastened on in front of us, we must overtake her before we reached the
end of the avenue. Wherever the shadows crowded more thickly, wherever
there was a sudden stir in the underbrush, I peered eagerly into the
obscurity, hoping that we had at last come up with the old woman, and
that I might offer her a place in the carriage. Though I had had only
the briefest glimpse of her, I had found her serene leaf-brown face
strangely attractive, almost, I thought oddly enough, as if her
mysterious black eyes, under the heavy brows, had penetrated to some
secret chamber of my memory. I had never seen her before, and yet I felt
as if I had known her all my life, particularly in some half-forgotten
childhood which haunted me like a dream. Could it be that she had nursed
my mother and my grandmother, and that she saw a resemblance to the
children she had trained in her youth? Stranger still, I felt not only
that she recognized me, but that she possessed some secret which she
wished to confide to me, that she was charged with a profoundly
significant message which, sooner or later, she would find an
opportunity to deliver.

As we went on, the hope that we should overtake her increased with every
foot of the road. I stared into the mass of shadows. I started at every
rustle on the scented ground. But still I caught no further glimpse of
her; and at last, while I was gazing breathlessly beneath the cedars, we
came out of the avenue on the edge of an open lawn, which was sown with
small star-shaped flowers of palest blue. In front of me there were
other ancient cedars, seven in number; and farther off, beyond the row
of cedars, there was a long white house standing against the
pomegranate-coloured afterglow, where a little horned moon was sailing.

I can shut my eyes now, after all these years, and summon back the scene
as vividly as I saw it when we emerged from the long stretch of
twilight. I can still see the blue glimmer of the flowers in the grass;
the low house, with deep wings, where the stucco was peeling from the
red brick beneath a delicate tracery of Virginia creeper; the seven
pyramidal cedars guarding the hooded roof of gray shingles; and the
clear afterglow in which the little moon sailed like a ship. Fifteen
years ago! And I have not forgotten so much as the spiral pattern the
Virginia creeper made on the pinkish white of the wall.

“Are there no trees,” I asked, “except cedars?” The driver lifted his
whip and pointed over the roof. “You never saw such elms. I reckon there
ain’t any finer trees in the country, but they’re all at the back, every
last one of ’em. Mr. Blanton’s grandfather had a notion that cedars
didn’t mix, and he wouldn’t have any other trees planted in front.”

I understood as I looked, in the flushed evening air, at the dark trees
presiding over the approach to the house, with its Ionic columns and its
quaint wings, added, one could see, long after the original walls were
built. The drooping eaves, I knew, sheltered a multitude of wrens and
phoebes, and the whole place was alive with swallows, which dipped and
wheeled under the glowing sky.

We turned briskly into the circular drive, and a few minutes later, when
we stopped before the walk of sunken flagstones, the driver jumped down
and assisted me to descend. As I reached the porch, the door opened in a
leisurely manner, and my cousin Pelham, a tall, relaxed,
indolent-looking man of middle age, with gray hair, brilliant dark eyes
and an air of pensive resignation, came out to receive me. I had heard,
or had formed some vague idea, that the family had “run to seed,” as
they say in the South, and my first view of Cousin Pelham helped to fix
this impression more firmly in my mind. He looked, I thought, a man who
had ceased to desire anything intensely except physical comfort.

“So this is Cousin Effie’s daughter,” he remarked by way of greeting, as
he stooped and placed a perfunctory kiss on my cheek.

Beyond him I saw a large angular woman, with massive features and hair
of ambiguous brown, and I inferred, from the baby in her arms and four
sturdy children at her skirts, that she was the “Miss Hannah,” for whom
Uncle Moab had prepared me. She appeared to me then and afterward to be
a woman who was proficient in the art of making a man comfortable, and
who hadn’t, as the phrase goes, “a nerve in her body.”

After greeting me cordially enough in her dry fashion, she directed the
driver to take my bag upstairs to “the red room.”

“I hope you can do without your trunk until to-morrow,” she added. “All
the teams have been ploughing to-day, and we couldn’t send over to the
station.”

I replied that I could do very well without it since I had brought my
travelling bag. Then, after a few questions from Cousin Pelham about my
mother, whom he had not seen since they were both children at Whispering
Leaves, Mrs. Blanton led me into the wide hall, where I saw a picture,
framed in the open back door, of clustering elms and a flagged walk
which ran down into a sunken garden. A minute later, while we ascended
the circular staircase, with its beautifully carved balustrade, I found
my eyes turning toward that vision of spring which I had seen through
the open door.

“How white it looks out there in the garden,” I said. “It seems carpeted
with moonlight.”

She bent her head indifferently to glance over the balustrade. “That’s
narcissus. It’s in full bloom now,” she answered. “The first Mrs.
Blanton” (she might have been speaking of some one she had just left on
the porch) “planted the whole garden in those flowers, and we have never
got rid of them. The poet’s narcissus, Mr. Blanton calls it.”

“There are lilacs, too,” I responded, for the cool dim hall was filled
with the fragrance which seemed to me to be the secret of spring.

“Oh, yes, there are a great many lilacs about the wings, but they are
thickest out by the kitchen.”

The upstairs hall, like the one below, was large and dim, and while we
crossed it, my companion called my attention to a loosened board or two
in the floor. “The rats are bad,” she observed. “I hope they won’t
bother you. They make a good deal of noise at night.” And then almost
immediately: “I don’t know how you’ll manage without a bathroom, but Mr.
Blanton would never have water put in the house.”

As she spoke, she opened a door at the front and ushered me into an
immense bedroom, which was hung in a last-century fashion with faded
calico. So far as I could distinguish in the dim light, there was not so
much as a touch of red in the room. The furniture was all of rich old
mahogany, made in too heavy a style for the taste that has been formed
on Chippendale or Sheraton, and much of it looked as if it were dropping
to pieces for lack of proper care. There was a high-tester bed, hung
with the dingy calico; there was an elaborately carved bureau, with a
greenish mirror which reflected my features in a fog; and there was a
huge screen, papered in a design of castles and peacocks, which
concealed an old-fashioned washstand. Yes, it was primitive. The touch
about the water belonged to the dark ages; and yet the place possessed,
for me at least, an inexpressible charm.

When Mrs. Blanton had left me alone, after telling me that supper would
be served in half an hour, I made a few hurried preparations, while I
tried in vain to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror, where my
reflection floated like a leaf in a lily pond. Then, stealing cautiously
from the room and across the deserted hall, with its musty smell of old
spices, I crept down the staircase and out of the open back door. Here
that provocative fragrance, the aroma of vanished springs, seized me
again; and running down the worn steps of the porch, I passed the bower
of lilacs beside the whitewashed kitchen wall, and followed the flagged
walk to the sunken garden.

At the end of the walk a primitive wooden stile, like an illustration in
_Mother Goose_, led into the garden; and when I passed it, I found
myself in a flowery space, which was surrounded by banks of honeysuckle
instead of a wall. A few old fruit trees, now well past blooming, stood
in the centre; and edging the grassy paths, there were all the shrubs
with quaint-sounding names of which I had dreamed in my
childhood—guelder rose, bridal wreath, mock orange, flowering quince,
and caly-canthus. Over all there hung a mist which had floated up from
the low ground by the river; and it seemed to me that this moisture
released the scents of a hundred springs. Never until that moment had I
known what the rapture of smell could be.

And the starry profusion of the narcissi! From bank to bank of
honeysuckle the garden looked as if the Milky Way had fallen over it and
been caught in the high grass.

Suddenly, in that enchanted silence, I heard the sound of a bell. In a
house where there were no bathrooms, I surmised that bells were probably
still rung for meals; and turning reluctantly, I started back to the
stile. I had gone but a step or two when a light flashing through the
windows of the house arrested my gaze; and the next instant, when I
glanced round again, I saw the figure of the old negress, in her white
apron and red turban, standing motionless under the boughs of a
pear-tree. In the twilight I saw her eyes fixed upon me, as I had seen
them at sunset, with a look of entreaty like the inarticulate appeal in
the eyes of the dumb. While I returned her gaze I felt, as I had felt at
our first meeting, that she was speaking to me in some inaudible
language which I did not yet understand, that she bore a message to me
which, sooner or later, she would find a way to deliver. What could she
mean? Why had she sought out me, a stranger, when she appeared to avoid
the family and even the servants? Quickening my steps, I hastened toward
her with a question on my lips; but before I reached her the bell rang
again with a chiming sound, and when I withdrew my eyes from the old
woman’s face, I noticed that the little boy was running down the flagged
walk to the stile. Bitterly I regretted the moment’s inadvertence, for
when I looked back, the negress had slipped beyond some of the flowering
shrubs, and the garden appeared to be deserted. Well, next time I would
be more careful, I resolved. And with this resolution in my mind, I
hurried to meet Pell at the stile.

“She says you must come to supper,” began the boy as soon as I came
within reach of his voice. It was the first time I had heard him allude
to his stepmother, and never, during the week I spent at Whispering
Leaves, did he speak of her, in my presence, by any more intimate name.

I held out my arms, and he came to me shyly but trustingly. Though I
could see that he was a nervous and sensitive child, the victim, I
fancied, of an excitable imagination, I felt that it would not be
difficult to win his confidence, if only one started about it in the
right way. For the first time in my life I was drawn to a child, and I
knew that the boy returned my liking in spite of his reserved manner.

“It is so beautiful I hate to go in,” I said, with my arm about him.

“I wish I could never go in,” he answered, turning back to the garden.
“It is so lonely inside the house.”

“Lonely?” I repeated, for the word struck me as a queer one for a child
to use. “Aren’t your little brothers and sisters there to play with
you?” He shook his head impatiently. “But they don’t like Mammy to come
in.”

As I glanced down at his grave little face I wondered if he could be not
quite right in his mind? Beneath his vivid hair, his wide-set
greenish-blue eyes held a burning ardour that was unusual in so young a
child. I could see that he was delicate in frame, and I inferred that
his intelligence was dangerously advanced for his years.

“Do you come to the table?” I asked.

He nodded with uncanny glee. “Ever since I was four years old. I had a
high chair then. Bobbie uses it now.”

“Is Bobbie one of the twins?”

“One of the littlest twins. Janie is the other. Jack and Gerty, they are
the big ones.” Then he laughed slyly. “I’m glad I’m not a twin! I’d hate
to have a girl tagging round after me.”

We had reached the back steps, and I turned, before going in, to have a
last look at the garden.

The twilight was the colour of white grapes, and the wisp of moon was
scarcely more than a thread in the paling sky. Above the kitchen roof
there was a flight of bats. An instant later I asked myself if I were
dreaming, or if I actually saw the glimmer of the old negress’s apron by
the stile. Then the boy waved his arm in an affectionate good-night, and
I knew that my imagination had not played a trick on me.

“Who is it, Pell?” I asked.

He glanced at me with his unchildish mirth. “Don’t you see her at the
stile over yonder?”

“The old coloured woman? Yes. I’ve seen her twice before. Who is she?”

Again he laughed. For some indefinable reason the laugh grated on my
nerves. “If I tell you, will you promise not to let them know?”

I pressed his thin little body to my heart. “I’ll never repeat anything
you ask me not to, Pell.” His hand, so like a bird’s claw, went up to my
cheek with a caress; and he was on the point of replying when a step
sounded in the hall, and one of the white servants came out on the porch
to remind us that Mr. Blanton was waiting. To keep Cousin Pelham waiting
for his meals was, I soon discovered, an unforgivable offence.

                                PART II

In the dining room, which was lighted by tallow candles, I found an
obviously exasperated host and hostess. When I entered Cousin Pelham was
fussing about a mahogany cellaret, while Mrs. Blanton was pinning a bib
of checked gingham round the neck of a little girl in a high chair. With
my English ideas of bringing up children, I thought it an odd custom to
have the row of high chairs and trays at the table, and to allow such
mere babies to appear at the evening meal.

“This is Gertrude,” said Mrs. Blanton, after my apologies had been
contritely offered and graciously accepted by Cousin Pelham, “and that,”
nodding to a little boy of the same age, “is John. The other two are
Robert and Jane.” They were robust, healthy-looking children, with dark
hair and high colour, as unlike their delicate half-brother as one could
well imagine.

At supper there was little conversation, for Cousin Pelham, who, I
surmised, could talk delightfully when he made the effort, appeared to
be absorbed in the food that was placed before him. This was of
excellent quality. Evidently, I decided, the second Mrs. Blanton was the
right wife for him. Vain, spoiled, selfish, amiable as long as he was
given everything that he wanted, and still good-looking in an obvious
and somewhat flashing style, he had long ago passed into that tranquil
state of mind which follows a complete surrender to the habits of life.
I wondered how that first wife, Clarissa of the romantic name and the
flaming hair, had endured existence in this lonely neighbourhood with
the companionship of a man who thought of nothing but food and drink.
Perhaps he was different then; and yet was it possible for such abnormal
egoism to develop in the years since her death? He ate immoderately, I
observed, and even before he left the table I could see that the
drowsiness which afflicts the overfed was descending upon him.

“The garden is charming,” I said. “I have never seen one like it, so
irregular and apparently neglected, and yet with a formal soul of its
own.” Cousin Pelham stared at me over the dish of fried chicken from
which he was carefully selecting the brownest and tenderest piece. “The
garden? Oh, yes, we’ve had to let that go. It was kept up as long as
Clarissa lived. She had a passion for flowers; but we can’t get any of
the darkeys to work it now.” Then he appealed directly to his wife, who
was engaged in teaching Gertrude how to hold her fork properly. “There
hasn’t been a spade stuck in the garden this spring, has there, Hannah?”

Mrs. Blanton shook her head, without removing her eyes from the little
girl. “Nor last spring, nor the one before that,” she rejoined. “Nobody
sets foot in it now except Pell, and he oughtn’t to go there. I tell him
there might be snakes in the long grass; but he won’t mind what I say.
It takes as much work as we can manage to plough the fields and the
kitchen beds. We can’t spare any for that old garden you have to spade.”

“Perhaps that’s a part of the charm,” I responded. “It expresses itself,
not some human being’s idea of planting.”

She looked at me as if she did not know what I meant, and on my other
side Cousin Pelham chuckled softly. “That sounds like Clarissa,” he
said, and there was no trace of sadness in his voice.

Across the table little Pell was eating delicately, pretending to be a
bird. Now and then his stepmother turned away from the younger children
to scold him about his fastidious appetite, or his odd manner of using
his knife and fork, as if they were a superior kind of chopsticks. Her
tone was not harsh. It was no sharper indeed than the one she used to
her own children; yet, whenever she spoke to him, I felt rather than saw
that he winced and shrank away from her. The child’s nerves were
overstrung, I could tell that just by watching him with his stepmother;
and to her, who could see nothing that was not directly before her eyes,
his sensitiveness appeared deliberate perversity. Yet he was an
attractive child in spite of his elfin ways. If he could only find the
sympathy and understanding he needed so desperately, I felt that he
might become very lovable.

Though I was sorry for the child then, I had barely touched the edge of
the passion which presently filled my heart. The hardest hour of all,
and one of the most trying moments in my life, came when we passed into
the library, and Mrs. Blanton summoned the children to bed. The younger
children, already nodding, obeyed without protest; but when it came to
Pell’s turn to kiss his father good-night, he began to shake and whimper
with terror. For a minute I did not understand; then turning to Cousin
Pelham, I asked, with a sympathy so acute that it stabbed like a knife,

“Is Pell afraid of the dark?”

Cousin Pelham, sunk in the softest old leather chair, was beyond the
sound of my voice; but his wife answered immediately in her firm and
competent tone.

“We are trying to break him of it. It would be dreadful for his father’s
son to be a coward.”

“Does he sleep in the nursery?”

