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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Questionable Shapes, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Questionable Shapes
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2005  [EBook #9458]
+This file was first posted on October 2, 2003
+Last Updated: April 6, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK QUESTIONABLE SHAPES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan, Tonya Allen, and
+Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+QUESTIONABLE SHAPES
+
+By W. D. Howells
+
+
+Author of "Literary Friends And Acquaintance," "Literature And Life,"
+"The Kentons," "Their Silver Wedding Journey," Etc., Etc.
+
+Published May, 1903
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+HIS APPARITION
+
+THE ANGEL OF THE LORD
+
+THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS (See HTML file)
+
+"MRS. ALDERLING CAME OUT WITH A BOOK IN HER HAND"
+
+"'I'M AFRAID I'M RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT'"
+
+"'WHY, THERE ISN'T ANY PUNISHMENT SEVERE ENOUGH FOR A CRIME LIKE THAT'"
+
+"HE BROKE INTO A SOBBING THAT SEEMED TO WRENCH AND TEAR"
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+HIS APPARITION.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+The incident was of a dignity which the supernatural has by no means
+always had, and which has been more than ever lacking in it since the
+manifestations of professional spiritualism began to vulgarize it. Hewson
+appreciated this as soon as he realized that he had been confronted with
+an apparition. He had been very little agitated at the moment, and it was
+not till later, when the conflict between sense and reason concerning the
+fact itself arose, that he was aware of any perturbation. Even then,
+amidst the tumult of his whirling emotions he had a sort of central calm,
+in which he noted the particulars of the occurrence with distinctness and
+precision. He had always supposed that if anything of the sort happened
+to him he would be greatly frightened, but he had not been at all
+frightened, so far as he could make out. His hair had not risen, or his
+cheek felt a chill; his heart had not lost or gained a beat in its
+pulsation; and his prime conclusion was that if the Mysteries had chosen
+him an agent in approaching the material world they had not made a
+mistake. This becomes grotesque in being put into words, but the words do
+not misrepresent, except by their inevitable excess, the mind in which
+Hewson rose, and flung open his shutters to let in the dawn upon the
+scene of the apparition, which he now perceived must have been, as it
+were, self-lighted. The robins were yelling from the trees and the
+sparrows bickering under them; catbirds were calling from the thickets of
+syringa, and in the nearest woods a hermit-thrush was ringing its crystal
+bells. The clear day was penetrating the east with the subtle light which
+precedes the sun, and a summer sweetness rose cool from the garden below,
+gray with dew.
+
+In the solitude of the hour there was an intimation of privity to the
+event which had taken place, an implication of the unity of the natural
+and the supernatural, strangely different from that robust gayety of the
+plain day which later seemed to disown the affair, and leave the burden
+of proof altogether to the human witness. By this time Hewson had already
+set about to putting it in such phrases as should carry conviction to the
+hearer, and yet should convey to him no suspicion of the pride which
+Hewson felt in the incident as a sort of tribute to himself. He
+dramatized the scene at breakfast when he should describe it in plain,
+matter-of-fact terms, and hold every one spellbound, as he or she leaned
+forward over the table to listen, while he related the fact with studied
+unconcern for his own part in it, but with a serious regard for the
+integrity of the fact itself, which he had no wish to exaggerate as to
+its immediate meaning or remoter implications. It did not yet occur to
+him that it had none; they were simply to be matters of future
+observation in a second ordeal; for the first emotion which the incident
+imparted was the feeling that it would happen again, and in this return
+would interpret itself. Hewson was so strongly persuaded of something of
+the kind, that after standing for an indefinite period at the window in
+his pajamas, he got hardily back into bed, and waited for the repetition.
+He was agreeably aware of waiting without a tremor, and rather eagerly
+than otherwise; then he began to feel drowsy, and this at first flattered
+him, as a proof of his strange courage in circumstances which would have
+rendered sleep impossible to most men; but in another moment he started
+from it. If he slept every one would say he had dreamt the whole thing;
+and he could never himself be quite sure that he had not.
+
+He got up, and began to dress, thinking all the time, in a dim way, how
+very long it would be till breakfast, and wondering what he should do
+till then with his appetite and his apparition. It was now only a little
+after four o'clock of the June morning, and nobody would be down till
+after eight; most people at that very movable feast, which St. John had
+in the English fashion, did not show themselves before nine. It was
+impossible to get a book and read for five hours; he would be dropping
+with hunger if he walked so long. Yet he must not sleep; and he must do
+something to keep from sleeping. He remembered a little interloping
+hotel, which had lately forced its way into precincts sacred to cottage
+life, and had impudently called itself the St. Johnswort Inn, after St.
+John's place, by a name which he prided himself on having poetically
+invented from his own and that of a prevalent wild flower. Upon the
+chance of getting an early cup of coffee at this hotel, Hewson finished
+dressing, and crept down stairs to let himself out of the house.
+
+He not only found the door locked, as he had expected, but the key taken
+out; and after some misgiving he decided to lift one of the long library
+windows, from which he could get into the garden, closing the window
+after him, and so make his escape. No one was stirring outside the house
+any more than within; he knocked down a trellis by which a clematis was
+trying to climb over the window he emerged from, and found his way out of
+the grounds without alarming any one. He was not so successful at the
+hotel, where a lank boy, sweeping the long piazzas, recognized one of the
+St. Johnswort guests in the figure approaching the steps, and apparently
+had his worst fears roused for Hewson's sanity when Hewson called to him
+and wondered if he could get a cup of coffee at that hour; he openly
+owned it was an unnatural hour, and he had a fine inward sense that it
+was supernatural. The boy dropped his broom without a word, and vanished
+through the office door, reappearing after a blank interval to pick up
+his broom and say, "I guess so," as he began sweeping again. It was well,
+for one reason that he did not state his belief too confidently, Hewson
+thought; but after another interval of unknown length a rude, sad girl
+came to tell him his coffee was waiting for him. He followed her back
+into the still dishevelled dining room, and sat down at a long table to a
+cup of lukewarm drink that in color and quality recalled terrible
+mornings of Atlantic travel when he haplessly rose and descended to the
+dining-saloon of the steamer, and had a marine version of British coffee
+brought him by an alien table-steward.
+
+He remembered the pock-marked nose of one alien steward, and how he had
+questioned whether he should give the fellow six-pence or a shilling,
+seeing that apart from this tribute he should have to fee his own steward
+for the voyage; at the same time his fancy played with the question
+whether that uncouth, melancholy waitress had found a moment to wash her
+face before hurrying to fetch his coffee. He amused himself by
+contrasting her sloven dejection with the brisk neatness of the service
+at St. Johnswort; but through all he never lost the awe, the sense of
+responsibility which he bore to the vision vouchsafed him, doubtless for
+some reason and to some end that it behooved him to divine.
+
+He found a yesterday's paper in the office of the hotel, and read it till
+he began to drowse over it, when he pulled himself up with a sharp jerk.
+He discovered that it was now six o'clock, and he thought if he could
+walk about for an hour he might return to St. Johnswort, and worry
+through the remaining hour till breakfast somehow. He was still framing
+in his thoughts some sort of statement concerning the apparition which he
+should make when the largest number of guests had got together at the
+table, with a fine question whether he should take them between the
+cantaloupe and the broiled chicken, or wait till they had come to the
+corn griddle-cakes, which St. John's cook served of a filigree perfection
+in homage to the good old American breakfast ideal. There would be more
+women, if he waited, and he should need the sympathy and countenance of
+women; his story would be wanting in something of its supreme effect
+without the electrical response of their keener nerves.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+When Hewson came up to the cottage he was sensible of a certain agitation
+in the air, which was intensified to him by the sight of St. John, in his
+bare, bald head and the neglige of a flannel housecoat, inspecting, with
+the gardener and one of the grooms, the fallen trellis under the library
+window, which from time to time they looked up at, as they talked. Hewson
+made haste to join them, through the garden gate, and to say shamefacedly
+enough, "Oh, I'm afraid I'm responsible for that," and he told how he
+must have thrown down the trellis in getting out of the window.
+
+"Oh!" said St. John, while the two men walked away with dissatisfied
+grins at being foiled of their sensation. "We thought it was burglars.
+I'm so glad it was only you." But in spite of his profession, St. John
+did not give Hewson any very lively proof of his enjoyment. "Deuced
+uncomfortable to have had one's guests murdered in their beds. Don't say
+anything about it, please, Hewson. The women would all fly the premises,
+if there'd been even a suspicion of burglars."
+
+"Oh, no; I won't," Hewson willingly assented; but he perceived a
+disappointment in St. John's tone and manner, and he suspected him,
+however unjustly, of having meant to give himself importance with his
+guests by the rumor of a burglary in the house.
+
+He was a man quite capable of that, Hewson believed, and failing it,
+capable of pretending that he wanted the matter hushed up in the interest
+of others.
+
+In any case he saw that it was not to St. John primarily, or secondarily
+to St. John's guests, that he could celebrate the fact of his apparition.
+In the presence of St. John's potential vulgarity he keenly felt his own,
+and he recoiled from what he had imagined doing. He even realized that he
+would have been working St. John an injury by betraying his house to his
+guests as the scene of a supernatural incident.
+
+Nobody believes in ghosts, but there is not one in a thousand of us who
+would not be uncomfortable in a haunted house, or a house so reputed. If
+Hewson told what he had seen, he would not only scatter St. John's
+house-party to the four winds, but he would cast such a blight upon St.
+Johnswort that it would never sell for a tenth of its cost.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+From that instant Hewson renounced his purpose, and he remained true to
+this renunciation in spite of the behavior of St. John, which might well
+have tempted him to a revenge in kind. No one seemed to have slept late
+that morning; several of the ladies complained that they had not slept a
+wink the whole night, and two or three of the men owned to having waked
+early and not been able to hit it off again in a morning nap, though it
+appeared that they were adepts in that sort of thing. The hour of their
+vigils corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson's apparition that he
+wondered if a mystical influence from it had not penetrated the whole
+house. The adventitious facts were of such a nature that he controlled
+with the greater difficulty the wish to explode upon an audience so aptly
+prepared for it the prodigious incident which he was keeping in reserve;
+but he did not yield even when St. John carefully led up to the point
+through the sensation of his guests, by recounting the evidences of the
+supposed visit of a burglar, and then made his effect by suddenly turning
+upon Hewson, and saying with his broad guffaw: "And here you have the
+burglar in person. He has owned his crime to me, and I've let him off the
+penalty on condition that he tells you all about it." The humor was not
+too rank for the horsey people whom St. John had mainly about him, but
+some of the women said, "Poor Mr. Hewson!" when the host, failing
+Hewson's confession, went on to betray that he had risen at that
+unearthly hour to go down to the St. Johnswort Inn for a cup of its
+famous coffee. The coffee turned out to be the greatest kind of joke; one
+of the men asked Hewson if he could say on his honor that it was really
+any better than St. John's coffee there before them, and another
+professed to be in a secret more recondite than had yet been divined: it
+was that long grim girl, who served it; she had lured Hewson from his
+rest at five o'clock in the morning; and this humorist proposed a Welsh
+rarebit some night at the inn, where they could all see for themselves
+why Hewson broke out of the house and smashed a trellis before sunrise.
+
+Hewson sat silent, not even attempting a defensive sally. In fact it was
+only his surface mind which was employed with what was going on; as
+before, his deeper thought was again absorbed with his great experience.
+He could not, if his conscience had otherwise suffered him, have spoken
+of it in that company, and the laughter died away from his silence as if
+it had been his offence. He was not offended, but he was ashamed, and
+not ashamed so much for St. John as for himself, that he could have ever
+imagined acquiring merit in such company by exploiting an experience
+which should have been sacred to him. How could he have been so shabby?
+He was justly punished in the humiliating contrast between being the butt
+of these poor wits, and the hero of an incident which, whatever its real
+quality was, had an august character of mystery. He had recognized this
+from the first instant; he had perceived that the occurrence was for him,
+and for him alone, until he had reasoned some probable meaning into it or
+from it; and yet he had been willing, he saw it, he owned it! to win the
+applause of that crowd as a man who had just seen a ghost.
+
+He thought of them as that crowd, but after all, they were good-natured
+people, and when they fancied that he was somehow vexed with the turn the
+talk had taken, they began to speak of other things; St. John himself led
+the way, and when he got Hewson alone after breakfast, he made him a sort
+of amend. "I didn't mean to annoy you, old fellow," he said, "with my
+story about the burglary."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," Hewson brisked up in response, as he took the
+cigar St. John offered him. "I'm afraid I must have seemed rather stupid.
+I had got to thinking about something else, and I couldn't pull myself
+away from it. I wasn't annoyed at all."
+
+Whether St. John thought this sufficient gratitude for his reparation did
+not appear. As Hewson did not offer to break the silence in which they
+went on smoking, his host made a pretext, toward the end of their cigars,
+after bearing the burden of the conversation apparently as long as he
+could, of being reminded of something by the group of women descending
+into the garden from the terraced walk beyond it and then slowly, with
+little pauses, trailing their summer draperies among the flower-beds and
+bushes toward the house.
+
+"Oh, by-the-way," he said, "I should like to introduce you to Miss
+Hernshaw; she came last night with Mrs. Rock: that tall girl, there,
+lagging behind a little. She's an original."
+
+"I noticed her at breakfast," Hewson answered, now first aware of having
+been struck with the strange beauty and strange behavior of the slim
+girl, who drooped in her chair, with her little head fallen forward, and
+played with her bread, ignoring her food otherwise, while she listened
+with a bored air to the talk which made Hewson its prey. She had an
+effect of being both shy and indifferent, in this retrospect; and when
+St. John put up the window, and led the way out to the women in the
+garden, and presented Hewson, she had still this effect. She did not
+smile or speak in acknowledgement of Hewson's bow; she merely looked at
+him with a sort of swift intensity, and then, when one of the women said,
+"We were coming to view the scene of your burglarious exploit, Mr.
+Hewson. Was that the very window?" the girl looked impatiently away.
+
+"The very window," Hewson owned. "You wouldn't know it. St. John has had
+the trellis put up and the spot fresh turfed," and he detached the
+interlocutory widow in the direction of their bachelor host, as she
+perhaps intended he should, and dropped back to the side of Miss
+Hernshaw.
+
+She was almost spiritually slender. In common with all of us, he had
+heard that shape of girl called willowy, but he made up his mind that
+sweetbriery would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face a virginal
+youth suggested the tender innocence and surprise of the flower, while
+the droop of her figure, at once delicate and self-reliant, arrested the
+fancy with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She looked not above
+sixteen in age, but as she was obviously out, in the society sense of the
+word, this must have been a moral effect; and Hewson was casting about in
+his mind for some appropriate form of thought and language to make talk
+in when she abruptly addressed him.
+
+"I don't see," she said, with her face still away, "why people make fun
+of those poor girls who have to work in that sort of public way."
+
+Hewson silently picked his steps back through the intervening events to
+the drolling at breakfast, and with some misgiving took his stand in the
+declaration, "You mean the waitress at the inn?"
+
+"Yes!" cried the girl, with a gentle indignation, which was so dear to
+the young man that he would have given anything to believe that it veiled
+a measure of sympathy for himself as well as for the waitress. "We went
+in there last night when we arrived, for some pins--Mrs. Rock had had her
+dress stepped on, getting out of the car--and that girl brought them. I
+never saw such a sad face. And she was very nice; she had no more manners
+than a cow."
+
+Miss Hernshaw added the last sentence as if it followed, and in his poor
+masculine pride of sequence Hewson wanted to ask if that were why she was
+so nice; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, "Yes, there's a whole
+tragedy in it. I wonder if it's potential or actual." He somehow felt
+safe in being so metaphysical.
+
+"Does it make any difference?" Miss Hernshaw demanded, whirling her face
+round, and fixing him with eyes of beautiful fierceness. "Tragedy is
+tragedy, whether you have lived it or not, isn't it? And sometimes it's
+all the more tragical if you have it still to live: you've got it before
+you! I don't see how any one can look at that girl's face and laugh at
+her. I should never forgive any one who did."
+
+"Then I'm glad I didn't do any of the laughing," said Hewson, willing to
+relieve himself from the strain of this high mood, and yet anxious not to
+fall too far below it. "Perhaps I should, though, if I hadn't been the
+victim of it in some degree."
+
+"It was the vulgarest thing I ever heard!" said the girl.
+
+Hewson looked at her, but she had averted her face again. He had a
+longing to tell her of his apparition which quelled every other interest
+in him, and, as it were, blurred his whole consciousness. She would
+understand, with her childlike truth, and with her unconventionality she
+would not find it strange that he should speak to her of such a thing for
+no apparent reason or no immediate cause. He walked silent at her side,
+revolving his longing in his thought, and hating the circumstance which
+forbade him to speak at once. He did not know how long he was lost in
+this, when he was suddenly recalled to fearful question of the fact by
+her saying, with another flash of her face toward him, "You _have_ lost
+sleep Mr. Hewson!" and she whipped forward, and joined the other women,
+who were following the lead of St. John and the widow.
+
+Mrs. Rock, to whom Hewson had been presented at the same time as to Miss
+Hernshaw, looked vaguely back at him over her shoulder, but made no
+attempt to include him in her group, and he thought, for no reason, that
+she was kept from doing so on account of Miss Hernshaw. He thought he
+could be no more mistaken in this than in the resentment of Miss
+Hernshaw, which he was aware of meriting, however unintentionally. Later,
+after lunch, he made sure of this fact when Mrs. Rock got him into a
+corner, and cozily began, "I always feel like explaining Rosalie a
+little," and then her vague, friendly eye wandered toward Miss Hernshaw
+across the room, and stopped, as if waiting for the girl to look away.
+But Miss Hernshaw did not look away, and that afternoon, Hewson's week
+being up, he left St. Johnswort before dinner.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+The time came, before the following winter, when Hewson was tempted
+beyond his strength, and told the story of his apparition. He told it
+more than once, and kept himself with increasing difficulty from lying
+about it. He always wished to add something, to amplify the fact, to
+heighten the mystery of the circumstances, to divine the occult
+significance of the incident. In itself the incident, when stated, was
+rather bare and insufficient; but he held himself rigidly to the actual
+details, and he felt that in this at least he was offering the powers
+which had vouchsafed him the experience a species of atonement for
+breaking faith with them. It seemed like breaking faith with Miss
+Hernshaw, too, though this impression would have been harder to reason
+than the other. Both impressions began to wear off after the first
+tellings of the story; the wound that Hewson gave his sensibility in the
+very first cicatrized before the second, and at the fourth or fifth it
+had quite calloused over; so that he did not mind anything so much as
+what always seemed to him the inadequate effect of his experience with
+his hearers. Some listened carelessly; some nervously; some
+incredulously, as if he were trying to put up a job on them; some
+compassionately, as if he were not quite right, and ought to be looked
+after. There was a consensus of opinion, among those who offered any sort
+of comment, that he ought to give it to the Psychical Research, and at
+the bottom of Hewson's heart, there was a dread that the spiritualists
+would somehow get hold of him. This remained to stay him, when the shame
+of breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw and with Mystery no longer
+restrained him from exploiting the fact. He was aware of lying in wait
+for opportunities of telling it, and he swore himself to tell it only
+upon direct provocation, or when the occasion seemed imperatively to
+demand it. He commonly brought it out to match some experience of
+another; but he could never deny a friendly appeal when he sat with some
+good fellows over their five-o'clock cocktails at the club, and one of
+them would say in behalf of a newcomer, "Hewson, tell Wilkins that odd
+thing that happened to you up country, in the summer." In complying he
+tried to save his self-respect by affecting a contemptuous indifference
+in the matter, and beginning reluctantly and pooh-poohingly. He had pangs
+afterwards as he walked home to dress for dinner, but his self-reproach
+was less afflicting as time passed. His suffering from it was never so
+great as from the slight passed upon his apparition, when Wilkins or what
+other it might be, would meet the suggestion that he should tell him
+about it, with the hurried interposition, "Yes, I have heard that; good
+story." This would make Hewson think that he was beginning to tell his
+story too often, and that perhaps the friend who suggested his doing so,
+was playing upon his forgetfulness. He wondered if he were really
+something of a bore with it, and whether men were shying off from him at
+the club on account of it. He fancied that might be the reason why the
+circle at the five-o'clock cocktails gradually diminished as the winter
+passed. He continued to join it till the chance offered of squarely
+refusing to tell Wilkins, or whoever, about the odd thing that had
+happened to him up country in the summer. Then he felt that he had in a
+manner retrieved himself, and could retire from the five-o'clock
+cocktails with honor.
+
+That it was a veridical phantom which had appeared to him he did not in
+his inmost at all doubt, though in his superficial consciousness he
+questioned it, not indeed so disrespectfully as he pooh-poohed it to
+others, but still questioned it. This he thought somehow his due as a man
+of intelligence who ought not to suffer himself to fall into superstition
+even upon evidence granted to few. Superficially, however, as well as
+interiorly, he was aware of always expecting its repetition; and now, six
+months after the occurrence this expectation was as vivid with him as it
+was the first moment after the vision had vanished, while his tongue was
+yet in act to stay it with speech. He would not have been surprised at
+any time in walking into his room to find It there; or waking at night to
+confront It in the electric flash which he kindled by a touch of the
+button at his bedside. Rather, he was surprised that nothing of the sort
+happened, to confirm him in his belief that he had been all but in touch
+with the other life, or to give him some hint, the slightest, the
+dimmest, why this vision had been shown him, and then instantly broken
+and withdrawn. In that inmost of his where he recognized its validity, he
+could not deny that it had a meaning, and that it had been sent him for
+some good reason special to himself; though at the times when he had
+prefaced his story of it with terms of slighting scepticism, he had
+professed neither to know nor to care why the thing had happened. He
+always said that he had never been particularly interested in the
+supernatural, and then was ashamed of a lie that was false to universal
+human experience; but he could truthfully add that he had never in his
+life felt less like seeing a ghost than that morning. It was not full
+day, but it was perfectly light, and there the thing was, as palpable to
+vision as any of the men that moment confronting him with cocktails in
+their hands. Asked if he did not think he had dreamed it, he answered
+scornfully that he did not think, he _knew_, he had not dreamed it; he
+did not value the experience, it was and had always been perfectly
+meaningless, but he would stake his life upon its reality. Asked if it
+had not perhaps been the final office of a nightcap, he disdained to
+answer at all, though he did not openly object to the laugh which the
+suggestion raised.
+
+Secretly, within his inmost, Hewson felt justly punished by the laughter.
+He had been unworthy of his apparition in lightly exposing it to such a
+chance; he had fallen below the dignity of his experience. He might never
+hope to fathom its meaning while he lived; but he grieved for the wrong
+he had done it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered
+that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a pillow at
+it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was profoundly and
+exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the story for his
+listeners' idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and snubbed
+solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that story, he
+was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation of seeing the
+vision again was the formless wish to offer it some sort of reparation,
+of apology.
+
+He longed to prove himself not wholly unworthy of the advance that had
+been made him from the other world upon grounds which he had done his
+worst to prove untenable. He could not imagine what the grounds were,
+though he had to admit their probable existence; such an event might have
+no obvious or present significance, but it had not happened for nothing;
+it could not have happened for nothing. Hewson might not have been in
+what he thought any stressful need of ghostly comfort or reassurance in
+matters of faith. He was not inordinately agnostic, or in the way of
+becoming so. He was simply an average skeptical American, who denied no
+more than he affirmed, and who really concerned himself so little about
+his soul, though he tried to keep his conscience decently clean, that he
+had not lately asked whether other people had such a thing or not. He had
+not lost friends, and he was so much alone in this world that it seemed
+improbable the fate of any uncle or cousin, in the absence of more
+immediate kindred, should be mystically forecast to him. He was perfectly
+well at the time of the apparition, and it could not have been the
+figment of a disordered digestion, as the lusty hunger which willingly
+appeased itself with the coffee of the St. Johnswort Inn sufficiently
+testified. Yet, in spite of all this, an occurrence so out of the course
+of events must have had some message for him, and it must have been his
+fault that he could not divine it. A sense of culpability grew upon him
+with the sense of his ignominy in cheapening it by making it subservient
+to what he knew was, in the last analysis, a wretched vanity. At least he
+could refuse himself that miserable gratification hereafter, and he got
+back some measure of self-respect in forbidding himself the pleasure he
+might have taken in being noted for a strange experience he could never
+be got to speak of.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+The implication of any such study as this is that the subject of it is
+continuously if not exclusively occupied with the matter which is
+supposed to make him interesting. But of course it was not so with
+Hewson, who perhaps did not think of his apparition once in a fortnight,
+or oftener, say, than he thought of the odd girl with whom for no reason,
+except contemporaneity in his acquaintance, he associated with it. If he
+never thought of the apparition without subconsciously expecting its
+return, he equally expected when he thought of Miss Hernshaw that the
+chances of society would bring them together again, and it was with no
+more surprise than if the vision had intimated its second approach that
+he one night found her name in the minute envelope which the footman
+presented him at a house where he was going to dine, and realized that he
+was appointed to take her out. It was a house where he rather liked to
+go, for in that New York of his where so few houses had any distinctive
+character, this one had a temperament of its own in so far that you might
+expect to meet people of temperament there, if anywhere. They were indeed
+held in a social solution where many other people of no temperament at
+all floated largely and loosely about, but they were there, all the same,
+and it was worth coming on the chance of meeting them, though the
+indiscriminate hospitality of the hostess might let the evening pass
+without promoting the chance. Now, however, she had unwittingly put into
+Hewson's keeping, for two hours at least, the very temperament that had
+kept his fancy for the last half-year and more. He fairly laughed at
+sight of the name on the little card, and hurried into the drawing-room,
+where the first thing after greeting his hostess, he caught the wandering
+look and vague smile of Mrs. Rock. The look and the smile became personal
+to him, and she welcomed him with a curious resumption of the
+confidential terms in which they had seemed to part that afternoon at St.
+Johnswort. He thought that she was going to begin talking to him where
+she had left off, about Rosalie, as she had called her, and he was
+disappointed in the commonplaces that actually ensued. At the end of
+these, however, she did say: "Miss Hernshaw is here with me. Have you
+seen her?"
+
+"Oh, yes," Hewson returned, for he had caught sight of the girl in a
+distant group, on his way up to Mrs. Rock, but in view of the affluent
+opportunity before him had richly forborne trying even to make her bow to
+him, though he believed she had seen him. "I am to have the happiness of
+going out with her."
+
+"Oh, indeed," said Mrs. Rock, "that is nice," and then the people began
+assorting themselves, and the man who was appointed to take Mrs. Rock
+out, came and bowed Hewson away.
+
+He hastened to that corner of the room where Miss Hernshaw was waiting,
+and if he had been suddenly confronted with his apparition he could not
+have experienced a deeper and stranger satisfaction than he felt as the
+girl lifted up her innocent fierce face upon him.
+
+It brought back that whole day at St. Johnswort, of which she, with his
+vision, formed the supreme interest and equally the mystery; and it went
+warmly to his heart to have her peremptorily abolish all banalities by
+saying, "I was wondering if they were going to give me you, as soon as
+you came in."
+
+She put her slim hand on his arm as she spoke, and he thought she must
+have felt him quiver at her touch. "Then you were not afraid they were
+going to give you me?" he bantered.
+
+"No," she said, "I wanted to talk with you. I wanted you to tell me what
+Mrs. Rock said about me!"
+
+"Just now? She said you were here."
+
+"No, I mean that day at St. Johnswort."
+
+Hewson laughed out for pleasure in her frankness, and then he felt a
+gathering up of his coat-sleeve under her nervous fingers, as if (such a
+thing being imaginable) she were going unwittingly to pinch him for his
+teasing. "She said she wanted to explain you a little."
+
+"And then what!"
+
+"And then nothing. She seemed to catch your eye, and she stopped."
+
+The fingers relaxed their hold upon that gathering up of his coat-sleeve.
+"I won't _be_ explained, and I have told her so. If I choose to act
+myself, and show out my real thoughts and feelings, how is it any worse
+than if I acted somebody else!"
+
+"I should think it was very much better," said Hewson, inwardly warned to
+keep his face straight.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+They had time for no more talk between the drawing-room and the dinner
+table, and when Miss Hernshaw's chair had been pushed in behind her, and
+she sat down, she turned instantly to the man on her right and began
+speaking to him, and left Hewson to make conversation with any one he
+liked or could.
+
+He did not get on very well, not because there were not enough amusing
+people beside him and over against him, but because he was all the time
+trying to eavesdrop what was saying between Miss Hernshaw and the man on
+her right. It seemed to be absolute trivialities they were talking; so
+far as Hewson made out they got no deeper than the new play which was
+then commanding the public favor apparently for the reason that it was
+altogether surface, with no measure upwards or downwards. Upon this
+surface the comment of the man on Miss Hernshaw's right wandered
+indefatigably.
+
+Hewson could not imagine of her sincerity a deliberate purpose of letting
+the poor fellow show all the shallowness that was in him, and of amusing
+itself with his satisfaction in turning his empty mind inside out for her
+inspection. She seemed, if not genuinely interested, to be paying him an
+unaffected attention; but when the lady across the table addressed a word
+to him, Miss Hernshaw, as if she had been watching for some such chance,
+instantly turned to Hewson.
+
+"What do you think of 'Ghosts'?" she asked, with imperative suddenness.
+
+"Ghosts?" he echoed.
+
+"Or perhaps you didn't go?" she suggested, and he perceived that she
+meant Ibsen's tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a shock,
+and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St. Johnswort,
+with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again
+when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew a
+long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss Hernshaw. "Ah, I see you
+did! Wasn't it tremendous? I think the girl who did Regina was simply
+awful, don't you?"
+
+"I don't know," said Hewson, still so trammeled in his own involuntary
+associations with the word as not fully to realize the strangeness of
+discussing "Ghosts" with a young lady. But he pulled himself together,
+and nimbly making his reflection that the latitude of the stage gave room
+for the meeting of cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise tabooed,
+if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. "I think that the
+greatest miracle of the play--and to me it was altogether miraculous"--
+
+"Oh, I'm glad to hear you say that!" cried the girl. "It was the greatest
+experience of my life. I can't bear to have people undervalue it. I want
+to hit them. But go on!"
+
+Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of her potential violence:
+he pictured Miss Hernshaw beating down the inadequate witnesses of
+"Ghosts" with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her cobwebby
+handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long limp gloves looking
+curiously like her pretty young arms in their slenderness. "I was merely
+going to say that the most prodigious effect of the play was among the
+actors--I won't venture on the spectators--"
+
+"No, don't! It isn't speakable."
+
+"It's astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen's has with the actors. They
+can't play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and
+women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He
+deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with
+themselves. They have to be, and not just _seem_."
+
+Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. "I'm glad you think that," she said, and
+Hewson felt very glad too that he thought that.
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"Why? Because that is what I always want to do; and it's what I always
+shall do, I don't care what they say."
+
+"But I don't know whether I understand exactly."
+
+"Deal squarely with everybody. Say what I really feel. Then they say what
+they really feel."
+
+There was an obscure resentment unworthily struggling at the bottom of
+Hewson's heart for her long neglect of him in behalf of the man on her
+left. "Yes," he said, "if they are capable of really feeling anything."
+
+"What do you mean? Everybody really feels."
+
+"Well, then, thinking anything."
+
+She drew herself up a little with an air of question. "I believe
+everybody really thinks, too, and it's your duty to let them find out
+what they're thinking, by truly saying what you think."
+
+"Then _she_ isn't dealing quite honestly with him," said Hewson, with a
+malicious smile.
+
+The man at Miss Hernshaw's left was still talking about the play, and he
+was at that moment getting off a piece of pure parrotry about it to the
+lady across the table: just what everybody had been saying about it from
+the first.
+
+"No, I should think she was not," said the girl, gravely. She looked
+hurt, as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate,
+and Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had
+had his revenge in making her realize the man's vacuity.
+
+He tried to get her back to talk about "Ghosts," again, but she answered
+with indifference, and just then he was arrested by something a man was
+saying near the head of the table.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+It was rather a large dinner, but not so large that a striking phrase,
+launched in a momentary lull, could not fuse all the wandering
+attentions in a sole regard. The man who spoke was the psychologist
+Wanhope, and he was saying with a melancholy that mocked itself a
+little in his smile: "I shouldn't be particular about seeing a ghost
+myself. I have seen plenty of men who had seen men who had seen ghosts;
+but I never yet saw a man who had seen a ghost. If I had it would go a
+long way to persuade me of ghosts."
+
+Hewson felt his heart thump in his throat. There was a pause, and it was
+as if all eyes but the eyes of the psychologist turned upon him; these
+rested upon the ice which the servant had just then silently slipped
+under them. Hewson had no reason to think that any of the people present
+were acquainted with his experience, but he thought it safest to take
+them upon the supposition that they had, and after he had said to the
+psychologist, "Will you allow me to present him to you?" he added, "I'm
+afraid every one else knows him too well already."
+
+"You!" said his _vis-a-vis_, arching her eyebrows; and others up and down
+the table, looked round or over at Hewson where he sat midway of it with
+Miss Hernshaw drooping beside him. She alone seemed indifferent to his
+pretension; she seemed even insensible of it, as she broke off little
+corners of her ice with her fork.
+
+The psychologist fixed his eyes on him with scientific challenge as well
+as scientific interest. "Do you mean that _you_ have seen a ghost?"
+
+"Yes--ghost. Generically--provisionally. We always consider them ghosts,
+don't we, till they prove themselves something else? I once saw an
+apparition."
+
+Several people who were near-sighted or far-placed put on their
+eye-glasses, to make out whether Hewson were serious; a lady who had a
+handsome forearm put up a lorgnette and inspected him through it; she had
+the air of questioning his taste, and the subtle aura of her censure
+penetrated to him, though she preserved a face of rigid impassivity. He
+returned her stare defiantly, though he was aware of not reaching her
+through the lenses as effectively as she reached him. Most of those who
+prepared themselves to listen seemed to be putting him on trial, and they
+apparently justified themselves in this from the cross-questioning method
+the psychologist necessarily took in his wish to clarify the situation.
+
+"How long ago was it?" he asked, coldly.
+
+"Last summer."
+
+"Was it after dark?"
+
+"Very much after. It was at day-break."
+
+"Oh! You were alone?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"You made sure you were not dreaming?"
+
+"I made sure of that, instantly. I was not awakened by the apparition. I
+was already fully awake."
+
+"Had your mind been running on anything of the kind?"
+
+"Nothing could have been farther from it. I was thinking what a very long
+while it would be till breakfast." This was not true as to the order of
+the fact; but Hewson could not keep himself from saying it, and it made a
+laugh and created a diversion in his favor.
+
+"How long did it seem to last?"
+
+"The vision? That was very curious. The whole affair was quite achronic,
+as I may say. The figure was there and it was not there."
+
+"It vanished suddenly?"
+
+"I can't say it vanished at all. It ought still to be there. Have you
+ever returned to a place where you had always been wrong as to the points
+of the compass, and found yourself right up to a certain moment as you
+approached, and then without any apparent change, found yourself
+perfectly wrong again? The figure was not there, and it was there, and
+then it was not there."
+
+"I think I see what you mean," said the psychologist, warily. "The
+evanescence was subjective."
+
+"Altogether. But so was the apparescence."
+
+"Ah!" said Wanhope. "You hadn't any headache?"
+
+"Not the least."
+
+"Ah!" The psychologist desisted with the effect of letting the defence
+take the witness.
+
+A general dissatisfaction diffused itself, and Hewson felt it; but he
+disdained to do anything to appease it. He remained silent for that
+appreciable time which elapsed before his host said, almost
+compassionately, "Won't you tell us all about it, Mr. Hewson."
+
+The guests, all but Miss Hernshaw, seemed to return to their impartial
+frame, with a leaning in Hewson's favor, such as the court-room feels
+when the accused is about to testify in his own behalf; the listeners
+cannot help wishing him well, though they may have their own opinions of
+his guilt.
+
+"Why, there _isn't_ any 'all-about-it,'" said Hewson. "The whole thing
+has been stated as to the circumstances and conditions." He could see the
+baffled greed in the eyes of those who were hungering for a morsel of the
+marvellous, and he made it as meagre as he could. He had now no
+temptation to exaggerate the simple fact, and he hurried it out in the
+fewest possible words.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+The general disappointment was evident in the moment of waiting which
+followed upon his almost contemptuous ending. His audience some of them
+took their cue from his own ironical manner, and joked; others looked as
+if they had been trifled with. The psychologist said, "Curious." He did
+not go back to his position that belief in ghosts should follow from
+seeing a man who had seen one; he seemed rather annoyed by the encounter.
+The talk took another turn and distributed itself again between
+contiguous persons for the brief time that elapsed before the women were
+to leave the men to their coffee and cigars.
+
+When their hostess rose Hewson offered his arm to Miss Hernshaw. She had
+not spoken to him since he had told the story of his apparition. Now she
+said in an undertone so impassioned that every vibration from her voice
+shook his heart, "If I were you, I would never tell that story again!"
+and she pressed his arm with unconscious intensity, while she looked
+away from him.
+
+"You don't believe it happened?" he returned.
+
+"It did."
+
+"Of course it happened! Why shouldn't I believe that? But that's the very
+reason why I wouldn't have told it. If it happened, it was something
+sacred--awful! Oh, I don't see how you could bear to speak of it at a
+dinner, when people were all torpid with--"
+
+She stopped breathlessly, with a break in her voice that sounded just
+short of a sob.
+
+"Well, I'm sufficiently ashamed of doing it, and not for the first time,"
+he said, in sullen discontent with himself. "And I've been properly
+punished. You can't think how sick it makes me to realize what a
+detestable sensation I was seeking."
+
+She did not heed what he was saying. "Was it that morning at St.
+Johnswort when you got up so early, and went for a cup of coffee at the
+inn?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I thought so! I could follow every instant of it; I could see just how
+it was. If such a thing had happened to me, I would have died before I
+spoke of it at such a time as this. Oh, _why_ do you suppose it happened
+to you?" the girl grieved.
+
+"Me, of all men?" said Hewson, with a self-contemptuous smile.
+
+"I thought you were different," she said absently; then abruptly: "What
+are you standing here talking to me so long for? You must go back! All
+the men have gone back," and Hewson perceived that they had arrived in
+the drawing-room, and were conspicuously parleying in the face of a dozen
+interested women witnesses.
+
+In the dining-room he took his way toward a vacant place at the table
+near his host, who was saying behind his cigar to another old fellow: "I
+used to know her mother; she was rather original too; but nothing to this
+girl. I don't envy Mrs. Rock her job."
+
+"I don't know what the pay of a chaperon is, but I suppose Hernshaw can
+make it worth her while, if he's like the rest out there," said the other
+old fellow. "I imagine he's somewhere in his millions."
+
+The host held up one of his fingers. "Is that all? I thought more.
+Mines?"
+
+"Cattle. Ah, Mr. Hewson," said the host, turning to welcome him to the
+chair on his other side. "Have a cigar. That was a strong story you gave
+us. It had a good fault, though. It was too short."
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+Hewson had begun now to feel a keen, persistent, painful sympathy for the
+apparition itself as for some one whose confidence had been abused; and
+this feeling was none the less, but all the more, poignant because it was
+he himself who was guilty towards it. He pitied it in a sort as if it had
+been the victim of a wrong more shocking perhaps for the want of taste in
+it than for any real turpitude. This was a quality of the event not
+without a strange consolation. In arraying him on the side of the
+apparition, it antagonized him with what he had done, and enabled him to
+renounce and disown it.