“He used to, but we had to move his bed across the hall because he kept
the other children awake. He gets, or pretends to get, the most
ridiculous notions into his head, and he carries on so that the other
children don’t get any sleep when they are in the room with him.”

“Where does he stay now?”

“In the spare room next to yours. We moved him there a few weeks ago,
and you would think from the way he behaved that we were sending him to
his grave.”

“But doesn’t that seem the wrong way, to frighten a nervous child into
hysterics?”

At this she turned on me the most exasperating force in the universe,
impregnable common sense.

“We’ve got to break him of it,” she retorted, “or he will be a baby all
his life.”

“I think you’re wrong,” was all I could say feebly in denial; and my
words had as little effect as the dash of hail on a window-pane. But,
while I answered, I was telling myself that I had found out where the
boy slept, and that I would go to his room as soon as I had bidden the
family goodnight. Cousin Pelham and his wife stayed downstairs, I knew,
in what they called “the chamber” behind the drawing room, so I should
have to guard against only the stupid-looking nurse who had a room, I
supposed, near the children.

Bending over, I pressed the boy to my heart. “I am near you, and I will
take care of you,” I whispered. Then, releasing him, I stood back and
watched him walk, wincing and trembling, after the sturdy children of
his stepmother.

It seemed to me that the evening would never end. Every minute I was
straining my ears for a sound from the floor above, while Cousin Pelham
dozed through the processes of digestion, and Mrs. Blanton and I
discussed such concrete facts as wood and stones and preserves and the
best way to build a road or to cut down a tree. At last, when I was
exhausted beyond belief, though it was only a little after nine o’clock,
she laid down her mending, rose from her chair, and, with her hand on
her husband’s shoulder, wished me good-night.

“You will find a candle in the hall,” she said. “We never use lamps in
the chambers.” Her use of the archaic word struck me at the time as
poetic. It was the only poetic touch I ever observed about her.

On a table in the hall I found a row of tallow dips in old brass
candlesticks; and after lighting one, I took it in my hand and ascended
the circular staircase. Ahead of me the light flitted like a moth up the
worn steps, which the feet of generations had hollowed out in the centre
as water hollows out a stairway of rock. The hall above was empty—it
occurred to me at the moment that I had never seen such empty-looking
halls—and was quite dark except for the flickering light of my candle.
As I crossed the floor the green mist which I had left in the garden
floated in and enveloped me, and that wistful fragrance became
intolerably sweet. I had suddenly the feeling that the dim corners and
winding recesses of the hall were crowded with intangible shapes.

After glancing through my open door to assure myself that I had not made
a mistake, I stole across the hall and hesitated before the threshold of
what Mrs. Blanton had pointed out to me as “the spare room.” If the
child were sleeping, I did not wish to arouse him, but all idea that he
slept was banished as I pushed the door wider and heard him talking
aloud to himself. Then, while the pointed flame of my candle pierced the
obscurity, I saw that he was not, as I had first thought, alone. The old
coloured woman in the black alpaca dress, with the white apron and the
red turban, was bending over him. When I approached she turned slowly
and looked at me; and I felt that her dark, compassionate face was love
made manifest to my eyes. So she had looked down on the child, and so,
for one miraculous instant, she gazed directly into my heart. For one
miraculous instant! Then, while I stood there, transfixed as by an
arrow, she passed, with that slow movement, across the room to the door
which I had left open. Before I could stir, before I could utter a word
to detain her, she had disappeared; and the boy, sitting up in the
heavily draped bed, was staring at me with wondering eyes. “Mammy was
telling me a story,” he said.

“I didn’t know that you had a mammy now.” This was the best that I could
do at the moment.

“Oh, yes, I have!” He smiled with charming archness, and I noticed that
the fear had passed out of his voice.

“When did she come?” I asked.

“She has been here always, ever since,” he hesitated, “since before I
was.”

“Does she look after the other children too?”

He laughed, cuddling down into the middle of the feather bed. “They
don’t know about her. They have never seen her.”

“But how can she come and go in the house without anybody seeing her?”

At this the laughter stopped. “She has a way,” he answered
enigmatically. “She never comes into the house except when I’m afraid.”

I bent over and kissed him. “Well, you’re not frightened any longer?”

“Oh, no. I’m all right now,” he replied, stroking my hand. “The next
time it gets dark Mammy says she will come back and finish her story.”

“And I am next door,” I said. “Whenever you begin to feel frightened you
can come and sleep on the big couch by the window.”

“By the window,” he repeated eagerly, “where Mammy’s wrens are under the
eaves. That would be fun.”

Then, as I arranged the bedclothes over him, he turned his cheek to the
pillow, and settled himself for the night. A moment later, when I went
out of the room, I began wondering again about the old negress. Was she
a faithful servant who had sacrificed her superstition to her affection
for Clarissa’s child, and had stayed on at Whispering Leaves when the
other negroes had gone away? In the morning I would make some inquiries.
Meanwhile I liked to remember the glory—there is no other word to
describe it—that I had seen in her dark face when she bent over the boy.

In the morning, when I came out of doors, it was into a world of
maize-coloured sunshine. There was new green on the cedars, and the
little blue flowers in the grass looked as formal as the blossoms in a
Gothic tapestry. Suddenly a harsh scream sounded a little way to the
right, and a peacock, with flaunting plumage, marched across the lawn,
through the sunlight and shadow. As I stood there, entranced by the
colour of the morning, it seemed to me that this circle of sunlight and
shadow became alive with the quiver of innumerable gauzy wings, the
bright ghosts of all the birds that had ever sung in this place.

When, presently, I turned in the direction of the garden, I saw that
Pell was playing in a row of flowering quince near the stile. He was on
his knees, building a castle of rocks, which he had brought in a little
wagon from the road in the pasture; and while I approached, I observed
that he was talking aloud to himself as children talk in their play.
Then, before I reached him, I found my gaze arrested by a glimmer of red
amid the smoke-gray boughs of a crêpe myrtle tree; and it seemed to my
startled fancy that I made out the figure of the old negress. But the
next minute a scarlet tanager flashed out of the branches, and the image
proved to be one of those grotesque shapes which crêpe myrtle bushes,
like ancient olive trees, frequently assume.

The child was playing happily by himself.

When my shadow fell over him, he looked up with his expression of secret
wisdom. Kneeling there, with his red curls and his blue-green eyes
enkindled by the sunshine, he reminded me of some unearthly flower of
light.

“It will be a fine castle,” I said.

He glanced hastily over his shoulder; and I noticed that his manner was
shy and furtive, though it expressed also a childish pleasure that was
very appealing.

“I’ve got something better than a castle,” he answered. “I found it
yesterday down by the ice pond. Will you promise not to tell if I let
you look?”

“I promise,” I assured him gravely; and, with another suspicious glance
in the direction of the house, he sprang to his feet and caught me by
the hand. Leading me round the shrubbery and over the stile, he showed
me a hollow he had made in the tall grasses beneath a cluster of lilac
bushes. Lying there on a bed of dry fern I saw a black and white mongrel
puppy, a delightful, audacious, independent puppy, half terrier and half
unknown, with an engaging personality and a waggish black ear that
dropped over one sparkling eye. Fastened securely by a strip of red
cotton to the shrub, beside a partly gnawed bone and a saucer of water,
he sat surveying me with an expectant, inquisitive look.

“Isn’t he a beauty?” asked Pell, enraptured, as he went down on his
knees and flung his arms about the puppy.

“A beauty,” I repeated; and I also went down on my knees to embrace boy
and dog.

“He hadn’t had anything to eat for ever so long when I found him. Martha
gives me scraps for him, and William lets him sleep in the stable.” Then
he looked straight into my eyes. “You won’t tell?” he pleaded. “She
wouldn’t let him stay if she knew. She doesn’t like dogs.”

Of course she didn’t like dogs. Hadn’t I felt from the first that she
wouldn’t? Why, there wasn’t a dog on the place, except the two black and
yellow hounds I had seen half a mile away in the cornfield, and they
belonged doubtless to one of the negroes.

“No, I won’t tell,” I promised. “I’ll help you take care of him.”

His eyes shone. “Can you teach him to do tricks? He knows how to beg
already. Mammy taught him.”

I released the child quickly and rose to my feet. “Where is your Mammy,
Pell?”

His rapid glance flew down the garden walk, and across the narcissi, to
the twisted pear tree. “She’s just gone,” he answered. “She went when
she saw you coming.”

“Where does she live?”

At this he broke into a laugh. “Oh, she lives away, way over yonder,” he
responded, with a sweep of his hand.

For the next week Pell and I were cheerful conspirators. When I look
back on it now, after so many years, I can still recall those cautious
trips to the barn or the little bed of ferns under the lilacs. We fed
Wop, that was the name we chose at last, until he grew as round as a
ball; and he was just passing into the second stage of his education
when Mrs. Blanton discovered his presence, as I was sure that she would
be obliged to do sooner or later.

I had been away for the afternoon to visit some relatives at a distance;
and as we drove home about sunset, we passed on the road the old
coloured woman whom Pell had called Mammy. I could not be mistaken, I
told myself. I should have recognized her anywhere, not only by the
quaint turban she wore bound about her head, but by that indescribable
light which shone in her face.

At the time we were driving through a stretch of burned pines, and when
I first noticed her she had stopped to rest and was sitting on a charred
stump by the roadside, with the red disc of the sun at her back. The
light was in my eyes; but, as I leaned out and smiled at her, she gave
me again that long deep look so filled with inarticulate yearning. I
knew then, as I had known the first afternoon, that she was trying to
make me understand, that she was charged with some message she could not
utter. While her eyes met mine I was smitten—that is the only word for
the sensation—into silence; but after we had driven on, I recovered
myself sufficiently to say to the cousin who was taking me home:

“If she is going a long way, don’t you think we might give her a lift?”

My cousin, an obtuse young man, gazed at me vacantly. “If who is going a
long way?”

“The old coloured woman by the roadside. Didn’t you see her?”

He shook his head. “No, I wasn’t looking. I didn’t see anybody.”

While he was still speaking, I leaned out with an exclamation of
surprise. “Why, there she is now in front of us! She must have run ahead
of us through the pines. She is waiting by the dead tree at the fork of
the road.”

My cousin was laughing now. “The sunset makes you see double. There
isn’t anybody there. Can you see anything except the blasted oak at the
fork of the road, Jacob?”

A few minutes later, when we reached the place where the road branched,
I saw that it was deserted. The red blaze of the sun could play tricks
with one’s vision, I knew; but it was odd that on both occasions, at
precisely the same hour, I should be visited by this hallucination. That
it was an hallucination, I no longer doubted when, looking up a short
while afterward, I saw again the old woman’s figure ahead of me. This
time, however, I kept silent, for the first thing one learns from such
visitations is the danger of talking to people of things which they
cannot understand. But I drove on with my heart in my throat. In front
of me in the blue air was that vision; and in my mind there was a
voiceless apprehension. Then, as we reached the lawn, the old woman
vanished, and a moment later the sound of a child’s crying fell on my
ears.

Alone on the front steps. Pell sat weeping inconsolably, with his face
hidden in his thin little hands. When I sprang from the carriage, he
rushed into my arms.

“She has sent him away! She has sent him away to be drowned!” he cried
in a heartbreaking voice.

As I drew him close, the door opened, and Mrs. Blanton looked out.

“Come in, Pell,” she called, not unkindly, but unseeingly. “You will
fret yourself into a fever. The circus is coming next week, and if you
make yourself sick, you won’t be able to go to it.”

At this Pell turned on her a white and quivering face. “I don’t want to
go to the circus,” he said. “I don’t want any supper. I want Wop, and I
wish you were dead!”

“Pell, dear!” I cried, but Mrs. Blanton only laughed good-naturedly, a
laugh that was as common as her features.

“He’s got his mother’s temper all right,” she remarked to me over the
child’s head. “If you don’t want any supper,” she added, dragging him
indoors, while he struggled to free himself from the grasp of her large
firm hand which seemed as inexorable as her purpose, “you must go
straight upstairs to bed.”

When we had entered the house the boy broke away from her, and marched,
without a tremor of hesitation, across the hall and into the thick dusk
of the staircase.

“Let me go after him,” I said. “He is so afraid of the dark, and the
candles are not lighted upstairs.”

Mrs. Blanton detained me by a gesture. “He is the sort of child you have
to be firm with,” she returned, and then immediately, “Mr. Blanton”—she
always addressed her husband as “Mr. Blanton”—“is waiting for us in the
dining room. It frets him to be kept waiting.”

After this there was nothing to do but follow her, with a heavy heart,
into the room, where Cousin Pelham stood, ponderously frowning at the
door. I could not this evening meet his annoyance with my usual playful
apology; and a little later, when the excellent supper was served, I
found that I was unable to swallow a morsel. The fact that I was leaving
the next day, that I should, perhaps, not see Pell again for years, had
turned my heart to lead.

When supper was over I escaped as soon as I could and ran upstairs to
the room where Pell slept. A candle was burning by his bed, and to my
amazement the child was sleeping peacefully, with a smile on his face
where the traces of tears were scarcely dried. While I looked down on
him, he stirred and opened his eyes.

“I thought you were Mammy,” he murmured, with a drowsy laugh.

“Has Mammy been here?” I asked.

He was so sleepy that he could barely answer; but, as he nestled down
into the middle of the feather bed, he replied without the faintest sign
of his recent distress:

“She was here when I came up. She told me it was all right about Wop.
Uncle Moab is keeping him for me.”

“Uncle Moab is keeping him?” I pressed my hand on his forehead under the
vivid hair; but there was no hint of fever.

“She says she gave Wop to Uncle Moab. Mammy wouldn’t let anybody hurt
him.”

Then his eyes closed while the smile quivered on his lips. “Mammy says
you must take me with you when you go away,” he murmured. His face
changed to an almost unearthly loveliness, and before I could answer,
before I could even take in the words he had spoken, he had fallen
asleep.

For a minute I stood looking down on him. Then leaving the candle still
burning, I went out, closing the door softly, and ran against the maid,
a young Irish woman, whose face I liked.

“I was just going to see if Pell had fallen asleep,” she explained a
little nervously. “I have a message for him. You won’t tell Mrs. Blanton
I brought it?”

“No. I won’t tell Mrs. Blanton.”

For an instant the girl hesitated. “She is so strict,” she blurted out,
and then more guardedly, “William wouldn’t have drowned the child’s
puppy. He just took it away and gave it to Uncle Moab who was going
along the road.”

“I am glad,” I said eagerly. “Uncle Moab will look after it?”

“He sent Pell a message not to worry. I was going in to tell him.”

“But he knows it already,” I replied indiscreetly. “Somebody told him.”

A puzzled look came into her face. “But nobody knew. William just came
back a minute ago, and there hasn’t been another soul on the place this
afternoon.”

I saw my slip at once and hastened to remedy it. “Then I was mistaken of
course. The child must have imagined it.”

“Yes, he does imagine things,” she responded readily; and after a word
of good-night, she turned back to the stairs while I crossed the hall to
my room.

There, as soon as I had closed the door, I put down my candle, and
turned to the open window to think over what I had heard. There was
nothing really strange, I told myself, in the incident of the puppy and
Uncle Moab. It was natural enough that William should have refused to
obey an order he thought cruel; it was natural enough also that Uncle
Moab should have been going by in the road at that hour. Everything was
easily explained except the singular change in the child, and the happy
smile on his little tear-stained face when he murmured, “Mammy says you
must take me with you when you go away.” Over and over again I heard
those words as I sat there by the window. So insistent was the
repetition that I might have deluded myself into the belief that they
were spoken aloud in the darkness outside. How could I take the child
away with me? I asked at last, as if I were disputing with some
invisible presence at my side. What room was there for a child in my
active life? I loved Pell; I hated to leave him; but how could I
possibly take him with me when I went away in the morning? Yet, even
after I had undressed, climbed into the canopied bed, and blown out my
candle, I still heard that phrase again and again in my mind. I was
still hearing it hours afterward when I fell asleep and dreamed of the
old coloured woman sitting on the charred stump by the roadside.

Dreams. The old coloured woman by the roadside. The song of far-off
birds coming nearer. The jade-green mist of the twilight changing
suddenly to opal. Light growing out of darkness. Light turning from
clear gold to flame colour. Still the song of birds that became so loud
it was like the torrent of waters—or of fire. Dreams. Dreams. Nothing
more....

Starting awake, I was aware first of that opal-coloured light; then of
the fact that I was stifling, that a gray cloud had swept in from the
open window, or the open door, and enveloped me. The next instant, with
a cry, I sprang up and caught at the dressing-gown on a chair by my bed.
From outside, mingled with that dream of singing birds and rushing
torrents, the sound of voices was reaching me. The words I could not
hear, but I needed no words to tell me that these were voices of
warning. Whispering Leaves was burning while I dreamed. Whispering
Leaves was burning, and I must fight my way to safety through the smoke
that rushed in at my open door!

“Pell!” I called in terror, as I ran out into the hall. But there was no
answer to my cry, and the next minute, when I looked into the child’s
room, I saw that the bed was empty. They had saved him and forgotten me.
Well, at least they had saved him!

Of the next few minutes, which seemed an eternity of terror, I can
recall nothing now except a struggle for air. I must have fought my way
through the smoke upstairs. I must have passed that savage light so
close that it scorched my face, which was blistered afterward, though I
felt no pain at the moment. I must have heard that rush of flames so
near that it deafened me; but of this I can remember nothing to-day. Yet
I can still feel the air blowing in my face on the lawn outside. I can
still see the little green leaves on the cedars standing out illuminated
in that terrible glow. I can still hear the cry that rang out:

“Pell! Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?”

Fifteen years ago. Fire and ashes, pain and happiness, have passed and
are forgotten; but that question, as I heard it then, still sounds in my
ears.

“Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?”

“I thought he was safe,” my voice was so thick that the words were
scarcely articulate. “His room was empty.”

“He isn’t with the other children. We thought he had gone to you.” The
speaker I have forgotten—Cousin Pelham or his wife, or the nurse, it is
no matter—but the words are still living.

“I will go back.” This was Cousin Pelham, I knew, for he had turned to
enter the burning house.

“It is too late now.” This was not one, but several voices together. As
they spoke the windows of the house shone like the sunrise while a
torrent of flame swept through the hall.

“Oh, Pell! Pell!” I cried out in agony. “Cannot you come to me?”

For a minute—it was scarcely longer—after I called, there was no answer.
We stood in that red glare, and round us and beyond us closed the
mysterious penumbra of the darkness. Without the circle, where we clung
together in our horror, there was the freshness and the sweetness of the
spring, and all the little quiet stirs that birds make when they nest at
night. And it was out of this bird-haunted darkness that a shape moved
suddenly past me into the flames, a shape which as the light edged it
round I saw to be that of the old negress.

“She is looking for him,” I cried now. “Oh, don’t you see her?”

They gathered anxiously round me. “The fire has blinded her,” I heard
them say. “She is looking straight at the flames.”

Yes, I was looking straight at the flames, for beyond the flames, past
the unburned wing of the house, from the window of an old storeroom,
which was never opened, they had told me, I saw the shape of the old
negress pass again like a shadow. The next instant my heart melted with
joy, for I saw that she was bringing the child in her arms. The little
face was pale as death; the red curls were singed to black; but it was
the child that she held. Even the unperceiving eyes about me, though
they could see only material things, knew that Pell had come unharmed
out of the fire. To them it was merely a shadow, a veil of smoke, which
surrounded him. I alone saw the dark arms that enfolded him. I alone,
among all those standing there in that awful light, recognized that dark
compassionate face.

Her eyes found me at last, and I knew, in that moment of vision, what
the message was that she had for me. Without a word I stepped forward,
and held out my arms. As I did so, I saw a glory break in the dim
features. Then, even while I gave my voiceless answer, the face melted
from me into spirals of smoke. Was it a dream, after all? Was the only
reality the fact that I held the child safe and unharmed in my arms?



                           A POINT IN MORALS


“The question seems to be—” began the Englishman. He looked up and bowed
to a girl in black who had just come in from deck and was taking the
seat beside him. “The question seems to be—” The girl was having some
difficulty in removing her coat, and he turned to assist her.

“In my opinion,” remarked the distinguished alienist, who was returning
from a vacation in Vienna, “the question is whether or not civilization
is defeating its own aims in placing an exorbitant value on human life.”
As he spoke he leaned forward authoritatively and accented his words
with foreign precision.

“You mean that the survival of the fittest is checkmated,” remarked a
young journalist travelling in the interest of a New York daily, “that
civilization should practise artificial selection, as it were?”

The alienist shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly. “My dear sir,” he
protested, “I mean nothing. It is the question that means something.”

“Well, as I was saying,” began the Englishman again, reaching for the
salt and upsetting a spoonful, “the question seems to be whether or not,
in any circumstances, the saving of a human life may become positively
immoral.”

“Upon that point—” began the alienist; but a young woman, in a white
dress, who was seated on the Captain’s right interrupted him.

“How could it?” she asked. “At least I don’t see how it could. Do you,
Captain?”

“There is no doubt,” remarked the journalist, looking up from a
conversation he had drifted into with a lawyer from one of the Western
States, “that the more humane spirit pervading modern civilization has
not worked wholly for good in the development of the species. Probably,
for instance, if we had followed the Spartan practice of exposing
unhealthy infants, we should have retained something of the Spartan
hardihood. Certainly if we had been content to remain barbarians both
our digestions and our nerves would have been the better for it, and
melancholia would perhaps have been unknown. But, at the same time, the
loss of a number of the more heroic virtues is overbalanced by an
increase of the softer ones. Notably, human life has never before been
regarded so sacredly.”

“On the other side,” observed the lawyer, lifting his hand to adjust his
eyeglasses, and pausing to brush a crumb from his coat, “though it is
all very well to be philanthropic to the point of pauperizing half a
community and of growing squeamish about capital punishment, the whole
thing sometimes takes a disgustingly morbid turn. Why, it seems as if
criminals were the real American heroes! Only last week I visited a man
sentenced to death for the murder of his two wives, and, by Jove, the
place was literally besieged by women sympathizers. I counted six
bunches of roses in his cell, and at least fifty notes.”

“Oh, but that is a form of nervous hysteria!” said the girl in black,
“and must be considered separately. Every sentiment has its fanatics,
philanthropy as well as religion. But we can’t judge a movement by a few
over-wrought disciples.”

“Why not?” asked the Englishman, quietly. He was a middle-aged man, with
an optimistic expression and a build of comfortable solidity. “But to
return to the original proposition. I suppose we all accept as a
self-evident truth the axiom that the highest civilization is the one in
which the highest value is placed upon individual life.”

“And happiness,” added the girl in black.

“And happiness,” assented the Englishman.

“And yet,” commented the lawyer, “I think that most of us will admit
that such a society, where life is regarded as sacred because it is
valuable to the individual, not because it is valuable to the state,
tends to the non-production of heroes.”

“That the average will be higher and the exception lower,” observed the
journalist. “In other words, that there will be a general elevation of
the mass, accompanied by a corresponding lowering of the few.”

“On the whole, I think our system does very well,” said the Englishman,
carefully measuring the horseradish. “A mean between two extremes is apt
to be satisfactory in results. If we don’t produce a Marcus Aurelius or
a Seneca, neither do we produce a Nero or a Phocas. We may have lost
patriotism, but we have gained humanity, which is better. If we have
lost chivalry, we have acquired decency; and if we have ceased to be
picturesque, we have become cleanly, which is considerably more to be
desired.”

“I have never felt the romanticism of the Middle Ages,” remarked the
girl in black. “When I read of the glories of the Crusaders, I can’t
help remembering that a knight wore a single garment for a lifetime, and
hacked his horse to pieces for a whim. Just as I never think of that
chivalrous brute, Richard the Lion-Hearted, that I don’t see him
chopping off the heads of his prisoners.”

“Oh, I don’t think that any of us are sighing for a revival of the
Middle Ages,” returned the journalist. “The worship of the past has for
its devotees people who have known only the present.”

“Which is as it should be,” commented the lawyer. “If man were confined
to the worship of the knowable, all the world would lapse into atheism.”

“Just as the great lovers of humanity were generally hermits,” added the
girl in black. “I had an uncle who used to say that he never really
loved mankind until he went to live in the wilderness.”

“I think we are drifting from the point,” said the alienist. “Was it
not: Can the saving of a human life ever prove to be an immoral act? I
once held that it could.”

“Did you act upon the theory?” asked the lawyer, with rising interest.
“I maintain that no proposition can be said to exist until it is
translated into action. Otherwise it is in an embryonic state merely.”

The alienist laid down his fork and leaned forward. He was a
notable-looking man of some thirty-odd years, who had made a sudden leap
into popularity through several successful cases. He had a nervous,
muscular face, with singularly penetrating eyes and hair of a light
sandy colour. His hands were white and well shaped.

“It was some years ago,” he said, bending a scintillant glance round the
table. “If you will listen—”

There followed a stir of assent, accompanied by a nod from the young
woman on the Captain’s right. “I feel as if it would be a ghost story,”
she declared.

“It is not a story at all,” returned the alienist, lifting his wineglass
and holding it against the light. “It is merely a fact.”

Then he glanced swiftly round the table as if challenging attention.

“As I said,” he began, slowly, “it was some few years ago. Just what
year it was does not matter; but at that time I had completed a course
at Heidelberg, and expected shortly to set out with an exploring party
for South Africa. It turned out afterward that I did not go, but for the
purpose of the present story it is sufficient that I intended to do so,
and had made my preparations accordingly. At Heidelberg I had lived
among a set of German students who were permeated with the metaphysics
of Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, and the rest, and I was pretty well
saturated myself. At that age I was an ardent disciple of pessimism. I
am still a disciple, but my ardour has abated, which is not the fault of
pessimism, but the virtue of middle age—”

“A man is called conservative when he grows less radical,” interrupted
the journalist.

“Or when he grows less in every direction,” added the Englishman,
“except in physical bulk.” The alienist accepted the suggestions with an
inclination, and continued. “One of my most cherished convictions,” he
said, “was to the effect that every man is the sole arbiter of his fate.
As Schopenhauer has put it, _‘that there is nothing to which a man has a
more unassailable title than to his own life and person.’_ Indeed, that
particular sentence had become a kind of motto with our set, and some of
my companions even went so far as to preach the proper ending of life
with the ending of the power of individual usefulness.”

He paused to help himself to salad.

“I was in Scotland at the time, where I had spent a fortnight with my
parents, in a small village on the Kyles of Bute. While there I had
been treating an invalid cousin who had acquired the morphine habit,
and who, under my care, had determined to uproot it. Before leaving I
had secured from her the amount of the drug which she had in her
possession—some thirty grains—done up in a sealed package, and
labelled by a London chemist. As I was in haste, I put it in my bag,
thinking that I would add it to my case of medicines when I reached
Leicester, where I was to spend the night with an old schoolmate. I
took the boat at Tighnabruaich, the small village, found a local train
at Gourock, to reach Glasgow, with one minute in which to catch the
first express to London. I made the change, and secured a first-class
smoking-compartment, which I at first thought to be vacant; but when
the train had started a man came from the dressing-room and took the
seat across from me. At first I paid no heed to him, but upon looking
up once or twice and finding his eyes upon me, I became unpleasantly
conscious of his presence. He was thin almost to emaciation, and yet
there was a suggestion of physical force about him which it was
difficult to account for, since he was both short and slight. His
clothes were shabby, though well made, and his tie had the appearance
of having been tied in haste, or by nervous fingers. There was a trace
of sensuality about his mouth, over which he wore a drooping yellow
moustache tinged with gray, and he was somewhat bald on the crown of
his head, which lent a deceptive hint of intellectuality to his
uncovered forehead. As he crossed his legs, I saw that his boots were
carefully blacked, and that they were long and slender, tapering to a
decided point.”

“I have always held,” interpolated the lawyer, “that to judge a man’s
character you must look at his feet.”

The alienist sipped his claret and took up his words:

“After passing the first stop, I remembered a book at the bottom of my
bag, and unfastening the strap in my search for the book, I laid a
number of small articles on the seat beside me, among them the sealed
package bearing the morphine label and the name of the London chemist.
Having found the book, I turned to replace the articles, when I noticed
that the man across from me was gazing attentively at the labelled
package. For a moment his expression startled me, and I stared back at
him from across my open bag, into which I had dropped the articles.
There was in his eyes a curious mixture of passion and repulsion, and,
beyond it all, the look of a hungry hound when he sees food. Thinking
that I had chanced upon a victim of the opium craving, I closed the bag,
placed it in the net above my head, and opened my book.

“For a while we rode in silence. Nothing was heard except the noise of
the train and the clicking of our bags as they jostled each other in the
receptacle above. I remember these details very vividly, because since
then I have recalled the slightest fact in connection with the incident.
I knew that the man across from me drew a cigar from his case, felt in
his pocket for an instant, and then turned to me for a match. At the
same time I experienced the feeling that the request veiled a larger
purpose, and that there were matches in the pocket into which he had
thrust his fingers.

“But, as I complied with his request, he glanced indifferently out of
the window, and following his gaze, I saw that we were passing a group
of low lying hills sprinkled with stray patches of heather, and that
across the hills a flock of sheep were filing, followed by a peasant
girl in a short skirt. It was the last faint reminder of the Highlands.

“The man across from me leaned out, looking back upon the neutral sky,
the sparse patches of heather, and the flock of sheep.

“‘What a tone the heather gives to a landscape!’ he remarked, and his
voice sounded forced and affected.

“I bowed without replying, and as he turned from the window, and a
draught of cinders blew in, I bent forward to lower the sash. In a
moment he spoke again:

“‘Do you go to London?’

“‘To Leicester,’ I answered, laying the book aside, impelled by a sudden
interest. ‘Why do you ask?’

“He flushed nervously.

“‘I—oh, nothing,’ he answered, and drew away from me.

“Then, as if with swift determination, he reached forward and lifted the
book I had laid on the seat. It was a treatise of Von Hartmann’s in
German.

“‘I had judged that you were a physician,’ he said, ‘a student, perhaps,
from a German university?’

“‘I am.’

“He paused for an instant, and then spoke in absent-minded reiteration,
‘So you don’t go on to London?’

“‘No,’ I returned, impatiently. ‘Can I do anything for you?’

“He handed me the book, regarding me resolutely as he did so.

“‘Are you a sensible man?’

“I bowed.

“‘And a philosopher?’

“‘In amateur fashion.’

“With feverish energy he went on more quickly, ‘You have in your
possession,’ he said, ‘something for which I would give my whole
fortune.’ He laid two half-sovereigns and some odd silver in the palm of
his hand. ‘This is all I possess,’ he continued, ‘but I would give it
gladly.’

“I looked at him curiously.

“‘You mean the morphine?’ I demanded.

“He nodded. ‘I don’t ask you to give it to me, I only ask—’

“I interrupted him. ‘Are you in pain?’

“He laughed softly, and I really believe he felt a tinge of amusement.
‘It is a question of expediency,’ he explained. If you happen to be a
moralist—’ He broke off.

“‘What of it?’ I inquired.

“He settled himself in his corner, resting his head against the
cushions.

“‘You get out at Leicester,’ he said, recklessly. ‘I go on to London,
where Providence, represented by Scotland Yard, is awaiting me.’

“I started. ‘For what?’

“‘They call it murder, I believe,’ he returned; but what they call it
matters very little. I call it divine justice—that also matters very
little. The point is—I shall arrive, they will be there before me. That
is settled. Every station along the road is watched.’