+
+From the night of that dinner, Hewson did not again tell the story of his
+apparition, though the opportunities to do so now sought him as
+constantly as he had formerly sought them. They offered him a fresh
+temptation through the different perversions of the fact that had got
+commonly abroad, but he resisted this temptation, and let the
+perversions, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes amusingly, but always more
+and more wildly, wide of the reality, take their course. In his reticence
+he had the sense of atoning not only to the apparition but to Miss
+Hernshaw too.
+
+[Illustration: "'I'M AFRAID I'M RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT'"]
+
+Before he met her again, Miss Hernshaw had been carried off to Europe by
+Mrs. Rock, perhaps with the purpose of trying the veteran duplicities of
+that continent in breaking down the insurgent sincerity of her ward.
+Hewson heard that she was not to be gone a great while; it was well into
+the winter when they started, and he understood that they were merely
+going to Rome for the end of the season, and were then going to work
+northward, and after June in London were coming home. He did not fail to
+see her again before she left for any want of wishing, but he did not
+happen to meet her at other houses, and at the house of Mrs. Rock, if she
+had one, he had not been asked to call, or invited to any function. In
+thinking the point over it occurred to Hewson that this was so because he
+was not wanted there, and not wanted by Miss Hernshaw herself; for it had
+been in his brief experience of her that she let people know what she
+wanted, and that with Mrs. Rock, whose character seemed to answer to her
+name but poorly, she had ways of getting what she wanted. If Miss
+Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he could not doubt that she would
+have asked him, or at the least had him asked to come and see her, and
+not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them together.
+Towards the end of the term which rumor had fixed to her stay abroad
+Hewson's folly was embittered to him in a way that he had never expected
+in his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, like good, does not
+cease till it has fulfilled itself in every possible consequence. It
+seeing even more active and persistent. Good seems to satisfy itself
+sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds sinuously in and out, and
+reaches round and over and under its wretched author, and strikes him in
+every tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding the places out
+that seems truly of hell. Hewson thought he had paid the principal of his
+debt in full through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any sort
+of consequence from his apparition, but the interest of his debt had
+accumulated, and the sorest pinch was in paying the interest. His penalty
+took the form that was most of all distasteful to him: the form of
+publicity in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. A young lady attached to
+the staff of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her
+reporter's Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an
+interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary
+of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the
+apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while
+tastefully disguising Hewson's identity in the figure of A Well-Known
+Society-man.
+
+When Hewson read this Story (and it seemed to him that no means of
+bringing it to his notice at the club, and on the street, and by mail was
+left unemployed), he had two thoughts: one was of St. John, and one was
+of Miss Hernshaw. In all his exploitations of his experience he had
+carefully, he thought religiously, concealed the scene, except that one
+only time when Miss Hernshaw suddenly got it out of him by that demand of
+hers, "Was it that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early and
+went for a cup of coffee at the inn?" He had confided so absolutely in
+her that his admission had not troubled him at the time, and it had not
+troubled him since, till now when he found the fact given this hideous
+publicity, and knew that it could have become known only through her:
+through her who had seemed to make herself the protectress of his
+apparition and to guard it with indignation even against his own slight!
+
+He could not tell himself what to think of her, and in this disability he
+had at least the sad comfort of literally thinking nothing of her; but he
+could not keep his thoughts away from St. John. It appeared to him that
+he thought and lived nothing else till his dread concreted itself in the
+letter which came from St. John as soon as that fatal newspaper could
+reach him, and his demand for an explanation could come back to Hewson.
+He wrote from St. Johnswort, where he had already gone for the season,
+and he assumed, as no doubt he had a right to do, that the whole thing
+was a fake, and that if Hewson was hesitating about denying it for fear
+of giving it further prominence, or out of contempt for it, he wished
+that he would not hesitate. There were reasons, which would suggest
+themselves to Hewson, why the thing, if merely and entirely a fake,
+should be very annoying, and he thought that it would be best to make the
+denial immediate and imperative. To this end he advised Hewson's sending
+the newspaper people a lawyer's letter; with the ulterior trouble which
+this would intimate they would move in the matter with a quickened
+conscience.
+
+Apparently St. John was very much in earnest, and Hewson would eagerly
+have lied out of it, he felt in sudden depravity, from a just regard for
+St. John's right to privacy in his own premises, but no lying, not the
+boldest, not the most ingenious, could now avail. Scores of people could
+witness that they had heard Hewson tell the story at first hand; at
+second hand hundreds could still more confidently affirm its truth. But
+if he admitted the truth of the fact and denied merely that it had
+happened at St. Johnswort, he would have Miss Hernshaw to deal with and
+what could he hope from truth so relentless as hers? She was of a moral
+make so awful that if he ventured to deny it without appeal for her
+support (which was impossible), she was quite capable of denying his
+denial.
+
+He did the only thing he could. He wrote to St. John declaring that the
+newspaper story, though utterly false in its pretensions to be an
+interview with him, was true in its essentials. The thing _had_ really
+happened, he _had_ seen an apparition, and he had seen it at St.
+Johnswort that morning when St. John supposed his house to have been
+invaded by burglars. He vainly turned over a thousand deprecatory
+expressions in his mind, with which to soften the blow but he let his
+letter go without including one.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+A week of silence passed, and then one night St. John himself appeared at
+Hewson's apartment. Hewson almost knew that it was his ring at the door,
+and in the tremulous note of his voice asking the man if he were at home,
+he recognized the great blubbery fellow's most plaintive mood.
+
+"Well, Hewson," he whimpered, without staying for any form of greeting
+when they stood face to face, "this has been a terrible business for me.
+You can't imagine how it's broken me up in every direction."
+
+"I--I'm afraid I can, St. John," Hewson began, but St. John cut him off.
+
+"Oh, no, you can't. Look here!" He showed a handful of letters. "All from
+people who had promised to stay with me, taking it back, since that
+infernal interview of yours, or from people who hadn't answered before,
+saying they can't come. Of course they make all sorts of civil excuses. I
+shouldn't know what to do with these people if any of them came. There
+isn't a servant left on the place, except the gardener who lives in his
+own house, and the groom who sleeps in the stable. For the last three
+days I've had to take my meals at that infernal inn where you got your
+coffee."
+
+"Is it so bad as that?" Hewson gasped.
+
+"Yes, it is. It's so bad that sometimes I can't realize it. Do you
+actually mean to tell me, Hewson that you saw a ghost in my house?"
+
+"I never said a ghost. I said an apparition. I don't know what it was. It
+may have been an optical delusion. I call it an apparition, because
+that's the shortest way out. You know I'm not a spiritualist."
+
+"Yes, that's the devil of it," said St. John. "That's the very thing that
+makes people believe it _is_ a ghost. There isn't one of them that don't
+say to himself and the other fellows that if a cool, clear-headed chap
+like you saw something queer, it _must_ have been a ghost; and so they go
+on knocking my house down in price till I don't believe it would fetch
+fifteen hundred under the hammer to-morrow. It's simply ruin to me."
+
+"Ruin?" Hewson echoed.
+
+"Yes, ruin," St. John repeated. "Before this thing came out I refused
+twenty-five thousand for the place, because I knew I could get
+twenty-eight thousand. Now I couldn't get twenty-eight hundred. Couldn't
+you understand that the reputation of being haunted simply plays the
+devil with a piece of property?" "Yes; yes, I did understand that, and
+for that very reason I was always careful--"
+
+"Careful! To tell people that you had seen a ghost in my house?"
+
+"No! _Not_ to tell them where I had seen a ghost. I never--"
+
+"How did it get out then?"
+
+"I," Hewson began, and then he stood with his mouth open, unable to close
+it for the articulation of the next word, which he at last huskily
+whispered forth, "can't tell you."
+
+"Can't tell me?" wailed St. John. "Well, I call that pretty rough!"
+
+"It is rough," Hewson admitted; "and Heaven knows that I would make it
+smooth if I could. I never once--except once only--mentioned your place
+in connection with the matter. I was scrupulously careful not to do so,
+for I did imagine something like what has happened. I would do
+anything--anything--in reparation. But I can't even tell you how the name
+of your place got out in the connection, though certainly you have a
+right to ask and to know. The circumstances were--peculiar. The person--
+was one that I wouldn't have dreamt was capable of repeating it. It was
+as if I had said the words over to myself."
+
+"Well, I can't understand all that," said St. John, with rueful
+sulkiness, from which he brisked up to ask, as if by a sudden
+inspiration, "If it was only to one person, why couldn't you deny it, and
+throw the onus on the other fellow?" He looked up at Hewson, standing
+nerveless before him, from where he lay mournfully wallowing in an
+easy-chair, as if now for the first time, there might be a gleam of hope
+for them both in some such notion.
+
+Hewson slowly shook his head. "It wouldn't work. The person--isn't that
+kind of person."
+
+"Why, but see here," St. John urged. "There must be something in the
+fellow that you can appeal to. If you went and told him how it was
+playing the very deuce with me pecuniarily, he would see the necessity of
+letting you deny it, and taking the consequences, if he was anything of a
+man at all."
+
+"He isn't anything of a man at all," said Hewson, in mechanical and
+melancholy parody.
+
+"Then in Heaven's name what is he?" demanded St. John, savagely.
+
+"A woman." "Oh!" St. John fell back in his chair. But he pulled himself
+up again with a sudden renewal of hope. "Why, see here! If she's the
+right kind of woman, she'll enjoy denying the story, and putting the
+people in the wrong that have circulated it!"
+
+Hewson shook his head in rejection of the general principle, while, as to
+the particular instance, he could only say: "She isn't that kind. She's
+the kind that would rather die herself, and let everybody else die, than
+be party to any sort of deception."
+
+"She must be a queer woman," St. John bewailed himself, looking at the
+point of his cigar, and discovering to his surprise that it was out. He
+did not attempt to light it. "Of course, I can't ask you _who_ she is;
+but why shouldn't I see her, and try what _I_ can do with her? I'm the
+one that's the principal sufferer in this matter," he added, perhaps
+seeing refusal in Hewson's troubled eye.
+
+"Because--for one reason--she's in London."
+
+"Oh Lord!" St. John lamented.
+
+"But if she were here in New York, I couldn't allow it," he continued.
+"It was in confidence between us."
+
+"She doesn't seem to have thought so," said St. John, with sarcasm which
+Hewson could not resent.
+
+"There's only one thing for me to do," said Hewson, who had been thinking
+the point over, and saw no other way out for him as a gentleman, or even
+merely as a just man. He was not rich, and in the face of the mounting
+accumulations of other men he had grown comparatively poor, without
+actually losing money, since he had begun to lead the life which had long
+been his ideal. After carefully ascertaining at the time in question that
+he had sufficient income from inherited means to live without his
+profession, he had closed his law-office without shutting many clients
+out, and had contributed himself to the formation of a leisure class,
+which he conceived was regrettably lacking in our conditions. He had
+taste, he had reading, he had a pretty knowledge of the world from
+travel, he had observed manners, and it seemed to him that he might not
+immodestly pretend to supply, as far as one man went, a well-recognized
+want.
+
+Hitherto he had been able to live up to his ideal with, sufficient
+satisfaction, and in proposing to himself never to marry, but to grow old
+gradually and gracefully as a bachelor of adequate income, he saw no
+difficulties in his way for the future, until this affair of the
+apparition. If now he incurred the chances of an open change in his way
+of living--the end was simply a question of very little time. He must not
+only declass, he must depatriate himself, for he would not have the means
+of living even much more economically than he now lived in New York, if
+he did what a sense of honor, of just responsibility urged him to do with
+regard to St. John.
+
+He would have been glad of any interposition of Providence that would
+have availed him against his obvious duty. He would have liked to recall
+the words saying that there was only one thing for him to do, but he
+could not recall them and he was forced to go on. "Will you sell me your
+place?" he said to St. John, colorlessly.
+
+"Sell you my place? What do you mean?"
+
+"Simply that if you will, I shall be glad to buy it at your own
+valuation."
+
+"Oh, look here, now, Hewson! I can't let you do this," St. John began,
+trying to feel a magnanimity which proved impossible to him. "What do you
+want with my place? You couldn't get anybody to live there with you."
+
+"I couldn't afford to live there in any case," said Hewson; "but I am
+entirely willing to risk the purchase."
+
+Was it possible that Hewson knew something of the neighborhood or its
+future, which encouraged him to take the chances of the property
+appreciating in value? This thought passed through St. John's mind, and
+he was not the man to let himself be overreached in a deal. "The place
+ought to be worth thirty thousand," he said, for a bluff.
+
+It was a relief for Hewson to feel ashamed of St. John instead of
+himself, for a moment. "Very well, I'll give you thirty thousand."
+
+St. John examined himself for a responsive generosity. The most he could
+say was, "You're doing this because of what I'd said."
+
+"What does it matter? I make you a bonafide offer. I will give you thirty
+thousand dollars for St. Johnswort," said Hewson, haughtily. "I ask you
+to sell me that place. I cannot see that it will ever be any good to me,
+but I can assure you that it would be a far worse burden for me to carry
+round the sense of having injured you, however unwillingly--God knows I
+never meant you harm!--than to shoulder the chance of your place
+remaining worthless on my hands."
+
+St. John caught at the hope which the form of words suggested. "If
+anything can bring it up, it will be the fact that you have bought it.
+Such a thing would give the lie to that ridiculous story, as nothing else
+could. Every one will see that a house can't be very badly haunted, if
+the man that the ghost appeared to is willing to buy it."
+
+"Perhaps," said Hewson sadly.
+
+"No perhaps about it," St. John retorted, all the more cheerfully because
+he would have been glad before this incident to take twenty thousand for
+his place. "It's just on the borders of Lenox, and it's bound to come up
+when this blows over." He talked on for a time in an encouraging strain,
+while Hewson, standing with his back against the mantel, looked absently
+down upon him. St. John was inwardly struggling through all to say that
+Hewson might have the property for twenty-eight thousand, but he could
+not. Possibly he made himself believe that he was letting it go a great
+bargain at thirty; at any rate he ended by saying, "Well, it's yours--if
+you really mean it."
+
+"I mean it," said Hewson.
+
+St. John floundered up out of his chair with seal-like struggles. "Do you
+want the furniture?" he panted.
+
+"The furniture? Yes, why not?" said Hewson. He did not seem to know what
+he was saying, or to care.
+
+"I will put that in for a mere nominal consideration--the rugs alone are
+worth the money--say a thousand more."
+
+Hewson's man came in with a note. "The messenger is waiting, sir," he
+said.
+
+Hewson was aware of wondering that he had not heard any ring. "Will you
+excuse me?" he said, toward St. John.
+
+"By all means," said St. John.
+
+Hewson opened the note, and read it with an expression which can only be
+described as a radiant frown. He sat down at his desk, and wrote an
+answer to the note, and gave it to his man, who was still waiting. Then
+he said to St. John, "What did you say the rugs were worth?"
+
+"A thousand."
+
+"I'll take them. And what do you want for the rest of the furniture?"
+
+Clearly he had not understood that the furniture, rugs, and all, had been
+offered to him for a thousand dollars. But what was a man in St. John's
+place to do? As it was he was turning himself out of house and home for
+Hewson, and that was sacrifice enough. He hesitated, sighed deeply, and
+then said, "Well, I will throw all that in for a couple of thousand
+more."
+
+"All right," said Hewson, "I will give it. Have the papers made out and
+I will have the money ready at once."
+
+"Oh, there's no hurry about that, my dear fellow," said St. John,
+handsomely.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+Hewson's note was from Mrs. Rock, asking him to breakfast with her at the
+Walholland the next morning. She said that they were just off the
+steamer, which had got in late, and they had started so suddenly from
+London that she had not had time to write and have her apartment opened.
+She came to business in the last sentence where she said that Miss
+Hernshaw joined her in kind remembrances, and wished her to say that he
+must not fail them, or if he could not come to breakfast, to let them
+know at what hour during the day he would be kind enough to call; it was
+very important they should see him at the earliest possible moment.
+
+Hewson instantly decided that this summons was related to the affair of
+his apparition, without imagining how or why, and when Miss Hernshaw met
+him, and almost before she could say that Mrs. Rock would be down in a
+moment, began with it, he made no feint of having come for anything else.
+
+[Illustration: "'WHY, THERE ISN'T ANY PUNISHMENT SEVERE ENOUGH FOR A
+CRIME LIKE THAT'"]
+
+As he entered the door of Mrs. Rock's parlor, where the breakfast table
+was laid, the girl came swiftly toward him, with the air of having turned
+from watching for him at the window. "Well, what do you think of me?" she
+demanded as soon as she had got over Mrs. Rock's excuses for having her
+receive him. He had of course to repeat, "What do I think of you?" but he
+knew perfectly what she meant.
+
+She disdained to help him pretend that he did not know. "It was I who
+told that horrible woman about your experience at St. Johnswort. I
+didn't dream that she was an interviewer, but that doesn't excuse me,
+and I am willing to take any punishment for my--I don't know what to call
+it--mischief."
+
+She was so intensely ready, so magnificently prepared for the stake, if
+that should be her sentence, that Hewson could not help laughing. "Why
+there isn't any punishment severe enough for a crime like that," he
+began, but she would not allow him to trifle with the matter.
+
+"Oh, I didn't think you would be so uncandid! The instant I read that
+interview I made Mrs. Rock get ready to come. And we started the first
+steamer. It seemed to me that I could not eat or sleep, till I had seen
+you and told you what I had done and taken the consequences. And now do
+you think it right to turn it off as a joke?"
+
+"I don't wish to make a joke of it," said Hewson, gravely, in compliance
+with her mood. "But I don't understand, quite, how you could have got the
+story over there in time for you--"
+
+"It was cabled to their London edition--that's what it said in the paper;
+and by this time they must have it in Australia," said Miss Hernshaw,
+with unrelieved severity.
+
+"Oh!" said Hewson, giving himself time to realize that he was the
+psychical hero of two hemispheres. "Well," he resumed "what do you expect
+me to say?"
+
+"I don't know what I expect. I expected you to say something without my
+prompting you. You know that it was outrageous for me to talk about your
+apparition without your leave, and to be the means of its getting into
+the newspapers."
+
+"I'm not sure you were the means. I have told the story a hundred
+times, myself."
+
+"But that doesn't excuse me. You knew the kind of people to tell it to,
+and I didn't."
+
+"Oh, I am afraid I was willing to tell it to all kinds of people--to any
+kind that would listen."
+
+"You are trying to evade me, Mr. Hewson," she said, with a severity he
+found charming. "I didn't expect that of you."
+
+The appeal was not lost upon Hewson. "What do you want me to say?"
+
+"I want you," said Miss Hernshaw, with an effect of giving him another
+trial, "to say--to acknowledge that you were terribly annoyed by that
+interview."
+
+"If you will excuse me from attaching the slightest blame to you for it,
+I will acknowledge that I was annoyed."
+
+Miss Hernshaw drew a deep breath as of relief. "I will arrange about
+the blame," she said loftily. "And now I wish to tell you how I
+never supposed that girl was an interviewer. We were all together
+at an artist's house in Rome, and after dinner, we got to telling
+ghost-stories, the way people do, around the fire, and I told mine--yours
+I mean. And before we broke up, this girl came to me--it was while we
+were putting on our wraps--and introduced herself, and said how much she
+had been impressed by my story--of course, I mean your story--and she
+said she supposed it was made up. I said I should not dream of making up
+a thing of that kind, and that it was every word true, and I had heard
+the person it happened to tell it himself. I don't know! I was vain of
+having heard it, so, at first hand."
+
+"I can understand," said Hewson, sadly.