“I glanced out of the window.

“‘But you came from Glasgow,’ I suggested.

“‘Worse luck! I waited in the dressing-room until the train started. I
hoped to have the compartment alone, but—’ He leaned forward and lowered
the window-shade. ‘If you don’t object,’ he said, apologetically; ‘I
find the glare trying. It is a question for a moralist,’ he repeated.
‘Indeed, I may call myself a question for a moralist,’ and he smiled
again with that ugly humour. ‘To begin with the beginning, the question
is bred in the bone and it’s out in the blood.’ He nodded at my look of
surprise. ‘You are an American,’ he continued, ‘so am I. I was born in
Washington some thirty years ago. My father was a politician, whose
honour was held to be unimpeachable—which was a mistake. His name
doesn’t matter, but he became very wealthy through judicious
speculations in votes and other things. My mother has always suffered
from an incipient hysteria, which developed shortly before my birth.’ He
wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and knocked the ashes from his
cigar with a flick of his finger. ‘The motive for this is not far to
seek,’ he said, with a glance at my travelling-bag. He had the coolest
bravado I have ever met. ‘As a child,’ he went on, ‘I gave great
promise. Indeed, we moved to England that I might be educated at Oxford.
My father considered the ecclesiastical atmosphere to be beneficial. But
while at college I got into trouble with a woman, and I left. My father
died, his fortune burst like a bubble, and my mother moved to the
country. I was put into a banking office, but I got into more trouble
with women, this time two of them. One was a variety actress, and I
married her. I didn’t want to do it. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help
it, and I did it. A month later I left her. I changed my name and went
to Belfast where I resolved to become an honest man. It was a tough job,
but I laboured and I succeeded for a time. The variety actress began
looking for me, but I escaped her, and have escaped her so far. That was
eight years ago. And several years after reaching Belfast I met another
woman. She was different. I fell ill of fever in Ireland, and she nursed
me. She was a good woman, with a broad Irish face, strong hands, and
motherly shoulders. I was weak and she was strong, and I fell in love
with her. I tried to tell her about the variety actress, but somehow I
couldn’t, and I married her.’ He shot the stump of his cigar through the
opposite window and lighted another, this time drawing the match from
his pocket. ‘She is an honest woman,’ he said, ‘as honest as the day.
She believes in me. It would kill her to know about the variety actress
and all the others. There is one child, a girl, a freckle-faced mite
just like her mother, and another is coming.’

“‘She knows nothing of this affair?’

“‘Not a blamed thing. She is the kind of woman who is good because she
can’t help herself. She enjoys it. I never did. My mother is different
too. She would die if other people knew of this; my wife would die if
she knew of it herself. Well, I got tired, and I wanted money, so I left
her and went to Dublin. I changed my name and got a clerkship in a
shipping-office. My wife thinks I went to America to get work, and if
she never hears of me she’ll probably think no worse. I did intend going
to America, but somehow I didn’t. I got in with a man who signed
somebody’s name to a cheque and got me to present it. Then we quarrelled
about the money; the man threw the job on me, and the affair came out.
But before they arrested me, I ran him down and shot him. I was ridding
the world of a damned traitor.’

“He raised the shade with a nervous hand; but the sun flashed into his
eyes, and he lowered it.

“‘I suppose I’d hang for it,’ he said. ‘There isn’t much doubt of that.
If I waited, I’d hang for it, but I am not going to wait. I am going to
die.’

“‘And how?’

“‘Before this train reaches London,’ he replied. ‘I am a dead man. There
are two ways. I might say three, except that a pitch from the carriage
might mean only a broken leg. But there is this—’ He drew a vial from
his pocket and held it to the light. It contained an ounce or so of
carbolic acid.

“‘One of the most corrosive of irritants,’ I observed.

“‘And there is—your package.’

“My first impulse was to force the vial from him. He was a slight man,
and I could have overcome him with but little exertion. But the exertion
I did not make. I should as soon have thought, when my rational humour
reasserted itself, of knocking a man down and robbing him of his watch.
The acid was as exclusively his property as the clothes he wore, and
equally his life was his own. Had he declared his intention to hurl
himself from the window, I might not have made way for him, but I should
certainly not have obstructed his passage.

“But the morphine was mine, and that I should assist him was another
matter, so I said:

“‘The package belongs to me.’

“‘And you will not exchange?’

“‘Certainly not.’

“He answered, almost angrily:

“‘Why not be reasonable? You admit that I am in a mess of it?’

“‘Readily.’

“‘You also admit that my life is morally my own?’

“‘Equally.’

“‘That its continuance could in no wise prove to be of benefit to
society?’

“‘I do.’

“‘That for all connected with me it is better that I should die unknown
and under an assumed name?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Then you admit also that the best I can do is to kill myself before
reaching London?’

“‘Perhaps.’

“‘So you will leave me the morphine when you get off at Leicester?’

“‘No.’

“He struck the window-sill impatiently with the palm of his hand.

“‘And why not?’

“I hesitated an instant.

“‘Because, upon the whole, I do not care to be the instrument of your
self-destruction.’

“‘Don’t be a fool!’ he retorted. ‘Speak honestly, and say that because
of a little moral shrinking on your part, you prefer to leave a human
being to a death of agony. I don’t like physical pain. I am like a woman
about it, but it is better than hanging, or life-imprisonment, or any
jury finding.’

“I became exhortatory.

“‘Why not face it like a man and take your chances? Who knows—’

“‘I have had my chances,’ he returned. ‘I have squandered more chances
than most men ever lay eyes on, and I don’t care. If I had the
opportunity, I’d squander them again. It is the only thing chances are
made for.’

“‘What, a scoundrel you are!’ I exclaimed.

“‘Well, I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘there have been worse men. I never
said a harsh word to a woman, and I never hit a man when he was down—’

“I blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to hit you,’ I responded.

“He took no notice.

“‘I like my wife,’ he said. ‘She is a good woman, and I’d do a good deal
to keep her and the children from knowing the truth. Perhaps I’d kill
myself even if I didn’t want to. I don’t know, but I am tired—damned
tired.’

“‘And yet you deserted her.’

“‘I did. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. If I were free to go
back to her to-morrow, unless I was ill and wanted nursing, I’d see that
she had grown shapeless, and that her hands were coarse.’ He stretched
out his own, which were singularly white and delicate. ‘I believe I’d
leave her in a week,’ he said.

“Then with an eager movement he pointed to my bag.

“‘That is the ending of the difficulty,’ he added. ‘Otherwise I swear
that before the train gets to London, I will swallow this stuff and die
like a rat.’

“‘I admit your right to die in any manner you choose; but I don’t see
that it is my place to assist you. It is an ugly job.”

“‘So am I,’ he retorted, grimly. ‘At any rate, if you leave the train
with that package in your bag it will be cowardice—sheer cowardice. And
for the sake of your cowardice you will damn me to this.’ He touched the
vial.

“‘It won’t be pleasant,’ I said, and we were silent.

“I knew that the man had spoken the truth. I was accustomed to lies, and
had learned to detect them. I knew, also, that the world would be well
rid of him and his kind. Why I should preserve him for death upon the
gallows I did not see. The majesty of the law would be in no way ruffled
by his premature departure; and if I could trust that part of his story,
the lives of innocent women and children would, in the other case,
suffer considerably. And, even if I and my unopened bag alighted at
Leicester, I was sure that he would never reach London alive. He was a
desperate man, this I read in his set face, his dazed eyes, his nervous
hands. He was a poor devil, and I was sorry for him. Why, then, should I
contribute, by my refusal to comply with his request, an additional hour
of agony to his existence? Could I, with my pretence of philosophic
freedom, alight at my station, leaving him to swallow the acid and die
like a rat in a cage before the journey was over? I remembered that I
had once seen a guinea-pig die from the effects of carbolic acid, and
the remembrance sickened me.

“As I sat there listening to the noise of the slackening train, which
was nearing Leicester, I thought of a hundred things. I thought of
Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. I thought of the dying guinea-pig. I
thought of the broad-faced Irish wife and the two children.

“Then ‘Leicester’ flashed before me, and the train stopped. I rose,
gathered my coat and rug, and lifted the volume of Von Hartmann from the
seat. The man remained motionless in the corner of the compartment, but
his eyes followed me.

“I stooped, opened my bag, and laid the chemist’s package on the seat.
Then I stepped out, closing the door after me.”

As the speaker finished, he reached forward, selected an almond from the
stand of nuts, fitted it carefully between the crackers, and cracked it
slowly.

The young woman in the white dress started up with a shudder.

“What a horrible story!” she exclaimed; “for it is a story, after all,
and not a fact.”

“A point, rather,” suggested the Englishman; “but is that all?”

“All of the point,” returned the alienist. “The next day I saw in the
_Times_ that a man, supposed to be James Morganson, who was wanted for
murder, was found dead in a first-class smoking-compartment of the
Midland Railway. Coroner’s verdict, ‘Death resulting from an overdose of
opium, taken with suicidal intent.’”

The journalist dropped a lump of sugar in his cup and watched it
attentively.

“I don’t think I could have done it,” he said. “I might have left him
with his carbolic. But I couldn’t have deliberately given him his
death-potion.”

“But as long as he was going to die,” responded the girl in black, “it
was better to let him die painlessly.”

The Englishman smiled. “Can a woman ever consider the ethical side of a
question when the sympathetic one is visible?” he asked.

The alienist cracked another almond. “I was sincere,” he said. “Of that
there is no doubt. I thought I did right. The question is—did I do
right?”

“It would have been wiser,” began the lawyer, argumentatively, “since
you were the stronger, to take the vial from him and leave him to the
care of the law.”

“But the wife and children,” replied the girl in black. “And hanging is
so horrible!”

“So is murder,” responded the lawyer, dryly.

The young woman on the Captain’s right laid her napkin on the table and
rose. “I don’t know what was right,” she said, “but I do know that in
your place I should have felt like a murderer.”

The alienist smiled half cynically. “So I did,” he answered; “but there
is such a thing, my dear young lady, as a conscientious murderer.”



                             THE DIFFERENCE


Outside, in the autumn rain, the leaves were falling.

For twenty years, every autumn since her marriage, Margaret Fleming had
watched the leaves from this window; and always it had seemed to her
that they were a part of her life which she held precious. As they fell
she had known that they carried away something she could never
recover—youth, beauty, pleasure, or only memories that she wanted to
keep. Something gracious, desirable and fleeting; but never until this
afternoon had she felt that the wind was sweeping away the illusion of
happiness by which she lived. Beyond the panes, against which the rain
was beating in gray sheets, she looked out on the naked outlines of the
city: bleak houses, drenched grass in squares, and boughs of trees where
a few brown or yellow leaves were clinging.

On the hearth rug the letter lay where it had fallen a few minutes—or
was it a few hours ago? The flames from the wood fire cast a glow on the
white pages; and she imagined that the ugly words leaped out to sting
her like scorpions as she moved by them. Not for worlds, she told
herself, would she stoop and touch them again. Yet what need had she to
touch them when each slanting black line was etched in her memory with
acid? Never, though she lived a hundred years, could she forget the way
the letters fell on the white paper!

Once, twice, three times, she walked from window to door and back again
from door to window. The wood fire burned cheerfully with a whispering
sound. As the lights and shadows stirred over the familiar objects she
had once loved, her gaze followed them hungrily. She had called this
upstairs library George’s room, and she realized now that every piece of
furniture, every book it contained, had been chosen to please him. He
liked the golden brown of the walls, the warm colours in the Persian
rugs, the soft depth of the cushioned chairs. He liked, too, the
flamboyant red lilies beneath the little Chippendale mirror.

After twenty years of happiness, of comradeship, of mutual dependence,
after all that marriage could mean to two equal spirits, was there
nothing left except ashes? Could twenty years of happiness be destroyed
in an afternoon, in an hour? Stopping abruptly, with a jerk which ran
like a spasm through her slender figure, she gazed with hard searching
eyes over the red lilies into the mirror. The grave beauty of her face,
a beauty less of flesh than of spirit, floated there in the shadows like
a flower in a pond.

“I am younger than he is by a year,” she thought, “and yet he can begin
over again to love, while a new love for me would be desecration.”

There was the sound of his step on the stair. An instant later his hand
fell on the door, and he entered the room.

Stooping swiftly, she picked up the letter from the rug and hid it in
her bosom. Then turning toward him, she received his kiss with a smile.
“I didn’t wait lunch for you,” she said.

“I got it at the club.” After kissing her cheek, he moved to the fire
and stood warming his hands. “Beastly day. No chance of golf, so I’ve
arranged to see that man from Washington. You won’t get out, I suppose?”

She shook her head. “No, I sha’n’t get out.”

Did he know, she wondered, that this woman had written to her? Did he
suspect that the letter lay now in her bosom? He had brought the smell
of rain, the taste of dampness, with him into the room; and this air of
the outer world enveloped him while he stood there, genial, robust,
superbly vital, clothed in his sanguine temperament as in the healthy
red and white of his flesh. Still boyish at forty-five, he had that look
of perennial innocence which some men carry untarnished through the most
enlightening experiences. Even his moustache and his sharply jutting
chin could not disguise the softness that hovered always about his
mouth, where she noticed now, with her piercing scrutiny, the muscles
were growing lax. Strange that she had never seen this until she
discovered that George loved another woman! The thought dashed into her
mind that she knew him in reality no better than if she had lived with a
stranger for twenty years. Yet, until a few hours ago, she would have
said, had any one asked her, that their marriage was as perfect as any
mating between a man and a woman could be in this imperfect world.

“You’re wise. The wind’s still in the east, and there is no chance, I’m
afraid, of a change.” He hesitated an instant, stared approvingly at the
red lilies, and remarked abruptly, “Nice colour.”

“You always liked red.” Her mouth lost its softness. “And I was pale
even as a girl.”

His genial gaze swept her face. “Oh, well, there’s red and red, you
know. Some cheeks look best pale.”

Without replying to his words, she sat looking up at him while her
thoughts, escaping her control, flew from the warm room out into the
rough autumn weather. It was as if she felt the beating of the rain in
her soul, as if she were torn from her security and whirled downward and
onward in the violence of the storm. On the surface of her life nothing
had changed. The fire still burned; the lights and shadows still
flickered over the Persian rugs; her husband still stood there, looking
down on her through the cloudless blue of his eyes. But the real
Margaret, the vital part of her, was hidden far away in that deep place
where the seeds of mysterious impulses and formless desires lie buried.
She knew that there were secrets within herself which she had never
acknowledged in her own thoughts; that there were unexpressed longings
which had never taken shape even in her imagination. Somewhere beneath
the civilization of the ages there was the skeleton of the savage.

The letter in her bosom scorched her as if it were fire. “That was why
you used to call me magnolia blossom,” she said in a colourless voice,
and knew it was only the superficial self that was speaking.

His face softened; yet so perfectly had the note of sentiment come to be
understood rather than expressed in their lives that she could feel his
embarrassment. The glow lingered in his eyes, but he answered only,
“Yes, you were always like that.”

An irrepressible laugh broke from her. Oh, the irony, the bitterness!
“Perhaps you like them pale!” she tossed back mockingly, and wondered if
this Rose Morrison who had written to her was coloured like her name?

He looked puzzled but solicitous. “I’m afraid I must be off. If you are
not tired, could you manage to go over these galleys this afternoon? I’d
like to read the last chapter aloud to you after the corrections are
made.” He had written a book on the history of law; and while he drew
the roll of proof sheets from his pocket, she remembered, with a pang as
sharp as the stab of a knife, all the work of last summer when they had
gathered material together. He needed her for his work, she realized, if
not for his pleasure. She stood, as she had always done, for the serious
things of his life. This book could not have been written without her.
Even his success in his profession had been the result of her efforts as
well as his own.

“I’m never too tired for that,” she responded, and though she smiled up
at him, it was a smile that hurt her with its irony.

“Well, my time’s up,” he said. “By the way. I’ll need my heavier golf
things if it is fine to-morrow.” To-morrow was Sunday, and he played
golf with a group of men at the Country Club every Sunday morning.

“They are in the cedar closet. I’ll get them out.”

“The medium ones, you know. That English tweed.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll have them ready,” Did Rose Morrison play golf, she
wondered.

“I’ll try to get back early to dinner. There was a button loose on the
waistcoat I wore last evening. I forgot to mention it this morning.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I left it to the servants, but I’ll look after it
myself.” Again this perverse humour seized her. Had he ever asked Rose
Morrison to sew on a button?

At the door he turned back. “And I forgot to ask you this morning to
order flowers for Morton’s funeral. It is to be Monday.”

The expression on her face felt as stiff as a wax mask, and though she
struggled to relax her muscles, they persisted in that smile of inane
cheerfulness. “I’ll order them at once, before I begin the galleys,” she
answered.

Rising from the couch on which she had thrown herself at his entrance,
she began again her restless pacing from door to window. The library was
quiet except for the whispering flames. Outside in the rain the leaves
were falling thickly, driven hither and thither by the wind which rocked
the dappled boughs of the sycamores. In the gloom of the room the red
lilies blazed.

The terror, which had clutched her like a living thing, had its fangs in
her heart. Terror of loss, of futility. Terror of the past because it
tortured her. Terror of the future because it might be empty even of
torture. “He is mine, and I will never give him up,” she thought wildly.
“I will fight to the end for what is mine.”

There was a sound at the door and Winters, the butler, entered. “Mrs.
Chambers, Madam. She was quite sure you would be at home.”

“Yes, I am at home.” She was always at home, even in illness, to Dorothy
Chambers. Though they were so different in temperament, they had been
friends from girlhood; and much of the gaiety of Margaret’s life had
been supplied by Dorothy. Now, as her friend entered, she held out her
arms. “You come whenever it rains, dear,” she said. “It is so good of
you.” Yet her welcome was hollow, and at the very instant when she
returned her friend’s kiss she was wishing that she could send her away.
That was one of the worst things about suffering; it made one
indifferent and insincere.

Dorothy drew off her gloves, unfastened her furs, and after raising her
veil over the tip of her small inquisitive nose, held out her hand with
a beseeching gesture.

“I’ve come straight from a committee luncheon. Give me a cigarette.”

Reaching for the Florentine box on the desk, Margaret handed it to her.
A minute later, while the thin blue flame shot up between them, she
asked herself if Dorothy could look into her face and not see the
difference?

Small, plain, vivacious, with hair of ashen gold, thin intelligent
features, and a smile of mocking brilliance, Dorothy was the kind of
woman whom men admire without loving and women love without admiring. As
a girl she had been a social success without possessing a single one of
the qualities upon which social success is supposed to depend.

Sinking back in her chair, she blew several rings of smoke from her lips
and watched them float slowly upward.

“We have decided to give a bridge party. There’s simply no other way to
raise money. Will you take a table?”

Margaret nodded. “Of course.” Suffering outside of herself made no
difference to her. Her throbbing wound was the only reality.

“Janet is going to lend us her house.” A new note had come into
Dorothy’s voice. “I haven’t seen her since last spring. She had on a new
hat, and was looking awfully well. You know Herbert has come back.”

Margaret started. At last her wandering attention was fixed on her
visitor. “Herbert? And she let him?” There was deep disgust in her tone.

Dorothy paused to inhale placidly before she answered. “Well, what else
could she do? He tried to make her get a divorce, and she wouldn’t.”

A flush stained Margaret’s delicate features. “I never understood why
she didn’t. He made no secret of what he wanted. He showed her plainly
that he loved the other woman.”

Dorothy’s only reply was a shrug; but after a moment, in which she
smoked with a luxurious air, she commented briefly, “But man’s love
isn’t one of the eternal verities.”

“Well, indifference is, and he proved that he was indifferent to Janet.
Yet she has let him come back to her. I can’t see what she is to get out
of it.”

Dorothy laughed cynically. “Oh, she enjoys immensely the attitude of
forgiveness, and at last he has permitted her to forgive him. There is a
spiritual vanity as well as a physical one, you know, and Janet’s
weakness is spiritual.”

“But to live with a man who doesn’t love her? To remember every minute
of the day and night that it is another woman he loves?”

“And every time that she remembers it she has the luxury of forgiving
again.” Keenness flickered like a blade in Dorothy’s gray eyes. “You are
very lovely, Margaret,” she said abruptly. “The years seem only to leave
you rarer and finer, but you know nothing about life.”

A smile quivered and died on Margaret’s lips. “I might retort that you
know nothing about love.”

With an impatient birdlike gesture Dorothy tossed her burned-out
cigarette into the fire. “Whose love?” she inquired as she opened the
Florentine box, “Herbert’s or yours?”

“It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

By the flame of the match she had struck Dorothy’s expression appeared
almost malign. “There, my dear, is where you are wrong,” she replied.
“When a man and a woman talk of love they speak two different languages.
They can never understand each other because women love with their
imagination and men with their senses. To you love is a thing in itself,
a kind of abstract power like religion; to Herbert it is simply the way
he feels.”

“But if he loves the other woman, he doesn’t love Janet; and yet he
wants to return to her.” Leaning back in her chair, Dorothy surveyed her
with a look which was at once sympathetic and mocking. Her gaze swept
the pure grave features; the shining dusk of the hair; the narrow nose
with its slight arch in the middle; the straight red lips with their
resolute pressure; the skin so like a fading rose-leaf. Yes, there was
beauty in Margaret’s face if one were only artist or saint enough to
perceive it.

“There is so much more in marriage than either love or indifference,”
she remarked casually. “There is, for instance, comfort.”

“Comfort?” repeated Margaret scornfully. She rose, in her clinging
draperies of chiff on, to place a fresh log on the fire. “If he really
loves the other woman, Janet ought to give him up,” she said.

At this Dorothy turned on her. “Would you, if it were George?” she
demanded.

For an instant, while she stood there in front of the fire, it seemed to
Margaret that the room whirled before her gaze like the changing colours
in a kaleidoscope. Then a gray cloud fell over the brightness, and out
of this cloud there emerged only the blaze of the red lilies. A pain
struck her in the breast, and she remembered the letter she had hidden
there.

“Yes,” she answered presently. “I should do it if it were George.”

A minute afterward she became conscious that while she spoke, a miracle
occurred within her soul.

The tumult of sorrow, of anger, of bitterness, of despair, was drifting
farther and farther away. Even the terror, which was worse than any
tumult, had vanished. In that instant of renunciation she had reached
some spiritual haven. What she had found, she understood presently, was
the knowledge that there is no support so strong as the strength that
enables one to stand alone.

“I should do it if it were George,” she said again, very slowly.

“Well, I think you would be very foolish.” Dorothy had risen and was
lowering her veil. “For when George ceases to be desirable for
sentimental reasons, he will still have his value as a good provider.”
Her mocking laugh grated on Margaret’s ears. “Now, I must run away. I
only looked in for an instant. I’ve a tea on hand, and I must go home
and dress.”

When she had gone, Margaret stood for a minute, thinking deeply. For a
minute only, but in that space of time her decision was made. Crossing
to the desk, she telephoned for the flowers. Then she left the library
and went into the cedar closet at the end of the hall. When she had
found the golf clothes George wanted, she looked over them carefully and
hung them in his dressing room. Her next task was to lay out his dinner
clothes and to sew the loose button on the waistcoat he had worn last
evening. She did these things deliberately, automatically, repeating as
if it were a forumla, “I must forget nothing”; and when at last she had
finished, she stood upright, with a sigh of relief, as if a burden had
rolled from her shoulders. Now that she had attended to the details of
existence, she would have time for the problem of living.

Slipping out of her gray dress, she changed into a walking suit of blue
homespun. Then, searching among the shoes in her closet, she selected a
pair of heavy boots she had worn in Maine last summer. As she put on a
close little hat and tied a veil of blue chiffon over her face, she
reflected, with bitter mirth, that only in novels could one hide one’s
identity behind a veil.

In the hall downstairs she met Winters, who stared at her discreetly but
disapprovingly.

“Shall I order the car, madam?”

She shook her head, reading his thoughts as plainly as if he had uttered
them. “No, it has stopped raining. I want to walk.”

The door closed sharply on her life of happiness, and she passed out
into the rain-soaked world where the mist caught her like damp smoke. So
this was what it meant to be deserted, to be alone on the earth! The
smell of rain, the smell that George had brought with him into the warm
room upstairs, oppressed her as if it were the odour of melancholy.

As the chill pierced her coat, she drew her furs closely about her neck,
and walked briskly in the direction of the street car. The address on
the letter she carried was burned into her memory not in numbers, but in
the thought that it was a villa George owned in an unfashionable suburb
named Locust Park. Though she had never been there, she knew that, with
the uncertain trolley service she must expect, it would take at least
two hours to make the trip and return. Half an hour for Rose Morrison;
and even then it would be night, and Winters at least would be anxious,
before she reached home. Well, that was the best she could do.

The street car came, and she got in and found a seat behind a man who
had been shooting and carried a string of partridges. All the other
seats were filled with the usual afternoon crowd for the suburbs—women
holding bundles or baskets and workmen returning from the factories. A
sense of isolation like spiritual darkness descended upon her; and she
closed her eyes and tried to bring back the serenity she had felt in the
thought of relinquishment. But she could remember only a phrase of
Dorothy’s which floated like a wisp of thistledown through her thoughts,
“Spiritual vanity. With some women it is stronger than physical vanity.”
Was that her weakness, vanity, not of the body, but of the spirit?

Thoughts blew in and out of her mind like dead leaves, now whirling, now
drifting, now stirring faintly in her consciousness with a moaning
sound. Twenty years. Nothing but that. Love and nothing else in her
whole life.... The summer of their engagement. A rose garden in bloom.
The way he looked. The smell of roses. Or was it only the smell of dead
leaves rotting to earth?... All the long, long years of their marriage.
Little things that one never forgot. The way he laughed. The way he
smiled. The look of his hair when it was damp on his forehead. The smell
of cigars in his clothes. The three lumps of sugar in his coffee. The
sleepy look in his face when he stood ready to put out the lights while
she went up the stairs. Oh, the little things that tore at one’s heart!

The street car stopped with a jerk, and she got out and walked through
the drenched grass in the direction one of the women had pointed out to
her.

“The Laurels? That low yellow house at the end of this lane, farther on
where the piles of dead leaves are. You can’t see the house now, the
lane turns, but it’s just a stone’s throw farther on.”

Thanking her, Margaret walked on steadily toward the turn in the lane.
Outside of the city the wind blew stronger, and the coloured leaves,
bronze, yellow, crimson, lay in a thick carpet over the muddy road. In
the west a thin line of gold shone beneath a range of heavy,
smoke-coloured clouds. From the trees rain still dripped slowly; and
between the road and the line of gold in the west there stretched the
desolate autumn landscape.

“Oh, the little things!” her heart cried in despair. “The little things
that make happiness!”

Entering the sagging gate of The Laurels, she passed among mounds of
sodden leaves which reminded her of graves, and followed the neglected
walk between rows of leafless shrubs which must have looked gay in
summer. The house was one of many cheap suburban villas (George had
bought it, she remembered, at an auction) and she surmised that, until
this newest tenant came, it must have stood long unoccupied. The whole
place wore, she reflected as she rang the loosened bell, a furtive and
insecure appearance.

After the third ring the door was hurriedly opened by a dishevelled
maid, who replied that her mistress was not at home.

“Then I shall wait,” said Margaret firmly. “Tell your mistress, when she
comes in, that Mrs. Fleming is waiting to see her.” With a step as
resolute as her words, she entered the house and crossed the hall to the
living room where a bright coal fire was burning.

The room was empty, but a canary in a gilded cage at the window broke
into song as she entered. On a table stood a tray containing the remains
of tea; and beside it there was a half-burned cigarette in a bronze
Turkish bowl. A book—she saw instantly that it was a volume of the
newest plays—lay face downward beneath a pair of eyeglasses, and a rug,
which had fallen from the couch, was in a crumpled pile on the floor.

“So she isn’t out,” Margaret reflected; and turning at a sound, she
confronted Rose Morrison.

For an instant it seemed to the older woman that beauty like a lamp
blinded her eyes. Then, as the cloud passed, she realized that it was
only a blaze, that it was the loveliness of dead leaves when they are
burning.

“So you came?” said Rose Morrison, while she gazed at her with the clear
and competent eyes of youth. Her voice, though it was low and clear, had
no softness; it rang like a bell. Yes, she had youth, she had her
flamboyant loveliness; but stronger than youth and loveliness, it seemed
to Margaret, surveying her over the reserves and discriminations of the
centuries, was the security of one who had never doubted her own
judgment. Her power lay where power usually lies in an infallible
self-esteem.

“I came to talk it over with you,” began Margaret quietly; and though
she tried to make her voice insolent, the deep instinct of good manners
was greater than her effort. “You tell me that my husband loves you.”

The glow, the flame, in Rose Morrison’s face made Margaret think again
of leaves burning. There was no embarrassment, there was no evasion
even, in the girl’s look. Candid and unashamed, she appeared to glory in
this infatuation, which Margaret regarded as worse than sinful, since it
was vulgar.

“Oh, I am so glad that you did,” Rose Morrison’s sincerity was
disarming. “I hated to hurt you. You can never know what it cost me to
write that letter; but I felt that I owed it to you to tell you the
truth. I believe that we always owe people the truth.”

“And did George feel this way also?”

“George?” The flame mounted until it enveloped her. “Oh, he doesn’t
know. I tried to spare him. He would rather do anything than hurt you,
and I thought it would be so much better if we could talk it over and
find a solution just between ourselves. I knew if you cared for George,
you would feel as I do about sparing him.”

About sparing him! As if she had done anything for the last twenty
years, Margaret reflected, except think out new and different ways of
sparing George!

“I don’t know,” she answered, as she sat down in obedience to the
other’s persuasive gesture. “I shall have to think a minute. You see
this has been—well, rather—sudden.”

“I know, I know.” The girl looked as if she did. “May I give you a cup
of tea? You must be chilled.”

“No, thank you. I am quite comfortable.”

“Not even a cigarette? Oh, I wonder what you Victorian women did for a
solace when you weren’t allowed even a cigarette!”

You Victorian women! In spite of her tragic mood, a smile hovered on
Margaret’s lips. So that was how this girl classified her. Yet Rose
Morrison had fallen in love with a Victorian man.

“Then I may?” said the younger woman with her full-throated laugh. From
her bright red hair, which was brushed straight back from her forehead,
to her splendid figure, where her hips swung free like a boy’s, she was
a picture of barbaric beauty. There was a glittering hardness about her,
as if she had been washed in some indestructible glaze; but it was the
glaze of youth, not of experience. She reminded Margaret of a gilded
statue she had seen once in a museum; and the girl’s eyes, like the eyes
of the statue, were gleaming, remote and impassive—eyes that had never
looked on reality. The dress she wore was made of some strange “art
cloth,” dyed in brilliant hues, fashioned like a kimono, and girdled at
the hips with what Margaret mistook for a queer piece of rope. Nothing,
not even her crude and confident youth, revealed Rose Morrison to her
visitor so completely as this end of rope.

“You are an artist?” she asked, for she was sure of her ground. Only an
artist, she decided, could be at once so arrogant with destiny and so
ignorant of life.

“How did you know? Has George spoken of me?”

Margaret shook her head. “Oh, I knew without any one’s telling me.”

“I have a studio in Greenwich Village, but George and I met last summer
at Ogunquit. I go there every summer to paint.”

“I didn’t know.” How easily, how possessively, this other woman spoke
her husband’s name.