+
+"And then I told her who the person was, and where it happened--and about
+the burglary. You can't imagine how silly people get when they begin
+going in that direction."
+
+"I am afraid I can," said Hewson.
+
+"She seemed very grateful somehow; I couldn't see why, but I didn't ask;
+and then I didn't think about it again till I saw it in that awful
+newspaper. She sent it to me herself; she was such a simpleton; she
+thought I would actually like to see it. She must have written it down,
+and sent it to the paper, and they printed it when they got ready to; she
+needed the money, I suppose. Then I began to wonder what you would say,
+when you remembered how I blamed you for telling the same story--only not
+half so bad--at that dinner."
+
+"I always felt you were quite right," said Hewson. "I have always thanked
+you in my own mind for being so frank with me."
+
+"Well, and what do you think now, when you know that I was ten times as
+bad as you--ten times as foolish and vulgar!"
+
+"I haven't had time to formulate my ideas yet," Hewson urged.
+
+"You know perfectly well that you despise me. Can you say that I had any
+right to give your name?"
+
+"It must have got out sooner or later. I never asked any one not to
+mention my name when I told the story--"
+
+"I see that you think I took a liberty, and I did. But that's nothing.
+That isn't the point. How I do keep beating about the bush! Mrs. Rock
+says it was a great deal worse to tell where it happened, for that would
+give the place the reputation of being haunted and nobody could ever live
+there afterwards, for they couldn't keep servants, even if they didn't
+have the creeps themselves, and it would ruin the property."
+
+Hewson had not been able, when she touched upon this point, to elude the
+keen eye with which she read his silent thought.
+
+"Is that true?" she demanded.
+
+"Oh, no; oh, no," he began, but he could not frame in plausible terms the
+lies he would have uttered. He only succeeded in saying, "Those things
+soon blow over."
+
+"Then how," she said, sternly, "does it happen that in every town and
+village, almost, there are houses that you can hardly hire anybody to
+live in, because people say they are haunted? No, Mr. Hewson, it's very
+kind of you, and I appreciate it, but you can't make me believe that it
+will ever blow over, about St. Johnswort. Have you heard from Mr. St.
+John since?"
+
+"Yes," Hewson was obliged to own.
+
+"And was he very much troubled about it? I should think he was a man that
+would be, from the way he behaved about the burglary. Was he?" she
+persisted, seeing that Hewson hesitated.
+
+"Yes, I must say he was."
+
+There was a sound of walking to and fro in the adjoining room, a quick
+shutting as of trunk-lids, a noise as of a skirt shaken out, and steps
+advanced to the door. Miss Hernshaw ran to it and turned the key in the
+lock. "Not yet, Mrs. Rock," she called to the unseen presence within, and
+she explained to Hewson, as she faced him again, "She promised that I
+should have it all out with you myself, and now I'm not going to have her
+in here, interrupting. Well, did he write to you?"
+
+"Yes, he wrote to me. He wanted me to deny the story."
+
+"And did you?"
+
+"Of course not!" said Hewson, with a note of indignation. "It was true.
+Besides it wouldn't have been of any use."
+
+"No, it would have been wicked and it would have been useless. And then
+what did he say?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+"Nothing? And you have never heard another word from him?"
+
+"Yes, he came to see me last night."
+
+"Here in New York? Is he here yet?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"Where?"
+
+"I believe at the Overpark."
+
+Miss Hernshaw caught her breath, as if she were going to speak, but she
+did not say anything.
+
+"Why do you insist upon all this, Miss Hernshaw?" he entreated. "It can
+do you no good to follow the matter up!"
+
+"Do you think I want to do myself _good?_" she returned. "I want to do
+myself _harm!_ What did he say when he came to see you?"
+
+"Well, you can imagine," said Hewson, not able to keep out of his tone
+the lingering disgust he felt for St. John.
+
+"He complained?"
+
+"He all but shed tears," said Hewson, recalled to a humorous sense of St.
+John's behavior. "I felt sorry for him; though," he added, darkly, "I
+can't say that I do now."
+
+Miss Hernshaw didn't seek to fathom the mystery of his closing words.
+"Had he been actually inconvenienced by that thing in the paper?"
+
+"Yes--somewhat."
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Oh," Hewson groaned. "If you must know--"
+
+"I must! The worst!"
+
+"It had fairly turned him out of house and home. His servants had all
+left him, and he had been reduced to taking his meals at the inn. He
+showed me a handful of letters from people whom he had asked to visit
+him, withdrawing their acceptances, or making excuses for not accepting."
+
+"Ah!" said Miss Hernshaw, with a deep, inward breath, as if this now were
+indeed something like the punishment she had expected. "And will it--did
+he think--did he say anything about the pecuniary effect--the--whether it
+would hurt the property?"
+
+"He seemed to think it would," answered Hewson, reluctantly, and he
+added, unfortunately for his generous purpose, "I really can't enter upon
+that part."
+
+She arched her eyebrows in grieved surprise. "But that is the very part
+that I want you to enter upon Mr. Hewson. You _must_ tell me, now! Did he
+say that it had injured the property very much?"
+
+"He did, but--"
+
+"But what?"
+
+"I think St. John is a man to put the worst face on that matter."
+
+"You are saying that to keep me from feeling badly. But I ought to feel
+badly--I _wish_ to feel badly. I suppose he said that it wasn't worth
+anything now."
+
+"Something of that sort," Hewson helplessly admitted.
+
+"Very well, then, I will buy it for whatever he chooses to ask!" With the
+precipitation which characterized all her actions, Miss Hernshaw rose
+from the chair in which she had been provisionally sitting, pushed an
+electric button in the wall, swirled away to the other side of the room,
+unlocked the door behind which those sounds had subsided, and flinging it
+open, said, "You can come out, Mrs. Hock; I've rung for breakfast."
+
+Mrs. Rock came smoothly forth, with her vague eyes wandering over every
+other object in the room, till they rested upon Hewson, directly before
+her. Then she gave him her hand, and asked, with a smile, as if taking
+him into the joke. "Well, has Rosalie had it out with you?"
+
+"I have had it out with him, Mrs. Rock," Miss Hernshaw answered, "and I
+will tell you all about it later. Now I want my breakfast."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+Hewson ate the meal before him, and it was a very good one, as from time
+to time he noted, in a daze which was as strange a confusion of the two
+consciousnesses as he had ever experienced. Whatever the convention was
+between Miss Hernshaw and Mrs. Rock with regard to the matter in hand, or
+lately in hand, it dropped, after a few uninterested inquiries from Mrs.
+Rock, who was satisfied, or seemed so, to know that Miss Hernshaw had got
+at the worst. She led the talk to other things, like the comparative
+comforts and discomforts of the line to Genoa and the line to Liverpool;
+and Hewson met her upon these polite topics with an apparent fulness of
+interest that would have deceived a much more attentive listener.
+
+All the time he was arguing with Miss Hernshaw in his nether
+consciousness, pleading with her to keep her away from the fact that he
+had himself bought St. Johnswort, until he could frame some fitting
+form in which to tell her that he had bought it. With his outward eyes,
+he saw her drooping on the opposite side of the table, and in spite of
+her declaration that she wanted her breakfast, making nothing of it,
+after the preliminary melon, while to his inward vision she was
+passionately refusing, by every charming perversity, to be tempted
+away from the subject.
+
+As the Cunard boats always get in on Saturday, this morrow of their
+arrival was naturally Sunday; and after a while Hewson fancied symptoms
+of going to church in Mrs. Rock. She could not have become more vague
+than she ordinarily was, but her wanderings were of a kind of devotional
+character. She spoke of the American church in Rome, and asked Hewson if
+he knew the rector. Then, when he said he was afraid he was keeping her
+from going to church, she said she did not know whether Rosalie intended
+going. At the same time she rose from the table, and Hewson found that he
+should not be allowed to sit down again, unless by violence. He had to go
+away, and he went, as little at ease in his mind as he very well could
+be.
+
+He was no sooner out of the house than he felt the necessity of
+returning. He did not know how or when Miss Hernshaw would write to St.
+John, but that she would do so, he did not at all doubt, and then, when
+the truth came out, what would she think of him? He did not think her a
+very wise person; she seemed to him rather a wild and whirling person in
+her ideals of conduct, an unbridled and undisciplined person; and yet he
+was aware of profoundly and tenderly respecting her as a creature of the
+most inexpugnable innocence and final goodness. He could not bear to have
+her feel that he had trifled with her. There had not been many meetings
+between them, but each meeting had been of such event that it had
+advanced their acquaintance far beyond the point that it could have
+reached through weeks of ordinary association. From the first there had
+been that sort of intimacy which exists between spirits which encounter
+in the region of absolute sincerity. She had never used the least of
+those arts which women use in concealing the candor of their natures from
+men unworthy of it; she had not only practiced her rule of instant and
+constant veracity, but had avowed it, and as it were, invited his
+judgment of it. Hitherto, he had met her half-way at least, but now he
+was in the coil of a disingenuousness which must more and more trammel
+him from her, unless he found some way to declare the fact to her.
+
+This ought to have been an easy matter, but it was not easy; upon
+reflection it grew rather more difficult. Hewson did not see how he could
+avow the fact, which he wished to avow, without intolerable awkwardness;
+without the effect of boasting, without putting upon her a burden which
+he had no right to put. To be sure, she had got herself in for it all by
+her divine imprudence, but she had owned her error in that as promptly as
+if it had been the blame of some one else. Still Hewson doubted whether
+her magnanimity was large enough to go round in the case of a man who
+tried to let his magnanimity come upon her with any sort of dramatic
+surprise. This was what he must seem to be doing if he now left her to
+learn from another how he had kept St. John from loss by himself assuming
+the chance of depreciation in his property. But if he went and told her
+that he had done it, how much better for him would that be?
+
+He took a long, unhappy walk up into the Park, and then he walked back to
+the Walholland. By this time he thought Mrs. Rock and Miss Hernshaw must
+have been to church, but he had not the courage to send up his name to
+them. He waited about in the region of the dining-room, in the senseless
+hope that it would be better for him to surprise them on their way to
+luncheon, and trust to some chance for introducing his confession, than
+to seek a direct interview with Miss Hernshaw. But they did not come to
+luncheon, and then Hewson had the clerk send up his card. Word came back
+that the ladies would see him, and he followed the messenger to Mrs.
+Rock's apartment, where if he was surprised, he was not disappointed to
+be received by Miss Hernshaw alone.
+
+"Mrs. Rock is lying down," she explained, "but I thought that it might be
+something important, and you would not mind seeing me."
+
+"Not at all," said Hewson, with what seemed to him afterwards superfluous
+politeness, and then they both waited until he could formulate his
+business, Miss Hernshaw drooping forward, and looking down in a way that
+he had found was most characteristic of her. "It _is_ something
+important--at least it is important to me. Miss Hernshaw, may I ask
+whether you have done anything--it seems a very unwarrantable
+question--about St. Johnswort?"
+
+"About buying it?"
+
+"Yes. It will be useless to make any offer for it."
+
+"Why will it be useless to do that?"
+
+"Because--because I have bought it myself."
+
+"You have bought it?"
+
+"Yes; when he came to me last night, and made those
+representations--Well, in short, I have bought the place."
+
+"To save him from losing money by that--story?"
+
+"Well--yes. I ought to have told you the fact this morning, as soon as
+you said you would buy the place. I know that you like people to be
+perfectly truthful. But--I couldn't--without seeming to--brag."
+
+"I understand," said Miss Hernshaw.
+
+"I took the risk of your writing to St. John; but then I realized that if
+he answered and told you what I ought to have told you myself, it would
+make it worse, and I came back."
+
+"I don't know whether it would have made it worse; but you have come too
+late," said Miss Hernshaw. "I've just written to Mr. St. John."
+
+They were both silent for what Hewson thought a long time. At the end of
+it, he asked, "Did you--you must excuse me--refer to me at all?"
+
+"No, certainly not. Why should I?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't know that it would have mattered." He was silent
+again, with bowed head; when he looked up he saw tears in the girl's
+eyes.
+
+"I suppose you know where this leaves me?" she said gently.
+
+"I can't pretend that I don't," answered Hewson. "What can I do?"
+
+"You can sell me the place for what it cost you."
+
+"Oh, no, I can't do that," said Hewson.
+
+"Why do you say that? It isn't as if I were poor; but even then you
+wouldn't have the right to refuse me if I insisted. It was my fault that
+it ever came out about St. Johnswort. It might have come out about you,
+but the harm to Mr. St. John--I did that, and why should you take it upon
+yourself?"
+
+"Because I was really to blame from the beginning to the end. If it had
+not been for my pitiful wish to shine as the confidant of mystery,
+nothing would have been known of the affair. Even when you asked me that
+night if it had not happened at St. Johnswort, I know now that I had a
+wretched triumph in saying that it had, and I was so full of this that I
+did not think to caution you against repeating what I had owned."
+
+"Yes," said the girl, with her unsparing honesty, "if you had given
+me any hint, I would not have told for the world. Of course I did not
+think--a girl wouldn't--of the effect it would have on the property."
+
+"No, you wouldn't think of that," said Hewson. Though he agreed with
+her, he would have preferred that she should continue to blame herself;
+but he took himself severely in hand again. "So, you see, the fault was
+altogether mine, and if there is to be any penalty it ought to fall upon
+me."
+
+"Yes," said Miss Hernshaw, "and if there has been a fault there ought to
+be a penalty, don't you think? It would have been no penalty for me to
+buy St. Johnswort. My father wouldn't have minded it." She blushed
+suddenly, and added, "I don't mean that--You may be so rich that--I think
+I had better stop."
+
+"No, no!" said Hewson, amused, and glad of the relief. "Go on. I will
+tell you anything you wish to know."
+
+"I don't wish, to know anything," said Miss Hernshaw, haughtily.
+
+Her words seemed to put an end to an interview for which there was no
+longer any excuse.
+
+Hewson rose. "Good-by," he said, and he was rather surprised at her
+putting out her hand, but he took it gratefully. "Will you make my adieux
+to Mrs. Rock? And excuse my coming a second time to trouble you!"
+
+"I don't see how you could have helped coming," said Miss Hernshaw, "when
+you thought I might write to Mr. St. John at once."
+
+Whether this implied excuse or greater blame, Hewson had to go away with
+it as her final response, and he went away certainly in as great
+discomfort as he had come. He did not feel quite well used; it seemed to
+him that hard measure had been dealt him on all sides, but especially by
+Miss Hernshaw. After her futile effort at reparation to St. John she had
+apparently withdrawn from all responsibility in the matter. He did not
+know when he was to see her again, if ever, and he did not know what he
+was to wait for, if anything.
+
+Still he had the sense of waiting for something, or for some one, and he
+went home to wait. There he perceived that it was for St. John, who did
+not keep him waiting long. His nervous ring roused Hewson half an hour
+after his return, and St. John came in with a look in his greedy eyes
+which Hewson rightly interpreted at the first glance.
+
+"See here, Hewson," St. John said, with his habitual lack of manners. "I
+don't want to get you in for this thing at St. Johnswort. I know why you
+offered to buy the place, and though of course you are the original cause
+of the trouble, I don't feel that it's quite fair to let you shoulder the
+consequences altogether."
+
+"Have I been complaining?" Hewson asked, dryly.
+
+"No, and that's just it. You've behaved like a little man through it all,
+and I don't like to take advantage of you. If you want to rue your
+bargain, I'll call it off. I've had some fresh light on the matter, and I
+believe I can let you off without loss to myself. So that if it's me
+you're considering--"
+
+"What's your fresh light?" asked Hewson.
+
+"Well," said St. John, and he swallowed rather hard, as if it were a
+pill, "the fact is, I've had another offer for the place."
+
+"A better one?"
+
+"Well, I don't know that I can say that it is," answered St. John, saving
+his conscience in the form of the words.
+
+Hewson knew that he was lying, and he had no mercy on him. "Then I
+believe I'll stick to my bargain. You say that the other party hasn't
+bettered my offer, and so I needn't withdraw on your account. I'm not
+bound to withdraw for any other reason."
+
+"No, of course not." St. John rubbed his chin, as if hesitating to eat
+his words, however unpalatable; but in the end he seemed not to find it
+possible. "Well," he said, disgustedly, as he floundered up to take his
+leave, "I thought I ought to come and give you the chance."
+
+"It's very nice of you," said Hewson, with a smile that made itself a
+derisive grin in spite of him, and a laugh of triumph when the door had
+closed upon St. John.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+After the first flush of Hewson's triumph had passed he began to enjoy it
+less, and by-and-by he did not enjoy it at all. He had done right not
+only in keeping St. John from plundering Miss Hernshaw, but in standing
+firm and taking the punishment which ought to fall upon him and not on
+her. But the sense of having done right sufficed him no more than the
+sense of having got the better of St. John. What was lacking to him? In
+the casuistry of the moment, which was perhaps rather emotional than
+rational, it appeared to Hewson that he had again a duty toward Miss
+Hernshaw, and that his feeling of dissatisfaction was the first effect of
+its non-fulfilment. But it was clearly impossible that he should go again
+to see her, and tell her what had passed between him and St. John, and it
+was clearly impossible that he should write and tell her what it was
+quite as clearly her right to know from him. If he went to her, or wrote
+to her, he felt himself in danger of wanting to shine in the affair, as
+her protector against the rapacity of St. John, and as the man of
+superior quality who had outwitted a greedy fellow. The fear that she
+might not admire his splendor in either sort caused him to fall somewhat
+nervelessly back upon Providence; but if the moral government of the
+universe finally favored him it was not by traversing any of its own
+laws. By the time he had determined to achieve both the impossibilities
+which formed his dilemma--had decided to write to Miss Hernshaw and call
+upon her, and leave his letter in the event of failing to find her--his
+problem was as far solved as it might be, by the arrival of a note from
+Miss Hernshaw herself, hoping that he would come to see her on business
+of pressing importance.
+
+She received him without any pretence of Mrs. Rock's intermediary
+presence, and put before him a letter which she had received, before
+writing him, from St. John, and which she could not answer without first
+submitting it to him. It was a sufficiently straightforward expression of
+his regret that he could not accept her very generous offer for St.
+Johnswort because the place was already sold. He had the taste to forbear
+any allusion to the motives which (she told Hewson) she had said prompted
+her offer; but then he became very darkling and sinuous in a suggestion
+that if Miss Hernshaw wished to have her offer known as hers to the
+purchaser of St. Johnswort he would be happy to notify him of it.
+
+"You see," she eagerly commented to Hewson, "he does not give your name;
+but I know who it is, though I did not know when I made him my offer. I
+must answer his letter now, and what shall I say? Shall I tell him I know
+who it is? I should like to; I hate all concealments! Will it do any harm
+to tell him I know?"
+
+Hewson reflected. "I don't see how it can. I was trying to come to you,
+when I got your note, to say that St. John had been to see me, and
+offered to release me from my offer, because, as I thought, you had made
+him a better one. He's amusingly rapacious, St. John is."
+
+"And what did you--I beg your pardon!"
+
+"Oh, not at all. I said I would stand to my offer."
+
+She repressed, apparently, some form of protest, and presently asked,
+"And what shall I say?"
+
+"Oh, if you like, that you have learned who the purchaser of St.
+Johnswort is, and that you know he will not give way."
+
+"Well!" she said, with a quick sigh, as of disappointment. After an
+indefinite pause, she asked, "Shall you be going to St. Johnswort?"
+
+"Why, I don't know," Hewson answered. "I had thought of going to Europe.
+But, yes, I think I shall go to St. Johnswort, first, at any rate. One
+can't simply turn one's back on a piece of real estate in that way," he
+said, recognizing a fact that would doubtless have presented itself in
+due order for his consideration. "My one notion was to forget it as
+quickly as possible."
+
+"I should not think you would want to do that," said the girl, seriously.