“It began at once.” To Margaret, with her inherited delicacy and
reticence, there was something repellent in this barbaric simplicity of
emotion.

“But you must have known that he was married,” she observed coldly.

“Yes, I knew, but I could see, of course, that you did not understand
him.”

“And you think that you do?” If it were not tragic, how amusing it would
be to think of her simple George as a problem!

“Oh, I realize that it appears very sudden to you; but in the emotions
time counts for so little. Just living with a person for twenty years
doesn’t enable one to understand him, do you think?”

“I suppose not. But do you really imagine,” she asked in what struck her
as a singularly impersonal tone for so intimate a question, “that George
is complex?”

The flame, which was revealed now as the illumination of some secret
happiness, flooded Rose Morrison’s features. As she leaned forward, with
clasped hands, Margaret noticed that the girl was careless about those
feminine details by which George declared so often that he judged a
woman. Her hair was carelessly arranged; her finger nails needed
attention; and beneath the kimonolike garment, a frayed place showed at
the back of her stocking. Even her red morocco slippers were run down at
the heels; and it seemed to Margaret that this physical negligence had
extended to the girl’s habit of thought.

“He is so big, so strong and silent, that it would take an artist to
understand him,” answered Rose Morrison passionately. Was this really,
Margaret wondered, the way George appeared to the romantic vision?

“Yes, he is not a great talker,” she admitted. “Perhaps if he talked
more, you might find him less difficult.” Then before the other could
reply, she inquired sharply, “Did George tell you that he was
misunderstood?”

“How you misjudge him!” The girl had flown to his defense; and though
Margaret had been, as she would have said “a devoted wife,” she felt
that all this vehemence was wasted. After all, George, with his easy,
prosaic temperament, was only made uncomfortable by vehemence. “He never
speaks of you except in the most beautiful way,” Rose Morrison was
insisting “He realizes perfectly what you have been to him, and he would
rather suffer in silence all his life than make you unhappy.”

“Then what is all this about?” Though she felt that it was unfair,
Margaret could not help putting the question.

Actually there were tears in Rose Morrison’s eyes. “I could not bear to
see his life ruined,” she answered. “I hated to write to you; but how
else could I make you realize that you were standing in the way of his
happiness? If it were just myself, I could have borne it in silence. I
would never have hurt you just for my own sake; but, the subterfuge, the
dishonesty, is spoiling his life. He does not say so, but, oh, I see it
every day because I love him!” As she bent over, the firelight caught
her hair, and it blazed out triumphantly like the red lilies in
Margaret’s library.

“What is it that you want me to do?” asked Margaret in her dispassionate
voice.

“I felt that we owed you the truth,” responded the girl, “and I hoped
that you would take what I wrote you in the right spirit.”

“You are sure that my husband loves you?”

“Shall I show you his letters?” The girl smiled as she answered, and her
full red lips reminded Margaret suddenly of raw flesh. Was raw flesh,
after all, what men wanted?

“No!” The single word was spoken indignantly.

“I thought perhaps they would make you see what it means,” explained
Rose Morrison simply. “Oh, I wish I could do this without causing you
pain!”

“Pain doesn’t matter. I can stand pain.”

“Well, I’m glad you aren’t resentful. After all, why should we be
enemies? George’s happiness means more than anything else to us both.”

“And you are sure you know best what is for George’s happiness?”

“I know that subterfuge and lies and dishonesty cannot bring happiness.”
Rose Morrison flung out her arms with a superb gesture. “Oh, I realize
that it is a big thing, a great thing, I am asking of you. But in your
place, if I stood in his way, I should so gladly sacrifice myself for
his sake I should give him his freedom. I should acknowledge his right
to happiness, to self-development.”

A bitter laugh broke from Margaret’s lips. What a jumble of sounds these
catchwords of the new freedom made! What was this self-development which
could develop only through the sacrifice of others? How would these
immature theories survive the compromises and concessions and
adjustments which made marriage permanent?

“I cannot feel that our marriage has interfered with his development,”
she rejoined presently.

“You may be right,” Rose Morrison conceded the point. “But to-day he
needs new inspiration, new opportunities. He needs the companionship of
a modern mind.”

“Yes, he has kept young at my cost,” thought the older woman. “I have
helped by a thousand little sacrifices, by a thousand little cares and
worries, to preserve this unnatural youth which is destroying me. I have
taken over the burden of details in order that he might be free for the
larger interests of life. If he is young to-day, it is at the cost of my
youth.”

For the second time that day, as she sat there in silence, with her eyes
on the blooming face of Rose Morrison, a wave of peace, the peace of one
who has been shipwrecked and then swept far off into some serene haven,
enveloped her. Something to hold by, that at least she had found. The
law of sacrifice, the ideal of self-surrender, which she had learned in
the past. For twenty years she had given freely, abundantly, of her
best; and to-day she could still prove to him that she was not beggared.
She could still give the supreme gift of her happiness. “How he must
love you!” she exclaimed. “How he must love you to have hurt me so much
for your sake! Nothing but a great love could make him so cruel.”

“He does love me,” answered Rose Morrison, and her voice was like the
song of a bird.

“He must.” Margaret’s eyes were burning, but no tears came. Her lips
felt cracked with the effort she made to keep them from trembling. “I
think if he had done this thing with any other motive than a great love,
I should hate him until I died.” Then she rose and held out her hand. “I
shall not stand in your way,” she added.

Joy flashed into the girl’s eyes. “You are very noble,” she answered. “I
am sorry if I have hurt you. I am sorry, too, that I called you
old-fashioned.”

Margaret laughed. “Oh, I am old-fashioned. I am so old-fashioned that I
should have died rather than ruin the happiness of another woman.” The
joy faded from Rose Morrison’s face. “It was not I,” she answered. “It
was life. We cannot stand in the way of life.”

“Life to-day, God yesterday, what does it matter? It is a generation
that has grasped everything except personal responsibility.” Oh, if one
could only keep the humour! A thought struck her, and she asked
abruptly, “When your turn comes, if it ever does, will you give way as I
do?”

“That will be understood. We shall not hold each other back.”

“But you are young. You will tire first. Then he must give way?” Why, in
twenty years George would be sixty-five and Rose Morrison still a young
woman!

Calm, resolute, uncompromising. Rose Morrison held open the door.
“Whatever happens, he would never wish to hold me back.”

Then Margaret passed out, the door closed behind her, and she stood
breathing deep draughts of the chill, invigorating air. Well, that was
over.

The lawn, with its grave-like mounds of leaves, looked as mournful as a
cemetery. Beyond the bare shrubs the road glimmered; the wind still blew
in gusts, now rising, now dying away with a plaintive sound; in the west
the thread of gold had faded to a pale greenish light. Veiled in the
monotonous fall of the leaves, it seemed to Margaret that the desolate
evening awaited her.

“How he must love her,” she thought, not resentfully, but with tragic
resignation. “How he must love her to have sacrificed me as he has
done.”

This idea, she found as she walked on presently in the direction of the
street car, had taken complete possession of her point of view. Through
its crystal lucidity she was able to attain some sympathy with her
husband’s suffering. What agony of mind he must have endured in these
past months, these months when they had worked so quietly side by side
on his book! What days of gnawing remorse! What nights of devastating
anguish! How this newer love must have rent his heart asunder before he
could stoop to the baseness of such a betrayal! Tears, which had not
come for her own pain, stung her eyelids. She knew that he must have
fought it hour by hour, day by day, night by night. Conventional as he
was, how violent this emotion must have been to have conquered him so
completely. “Terrible as an army with banners,” she repeated softly,
while a pang of jealousy shot through her heart. Was there in George,
she asked now, profounder depths of feeling than she had ever reached;
was there some secret garden of romance where she had never entered? Was
George larger, wilder, more adventurous in imagination, than she had
dreamed? Had the perfect lover lain hidden in his nature, awaiting only
the call of youth?

The street car returned almost empty; and she found restfulness in the
monotonous jolting, as if it were swinging her into some world beyond
space and time, where mental pain yielded to the sense of physical
discomfort. After the agony of mind, the aching of body was strangely
soothing.

Here and there, the lights of a house flashed among the trees, and she
thought, with an impersonal interest, of the neglected villa, surrounded
by mounds of rotting leaves, where that girl waited alone for happiness.
Other standards. This was how the newer generation appeared to
Margaret—other standards, other morals. Facing life stripped bare of
every safeguard, of every restraining tradition, with only the courage
of ignorance, of defiant inexperience, to protect one. That girl was not
wilfully cruel. She was simply greedy for emotion; she was gasping at
the pretense of happiness like all the rest of her undisciplined
generation. She was caught by life because she had never learned to give
up, to do without, to stand alone.

Her corner had come, and she stepped with a sensation of relief on the
wet pavement. The rain was dripping steadily in a monotonous drizzle.
While she walked the few blocks to her door, she forced herself by an
effort of will to go on, step by step, not to drop down in the street
and lose consciousness.

The tinkle of the bell and the sight of Winters’s face restored her to
her senses.

“Shall I bring you tea, madam?”

“No, it is too late.”

Going upstairs to her bedroom, she took off her wet clothes and slipped
into her prettiest tea gown, a trailing thing of blue satin and chiffon.
While she ran the comb through her damp hair and touched her pale lips
with colour, she reflected that even renunciation was easier when one
looked desirable. “But it is like painting the cheeks of the dead,” she
thought, as she turned away from the mirror and walked with a dragging
step to the library. Never, she realized suddenly, had she loved George
so much as in this hour when she had discovered him only to lose him.

As she entered, George hurried to meet her with an anxious air. “I
didn’t hear you come in, Margaret. I have been very uneasy. Has anything
happened?”

By artificial light he looked younger even than he had seemed in the
afternoon; and this boyishness of aspect struck her as strangely
pathetic. It was all a part, she told herself, of that fulfilment which
had come too late, of that perilous second blooming, not of youth, but
of Indian Summer. The longing to spare him, to save him from the
suffering she had endured, pervaded her heart.

“Yes, something has happened,” she answered gently. “I have been to see
Rose Morrison.”

As she spoke the name, she turned away from him, and walking with
unsteady steps across the room, stood looking down into the fire. The
knowledge of all that she must see when she turned, of the humiliation,
the anguish, the remorse in his eyes, oppressed her heart with a passion
of shame and pity. How could she turn and look on his wounded soul which
she had stripped bare?

“Rose Morrison?” he repeated in an expressionless voice. “What do you
know of Rose Morrison?”

At his question she turned quickly, and faced not anguish, not
humiliation, but emptiness. There was nothing in his look except the
blankness of complete surprise. For an instant the shock made her dizzy;
and in the midst of the dizziness there flashed through her mind the
memory of an evening in her childhood, when she had run bravely into a
dark room where they told her an ogre was hiding, and had found that it
was empty.

“She wrote to me.” Her legs gave way as she replied, and, sinking into
the nearest chair, she sat gazing up at him with an immobile face.

A frown gathered his eyebrows, and a purplish flush (he flushed so
easily of late) mounted slowly to the smooth line of his hair. She
watched the quiver that ran through his under lip (strange that she had
not noticed how it had thickened) while his teeth pressed it sharply.
Everything about him was acutely vivid to her, as if she were looking at
him closely for the first time. She saw the furrow between his eyebrows,
the bloodshot stain on one eyeball, the folds of flesh beneath his
jutting chin, the crease in his black tie, the place where his shirt
gave a little because it had grown too tight—all these insignificant
details would exist indelibly in her brain.

“She wrote to you?” His voice sounded strained and husky, and he coughed
abruptly as if he were trying to hide his embarrassment. “What the
devil! But you don’t know her.”

“I saw her this afternoon. She told me everything.”

“Everything?” Never had she imagined that he could appear so helpless,
so lacking in the support of any conventional theory. A hysterical laugh
broke from her, a laugh as utterly beyond her control as a spasm, and at
the sound he flushed as if she had struck him. While she sat there she
realized that she had no part or place in the scene before her. Never
could she speak the words that she longed to utter. Never could she make
him understand the real self behind the marionette at which he was
looking. She longed with all her heart to say: “There were possibilities
in me that you never suspected. I also am capable of a great love. In my
heart I also am a creature of romance, of adventure. If you had only
known it, you might have found in marriage all that you have sought
elsewhere....” This was what she longed to cry out, but instead she said
merely,

“She told me of your love. She asked me to give you up.”

“She asked you to give me up?” His mouth fell open as he finished, and
while he stared at her he forgot to shut it. It occurred to her that he
had lost the power of inventing a phrase, that he could only echo the
ones she had spoken. How like a foolish boy he looked as he stood there,
in front of the sinking fire, trying to hide behind that hollow echo!

“She said that I stood in your way.” The phrase sounded so grotesque as
she uttered it that she found herself laughing again. She had not wished
to speak these ugly things. Her heart was filled with noble words, with
beautiful sentiments, but she could not make her lips pronounce them in
spite of all the efforts she made. And she recalled suddenly the
princess in the fairy tale who, when she opened her mouth, found that
toads and lizards escaped from it instead of pearls and rubies.

At first he did not reply, and it seemed to her that only mechanical
force could jerk his jaw back into place and close the eyelids over his
vacant blue eyes. When at last he made a sound it was only the empty
echo again, “stood in my way!”

“She is desperately in earnest.” Justice wrung this admission from her.
“She feels that this subterfuge is unfair to us all. Your happiness, she
thinks, is what we should consider first, and she is convinced that I
should be sacrificed to your future. She was perfectly frank. She
suppressed nothing.”

For the first time George Fleming uttered an original sound. “O Lord!”
he exclaimed devoutly.

“I told her that I did not wish to stand in your way,” resumed Margaret,
as if the exclamation had not interrupted the flow of her thoughts. “I
told her I would give you up.”

Suddenly, without warning, he exploded. “What, in the name of heaven,
has it got to do with you?” he demanded.

“To do with me?” It was her turn to echo. “But isn’t that girl—” she
corrected herself painfully—“isn’t she living in your house at this
minute?”

He cast about helplessly for an argument. When at last he discovered
one, he advanced it with a sheepish air, as if he recognized its
weakness. “Well, nobody else would take it, would they?”

“She says that you love her.”

He shifted his ground nervously. “I can’t help what she says, can I?”

“She offered to show me your letters.”

“Compliments, nothing more.”

“But you must love her, or you couldn’t—you wouldn’t—” A burning flush
scorched Margaret’s body.

“I never said that I....” Even with her he had always treated the word
love as if it were a dangerous explosive, and he avoided touching it
now, “that I cared for her in that way.”

“Then you do in another way?”

He glanced about like a trapped animal. “I am not a fool, am I? Why, I
am old enough to be her father! Besides, I am not the only one anyway.
She was living with a man when I met her, and he wasn’t the first. She
isn’t bad, you know. It’s a kind of philosophy with her. She calls it
self....”

“I know.” Margaret cut the phrase short. “I have heard what she calls
it.” So it was all wasted! Nothing that she could do could lift the
situation above the level of the commonplace, the merely vulgar. She was
defrauded not only of happiness, but even of the opportunity to be
generous. Her sacrifice was as futile as that girl’s passion. “But she
is in love with you now,” she said.

“I suppose she is.” His tone had grown stubborn. “But how long would it
last? In six months she would be leaving me for somebody else. Of
course, I won’t see her again,” he added, with the manner of one who is
conceding a reasonable point. Then, after a pause in which she made no
response, his stubbornness changed into resentment. “Anybody would think
that you are angry because I am not in love with her!” he exclaimed.
“Anybody would think—but I don’t understand women!”

“Then you will not—you do not mean to leave me?” she asked; and her
manner was as impersonal, she was aware, as if Winters had just given
her notice.

“Leave you?” He glanced appreciatively round the room. “Where on earth
could I go?”

For an instant Margaret looked at him in silence. Then she insisted
coldly, “To her, perhaps. She thinks that you are in love with her.”

“Well, I suppose I’ve been a fool,” he confessed, after a struggle, “but
you are making too much of it.”

Yes, she was making too much of it; she realized this more poignantly
than he would ever be able to do. She felt like an actress who has
endowed a comic part with the gesture of high tragedy. It was not, she
saw clearly now, that she had misunderstood George, but that she had
overplayed life.

“We met last summer at Ogunquit.” She became aware presently that he was
still making excuses and explanations about nothing. “You couldn’t go
about much, you know, and we went swimming and played golf together. I
liked her, and I could see that she liked me. When we came away I
thought we’d break it off, but somehow we didn’t. I saw her several
times in New York. Then she came here unexpectedly, and I offered her
that old villa nobody would rent. You don’t understand such things,
Margaret. It hadn’t any more to do with you than—than—” He hesitated,
fished in the stagnant waters of his mind, and flung out abruptly, “than
golf has. It was just a sort of—well, sort of—recreation.”

Recreation! The memory of Rose Morrison’s extravagant passion smote her
sharply. How glorified the incident had appeared in the girl’s
imagination, how cheap and tawdry it was in reality. A continual
compromise with the second best, an inevitable surrender to the average,
was this the history of all romantic emotion? For an instant, such is
the perversity of fate, it seemed to the wife that she and this strange
girl were united by some secret bond which George could not share—by the
bond of woman’s immemorial disillusionment.

“I wouldn’t have had you hurt for worlds, Margaret,” said George,
bending over her. The old gentle voice, the old possessive and
complacent look in his sleepy blue eyes, recalled her wandering senses.
“If I could only make you see that there wasn’t anything in it.”

She gazed up at him wearily. The excitement of discovery, the
exaltation, the anguish, had ebbed away, leaving only gray emptiness.
She had lost more than love, more than happiness, for she had lost her
belief in life.

“If there had been anything in it, I might be able to understand,” she
replied.

He surveyed her with gloomy severity. “Hang it all! You act as if you
wanted me to be in love with her.” Then his face cleared as if by magic.
“You’re tired out, Margaret and you’re nervous. There’s Winters now. You
must try to eat a good dinner.”

Anxious, caressing, impatient to have the discussion end and dinner
begin, he stooped and lifted her in his arms. For an instant she lay
there without moving, and in that instant her gaze passed from his face
to the red lilies and the uncurtained window beyond.

Outside the leaves were falling.



                              JORDAN’S END


At the fork of the road there was the dead tree where buzzards were
roosting, and through its boughs I saw the last flare of the sunset. On
either side the November woods were flung in broken masses against the
sky. When I stopped they appeared to move closer and surround me with
vague, glimmering shapes. It seemed to me that I had been driving for
hours; yet the ancient negro who brought the message had told me to
follow the Old Stage Road till I came to Buzzard’s Tree at the fork.
“F’om dar on hit’s moughty nigh ter Marse Jur’dn’s place,” the old man
had assured me, adding tremulously, “en young Miss she sez you mus’ come
jes’ ez quick ez you kin.” I was young then (that was more than thirty
years ago), and I was just beginning the practice of medicine in one of
the more remote counties of Virginia.

My mare stopped, and leaning out, I gazed down each winding road, where
it branched off, under half bared boughs, into the autumnal haze of the
distance. In a little while the red would fade from the sky, and the
chill night would find me still hesitating between those dubious ways
which seemed to stretch into an immense solitude. While I waited
uncertainly there was a stir in the boughs overhead, and a buzzard’s
feather floated down and settled slowly on the robe over my knees. In
the effort to drive off depression, I laughed aloud and addressed my
mare in a jocular tone:

“We’ll choose the most God-forsaken of the two, and see where it leads
us.”

To my surprise the words brought an answer from the trees at my back.
“If you’re goin’ to Isham’s store, keep on the Old Stage Road,” piped a
voice from the underbrush.

Turning quickly, I saw the dwarfed figure of a very old man, with a
hunched back, who was dragging a load of pine knots out of the woods.
Though he was so stooped that his head reached scarcely higher than my
wheel, he appeared to possess unusual vigour for one of his age and
infirmities. He was dressed in a rough overcoat of some wood brown
shade, beneath which I could see his overalls of blue jeans. Under a
thatch of grizzled hair his shrewd little eyes twinkled cunningly, and
his bristly chin jutted so far forward that it barely escaped the
descending curve of his nose. I remember thinking that he could not be
far from a hundred; his skin was so wrinkled and weather-beaten that, at
a distance, I had mistaken him for a negro.

I bowed politely. “Thank you, but I am going to Jordan’s End,” I
replied.

He cackled softly. “Then you take the bad road. Thar’s Jur’dn’s
turnout.” He pointed to the sunken trail, deep in mud, on the right.
“An’ if you ain’t objectin’ to a little comp’ny, I’d be obleeged if
you’d give me a lift. I’m bound thar on my own o’ count, an’ it’s a long
ways to tote these here lightwood knots.”

While I drew back my robe and made room for him, I watched him heave the
load of resinous pine into the buggy, and then scramble with agility to
his place at my side.

“My name is Peterkin,” he remarked by way of introduction. “They call me
Father Peterkin along o’ the gran’child’en.” He was a garrulous soul, I
suspected, and would not be averse to imparting the information I
wanted.

“There’s not much travel this way,” I began, as we turned out of the
cleared space into the deep tunnel of the trees. Immediately the
twilight enveloped us, though now and then the dusky glow in the sky was
still visible. The air was sharp with the tang of autumn; with the
effluvium of rotting leaves, the drift of wood smoke, the ripe flavour
of crushed apples.

“Thar’s nary a stranger, thoughten he was a doctor, been to Jur’dn’s End
as fur back as I kin recollect. Ain’t you the new doctor?”

“Yes, I am the doctor.” I glanced down at the gnomelike shape in the
wood brown overcoat. “Is it much farther?”

“Naw, suh, we’re all but thar jest as soon as we come out of Whitten
woods.”

“If the road is so little travelled, how do you happen to be going
there?”

Without turning his head, the old man wagged his crescent shaped
profile. “Oh, I live on the place. My son Tony works a slice of the farm
on shares, and I manage to lend a hand at the harvest or corn shuckin’,
and, now-and-agen, with the cider. The old gentleman used to run the
place that away afore he went deranged, an’ now that the young one is
laid up, thar ain’t nobody to look arter the farm but Miss Judith. Them
old ladies don’t count. Thar’s three of ’em, but they’re all
addle-brained an’ look as if the buzzards had picked ’em. I reckon that
comes from bein’ shut up with crazy folks in that thar old tumbledown
house. The roof ain’t been patched fur so long that the shingles have
most rotted away, an’ thar’s times, Tony says, when you kin skearcely
hear yo’ years fur the rumpus the wrens an’ rats are makin’ overhead.”

“What is the trouble with them—the Jordans, I mean?”

“Jest run to seed, suh, I reckon.”

“Is there no man of the family left?”

For a minute Father Peterkin made no reply. Then he shifted the bundle
of pine knots, and responded warily. “Young Alan, he’s still livin’ on
the old place, but I hear he’s been took now, an’ is goin’ the way of
all the rest of ’em. ’Tis a hard trial for Miss Judith, po’ young thing,
an’ with a boy nine year old that’s the very spit an’ image of his pa.
Wall, wall, I kin recollect away back yonder when old Mr. Timothy Jur’dn
was the proudest man anywhar aroun’ in these parts; but arter the War
things sorter begun to go down hill with him, and he was obleeged to
draw in his horns.”

“Is he still living?”

The old man shook his head. “Mebbe he is, an’ mebbe he ain’t. Nobody
knows but the Jur’dn’s, an’ they ain’t tellin’ fur the axin’.”

“I suppose it was this Miss Judith who sent for me?”

“’T would most likely be she, suh. She was one of the Yardlys that lived
over yonder at Yardly’s Field; an’ when young Mr. Alan begun to take
notice of her, ’twas the first time sence way back that one of the
Jur’dn’s had gone courtin’ outside the family. That’s the reason the
blood went bad like it did, I reckon. Thar’s a sayin’ down aroun’ here
that Jur’dn an’ Jur’dn won’t mix.” The name was invariably called Jurdin
by all classes; but I had already discovered that names are rarely
pronounced as they are spelled in Virginia.

“Have they been married long?”

“Ten year or so, suh. I remember as well as if ’twas yestiddy the day
young Alan brought her home as a bride, an’ thar warn’t a soul besides
the three daft old ladies to welcome her. They drove over in my son
Tony’s old buggy, though ’twas spick an’ span then. I was goin’ to the
house on an arrant, an’ I was standin’ right down thar at the ice pond
when they come by. She hadn’t been much in these parts, an’ none of us
had ever seed her afore. When she looked up at young Alan her face was
pink all over and her eyes war shinin’ bright as the moon. Then the
front do’ opened an’ them old ladies, as black as crows, flocked out on
the po’ch. Thar never was anybody as peart-lookin’ as Miss Judith was
when she come here; but soon arterwards she begun to peak an’ pine,
though she never lost her sperits an’ went mopin’ roun’ like all the
other women folks at Jur’dn’s End. They married sudden, an’ folks do say
she didn’t know nothin’ about the family, an’ young Alan didn’t know
much mo’ than she did. The old ladies had kep’ the secret away from him,
sorter believin’ that what you don’t know cyarn’ hurt you. Anyways they
never let it leak out tell arter his chile was born. Thar ain’t never
been but that one, an’ old Aunt Jerusly declars he was born with a caul
over his face, so mebbe things will be all right fur him in the long
run.”

“But who are the old ladies? Are their husbands living?”

When Father Peterkin answered the question he had dropped his voice to a
hoarse murmur. “Deranged. All gone deranged,” he replied.

I shivered, for a chill depression seemed to emanate from the November
woods. As we drove on, I remembered grim tales of enchanted forests
filled with evil faces and whispering voices. The scents of wood earth
and rotting leaves invaded my brain like a magic spell. On either side
the forest was as still as death. Not a leaf quivered, not a bird moved,
not a small wild creature stirred in the underbrush. Only the glossy
leaves and the scarlet berries of the holly appeared alive amid the bare
interlacing branches of the trees. I began to long for an autumn
clearing and the red light of the afterglow.

“Are they living or dead?” I asked presently.

“I’ve hearn strange tattle,” answered the old man nervously, “but nobody
kin tell. Folks do say as young Alan’s pa is shut up in a padded place,
and that his gran’pa died thar arter thirty years. His uncles went crazy
too, an’ the daftness is beginnin’ to crop out in the women. Up tell now
it has been mostly the men. One time I remember old Mr. Peter Jur’dn
tryin’ to burn down the place in the dead of the night. Thar’s the end
of the wood, suh. If you’ll jest let me down here. I’ll be gittin’ along
home across the old-field, an’ thanky too.”

At last the woods ended abruptly on the edge of an abandoned field which
was thickly sown with scrub pine and broomsedge. The glow in the sky had
faded now to a thin yellow-green, and a melancholy twilight pervaded the
landscape. In this twilight I looked over the few sheep huddled together
on the ragged lawn, and saw the old brick house crumbling beneath its
rank growth of ivy. As I drew nearer I had the feeling that the
surrounding desolation brooded there like some sinister influence.

Forlorn as it appeared at this first approach, I surmised that Jordan’s
End must have possessed once charm as well as distinction. The
proportions of the Georgian front were impressive, and there was beauty
of design in the quaint doorway, and in the steps of rounded stone which
were brocaded now with a pattern of emerald moss. But the whole place
was badly in need of repair. Looking up, as I stopped, I saw that the
eaves were falling away, that crumbled shutters were sagging from
loosened hinges, that odd scraps of hemp sacking or oil cloth were
stuffed into windows where panes were missing. When I stepped on the
floor of the porch, I felt the rotting boards give way under my feet.

After thundering vainly on the door, I descended the steps, and followed
the beaten path that led round the west wing of the house. When I had
passed an old boxwood tree at the corner, I saw a woman and a boy of
nine years or so come out of a shed, which I took to be the smokehouse,
and begin to gather chips from the woodpile. The woman carried a basket
made of splits on her arm, and while she stooped to fill this, she
talked to the child in a soft musical voice. Then, at a sound that I
made, she put the basket aside, and rising to her feet, faced me in the
pallid light from the sky. Her head was thrown back, and over her dress
of some dark calico, a tattered gray shawl clung to her figure. That was
thirty years ago; I am not young any longer; I have been in many
countries since then, and looked on many women; but her face, with that
wan light on it, is the last one I shall forget in my life. Beauty! Why,
that woman will be beautiful when she is a skeleton, was the thought
that flashed into my mind.

She was very tall, and so thin that her flesh seemed faintly luminous,
as if an inward light pierced the transparent substance. It was the
beauty, not of earth, but of triumphant spirit. Perfection, I suppose,
is the rarest thing we achieve in this world of incessant compromise
with inferior forms; yet the woman who stood there in that ruined place
appeared to me to have stepped straight out of legend or allegory. The
contour of her face was Italian in its pure oval; her hair swept in
wings of dusk above her clear forehead; and, from the faintly shadowed
hollows beneath her brows, the eyes that looked at me were purple-black,
like dark pansies.

“I had given you up,” she began in a low voice, as if she were afraid of
being overheard. “You are the doctor?”

“Yes, I am the doctor. I took the wrong road and lost my way. Are you
Mrs. Jordan?”

She bowed her head. “Mrs. Alan Jordan. There are three Mrs. Jordans
besides myself. My husband’s grandmother and the wives of his two
uncles.”

“And it is your husband who is ill?”

“My husband, yes. I wrote a few days ago to Doctor Carstairs.” (Thirty
years ago Carstairs, of Baltimore, was the leading alienist in the
country.) “He is coming to-morrow morning; but last night my husband was
so restless that I sent for you to-day.” Her rich voice, vibrating with
suppressed feeling, made me think of stained glass windows and low organ
music.

“Before we go in,” I asked, “will you tell me as much as you can?”

Instead of replying to my request, she turned and laid her hand on the
boy’s shoulder. “Take the chips to Aunt Agatha, Benjamin,” she said,
“and tell her that the doctor has come.”

While the child picked up the basket and ran up the sunken steps to the
door, she watched him with breathless anxiety. Not until he had
disappeared into the hall did she lift her eyes to my face again. Then,
without answering my question, she murmured, with a sigh which was like
the voice of that autumn evening, “We were once happy here.” She was
trying, I realized, to steel her heart against the despair that
threatened it.

My gaze swept the obscure horizon, and returned to the mouldering
woodpile where we were standing. The yellow-green had faded from the
sky, and the only light came from the house where a few scattered lamps
were burning. Through the open door I could see the hall, as bare as if
the house were empty, and the spiral staircase which crawled to the
upper story. A fine old place once, but repulsive now in its abject
decay, like some young blood of former days who has grown senile.

“Have you managed to wring a living out of the land?” I asked, because I
could think of no words that were less compassionate.

“At first a poor one,” she answered slowly. “We worked hard, harder than
any negro in the fields, to keep things together, but we were happy.
Then three years ago this illness came, and after that everything went
against us. In the beginning it was simply brooding, a kind of
melancholy, and we tried to ward it off by pretending that it was not
real, that we imagined it. Only of late, when it became so much worse,
have we admitted the truth, have we faced the reality—”

This passionate murmur, which had almost the effect of a chant rising
out of the loneliness, was addressed, not to me, but to some abstract
and implacable power. While she uttered it her composure was like the
tranquillity of the dead. She did not lift her hand to hold her shawl,
which was slipping unnoticed from her shoulders, and her eyes, so like
dark flowers in their softness, did not leave my face.

“If you will tell me all, perhaps I may be able to help you,” I said.