+
+"No, one oughtn't to neglect an investment."
+
+"I don't mean that. But if such a thing had happened to me, there, I
+should want to go again and again."
+
+"You mean the apparition? Did I tell you how I had always had the
+expectation that I should see it again, and perhaps understand it? But
+when I had behaved so shabbily about it, I began to feel that it would
+not come again."
+
+"If I were in your place," said the girl, "I should never give up; I
+should spend my whole life trying to find out what it meant."
+
+"Ah!" he sighed. "I wish you could put yourself in my place."
+
+"I wish I could," she returned, intensely.
+
+They looked into each other's faces.
+
+"Miss Hernshaw," he demanded, solemnly, "do you really like people to say
+what they think?"
+
+"Of course I do!"
+
+"Then I wish you would come to St. Johnswort with me!"
+
+"Would that do?" she asked. "If Mrs. Rock--"
+
+He saw how far she was from taking his meaning, but he pushed on. "I
+don't want Mrs. Rock. I want you--you alone. Don't you understand me? I
+love you. I--of course it's ridiculous! We've only met three or four
+times in our lives, but I knew this as well the first moment as I do now.
+I knew it when you came walking across the garden that morning, and I
+haven't known it any better since, and I couldn't in a thousand years.
+But of course--"
+
+"Sit down," she said, wafting herself into a chair, and he obeyed her. "I
+should have to tell my father," she began.
+
+"Why, certainly," and he sprang to his feet again.
+
+She commanded him to his chair with an imperative gesture. "I have got
+to find out what I think, first, myself. If I were sure that I loved
+you--but I don't know. I believe you are good. I believed that when they
+were all joking you there at breakfast, and you took it so nicely; I have
+_always_ believed that you were good."
+
+She seemed to be appealing to him for confirmation, but he could not very
+well say that she was right, and he kept silent. "I didn't like your
+telling that story at the dinner, and I said so; and then I went and did
+the same thing, or worse; so that I have nothing to say about that. And I
+think you have behaved very nobly to Mr. St. John." As if at some sign of
+protest in Hewson, she insisted, "Yes, I do! But all this doesn't prove
+that I love you." Again she seemed to appeal to him, and this time he
+thought he might answer her appeal.
+
+"I couldn't prove that _I_ love _you_, but I feel sure of it."
+
+"And do you believe that we ought to take our feelings for a guide?"
+
+"That's what people do," he ventured, with the glimmer of a smile in his
+eyes, which she was fixing so earnestly with her own.
+
+"I am not satisfied that it is the right way," she answered. "If there is
+really such a thing as love there ought to be some way of finding it out
+besides our feelings. Don't you think it's a thing we ought to talk
+sensibly about?"
+
+"Of all things in the world; though it isn't the custom."
+
+Miss Hernshaw was silent for a moment. Then she said, "I believe I should
+like a little time."
+
+"Oh, I didn't expect you to answer me at once,--I"
+
+"But if you are going to Europe?"
+
+"I needn't go to Europe at all. I can go to St. Johnswort, and wait for
+your answer there."
+
+"It might be a good while," she urged. "I should want to tell my father
+that I was thinking about it, and he would want to see you before he
+approved."
+
+"Why, of course!"
+
+"Not," she added, "that it would make any difference, if I was sure of it
+myself. He has always said that he would not try to control me in such a
+matter, and I think he would like you. I do like you very much myself,
+Mr. Hewson, but I don't think it would be right to say I loved you unless
+I could prove it."
+
+Hewson was tempted to say that she could prove it by marrying him, but he
+had not the heart to mock a scruple which he felt to be sacred. What he
+did say was: "Then I will wait till you can prove it. Do you wish me not
+to see you again, before you have made up your mind?"
+
+"I don't know. I can't see what harm there would be in our meeting."
+"No, I can't, either," said Hewson, as she seemed to refer the point to
+him. "Should you mind my coming again, say, this evening?"
+
+"To-night?" She reflected a moment. "Yes, come to-night."
+
+When he came after dinner, Hewson was sensible from the perfect
+unconsciousness of Mrs. Rock's manner that Miss Hernshaw had been telling
+her. Her habit of a wandering eye, contributed to the effect she wished
+to produce, if this were the effect, and her success was such that it
+might easily have deceived herself. But when Mrs. Rock, in a supreme
+exercise of her unconsciousness, left him with the girl for a brief
+interval before it was time for him to go, Miss Hernshaw said, "Mrs. Rock
+knows about it, and she says that the best way for me to find out will be
+to try whether I can live without you."
+
+"Was that Mrs. Rock's idea?" asked Hewson, as gravely as he could.
+
+"No it was mine; I suggested it to her; but she approves of it. Don't
+you like it?"
+
+"Yes. I hope I sha'n't die while you are trying to live without me. Shall
+you be very long?" She frowned, and he hastened to say, "I do like your
+idea; it's the best way, and I thank you for giving me a chance."
+
+"We are going out to my father's ranch in Colorado, at once," she
+explained. "We shall start to-morrow morning."
+
+"Oh! May I come to see you off?"
+
+"No, I would rather begin at once."
+
+"May I write to you?"
+
+"I will write to you--when I've decided."
+
+She gave him her hand, but she would not allow him to keep it for more
+than farewell, and then she made him stay till Mrs. Rock came back, and
+take leave of her too; he had frankly forgotten Mrs. Rock, who bade him
+adieu with averted eyes, and many civilities about seeing him again. She
+could hardly have been said to be seeing him then.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+The difficulties of domestication at St. Johnswort had not been
+misrepresented by the late proprietor, Hewson found, when he went to take
+possession of his estate. He thought it right in engaging servants to say
+openly that the place had the reputation of being haunted, and if he had
+not thought it right he would have thought it expedient, for he knew that
+if he had concealed the fact it would have been discovered to them within
+twenty-four hours of their arrival. His declaration was sufficient at
+once with most, who recoiled from his service as if he had himself been a
+ghost; with one or two sceptics who seemed willing to take the risks
+(probably in a guilty consciousness of records that would have kept them
+out of other employ) his confession that he had himself seen the spectre
+which haunted St. Johnswort, was equally effective. He prevailed at last
+against the fact and his own testimony with a Japanese, who could not be
+made to understand the objection to the place, and who willingly went
+with Hewson as his valet and general house-workman. With the wife of the
+gardener coming in to cook for them during the long daylight, he got on
+in as much comfort as he could have expected, and by night he suffered no
+sort of disturbance from the apparition. He had expected to be annoyed by
+believers in spiritualism, and other psychical inquirers, but it sufficed
+with them to learn from him that he had come to regard his experience, of
+which he had no more question now than ever, as purely subjective.
+
+It seemed to Hewson, in the six weeks' time which he spent at St.
+Johnswort, waiting to hear from Rosalie (he had come already to think of
+her as Rosalie), that all his life was subjective, it passed so like a
+dream. He had some outward cares as to the place; he kept a horse in the
+stable, where St. John had kept half a dozen, and he had the gardener
+look after that as well as the shrubs and vegetables; but all went on in
+a suspensive and provisional sort. In the mean time Rosalie's charm grew
+upon him; everything that she had said or looked, was hourly and daily
+sweeter and dearer; her truth was intoxicating, beyond the lures of other
+women, in which the quality of deceit had once fascinated him. Now, so
+late in his youthful life, he realized that there was no beauty but that
+of truth, and he pledged himself a thousand times that if she should say
+she could not live without him he would henceforward live for truth
+alone, and not for the truth merely as it was in her, but as it was in
+everything. In those day's he learned to know himself, as he never had
+before, and to put off a certain shell of worldliness that had grown upon
+him. In his remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful to him;
+he thought with reluctance of going back to it; his club, which had been
+his home, now appeared a joyless exile; the life of a leisure class,
+which he had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little in the
+retrospect; he wondered how he could have valued the things that he had
+once thought worthy. He did not know what he should replace it all with,
+but Rosalie would know, in the event of not being able to live without
+him. In that event there was hardly any use of which he could not be
+capable. In any other event--he surprised himself by realizing that in
+any other event--still the universe had somehow more meaning than it once
+had. Somehow, he felt himself an emancipated man.
+
+He began many letters to Rosalie, and some he finished and some not, but
+he sent none; and when her letter came at last, he was glad that he had
+waited for it in implicit trust of its coming, though he believed she
+would have forgiven him if he had not had the patience. The letter was
+quite what he could have imagined of her. She said that she had put
+herself thoroughly to the test, and she could not live without him. But
+if he had found out that he could live without her, then she should know
+that she had been to blame, and would take her punishment. Apparently in
+her philosophy, which now seemed to him so divine, without punishment
+there must be perdition; it was the penalty that redeemed; that was the
+token of forgiveness.
+
+Hewson hurried out to Colorado, where he found Hernshaw a stout, silent,
+impersonal man, whose notion of the paternal office seemed to be a ready
+acquiescence in a daughter's choice of a husband; he appeared to think
+this could be best expressed to Hewson in a good cigar He perceptibly
+enjoyed the business details of the affair, but he enjoyed despatching
+them in the least possible time and the fewest words, and then he settled
+down to the pleasure of a superficial passivity. Hewson could not make
+out that he regarded his daughter as at all an unusual girl, and from
+this he argued that her mother must have been a very unusual woman. His
+only reason for doubting that Rosalie must have got all her originality
+from her mother was something that fell from Hernshaw when they were near
+the end of their cigars. He said irrelevantly to their talk at that
+point, "I suppose you know Rosalie believes in that ghost of yours?"
+
+"Was it a ghost?--I've never been sure, myself," said Hewson.
+
+"How do you explain it?" asked his prospective father-in-law.
+
+"I don't explain it. I have always left it just as it was. I know that it
+was a real experience."
+
+"I think I should have left it so, too," said Hernshaw. "That always
+gives it a chance to explain itself. If such a thing had happened to me I
+should give it all the time it wanted."
+
+"Well, I haven't hurried it," Hewson suggested.
+
+"What I mean," and Hernshaw stepped to the edge of the porch and threw
+the butt of his cigar into the darkness, where it described a glimmering
+arc, "is that if anything came to me that would help shore up my
+professed faith in what most of us want to believe in, I would take the
+common-law view of it. I would believe it was innocent till it proved
+itself guilty. I wouldn't try to make it out a fraud myself."
+
+"I'm afraid that's what I've really done," said Hewson. "But before
+people I've put up a bluff of despising it."
+
+"Oh, yes, I understand that," said Hernshaw. "A man thinks that if he
+can have an experience like that he must be something out of the common,
+and if he can despise it--"
+
+"You've hit my case exactly," said Hewson, and the two men laughed.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+After his marriage, which took place without needless delay, Hewson
+returned with his wife to spend their honey-moon at St. Johnswort. The
+honey-moon prolonged itself during an entire year, and in this time they
+contrived so far to live down its reputation of being a haunted house
+that they were able to conduct their _menage_ on the ordinary terms. They
+themselves never wished to lose the sense of something supernatural in
+the place, and were never quite able to accept the actual conditions as
+final. That is to say, Rosalie was not, for she had taken Hewson's
+apparition under her peculiar care, and defended it against even his
+question. She had a feeling (it was scarcely a conviction) that if he
+believed more strenuously in the validity of his apparition as an
+authorized messenger from the unseen world it would yet come again and
+declare its errand. She could not accept the theory that if such a thing
+actually happened it could happen for nothing at all, or that the reason
+of its occurrence could be indefinitely postponed. She was impatient of
+that, as often as he urged the possibility, and she wished him to use a
+seriousness of mind in speaking of his apparition which should form some
+sort of atonement to it for his past levity, though since she had taken
+his apparition into her keeping he had scarcely hazarded any suggestion
+concerning it; in fact it had become so much her apparition that he had a
+fantastic reluctance from meddling with it.
+
+"You are always requiring a great occasion for it," he said, at last.
+"What greater event could it have foreshadowed or foreshown, than that
+which actually came to pass?"
+
+"I don't understand you, Arthur," she said, letting her hand creep into
+his, where it trembled provisionally as they sat together in the
+twilight.
+
+"Why, that was the day I first saw you."
+
+"Now, you are laughing!" she said, pulling her hand away.
+
+"Indeed, I'm not! I couldn't imagine anything more important than the
+union of our lives. And if that was what the apparition meant to portend
+it could not have intimated it by a more noble and impressive behavior.
+Simply to be there, and then to be gone, and leave the rest to us! It was
+majestic, it was--delicate!"
+
+"Yes, it was. But it was too much, for it was out of proportion. A mere
+earthly love-affair--" "Is it merely for earth?"
+
+"Oh, husband, I hope you don't think so! I wanted you to say you didn't.
+And if you don't think so, yes, I'll believe it came for that!"
+
+"You may be sure I don't think so."
+
+"Then I know it will come again."
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+THE ANGEL OF THE LORD.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+"All that sort of personification," said Wanhope, "is far less remarkable
+than the depersonification which has now taken place so thoroughly that
+we no longer think in the old terms at all. It was natural that the
+primitive peoples should figure the passions, conditions, virtues, vices,
+forces, qualities, in some sort of corporal shape, with each a propensity
+or impulse of its own, but it does not seem to me so natural that the
+derivative peoples should cease to do so. It is rational that they should
+do so, and I don't know that any stronger proof of our intellectual
+advance could be alleged than the fact that the old personifications
+survive in the parlance while they are quite extinct in the
+consciousness. We still talk of death at times as if it were an embodied
+force of some kind, and of love in the same way; but I don't believe that
+any man of the commonest common-school education thinks of them so. If
+you try to do it yourself, you are rather ashamed of the puerility, and
+when a painter or a sculptor puts them in an objective shape, you follow
+him with impatience, almost with contempt."
+
+"How about the poets?" asked Minver, less with the notion, perhaps, of
+refuting the psychologist than of bringing the literary member of our
+little group under the disgrace that had fallen upon him as an artist.
+
+"The poets," said I, "are as extinct as the personifications."
+
+"That's very handsome of you, Acton," said the artist. "But go on,
+Wanhope."
+
+"Yes, get down to business," said Rulledge. Being of no employ whatever,
+and spending his whole life at the club in an extraordinary idleness,
+Rulledge was always using the most strenuous expressions, and requiring
+everybody to be practical. He leaned directly forward with the difficulty
+that a man of his girth has in such a movement, and vigorously broke off
+the ash of his cigar against the edge of his saucer. We had been dining
+together, and had been served with coffee in the Turkish room, as it was
+called from its cushions and hangings of Indian and Egyptian stuffs.
+"What is the instance you've got up your sleeve?" He smoked with great
+energy, and cast his eyes alertly about as if to make sure that there was
+no chance of Wanhope's physically escaping him, from the corner of the
+divan, where he sat pretty well hemmed in by the rest of us, spreading in
+an irregular circle before him.
+
+"You unscientific people are always wanting an instance, as if an
+instance were convincing. An instance is only suggestive; a thousand
+instances, if you please, are convincing," said the psychologist. "But I
+don't know that I wish to be convincing. I would rather be enquiring.
+That is much more interesting, and, perhaps, profitable."
+
+"All the same," Minver persisted, apparently in behalf of Rulledge, but
+with an after-grudge of his own, "you'll allow that you were thinking of
+something in particular when you began with that generalization about the
+lost art of personifying?"
+
+"Oh, that is very curious," said the psychologist. "We talk of
+generalizing, but is there any such thing? Aren't we always striving from
+one concrete to another, and isn't what we call generalizing merely a
+process of finding our way?"
+
+"I see what you mean," said the artist, expressing in that familiar
+formula the state of the man who hopes to know what the other man means.
+
+"That's what I say," Rulledge put in. "You've got something up your
+sleeve. What is it?"
+
+Wanhope struck the little bell on the table before him, but, without
+waiting for a response, he intercepted a waiter who was passing with a
+coffee-pot, and asked, "Oh, couldn't you give me some of that?"
+
+The man filled his cup for him, and after Wanhope put in the sugar and
+lifted it to his lips, Rulledge said, with his impetuous business air,
+"It's easy to see what Wanhope does his high thinking on."
+
+"Yes," the psychologist admitted, "coffee is an inspiration. But you can
+overdo an inspiration. It would be interesting to know whether there
+hasn't been a change in the quality of thought since the use of such
+stimulants came in--whether it hasn't been subtilized--"
+
+"Was that what you were going to say?" demanded Rulledge, relentlessly.
+"Come, we've got no time to throw away!"
+
+Everybody laughed.
+
+"_You_ haven't, anyway," said I.
+
+"Well, none of his own," Minver admitted for the idler.
+
+"I suppose you mean I have thrown it all away. Well, I don't want to
+throw away other peoples'. Go on, Wanhope."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+The psychologist set his cup down and resumed his cigar, which he had to
+pull at pretty strongly before it revived. "I should not be surprised,"
+he began, "if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, and
+perpetuated itself in the race, from the early personification of
+dissolution as an enemy of a certain dreadful aspect, armed and
+threatening. That conception wouldn't have been found in men's minds at
+first; it would have been the result of later crude meditation upon the
+fact. But it would have remained through all the imaginative ages, and
+the notion might have been intensified in the more delicate temperaments
+as time went on, and by the play of heredity it might come down to our
+own day in certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by the lapse
+of incalculable time."
+
+"You said just now," said Rulledge, in rueful reproach, "that
+personification had gone out."
+
+"Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion
+of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive
+in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory
+suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface."
+
+"I wish I knew what you were driving at," said Rulledge.
+
+"You remember Ormond, don't you?" asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me.
+
+"Perfectly," I said. "I--he isn't living, is he?"
+
+"No; he died two years ago."
+
+"I thought so," I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put
+a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally.
+
+"You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe," the psychologist pursued.
+
+I owned that I used to go to the Ormonds' house.
+
+"Then you know what a type she was, I suppose," he turned to the others,
+"and as they're both dead it's no contravention of the club etiquette
+against talking of women, to speak of her. I can't very well give the
+instance--the sign--that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her,
+unless I use a great deal of circumlocution." We all urged him to go on,
+and he went on. "I had the facts I'm going to give, from Mrs. Ormond. You
+know that the Ormonds left New York a couple of years ago?"
+
+He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and Minver answered: "No; I
+must confess that I didn't even know they had left the planet."
+
+Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. "They went to live
+provisionally at a place up the Housatonic road, somewhere--perhaps
+Canaan; but it doesn't matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with
+an obscure affection of the heart--"
+
+"Oh, come now!" said Rulledge. "You're not going to spring anything so
+pat as heart-disease on us?"
+
+"Acton is all ears," said Minver, nodding toward me. "He hears the weird
+note afar."
+
+The psychologist smiled. "I'm afraid you're not interested. I'm not much
+interested myself in these unrelated instances."
+
+"Oh, no!" "Don't!" "Do go on!" the different entreaties came, and after a
+little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: "I
+don't know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of
+death." We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope
+resumed: "I shouldn't say that he was a coward above other men I believe
+he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death
+weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if
+we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have
+been a character out of one of Tourguenief's books, the idea of death was
+so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a
+part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have
+had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the
+projection of an alien horror into his life--a prenatal influence--"
+
+"Jove!" Rulledge broke in. "I don't see how the women stand it. To look
+forward nearly a whole year to death as the possible end of all they're
+hoping for and suffering for! Talk of men's courage after that! I wonder
+we're not _all_ marked.'
+
+"I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond's history," said
+Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion.
+
+Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, "What
+do you fellows make of the terror that a two months' babe starts in its
+sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own
+hook?"
+
+"We don't make anything of it," the psychologist answered. "Perhaps the
+pathologists do."
+
+"Oh, it's easy enough to say wind," Rulledge indignantly protested.
+
+"Too easy, I agree with you," Wanhope consented. "We cannot tell what
+influences reach us from our environment, or what our environment really
+is, or how much or little we mean by the word. The sense of danger seems
+to be inborn, and possibly it is a survival of our race life when it was
+wholly animal and took care of itself through what we used to call the
+instincts. But, as I was saying, it was not danger that Ormond seemed to
+be afraid of, if it came short of death. He was almost abnormally
+indifferent to pain. I knew of his undergoing an operation that most
+people would take ether for, and not wincing, because it was not supposed
+to involve a fatal result.
+
+"Perhaps he carried his own anodyne with him," said Minver, "like the
+Chinese."
+
+"You mean a sort of self-anaesthesia?" Wanhope asked. "That is very
+interesting. How far such a principle, if there is one, can be carried in
+practice. The hypnotists--"
+
+"I'm afraid I didn't mean anything so serious or scientific," said the
+painter.
+
+"Then don't switch Wanhope off on a side track," Rulledge implored. "You
+know how hard it is to keep him on the main line. He's got a mind that
+splays all over the place if you give him the least chance. Now, Wanhope,
+come down to business."
+
+Wanhope laughed amiably. "Why, there's so very little of the business.
+I'm not sure that it wasn't Mrs. Ormond's attitude toward the fact that
+interested me most. It was nothing short of devout. She was a convert.
+She believed he really saw--I suppose," he turned to me, "there's no harm
+in our recognizing now that they didn't always get on smoothly together?"
+
+"Did they ever?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, yes--oh, yes," said the psychologist, kindly. "They were very fond
+of each other, and often very peaceful."
+
+"I never happened to be by," I said.
+
+"Used to fight like cats and dogs," said Minver. "And they didn't seem to
+mind people. It was very swell, in a way, their indifference, and it did
+help to take away a fellow's embarrassment."
+
+"That seemed to come mostly to an end that summer," said Wanhope, "if you
+could believe Mrs. Ormond."
+
+"You probably couldn't," the painter put in.
+
+"At any rate she seemed to worship his memory."
+
+"Oh, yes; she hadn't him there to claw."
+
+"Well, she was quite frank about it with me," the psychologist pursued.
+"She admitted that they had always quarreled a good deal. She seemed to
+think it was a token of their perfect unity. It was as if they were each
+quarreling with themselves, she said. I'm not sure that there wasn't
+something in the notion. There is no doubt but that they were
+tremendously in love with each other, and there is something curious in
+the bickerings of married people if they are in love. It's one way of
+having no concealments; it's perfect confidence of a kind--"
+
+"Or unkind," Minver suggested.
+
+"What has all that got to do with it!" Rulledge demanded.
+
+"Nothing directly," Wanhope confessed, "and I'm not sure that it has much
+to do indirectly. Still, it has a certain atmospheric relation. It is
+very remarkable how thoughts connect themselves with one another. It's a
+sort of wireless telegraphy. They do not touch at all; there is
+apparently no manner of tie between them, but they communicate--"
+
+"Oh, Lord!" Rulledge fumed.
+
+Wanhope looked at him with a smiling concern, such as a physician might
+feel in the symptoms of a peculiar case. "I wonder," he said absently,
+"how much of our impatience with a fact delayed is a survival of the
+childhood of the race, and how far it is the effect of conditions in
+which possession is the ideal!"
+
+Rulledge pushed back his chair, and walked away in dudgeon. "I'm a busy
+man myself. When you've got anything to say you can send for me."
+
+Minver ran after him, as no doubt he meant some one should. "Oh, come
+back! He's just going to begin;" and when Rulledge, after some pouting,
+had been _pushed down into his chair again,_ Wanhope went on, with a
+glance of scientific pleasure at him.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+"The house they had taken was rather a lonely place, out of sight of
+neighbors, which they had got cheap because it was so isolated and
+inconvenient, I fancy. Of course Mrs. Ormond, with her exaggeration,
+represented it as a sort of solitude which nobody but tramps of the most
+dangerous description ever visited. As she said, she never went to sleep
+without expecting to wake up murdered in her bed."
+
+"Like her," said Minver, with a glance at me full of relish for the touch
+of character which I would feel with him.
+
+"She said," Wanhope went on, "that she was anxious from the first for the
+effect upon Ormond. In the stress of any danger, she gave me to
+understand, he always behaved very well, but out of its immediate
+presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy apprehensions, unless the
+surroundings were cheerful. She could not imagine how he came to take the
+place, but when she told him so--"
+
+"I've no doubt she told him so pretty promptly," the painter grinned.
+
+"--he explained that he had seen it on a brilliant day in spring, when
+all the trees were in bloom, and the bees humming in the blossoms, and
+the orioles singing, and the outlook from the lawn down over the river
+valley was at its best. He had fallen in love with the place, that was
+the truth, and he was so wildly in love with it all through that he could
+not feel the defect she did in it. He used to go gaily about the wide,
+harking old house at night, shutting it up, and singing or whistling
+while she sat quaking at the notion of their loneliness and their
+absolute helplessness--an invalid and a little woman--in case anything
+happened. She wanted him to get the man who did the odd jobs about the
+house, to sleep there, but he laughed at her, and they kept on with their
+usual town equipment of two serving-women. She could not account for his
+spirits, which were usually so low when they were alone--"
+
+"And not fighting," Minver suggested to me.
+
+"--and when she asked him what the matter was he could not account for
+them, either. But he said, one day, that the fear of death seemed to be
+lifted from his soul, and that made her shudder."
+
+Rulledge fetched a long sigh, and Minver interpreted, "Beginning to feel
+that it's something like now."
+
+"He said that for the first time within his memory he was rid of that
+nether consciousness of mortality which had haunted his whole life, and
+poisoned, more or less, all his pleasure in living. He had got a
+reprieve, or a respite, and he felt like a boy--another kind of boy from
+what he had ever been. He was full of all sorts of brilliant hopes and
+plans. He had visions of success in business beyond anything he had
+known, and talked of buying the place he had taken, and getting a summer
+colony of friends about them. He meant to cut the property up, and make
+the right kind of people inducements. His world seemed to have been
+emptied of all trouble as well as all mortal danger."
+
+"Haven't you psychologists some message about a condition like
+that!" I asked.
+
+"Perhaps it's only the pathologists again," said Minver.
+
+"The alienists, rather more specifically," said Wanhope. "They recognize
+it as one of the beginnings of insanit--_folie des grandeurs_ as the
+French call the stage."
+
+"Is it necessarily that?" Rulledge demanded, with a resentment which we
+felt so droll in him that we laughed.
+
+"I don't know that it is," said Wanhope. "I don't know why we shouldn't
+sometimes, in the absence of proofs to the contrary, give such a fact the
+chance to evince a spiritual import. Of course it had no other import to
+poor Mrs. Ormond, and of course I didn't dream of suggesting a scientific
+significance."
+
+"I should think not!" Rulledge puffed.
+
+Wanhope went on: "I don't think I should have dared to do so to a woman
+in her exaltation concerning it. I could see that however his state had
+affected her with dread or discomfort in the first place, it had since
+come to be her supreme hope and consolation. In view of what afterward
+happened, she regarded it as the effect of a mystical intimation from
+another world that was sacred, and could not he considered like an
+ordinary fact without sacrilege. There was something very pathetic in her
+absolute conviction that Ormond's happiness was an emanation from the
+source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the consciousness
+persists, comes to a death-bed. That the dying are not afraid of dying is
+a fact of such common, such almost invariable observation--"
+
+"You mean," I interposed, "when the vital forces are beaten so low that
+the natural dread of ceasing to be, has no play? It has less play, I've
+noticed, in age than in youth, but for the same reason that it has when
+people are weakened by sickness."
+
+"Ah," said Wanhope, "that comparative indifference to death in the old,
+to whom it is so much nearer than it is to the young, is very suggestive.
+There may be something in what you say; they may not care so much because
+they have no longer the strength--the muscular strength--for caring. They
+are too tired to care as they used. There is a whole region of most
+important inquiry in that direction--"
+
+"Did you mean to have him take that direction?" Rulledge asked, sulkily.
+
+"He can take any direction for me," I said. "He is always delightful."
+
+"Ah, thank you!" said Wanhope.
+
+"But I confess," I went on, "that I was wondering whether the fact that
+the dying are indifferent to death could be established in the case of
+those who die in the flush of health and strength, like, for instance,
+people who are put to death."
+
+Wanhope smiled. "I think it can--measurably. Most murderers make a good
+end, as the saying used to be, when they end on the scaffold, though they
+are not supported by religious fervor of any kind, or the exaltation of a
+high ideal. They go meekly and even cheerfully to their death, without
+rebellion or even objection. It is most exceptional that they make a
+fight for their lives, as that woman did a few years ago at Dannemora,
+and disgusted all refined people with capital punishment."
+
+"I wish they would make a fight always," said Rulledge, with unexpected
+feeling. "It would do more than anything to put an end to that
+barbarity."
+
+"It would be very interesting, as Wanhope says," Minver remarked. "But
+aren't we getting rather far away? From the Ormonds, I mean."
+
+"We are, rather," said Wanhope. "Though I agree that it would be
+interesting. I should rather like to have it tried. You know Frederick
+Douglass acted upon some such principle when his master attempted to whip
+him. He fought, and he had a theory that if the slave had always fought
+there would soon have been an end of whipping, and so an end of slavery.
+But probably it will be a good while before criminals are--"
+
+"Educated up to the idea," Minver proposed.
+
+"Yes," Wanhope absently acquiesced. "There seems to be a resignation
+intimated to the parting soul, whether in sickness or in health, by the
+mere proximity of death. In Ormond's case there seems to have been
+something more positive. His wife says that in the beginning of those
+days he used to come to her and wonder what could be the matter with him.
+He had a joy he could not account for by anything in their lives, and it
+made her tremble."
+
+"Probably it didn't. I don't think there was anything that could make
+Mrs. Ormond tremble, unless it was the chance that Ormond would get the
+last word," said Minver.
+
+No one minded him, and Wanhope continued: "Of course she thought he
+must be going to have a fit of sickness, as the people say in the
+country, or used to say. Those expressions often survive in the common
+parlance long after the peculiar mental and moral conditions in which
+they originated have passed away. They must once have been more
+accurate than they are now. When one said 'fit of sickness' one must
+have meant something specific; it would be interesting to know what.
+Women use those expressions longer than men; they seem to be inveterate
+in their nerves; and women apparently do their thinking in their nerves
+rather than their brains."
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+Wanhope had that distant look in his eyes which warned his familiars of a
+possible excursion, and I said, in the hope of keeping him from it, "Then
+isn't there a turn of phrase somewhat analogous to that in a
+personification?"
+
+"Ah, yes--a personification," he repeated with a freshness of interest,
+which he presently accounted for. "The place they had taken was very
+completely furnished. They got it fully equipped, even to linen and
+silver; but what was more important to poor Ormond was the library, very
+rich in the English classics, which appeared to go with the house. The
+owner was a girl who married and lived abroad, and these were her
+father's books. Mrs. Ormond said that her husband had the greatest
+pleasure in them: their print, which was good and black, and their
+paper, which was thin and yellowish, and their binding, which was tree
+calf in the poets, he specially liked. They were English editions as well
+as English classics, and she said he caressed the books, as he read them,
+with that touch which the book-lover has; he put his face into them, and
+inhaled their odor as if it were the bouquet of wine; he wanted her to
+like it, too."
+
+"Then she hated it," Minver said, unrelentingly.
+
+"Perhaps not, if there was nobody else there," I urged.
+
+For once Wanhope was not to be tempted off on another scent. "There was a
+good deal of old-fashioned fiction of the suspiratory and exclamatory
+sort, like Mackenzie's, and Sterne's and his followers, full of feeling,
+as people understood feeling a hundred years ago. But what Ormond
+rejoiced in most were the poets, good and bad, like Gray and Collins and
+Young, and their contemporaries, who personified nearly everything from
+Contemplation to Indigestion, through the whole range of the Vices,
+Virtues, Passions, Propensities, Attributes, and Qualities, and gave them
+each a dignified capital letter to wear. She said he used to come roaring
+to her with the passages in which these personifications flourished, and
+read them off with mock admiration, and then shriek and sputter with
+laughter. You know the way he had when a thing pleased him, especially a
+thing that had some relish of the quaint or rococo. As nearly as she
+would admit, in view of his loss, he bored her with these things. He was
+always hunting down some new personification, and when he had got it,
+adding it to the list he kept. She said he had thousands of them, but I
+suppose he had not so many. He had enough, though, to keep him amused,
+and she said he talked of writing something for the magazines about them,
+but probably he never would have done it. He never wrote anything, did
+he?" Wanhope asked of me.
+
+"Oh, no. He was far too literary for _that_," I answered. "He had a
+reputation to lose."
+
+"Pretty good," said Minver, "even if Ormond _is_ dead."
+
+Wanhope ignored us both. "After awhile, his wife said, she began to
+notice a certain change in his attitude toward the personifications. She
+noticed this, always expecting that fit of sickness for him; but she was
+not so much troubled by his returning seriousness. Oh, I ought to tell
+you that when she first began to be anxious for him she privately wrote
+home to their family doctor, telling him how strangely happy Ormond was,
+and asking him if he could advise anything. He wrote back that if Ormond
+was so very happy they had better not do anything to cure him; that the
+disease was not infectious, and was seldom fatal."
+
+"What an ass!" said Rulledge.
+
+"Yes, I think he was, in this instance. But probably he had been
+consulted a good deal by Mrs. Ormond," said Wanhope. "The change that
+began to set her mind at rest about Ormond was his taking the
+personifications more seriously. Why, he began to ask, but always with a
+certain measure of joke in it, why shouldn't there be something _in_ the
+personifications? Why shouldn't Morn and Eve come corporeally walking up
+their lawn, with little or no clothes on, or Despair be sitting in their
+woods with her hair over her face, or Famine coming gauntly up to their
+back door for a hand-out? Why shouldn't they any day see pop-eyed Rapture
+passing on the trolley, or Meditation letting the car she intended to
+take go by without stepping lively enough to get on board? He pretended
+that we could have the personifications back again, if we were not so
+conventional in our conceptions of them. He wanted to know what reason
+there was for representing Life as a very radiant and bounding party,
+when Life usually neither shone nor bounded; and why Death should be
+figured as an enemy with a dart, when it was so often the only friend a
+man had left, and had the habit of binding up wounds rather than
+inflicting them. The personifications were all right, he said, but the
+poets and painters did not know how they really looked. By the way,"
+Wanhope broke off, "did you happen to see Hauptmann's 'Hannele' when it
+was here?"
+
+None of us had, and we waited rather restively for the passing of the
+musing fit which he fell into. After a while he resumed at a point whose
+relation to the matter in hand we could trace:
+
+"It was extremely interesting for all reasons, by its absolute
+fearlessness and freshness in regions where there has been nothing but
+timid convention for a long time; but what I was thinking of was the
+personification of Death as it appears there. The poor little dying
+pauper, lying in her dream at the almshouse, sees the figure of Death. It
+is not the skeleton with the dart, or the phantom with the shrouded face,
+but a tall, beautiful young man,--as beautiful as they could get into the
+cast, at any rate,--clothed in simple black, and standing with his back
+against the mantlepiece, with his hands resting on the hilt of a long,
+two-handed sword. He is so quiet that you do not see him until some time
+after the child has seen him. When she begins to question him whether she
+may not somehow get to heaven without dying, he answers with a sort of
+sorrowful tenderness, a very sweet and noble compassion, but unsparingly
+as to his mission. It is a singular moment of pure poetry that makes the
+heart ache, but does not crush or terrify the spirit."
+
+"And what has it got to do with Ormond?" asked Rulledge, but with less
+impatience than usual.
+
+"Why, nothing, I'm afraid, that I can make out very clearly. And yet
+there is an obscure connection with Ormond, or his vision, if it was a
+vision. Mrs. Ormond could not be very definite about what he saw, perhaps
+because even at the last moment he was not definite himself. What she was
+clear about, was the fact that his mood, though it became more serious,
+by no means became sadder. It became a sort of solemn joy instead of the
+light gaiety it had begun by being. She was no sort of scientific
+observer, and yet the keenness of her affection made her as closely
+observant of Ormond as if she had been studying him psychologically.
+Sometimes the light in his room would wake her at night, and she would go
+to him, and find him lying with a book faced down on his breast, as if he
+had been reading, and his fingers interlaced under his head, and a kind
+of radiant peace in his face. The poor thing said that when she would ask
+him what the matter was, he would say, 'Nothing; just happiness,' and
+when she would ask him if he did not think he ought to do something, he
+would laugh, and say perhaps it would go off of itself. But it did not go
+off; the unnatural buoyancy continued after he became perfectly tranquil.
+'I don't know,' he would say. 'I seem to have got to the end of my
+troubles. I haven't a care in the world, Jenny. I don't believe you could
+get a rise out of me if you said the nastiest thing you could think of.
+It sounds like nonsense, of course, but it seems to me that I have found
+out the reason of things, though I don't know what it is. Maybe I've only
+found out that there _is_ a reason of things. That would be enough,
+wouldn't it?'"
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+At this point Wanhope hesitated with a kind of diffidence that was rather
+charming in him. "I don't see," he said, "just how I can keep the facts
+from this on out of the line of facts which we are not in the habit of
+respecting very much, or that we relegate to the company of things that
+are not facts at all. I suppose that in stating them I shall somehow make
+myself responsible for them, but that is just what I don't want to do. I
+don't want to do anything more than give them as they were given to me."
+
+"You won't be able to give them half as fully," said Minver, "if Mrs.
+Ormond gave them to you."
+
+"No," Wanhope said gravely, "and that's the pity of it; for they ought to
+be given as fully as possible."
+
+"Go ahead," Rulledge commanded, "and do the best you can."
+
+"I'm not sure," the psychologist thoughtfully said, "that I am quite
+satisfied to call Ormond's experiences hallucinations. There ought to be
+some other word that doesn't accuse his sanity in that degree. For he
+apparently didn't show any other signs of an unsound mind."
+
+"None that Mrs. Ormond would call so," Minver suggested.
+
+"Well, in his case, I don't think she was such a bad judge," Wanhope
+returned. "She was a tolerably unbalanced person herself, but she wasn't
+altogether disqualified for observing him, as I've said before. They had
+a pretty hot summer, as the summer is apt to be in the Housatonic valley,
+but when it got along into September the weather was divine, and they
+spent nearly the whole time out of doors, driving over the hills. They
+got an old horse from a native, and they hunted out a rickety buggy from
+the carriage-house, and they went wherever the road led. They went mostly
+at a walk, and that suited the horse exactly, as well as Mrs. Ormond, who
+had no faith in Ormond's driving, and wanted to go at a pace that would
+give her a chance to jump out safely if anything happened. They put their
+hats in the front of the buggy, and went about in their bare heads. The
+country people got used to them, and were not scandalized by their
+appearance, though they were both getting a little gray, and must have
+looked as if they were old enough to know better.
+
+"They were not really old, as age goes nowadays: he was not more
+than forty-two or -three, and she was still in the late thirties. In
+fact, they were
+
+"Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita--
+
+"in that hour when life, and the conceit of life, is strongest, and when
+it feels as if it might go on forever. Women are not very articulate
+about such things, and it was probably Ormond who put their feeling into
+words, though she recognized at once that it was her feeling, and shrank
+from it as if it were something wicked, that they would be punished for;
+so that one day, when he said suddenly, 'Jenny, I don't feel as if I
+could ever die,' she scolded him for it. Poor women!" said Wanhope,
+musingly, "they are not always cross when they scold. It is often the
+expression of their anxieties, their forebodings, their sex-timidities.
+They are always in double the danger that men are, and their nerves
+double that danger again. Who was that famous _salonniere_--Mme.
+Geoffrin, was it?--that Marmontel says always scolded her friends when
+they were in trouble, and came and scolded him when he was put into the
+Bastille? I suppose Mrs. Ormond was never so tender of Ormond as she was
+when she took it out of him for suggesting what she wildly felt herself,
+and felt she should pay for feeling."