“But you know our story,” she responded. “You must have heard it.”

“Then it is true? Heredity, intermarriage, insanity?”

She did not wince at the bluntness of my speech. “My husband’s
grandfather is in an asylum, still living after almost thirty years. His
father—my husband’s, I mean—died there a few years ago. Two of his
uncles are there. When it began I don’t know, or how far back it
reaches. We have never talked of it. We have tried always to forget it-
Even now I cannot put the thing into words— My husband’s mother died of
a broken heart, but the grandmother and the two others are still living.
You will see them when you go into the house. They are old women now,
and they feel nothing.”

“And there have been other cases?”

“I do not know. Are not four enough?”

“Do you know if it has assumed always the same form?” I was trying to be
as brief as I could.

She flinched, and I saw that her unnatural calm was shaken at last. “The
same, I believe. In the beginning there is melancholy, moping.
Grandmother calls it, and then—” She flung out her arms with a
despairing gesture, and I was reminded again of some tragic figure of
legend.

“I know, I know,” I was young, and in spite of my pride, my voice
trembled. “Has there been in any case partial recovery, recurring at
intervals?”

“In his grandfather’s case, yes. In the others none. With them it has
been hopeless from the beginning.”

“And Carstairs is coming?”

“In the morning. I should have waited, but last night—” Her voice broke,
and she drew the tattered shawl about her with a shiver. “Last night
something happened. Something happened,” she repeated, and could not go
on. Then, collecting her strength with an effort which made her tremble
like a blade of grass in the wind, she continued more quietly, “To-day
he has been better. For the first time he has slept, and I have been
able to leave him. Two of the hands from the fields are in the room.”
Her tone changed suddenly, and a note of energy passed into it. Some
obscure resolution brought a tinge of colour to her pale cheek. “I must
know,” she added, “if this is as hopeless as all the others.”

I took a step toward the house. “Carstairs’s opinion is worth as much as
that of any man living,” I answered.

“But will he tell me the truth?”

I shook my head. “He will tell you what he thinks. No man’s judgment is
infallible.”

Turning away from me, she moved with an energetic step to the house. As
I followed her into the hall the threshold creaked under my tread, and I
was visited by an apprehension, or, if you prefer, by a superstitious
dread of the floor above. Oh, I got over that kind of thing before I was
many years older; though in the end I gave up medicine, you know, and
turned to literature as a safer outlet for a suppressed imagination.

But the dread was there at that moment, and it was not lessened by the
glimpse I caught, at the foot of the spiral staircase, of a scantily
furnished room, where three lean black-robed figures, as impassive as
the Fates, were grouped in front of a wood fire. They were doing
something with their hands. Knitting, crocheting, or plaiting straw?

At the head of the stairs the woman stopped and looked back at me. The
light from the kerosene lamp on the wall fell over her, and I was struck
afresh not only by the alien splendour of her beauty, but even more by
the look of consecration, of impassioned fidelity that illumined her
face.

“He is very strong,” she said in a whisper. “Until this trouble came on
him he had never had a day’s illness in his life. We hoped that hard
work, not having time to brood, might save us; but it has only brought
the thing we feared sooner.”

There was a question in her eyes, and I responded in the same subdued
tone. “His health, you say, is good?” What else was there for me to ask
when I understood everything?

A shudder ran through her frame. “We used to think that a blessing, but
now—” She broke off and then added in a lifeless voice, “We keep two
field hands in the room day and night, lest one should forget to watch
the fire, or fall asleep.”

A sound came from a room at the end of the hall, and, without finishing
her sentence, she moved swiftly toward the closed door. The
apprehension, the dread, or whatever you choose to call it, was so
strong upon me, that I was seized by an impulse to turn and retreat down
the spiral staircase. Yes, I know why some men turn cowards in battle.

“I have come back, Alan,” she said in a voice that wrung my
heartstrings.

The room was dimly lighted; and for a minute after I entered, I could
see nothing clearly except the ruddy glow of the wood fire in front of
which two negroes were seated on low wooden stools. They had kindly
faces, these men; there was a primitive humanity in their features,
which might have been modelled out of the dark earth of the fields.

Looking round the next minute, I saw that a young man was sitting away
from the fire, huddled over in a cretonne-covered chair with a high back
and deep wings. At our entrance the negroes glanced up with surprise;
but the man in the winged chair neither lifted his head nor turned his
eyes in our direction. He sat there, lost within the impenetrable
wilderness of the insane, as remote from us and from the sound of our
voices as if he were the inhabitant of an invisible world. His head was
sunk forward; his eyes were staring fixedly at some image we could not
see; his fingers, moving restlessly, were plaiting and unplaiting the
fringe of a plaid shawl. Distraught as he was, he still possessed the
dignity of mere physical perfection. At his full height he must have
measured not under six feet three; his hair was the colour of ripe
wheat, and his eyes, in spite of their fixed gaze, were as blue as the
sky after rain. And this was only the beginning, I realized. With that
constitution, that physical frame, he might live to be ninety.

“Alan!” breathed his wife again in her pleading murmur.

If he heard her voice, he gave no sign of it. Only when she crossed the
room and bent over his chair, he put out his hand, with a gesture of
irritation, and pushed her away, as if she were a veil of smoke which
came between him and the object at which he was looking. Then his hand
fell back to its old place, and he resumed his mechanical plaiting of
the fringe.

The woman lifted her eyes to mine. “His father did that for twenty
years,” she said in a whisper that was scarcely more than a sigh of
anguish.

When I had made my brief examination, we left the room as we had come,
and descended the stairs together. The three old women were still
sitting in front of the wood fire. I do not think they had moved since
we went upstairs; but, as we reached the hall below, one of them, the
youngest, I imagine, rose from her chair, and came out to join us. She
was crocheting something soft and small, an infant’s sacque, I perceived
as she approached, of pink wool. The ball had rolled from her lap as she
stood up, and it trailed after her now, like a woollen rose, on the bare
floor. When the skein pulled at her, she turned back and stooped to pick
up the ball, which she rewound with caressing fingers. Good God, an
infant’s sacque in that house!

“Is it the same thing?” she asked.

“Hush!” responded the younger woman kindly. Turning to me she added, “We
cannot talk here,” and opening the door, passed out on the porch. Not
until we had reached the lawn, and walked in silence to where my buggy
stood beneath an old locust tree, did she speak again.

Then she said only, “You know now?”

“Yes, I know,” I replied, averting my eyes from her face while I gave my
directions as briefly as I could. “I will leave an opiate,” I said.
“To-morrow, if Carstairs should not come, send for me again. If he does
come,” I added, “I will talk to him and see you afterward.”

“Thank you,” she answered gently; and taking the bottle from my hand,
she turned away and walked quickly back to the house.

I watched her as long as I could; and then getting into my buggy, I
turned my mare’s head toward the woods, and drove by moonlight, past
Buzzard’s Tree and over the Old Stage Road, to my home. “I will see
Carstairs to-morrow,” was my last thought that night before I slept.

But, after all, I saw Carstairs only for a minute as he was taking the
train. Life at its beginning and its end had filled my morning; and when
at last I reached the little station, Carstairs had paid his visit, and
was waiting on the platform for the approaching express. At first he
showed a disposition to question me about the shooting, but as soon as I
was able to make my errand clear, his jovial face clouded.

“So you’ve been there?” he said. “They didn’t tell me. An interesting
case, if it were not for that poor woman. Incurable, I’m afraid, when
you consider the predisposing causes. The race is pretty well
deteriorated, I suppose. God! what isolation! I’ve advised her to send
him away. There are three others, they tell me, at Staunton.”

The train came; he jumped on it, and was whisked away while I gazed
after him. After all, I was none the wiser because of the great
reputation of Carstairs.

All that day I heard nothing more from Jordan’s End; and then, early
next morning, the same decrepit negro brought me a message.

“Young Miss, she tole me ter ax you ter come along wid me jes’ ez soon
ez you kin git ready.”

“I’ll start at once, Uncle, and I’ll take you with me.”

My mare and buggy stood at the door. All I needed to do was to put on my
overcoat, pick up my hat, and leave word, for a possible patient, that I
should return before noon. I knew the road now, and I told myself, as I
set out, that I would make as quick a trip as I could. For two nights I
had been haunted by the memory of that man in the armchair, plaiting and
unplaiting the fringe of the plaid shawl. And his father had done that,
the woman had told me, for twenty years!

It was a brown autumn morning, raw, windless, with an overcast sky and a
peculiar illusion of nearness about the distance. A high wind had blown
all night, but at dawn it had dropped suddenly, and now there was not so
much as a ripple in the broomsedge. Over the fields, when we came out of
the woods, the thin trails of blue smoke were as motionless as cobwebs.
The lawn surrounding the house looked smaller than it had appeared to me
in the twilight, as if the barren fields had drawn closer since my last
visit. Under the trees, where the few sheep were browsing, the piles of
leaves lay in windrifts along the sunken walk and against the wings of
the house.

When I knocked the door was opened immediately by one of the old women,
who held a streamer of black cloth or rusty crape in her hands.

“You may go straight upstairs,” she croaked; and, without waiting for an
explanation, I entered the hall quickly, and ran up the stairs.

The door of the room was closed, and I opened it noiselessly, and
stepped over the threshold. My first sensation, as I entered, was one of
cold. Then I saw that the windows were wide open, and that the room
seemed to be full of people, though, as I made out presently, there was
no one there except Alan Jordan’s wife, her little son, the two old
aunts, and an aged crone of a negress. On the bed there was something
under a yellowed sheet of fine linen (what the negroes call “a burial
sheet,” I suppose), which had been handed down from some more affluent
generation.

When I went over, after a minute, and turned down one corner of the
covering, I saw that my patient of the other evening was dead. Not a
line of pain marred his features, not a thread of gray dimmed the
wheaten gold of his hair. So he must have looked, I thought, when she
first loved him. He had gone from life, not old, enfeebled and
repulsive, but enveloped still in the romantic illusion of their
passion.

As I entered, the two old women, who had been fussing about the bed,
drew back to make way for me, but the witch of a negress did not pause
in the weird chant, an incantation of some sort, which she was mumbling.
From the rag carpet in front of the empty fireplace, the boy, with his
father’s hair and his mother’s eyes, gazed at me silently, broodingly,
as if I were trespassing; and by the open window, with her eyes on the
ashen November day, the young wife stood as motionless as a statue.
While I looked at her a redbird flew out of the boughs of a cedar, and
she followed it with her eyes.

“You sent for me?” I said to her.

She did not turn. She was beyond the reach of my voice, of any voice, I
imagine; but one of the palsied old women answered my question.

“He was like this when we found him this morning,” she said. “He had a
bad night, and Judith and the two hands were up with him until daybreak.
Then he seemed to fall asleep, and Judith sent the hands, turn about, to
get their breakfast.”

While she spoke my eyes were on the bottle I had left there. Two nights
ago it had been full, and now it stood empty, without a cork, on the
mantelpiece. They had not even thrown it away. It was typical of the
pervading inertia of the place that the bottle should still be standing
there awaiting my visit.

For an instant the shock held me speechless; when at last I found my
voice it was to ask mechanically.

“When did it happen?”

The old woman who had spoken took up the story. “Nobody knows. We have
not touched him. No one but Judith has gone near him.” Her words trailed
off into unintelligible muttering. If she had ever had her wits about
her, I dare-say fifty years at Jordan’s End had unsettled them
completely.

I turned to the woman at the window. Against the gray sky and the black
intersecting branches of the cedar, her head, with its austere
perfection, was surrounded by that visionary air of legend. So Antigone
might have looked on the day of her sacrifice, I reflected. I had never
seen a creature who appeared so withdrawn, so detached, from all human
associations. It was as if some spiritual isolation divided her from her
kind.

“I can do nothing,” I said.

For the first time she looked at me, and her eyes were unfathomable.
“No, you can do nothing,” she answered. “He is safely dead.”

The negress was still crooning on; the other old women were fussing
helplessly. It was impossible in their presence, I felt, to put in words
the thing I had to say.

“Will you come downstairs with me?” I asked. “Outside of this house?”

Turning quietly, she spoke to the boy. “Run out and play, dear. He would
have wished it.” Then, without a glance toward the bed, or the old women
gathered about it, she followed me over the threshold, down the stairs,
and out on the deserted lawn. The ashen day could not touch her, I saw
then. She was either so remote from it, or so completely a part of it,
that she was impervious to its sadness. Her white face did not become
more pallid as the light struck it; her tragic eyes did not grow deeper;
her frail figure under the thin shawl did not shiver in the raw air. She
felt nothing, I realized suddenly.

Wrapped in that silence as in a cloak, she walked across the windrifts
of leaves to where my mare was waiting. Her step was so slow, so
unhurried, that I remember thinking she moved like one who had all
eternity before her. Oh, one has strange impressions, you know, at such
moments!

In the middle of the lawn, where the trees had been stripped bare in the
night, and the leaves were piled in long mounds like double graves, she
stopped and looked in my face. The air was so still that the whole place
might have been in a trance or asleep. Not a branch moved, not a leaf
rustled on the ground, not a sparrow twittered in the ivy; and even the
few sheep stood motionless, as if they were under a spell. Farther away,
beyond the sea of broomsedge, where no wind stirred, I saw the flat
desolation of the landscape. Nothing moved on the earth, but high above,
under the leaden clouds, a buzzard was sailing.

I moistened my lips before I spoke. “God knows I want to help you!” At
the back of my brain a hideous question was drumming. How had it
happened? Could she have killed him? Had that delicate creatine nerved
her will to the unspeakable act? It was incredible. It was
inconceivable. And yet.....

“The worst is over,” she answered quietly, with that tearless agony
which is so much more terrible than any outburst of grief. “Whatever
happens, I can never go through the worst again. Once in the beginning
he wanted to die. His great fear was that he might live too long, until
it was too late to save himself. I made him wait then. I held him back
by a promise.”

So she had killed him, I thought. Then she went on steadily, after a
minute, and I doubted again.

“Thank God, it was easier for him than he feared it would be,” she
murmured.

No, it was not conceivable. He must have bribed one of the negroes. But
who had stood by and watched without intercepting? Who had been in the
room? Well, either way! “I will do all I can to help you,” I said.

Her gaze did not waver. “There is so little that any one can do now,”
she responded, as if she had not understood what I meant. Suddenly,
without the warning of a sob, a cry of despair went out of her, as if it
were torn from her breast. “He was my life,” she cried, “and I must go
on!”

So full of agony was the sound that it seemed to pass like a gust of
wind over the broomsedge. I waited until the emptiness had opened and
closed over it. Then I asked as quietly as I could: “What will you do
now?”

She collected herself with a shudder of pain. “As long as the old people
live, I am tied here. I must bear it out to the end. When they die, I
shall go away and find work. I am sending my boy to school. Doctor
Carstairs will look after him, and he will help me when the time comes.
While my boy needs me, there is no release.” While I listened to her, I
knew that the question on my lips would never be uttered. I should
always remain ignorant of the truth. The thing I feared most, standing
there alone with her, was that some accident might solve the mystery
before I could escape. My eyes left her face and wandered over the dead
leaves at our feet. No, I had nothing to ask her.

“Shall I come again?” That was all.

She shook her head. “Not unless I send for you. If I need you, I will
send for you,” she answered; but in my heart I knew that she would never
send for me.

I held out my hand, but she did not take it; and I felt that she meant
me to understand, by her refusal, that she was beyond all consolation
and all companionship. She was nearer to the bleak sky and the deserted
fields than she was to her kind.

As she turned away, the shawl slipped from her shoulders to the dead
leaves over which she was walking; but she did not stoop to recover it,
nor did I make a movement to follow her. Long after she had entered the
house I stood there, gazing down on the garment that she had dropped.
Then climbing into my buggy, I drove slowly across the field and into
the woods.

                                THE END





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