+
+Wanhope had the effect of appealing to Minver, but the painter would
+not relent. "I don't know. I've seen her--or heard her--in very
+devoted moments."
+
+"At any rate," Wanhope resumed, "she says she scolded him, and it did not
+do the least good. She could not scold him out of that feeling, which was
+all mixed up in her retrospect with the sense of the weather and the
+season, the leaves just beginning to show the autumn, the wild asters
+coming to crowd the goldenrod, the crickets shrill in the grass, and the
+birds silent in the trees, the smell of the rowan in the meadows, and the
+odor of the old logs and fresh chips in the woods. She was not a woman to
+notice such things much, but he talked of them all and made her notice
+them. His nature took hold upon what we call nature, and clung fondly to
+the lowly and familiar aspects of it. Once she said to him, trembling for
+him, 'I should think you would be afraid to take such a pleasure in those
+things,' and when he asked her why, she couldn't or wouldn't tell him;
+but he understood, and he said: 'I've never realized before that I was so
+much a part of them. Either I am going to have them forever, or they are
+going to have me. We shall not part, for we are all members of the same
+body. If it is the body of death, we are members of that. If it is the
+body of life, we are members of that. Either I have never lived, or else
+I am never going to die.' She said: 'Of course you are never going to
+die; a spirit can't die.' But he told her he didn't mean that. He was
+just as radiantly happy when they would get home from one of their
+drives, and sit down to their supper, which they had country-fashion
+instead of dinner, and then when they would turn into their big, lamplit
+parlor, and sit down for a long evening with his books. Sometimes he read
+to her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and he said he hadn't
+had such a bath of poetry since he was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid
+nights, which were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of the
+gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and walk up and down the long
+veranda. Once, when he coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm
+and walked her up and down, and he said: 'Isn't it like a ship? The earth
+is like a ship, and we're sailing, sailing! Oh, I wonder where!' Then he
+stopped with a sob, and she was startled, and asked him what the matter
+was, but he couldn't tell her. She was more frightened than ever at what
+seemed a break in his happiness. She was troubled about his reading the
+Bible so much, especially the Old Testament; but he told her he had never
+known before what majestic literature it was. There were some turns or
+phrases in it that peculiarly took his fancy and seemed to feed it with
+inexhaustible suggestion. 'The Angel of the Lord' was one of these. The
+idea of a divine messenger, embodied and commissioned to intimate the
+creative will to the creature: it was sublime, it was ineffable. He
+wondered that men had ever come to think in any other terms of the living
+law that we were under, and that could much less conceivably operate like
+an insensate mechanism than it could reveal itself as a constant purpose.
+He said he believed that in every great moral crisis, in every ordeal of
+conscience, a man was aware of standing in the presence of something sent
+to try him and test him, and that this something was the Angel of the
+Lord.
+
+"He went off that night, saying to himself, 'The Angel of the Lord, the
+Angel of the Lord!' and when she lay a long time awake, waiting for him
+to go to sleep, she heard him saying it again in his room. She thought he
+might be dreaming, but when she went to him, he had his lamp lighted, and
+was lying with that rapt smile on his face which she was so afraid of.
+She told him she was afraid and she wished he would not say such things;
+and that made him laugh, and he put his arms round her, and laughed and
+laughed, and said it was only a kind of swearing, and she must cheer up.
+He let her give him some trional to make him sleep, and then she went off
+to her bed again. But when they both woke late, she heard him, as he
+dressed, repeating fragments of verse, quoting quite without order, as
+the poem drifted through his memory. He told her at breakfast that it was
+a poem which Longfellow had written to Lowell upon the occasion of his
+wife's death, and he wanted to get it and read it to her. She said she
+did not see how he could let his mind run on such gloomy things. But he
+protested he was not the least gloomy, and that he supposed his
+recollection of the poem was a continuation of his thinking about the
+Angel of the Lord.
+
+"While they were at table a tramp came up the drive under the window, and
+looked in at them hungrily. He was a very offensive tramp, and quite took
+Mrs. Ormond's appetite away: but Ormond would not send him round to the
+kitchen, as she wanted; he insisted upon taking him a plate and a cup of
+coffee out on the veranda himself. When she expostulated with him, he
+answered fantastically that the fellow might be an angel of the Lord, and
+he asked her if she remembered Parnell's poem of 'The Hermit.' Of course
+she didn't, but he needn't get it, for she didn't want to hear it, and if
+he kept making her so nervous, she should be sick herself. He insisted
+upon telling her what the poem was, and how the angel in it had made
+himself abhorrent to the hermit by throttling the babe of the good man
+who had housed and fed them, and committing other atrocities, till the
+hermit couldn't stand it any longer, and the angel explained that he had
+done it all to prevent the greater harm that would have come if he had
+not killed and stolen in season. Ormond laughed at her disgust, and said
+he was curious to see what a tramp would do that was treated with real
+hospitality. He thought they had made a mistake in not asking this tramp
+in to breakfast with them; then they might have stood a chance of being
+murdered in their beds to save them from mischief."
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+"Mrs. Ormond really lost her patience with him, and felt better than she
+had for a long time by scolding him in good earnest. She told him he was
+talking very blasphemously, and when he urged that his morality was
+directly in line with Parnell's, and Parnell was an archbishop, she was
+so vexed that she would not go to drive with him that morning, though he
+apologized and humbled himself in every way. He pleaded that it was such
+a beautiful day, it must be the last they were going to have; it was
+getting near the equinox, and this must be a weather-breeder. She let him
+go off alone, for he would not lose the drive, and she watched him out of
+sight from her upper window with a heavy heart. As soon as he was fairly
+gone, she wanted to go after him, and she was wild all the forenoon. She
+could not stay indoors, but kept walking up and down the piazza and
+looking for him, and at times she went a bit up the road he had taken, to
+meet him. She had got to thinking of the tramp, though the man had gone
+directly off down another road after he had his breakfast. At last she
+heard the old creaking, rattling buggy, and as soon as she saw Ormond's
+bare head, and knew he was all right, she ran up to her room and shut
+herself in. But she couldn't hold out against him when he came to her
+door with an armful of wild flowers that he had gathered for her, and
+boughs from some young maples that he had found all red in a swamp. She
+showed herself so interested that he asked her to come with him after
+their midday dinner and see them, and she said perhaps she would, if he
+would promise not to keep talking about the things that made her so
+miserable. He asked her, 'What things?' and she answered that he knew
+well enough, and he laughed and promised.
+
+"She didn't believe he would keep his word, but he did at first, and he
+tried not to tease her in any way. He tried to please her in the whims
+and fancies she had about going this way or that, and when she decided
+not to look up his young maples with him, because the first autumn leaves
+made her melancholy, he submitted. He put his arm across her shoulder as
+they drove through the woods, and pulled her to him, and called her 'poor
+old thing,' and accused her of being morbid. He wanted her to tell him
+all there was in her mind, but she could not; she could only cry on his
+arm. He asked her if it was something about him that troubled her, and
+she could only say that she hated to see people so cheerful without
+reason. That made him laugh, and they were very gay after she had got her
+cry out; but he grew serious again. Then her temper rose, and she asked,
+'Well, what is it?' and he said at first, 'Oh, nothing,' as people do
+when there is really something, and presently he confessed that he was
+thinking about what she had said of his being cheerful without reason.
+Then, as she said, he talked so beautifully that she had to keep her
+patience with him, though he was not keeping his word to her. His talk,
+as far as she was able to report it, didn't amount to much more than
+this: that in a world where death was, people never could be cheerful
+with reason unless death was something altogether different from what
+people imagined. After people came to their intellectual consciousness,
+death was never wholly out of it, and if they could be joyful with that
+black drop at the bottom of every cup, it was proof positive that death
+was not what it seemed. Otherwise there was no logic in the scheme of
+being, but it was a cruel fraud by the Creator upon the creature; a poor
+practical joke, with the laugh all on one side. He had got rid of his
+fear of it in that light, which seemed to have come to him before the
+fear left him, and he wanted her to see it in the same light, and if he
+died before her--But there she stopped him and protested that it would
+kill her if she did not die first, with no apparent sense, even when she
+told me, of her fatuity, which must have amused poor Ormond. He said what
+he wanted to ask was that she would believe he had not been the least
+afraid to die, and he wished her to remember this always, because she
+knew how he always used to be afraid of dying. Then he really began to
+talk of other things, and he led the way back to the times of their
+courtship and their early married days, and their first journeys
+together, and all their young-people friends, and the simple-hearted
+pleasure they used to take in society, in teas and dinners, and going to
+the theater. He did not like to think how that pleasure had dropped out
+of their life, and he did not know why they had let it, and he was going
+to have it again when they went to town.
+
+"They had thought of staying a long time in the country, perhaps till
+after Thanksgiving, for they had become attached to their place; but now
+they suddenly agreed to go back to New York at once. She told me that as
+soon as they agreed she felt a tremendous longing to be gone that
+instant, as if she must go to escape from something, some calamity, and
+she felt, looking back, that there was a prophetic quality in her
+eagerness."
+
+"Oh, she was always so," said Minver. "When a thing was to be done, she
+wanted it done like lightning, no matter what the thing was."
+
+"Well, very likely," Wanhope consented. "I never make much account of
+those retroactive forebodings. At any rate, she says she wanted him to
+turn about and drive home so that they could begin packing, and when he
+demurred, and began to tease, as she called it, she felt as if she should
+scream, till he turned the old horse and took the back track. She was
+_wild_ to get home, and kept hurrying him, and wanting him to whip the
+horse; but the old horse merely wagged his tail, and declined to go
+faster than a walk, and this was the only thing that enabled her to
+forgive herself afterward."
+
+"Why, what had she done?" Rulledge asked. "She would have been
+responsible for what happened, according to her notion, if she had had
+her way with the horse; she would have felt that she had driven Ormond to
+his doom."
+
+"Of course!" said Minver. "She always found a hole to creep out of. Why
+couldn't she go back a little further, and hold herself responsible
+through having made him turn round?"
+
+"Poor woman!" said Rulledge, with a tenderness that made Minver smile.
+"What was it that did happen?"
+
+Wanhope examined his cup for some dregs of coffee, and then put it down
+with an air of resignation. I offered to touch the bell, but, "No,
+don't," he said. "I'm better without it." And he went on: "There was a
+lonely piece of woods that they had to drive through before they struck
+the avenue leading to their house, which was on a cheerful upland
+overlooking the river, and when they had got about half-way through this
+woods, the tramp whom Ormond had fed in the morning, slipped out of a
+thicket on the hillside above them, and crossed the road in front of
+them, and slipped out of sight among the trees on the slope below. Ormond
+stopped the horse, and turned to his wife with a strange kind of whisper.
+'Did you see it?' he asked, and she answered yes, and bade him drive on.
+He did so, slowly looking back round the side of the buggy till a turn of
+the road hid the place where the tramp had crossed their track. She could
+not speak, she says, till they came in sight of their house. Then her
+heart gave a great bound, and she broke out on him, blaming him for
+having encouraged the tramp to lurk about, as he must have done, all day,
+by his foolish sentimentality in taking his breakfast out to him. 'He saw
+that you were a delicate person, and now to-night he will be coming
+round, and--' She says Ormond kept looking at her, while she talked, as
+if he did not know what she was saying, and all at once she glanced down
+at their feet, and discovered that her hat was gone.
+
+"That, she owned, made her frantic, and she blazed out at him again, and
+accused him of having lost her hat by stopping to look at that worthless
+fellow, and then starting up the horse so suddenly that it had rolled
+out. He usually gave her as good as she sent when she let herself go in
+that way, and she told me she would have been glad if he had done it now,
+but he only looked at her in a kind of daze, and when he understood, at
+last, he bade her get out and go into the house--they were almost at the
+door,--and he would go back and find her hat himself. 'Indeed, you'll do
+nothing of the kind,' she said she told him. 'I shall go back with you,
+or you'll be hunting up that precious vagabond and bringing him home to
+supper.' Ormond said, 'All right,' with a kind of dreamy passivity, and
+he turned the old horse again, and they drove slowly back, looking for
+the hat in the road, right and left. She had not noticed before that it
+was getting late, and perhaps it was not so late as it seemed when they
+got into that lonely piece of woods again, and the veils of shadow began
+to drop round them, as if they were something falling from the trees, she
+said. They found the hat easily enough at the point where it must have
+rolled out of the buggy, and he got down and picked it up. She kept
+scolding him, but he did not seem to hear her. He stood dangling the hat
+by its ribbons from his right hand, while he rested his left on the
+dashboard, and looking--looking down into the wooded slope where the
+tramp had disappeared. A cold chill went over her, and she stopped her
+scolding. 'Oh, Jim,' she said, 'do you see something? What do you see?'
+He flung the hat from him, and ran plunging down the hillside--she
+covered up her face when she told me, and said she should always see him
+running--till the dusk among the trees hid him. She ran after him, and
+she heard him calling, calling joyfully, 'Yes, I'm coming!' and she
+thought he was calling back to her, but the rush of his feet kept getting
+farther, and then he seemed to stop with a sound like falling. He
+couldn't have been much ahead of her, for it was only a moment till she
+stood on the edge of a boulder in the woods, looking over, and there at
+the bottom Ormond was lying with his face turned under him, as she
+expressed it; and the tramp, with a heavy stick in his hand, was standing
+by him, stooping over him, and staring at him. She began to scream, and
+it seemed to her that she flew down from the brink of the rock, and
+caught the tramp and clung to him, while she kept screaming 'Murder!'
+The man didn't try to get away; he only said, over and over, 'I didn't
+touch him, lady; I didn't touch him.' It all happened simultaneously,
+like events in a dream, and while there was nobody there but herself
+and the tramp, and Ormond lying between them, there were some people
+that must have heard her from the road and come down to her. They were
+neighbor-folk that knew her and Ormond, and they naturally laid hold of
+the tramp; but he didn't try to escape. He helped them gather poor Ormond
+up, and he went back to the house with them, and staid while one of them
+ran for the doctor. The doctor could only tell them that Ormond was dead,
+and that his neck must have been broken by his fall over the rock. One of
+the neighbors went to look at the place the next morning, and found one
+of the roots of a young tree growing on the rock, torn out, as if Ormond
+had caught his foot in it; and that had probably made his fall a headlong
+dive. The tramp knew nothing but that he heard shouting and running, and
+got up from the foot of the rock, where he was going to pass the night,
+when something came flying through the air, and struck at his feet. Then
+it scarcely stirred, and the next thing, he said, the lady was _onto_
+him, screeching and tearing. He piteously protested his innocence, which
+was apparent enough, at the inquest, and before, for that matter. He said
+Ormond was about the only man that ever treated him white, and Mrs.
+Ormond was remorseful for having let him get away before she could tell
+him that she didn't blame him, and ask him to forgive her."
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+Wanhope desisted with a provisional air, and Rulledge went and got
+Himself a sandwich from the lunch-table.
+
+"Well, upon my word!" said Minver. "I thought you had dined, Rulledge."
+
+Rulledge came back munching, and said to Wanhope, as he settled himself
+in his chair again: "Well, go on."
+
+"Why, that's all."
+
+The psychologist was silent, with Rulledge staring indignantly at him.
+
+"I suppose Mrs. Ormond had her theory?" I ventured.
+
+"Oh, yes--such as it was," said Wanhope. "It was her belief--her
+religion--that Ormond had seen Death, in person or personified, or the
+angel of it; and that the sight was something beautiful, and not
+terrible. She thought that she should see Death, too in the same way, as
+a messenger. I don't know that it was such a bad theory," he added
+impartially.
+
+"Not," said Minver, "if you suppose that Ormond was off his nut. But, in
+regard to the whole matter, there is always a question of how much truth
+there was in what she said about it."
+
+"Of course," the psychologist admitted, "that is a question which must be
+considered. The question of testimony in such matters is the difficult
+thing. You might often believe in supernatural occurrences if it were not
+for the witnesses. It is very interesting," he pursued, with his
+scientific smile, "to note how corrupting anything supernatural or
+mystical is. Such things seem mostly to happen either in the privity of
+people who are born liars, or else they deprave the spectator so, through
+his spiritual vanity or his love of the marvelous, that you can't believe
+a word he says.
+
+"They are as bad as horses on human morals," said Minver. "Not that I
+think it ever needed the coming of a ghost to invalidate any statement of
+Mrs. Ormond's." Rulledge rose and went away growling something, partially
+audible, to the disadvantage of Minver's wit, and the painter laughed
+after him: "He really believes it."
+
+Wanhope's mind seemed to be shifted from Mrs. Ormond to her convert, whom
+he followed with his tolerant eyes. "Nothing in all this sort of inquiry
+is so impossible to predicate as the effect of any given instance upon a
+given mind. It would be very interesting--"
+
+"Excuse me!" said Minver. "There's Whitley. I must speak to him."
+
+He went away, leaving me alone with the psychologist.
+
+"And what is your own conclusion in this instance?" I asked.
+
+"Why, I haven't formulated it yet."
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+You are very welcome to the Alderling incident, my dear Acton, if you
+think you can do anything with it, and I will give it as circumstantially
+as possible. The thing has its limitations, I should think, for the
+fictionist, chiefly in a sort of roundedness which leaves little play to
+the imagination. It seems to me that it would be more to your purpose if
+it were less _pat_, in its catastrophe, but you are a better judge of all
+that than I am, and I will put the facts in your hands, and keep my own
+hands off, so far as any plastic use of the material is concerned.
+
+The first I knew of the peculiar Alderling situation was shortly after
+William James's "Will to Believe" came out. I had been telling the
+Alderlings about it, for they had not seen it, and I noticed that from
+time to time they looked significantly at each other. When I had got
+through he gave a little laugh, and she said, "Oh, you may laugh!" and
+then I made bold to ask, "What is it?"
+
+"Marion can tell you," he said. He motioned towards the coffee-pot and
+asked, "More?" I shook my head, and he said, "Come out and let us see
+what the maritime interests have been doing for us. Pipe or cigar?" I
+chose cigarettes, and he brought the box off the table, stopping on his
+way to the veranda, and taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the hall
+mantel.
+
+Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, and done things to the
+chairs and cushions, and was leaning against one of the slender fluted
+pine columns like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, with the
+blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing deliciously against
+the background of white house-wall. He and she were an astonishing and
+satisfying contrast; in the midst of your amazement you felt the divine
+propriety of a woman like her wanting just such a wiry,
+smoky-complexioned, black-browed, black-bearded, bald-headed little man
+as he was. Before he sat down where she was going to put him, he
+stood stoopingly, and frowned at the waters of the cove lifting from
+the foot of the lawn that sloped to it before the house. "Three
+lumbermen, two goodish-sized yachts, a dozen sloop-rigged boats: not so
+bad. About the usual number that come loafing in to spend the night.
+You ought to see them when it threatens to breeze up. Then they're here
+in flocks. Go on, Marion."
+
+He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and began
+pulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him in a
+rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarely
+interesting--that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know that
+lovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind can scarcely
+hold the reader without them. The love-interest, as they call it, is also
+supposed to be essential to the drama, and friends of mine who have tried
+to foist their plays upon managers have been overthrown by the objection
+that the love-interest is not strong enough in what they have done. Yet
+lovers in real life are, so far as I have observed them, bores. They are
+confessed to be disgusting before or after marriage when they let their
+fondness appear, but even when they try to hide it, they are tiresome.
+Character goes down before passion in them; nature is reduced to
+propensity. Then, how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and
+to give us nature and character while seeming to offer nothing but
+propensity and passion? Perhaps he does not give them. Perhaps what he
+does is to hypnotize us so that we each of us identify ourselves with the
+lovers, and add our own natures and characters to the single principle
+that animates them. The reason we like, that we endure, to read about
+them, may be that they are ourselves rendered objective in an instant of
+intense vitality, without the least trouble or risk to us. But if we have
+them there before us in the tiresome reality, they exclude us from their
+pleasure in each other and stop up the perspective of our happiness with
+their hulking personalities, bare of all the iridescence of potentiality,
+which we could have cast about them. Something of this iridescence may
+cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a
+sheer offence.
+
+I do not know why it was not an offence in the case of the Alderlings,
+unless it was because they both, in their different ways, saw the joke of
+the thing. At any rate, I found that in their charm for each other they
+had somehow not ceased to be amusing for me, and I waited confidently for
+the answer she would make to his whimsically abrupt bidding. But she did
+not answer very promptly, even when he had added, "Wanhope, here, is
+scenting something psychological in the reason of my laughing at you,
+instead of accepting the plain inference in the case."
+
+"What is the plain inference?" I asked, partly to fill up Mrs.
+Alderling's continued silence.
+
+"When a man laughs at a woman for no apparent reason it is because he is
+amused at her being afraid of him when he is so much more afraid of her,
+or puzzled by him when she is such an incomparable riddle herself, or
+caring for him when he knows he is not worth his salt."
+
+"You don't expect to put me off with that sort of thing," I said.
+
+"Well, then, go on Marion," Alderling repeated.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Mrs. Alderling stood looking at him, not me, with a smile hovering about
+the corners of her mouth, which, when it decided not to alight anywhere,
+scarcely left her aspect graver for its flitting. She said at last, in
+her slow, deep-throated voice, "I guess I will let you tell him."
+
+"Oh, I'll tell him fast enough," said Alderling, nursing his knee, and
+bringing it well up toward his chin, between his clasped hands. "Marion
+has always had the notion that I should live again if I believed I
+should, and that as I don't believe I shall, I am not going to. The joke
+of it is," and he began to splutter laughter round the stem of his pipe,
+"she's as much of an agnostic as I am. She doesn't believe she is going
+to live again, either."
+
+Mrs. Alderling said, "I don't care for it in my case." That struck me as
+rather touching, but I had no right to enter uninvited into the intimacy
+of her meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, "Aren't
+you both rather belated?"
+
+"You mean that protoplasm has gone out?" he chuckled.
+
+"Not exactly," I answered. "But you know that a great many things are
+allowed now that were once forbidden to the True Disbeliever."
+
+"You mean that we may trust in the promises, as they used to be called,
+and still keep the Unfaith?"
+
+"Something like that."
+
+Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the
+pleasure of teasing his wife.
+
+"That'll be a great comfort to Marion," he said, and he threw back his
+head and laughed.
+
+She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she enjoyed his pleasure
+in teasing her.
+
+"Where have you been," I asked, "that you don't know the changed attitude
+in these matters?"
+
+"Well, here for the last three years. We tried it the first winter after
+we came, and found it was not so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I
+haven't really looked into the question since I gave the conundrum up
+twenty years ago, on what was then the best authority. Marion doesn't
+complain. She knew what I was when she married me. She was another. We
+were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We should not have burned
+anybody at the stake for saying that we had souls."
+
+Alderling put back his pipe and cackled round it, taking his knee between
+his hands again.
+
+"You know," she explained, more in my direction than to me, "that I had
+none to begin with. But Alderling had. His people believed in the future
+life."
+
+"That's what they said," Alderling crowed. "And Marion has always thought
+that if she had believed that way, she could have kept me up to it; and
+so when I died I should have lived again. It is perfectly logical, though
+it isn't capable of a practical demonstration. If Marion had come of a
+believing family, she could have brought me back into the fold. Her great
+mistake was in being brought up by an uncle who denied that he was living
+here, even. The poor girl could not do a thing when it came to the life
+hereafter."
+
+The smile now came hovering back, and alighted at a corner of Mrs.
+Alderling's mouth, making it look, oddly enough, rather rueful. "It
+didn't matter about me. I thought it a pity that Alderling's talent
+should stop here."
+
+"Did you ever know anything like that?" he cried. "Perfectly willing to
+thrust me out into a cold other-world, and leave me to struggle on
+without her, when I had got used to her looking after me. Now I'm not so
+selfish as that. I shouldn't want to have Marion living on through all
+eternity if I wasn't with her. It would be too lonely for her."
+
+He looked up at her, with his dancing eyes, and she put her hand down
+over his shoulder into the hand that he lifted to meet it, in a way that
+would have made me sick in some people. But in her the action was so
+casual, so absent, that it did not affect me disagreeably.
+
+"Do you mean that you haven't been away since you came here three years
+ago?" I asked.
+
+"We ran up to the theatre once in Boston last winter, but it bored us to
+the limit." Alderling poked his knife-blade into the bowl of his pipe as
+he spoke, having freed his hand for the purpose, while Mrs. Alderling
+leaned back against the slim column again. He said gravely: "It was a
+great thing for Marion, though. In view of the railroad accident that
+didn't happen, she convinced herself that her sole ambition was that we
+should die together. Then, whether we found ourselves alive or not, we
+should be company for each other. She's got it arranged with the
+thunderstorms, so that one bolt will do for us both, and she never lets
+me go out on the water alone, for fear I shall watch my chance, and get
+drowned without her."
+
+I did not trouble myself to make out how much of this was mocking, and as
+there was no active participation in the joke expected of me, I kept on
+the safe side of laughing. "No wonder you've been able to do such a lot
+of pictures," I said. "But I should have thought you might have found it
+dull--I mean dull together--at odd times."
+
+"Dull?" he shouted. "It's stupendously dull! Especially when our country
+neighbors come in to ''liven us up.' We've got neighbors here that can
+stay longer in half an hour than most people can in a week. We get tired
+of each other at times, but after a call from the people in the next
+house, we return with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting."
+
+"And you never," I ventured, making my jocosity as ironical as possible,
+"wear upon each other?"
+
+"Horribly!" said Alderling, and his wife smiled contentedly, behind him.
+"We haven't a whole set of china in the house, from exchanging it across
+the table, and I haven't made a study of Marion--you must have noticed
+how many Marions there were that she hasn't thrown at my head. Especially
+the Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me."
+
+I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. Alderling. "Does he
+keep it up all the time--this blague?"
+
+"Pretty much," she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the
+fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke.
+
+"But I didn't see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling," I said. She
+had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her
+husband's,--but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house.
+
+"The housekeeping is enough," she answered, with her tranquil smile.
+
+There was nothing in her smile that was leading, and I did not push my
+inquiry, especially as Alderling did not seem disposed to assist. "Well,"
+I said, "I suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that your
+situation is most suggestive."
+
+"Oh, don't mind _us!_" said Alderling.
+
+"I won't, thank you," I answered. "Why, it's equal to being cast away
+together on an uninhabited island."
+
+"Quite," he assented.
+
+"There can't," I went on, "be a corner of your minds that you haven't
+mutually explored. You must know each other," I cast about for the word,
+and added abruptly, "by heart."
+
+"I don't suppose he meant anything pretty?" said Alderling, with a look
+up over his shoulder at his wife; and then he said to me, "We do; and
+there are some very curious things I could tell you, if Marion would ever
+let me get in a word."
+
+"Do let him, Mrs. Alderling," I entreated, humoring his joke at her
+silence.
+
+She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed.
+
+"I could make your flesh creep," he went on, "or I could if you were not
+a psychologist. I assure you that we are quite weird at times."
+
+"As how?"
+
+"Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a given moment, and
+saying it. There are times when Marion's thinking is such a nuisance to
+me, that I have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The racket
+it makes breaks me all up. It's a relief to have her talk, and I try to
+make her, when she's posing, just to escape the din of her thinking. Then
+the willing! We experimented with it, after we had first noticed it, but
+we don't any more. It's too dead easy."
+
+"What do you mean by the willing?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and there he or she is."
+
+"Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling?" I appealed to her, and she
+answered from her calm:
+
+"It is very unaccountable."
+
+"Then you really mean it! Why can't you give me an illustration?"
+
+"Why, you know," said Alderling more seriously than he had yet spoken, "I
+don't believe those things, if they are real, can ever be got to show
+off. That's the reason why your 'Quests in the Occult' are mainly such
+rubbish, as far as the evidences are concerned. If Marion and I tried to
+give you an illustration, as you call it, the occult would snub us. But,
+is there anything so very strange about it? The wonder _is_ that a man
+and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They
+pervade each other's minds, if they are really married, and they are so
+present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call.
+Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by
+living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it
+belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as I understand it."
+
+"Ah!" I said. "What is that queer something?"
+
+"Being visibly present when absent. It has not happened often, but it has
+happened that I have seen Marion in my loft when she was really somewhere
+else and not when I had willed her or wished her to be there."
+
+"Now, really," I said, "I must ask you for an instance."
+
+"You want to heap up facts, Lombroso fashion? Well, this is as good as
+most of Lombroso's facts, or better. I went up one morning, last winter,
+to work at a study of a Madonna from Marion, directly after breakfast,
+and left her below in the dining-room, putting away the breakfast
+things. She has to do that occasionally, between the local helps, who
+are all we can get in the winter. She professes to like it, but you
+never can tell, from what a woman says; she has to do it, anyway." It is
+hard to convey a notion of the serene, impersonal acquiescence of Mrs.
+Alderling in taking this talk of her. "I was banging away at it when I
+knew she was behind me looking over my shoulder rather more stormily
+than she usually does; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and
+saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after awhile I was aware
+of hearing her step on the stairs."
+
+Alderling stopped, and smoked definitively, as if that were the end.
+
+"Well," I said, after waiting a while, "I don't exactly get the unique
+value of the incident."
+
+"Oh," he said, as if he had accidentally forgotten the detail, "the steps
+were coming up?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She opened the door, which she had omitted to do before, and when she
+came in she denied having been there already. She owned that she had been
+hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so as to make me do
+something, or undo something, to it; and then all at once she lost her
+impatience, and came up at her leisure. I don't exactly like to tell what
+she wanted."
+
+He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tranquilly, "I don't mind
+your telling Mr. Wanhope."
+
+"Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, I will confide that
+she had found some traces of a model that I used to paint my Madonnas
+from, before we were married, in that picture. She had slept on her
+suspicion, and then when she could not stand it any longer, she had come
+up in the spirit to say that she was not going to be mixed up in a
+Madonna with any such minx. The words are mine, but the meaning was
+Marion's. When she found me taking the minx out, she went quietly back to
+washing her dishes, and then returned in the body to give me a sitting."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+We were silent a moment, till I asked, "Is this true, Mrs. Alderling?"
+
+"About," she said. "I don't remember the storm, exactly."
+
+"Well, I don't see why you bother to remain in the body at all," I
+remarked.
+
+"We haven't arranged just how to leave it together," said Alderling.
+"Marion, here, if I managed to get off first, would have no means of
+knowing whether her theory of the effect of my unbelief on my future was
+right or not; and if _she_ gave _me_ the slip, she would always be sorry
+that she had not stayed here to convert me."
+
+"Why don't you agree that if either of you lives again, he or she shall
+make some sign to let the other know?" I suggested. "Well, that has been
+tried so often, and has it ever worked? It's open to the question whether
+the dead do not fail to show up because they are forbidden to communicate
+with the living; and you are just where you were, as to the main point.
+No, I don't see any way out of it."
+
+Mrs. Alderling went into the house and came out with a book in her hand,
+and her fingers in it at two places. It was that impressive collection of
+Christ's words from the New Testament called "The Great Discourse." She
+put the book before me, first at one place and then at another, and I
+read, "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," and then,
+"Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." She did not
+say anything in showing me these passages, and I found something in her
+action touchingly childlike and elemental, as well as curiously
+heathenish. It was as if some poor pagan had brought me his fetish to
+test its effect upon me. "Yes," I said, "those are things that we hardly
+know what to do with in our philosophy. They seem to be said as with
+authority, and yet, somehow, we cannot admit their validity in a
+philosophical inquiry as to a future life. Aren't they generally taken to
+mean that we shall be unhappy or happy hereafter, rather than that we
+shall be or not be at all? And what is believing? Is it the mere act of
+acknowledgement, or is it something more vital, which expresses itself in
+conduct?"
+
+She did not try to say. In fact she did not answer at all. Whatever point
+was in her mind she did not, or could not, debate it. I perceived, in a
+manner, that her life was so largely subliminal that if she had tried she
+could not have met my question any more than if she had not had the gift
+of speech at all. But, in her inarticulate fashion, she had exposed to me
+a state of mind which I was hardly withheld by the decencies from
+exploring. "You know," I said, "that psychology almost begins by
+rejecting the authority of these sayings, and that while we no longer
+deny anything, we cannot allow anything merely because it has been
+strongly affirmed. Supposing that there is a life after this, how can it
+be denied to one and bestowed upon another because one has assented to a
+certain supernatural claim and another has refused to do so? That does
+not seem reasonable, it does not seem right. Why should you base your
+conclusion as to that life upon a promise and a menace which may not
+really refer to it in the sense which they seem to have?"
+
+"Isn't it all there is?" she asked, and Alderling burst into his laugh.
+
+"I'm afraid she's got you there, Wanhope. When it comes to polemics
+there's nothing like the passive obstruction of Mrs. Alderling. Marion
+might never have been an early Christian herself--I think she's an
+inexpugnable pagan--but she would have gone round making it awfully
+uncomfortable for the other unbelievers."
+
+"You know," she said to him, and I never could decide how much she was in
+earnest, "that I can't believe till you do. I couldn't take the risk of
+keeping on without you."
+
+Alderling followed her in-doors, where she now went to put the book away,
+with the mock addressed to me, "Did you ever know such a stubborn woman?"
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+One conclusion from my observation of the Alderlings during the week I
+spent with them was that it is bad for a husband and wife to be
+constantly and unreservedly together, not because they grow tired of each
+other, but because they grow more intensely interested in each other.
+Children, when they come, serve the purpose of separating the parents;
+they seem to unite them in one care, but they divide them in their
+employments, at least in the normally constituted family. If they are
+rich, and can throw the care of the children upon servants, then they
+cannot enjoy the relief from each other that children bring to the mother
+who nurtures and teaches them, and to the father who must work for them
+harder than before. The Alderlings were not rich enough to have been
+freed from the wholesome responsibilities of parentage, but they were
+childless, and so they were not detached from the perpetual thought of
+each other. If they had only had different tastes, it might have been
+better, but they were both artists, she not less than he, though she no
+longer painted. When their common thoughts were not centred upon each
+other's being, they were centred on his work, which, viciously enough,
+was the constant reproduction of her visible personality. I could always
+see them studying each other, he with an eye to her beauty, she with an
+eye to his power.
+
+He was every now and then saying to her, "Hold on, Marion," and staying
+her in some pose or movement, while he made mental note of it, and I was
+conscious of her preying upon his inmost thoughts and following him into
+the recesses of his reveries, where it is best for a man to be alone,
+even if he is sometimes a beast there. She was not like those wives who
+ask their husbands, when they do not happen to be talking, "What are you
+thinking about?" and I put this to her credit, till I realized that she
+had no need to ask, for she knew already. Now and then I saw him get up
+and shake himself restively, but I am bound to say in her behalf, that
+her pursuit of him seemed quite involuntary, and that she enjoyed it no
+more than he did. Twenty times I was on the point of asking, "Why don't
+you people go in for a good long separation? Is there nothing to call you
+to Europe, Alderling? Haven't you got a mother, or sister, or some one
+that you could visit, Mrs. Alderling? It would do you both a world of
+good."
+
+But it happened, oddly enough, that the Alderlings were as kinless as
+they were childless, and if he had gone to Europe he would have taken her
+with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people
+necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only
+acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on
+the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly
+from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary
+associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the
+good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their
+intimacy, instead of making themselves part of my strangeness.
+
+After a day or two, their queer experiences began to resume themselves,
+unabashed by my presence. These were mostly such as they had already more
+than hinted to me: the thought-transferences, and the unconscious
+hypnotic suggestions which they made to each other. There was more
+novelty in the last than the first. If I could trust them, and they did
+not seem to wish to exploit their mysteries for the effect on me, they
+were with each other because one or the other had willed it. She would
+say, if we were sitting together without him, "I think Rupert wants me;
+I'll be back in a moment," and he, if she were not by, for some time,
+would get up with, "Excuse me, I must go to Marion; she's calling me."
+
+I had to take a great deal of this on faith; in fact, none of it was
+susceptible of proof; but I have not been able since to experience all
+the skepticism which usually replaces the impression left by sympathy
+with such supposed occurrences. The thing was not quite what we call
+uncanny; the people were so honest, both of them, that the morbid
+character of like situations was wanting. The events, if they could be
+called so, were not invited, I was quite sure, and they were varied by
+such diversions as we had in reach. I went blueberrying with Mrs.
+Alderling in the morning after she had got her breakfast dishes put away,
+in order that we might have something for dessert at our midday dinner;
+and I went fishing off the old stone crib with Alderling in the
+afternoon, so that we might have cunners for supper. The farmerfolks and
+fisherfolks seemed to know them and to be on tolerant terms with them,
+though it was plain that they still considered them probational in
+their fellow-citizenship. I do not think they were liked the less
+because they did not assume to be of the local sort, but let their
+difference stand, if it would. There was nothing countrified in her
+dress, which was frankly conventional; the short walking-skirt had as
+sharp a slant in front as her dinner-gown would have had, and he wore his
+knickerbockers--it was then the now-faded hour of knickerbockers--with an
+air of going out golfing in the suburbs. They stood on ceremony in
+addressing the natives, who might have been Jim or Liza to each other,
+but were always Mr. Donald or Mrs. Moody, with the Alderlings. They said
+they would not like being called by their first names themselves, and
+they did not see why they should take that freedom with others. Neither
+by nature nor by nurture were they out of the ordinary in their ideals,
+and it was by a sort of accident that they were so different in their
+realities. She had stayed on with him through the first winter in the
+place they had taken for the summer, because she wished to be with him,
+rather than because she wished to be there, and he had stayed because he
+had not just found the moment to break away, though afterwards he
+pretended a reason for staying. They had no more voluntarily
+cultivated the natural than the supernatural; he kindled the fire for
+her, and she made the coffee for him, not because they preferred, but
+because they must; and they had arrived at their common ground in the
+occult by virtue of being alone together, and not by seeking the solitude
+for the experiment which the solitude promoted. Mrs. Alderling did not
+talk less, nor he more, when either was alone with me, than when we were
+all together; perhaps he was more silent, and she not quite so much; she
+was making up for him in his absence as he was for her in her presence.
+But they were always hospitable and attentive hosts, and though under the
+peculiar circumstances of Mrs. Alderling's having to do the house-work I
+necessarily had to do a good many things for myself, there were certain
+little graces which were never wanting, from her hands: my curtains were
+always carefully drawn, and my coverlet triangularly opened, so that I
+did not have to pull it down myself. There was a freshly trimmed lamp on
+the stand at my bed-head, and a book and paper-cutter put there, with a
+decanter of whiskey and a glass of water. I note these things to you,
+because they are touches which help remove the sense of anything
+intentional in the occultism of the Alderlings.
+
+I do not know whether I shall be able to impart the feeling of an obscure
+pathos in the case of Mrs. Alderling, which I certainly did not
+experience in Alderling's. Temperamentally he was less fitted to undergo
+the rigors of their seclusion than she was; in his liking to talk, he
+needed an audience and a variety of listening, and she, in her somewhat
+feline calm, could not have been troubled by any such need. You can be
+silent to yourself, but you cannot very well be loquacious, without
+danger of having the devil for a listener, if the old saying is true. Yet
+still, I felt a keener poignancy in her sequestration. Her beauty had
+even greater claim to regard than his eloquence. She was a woman who
+could have commanded a whole roomful with it, and no one would have
+wanted a word from her. She could only have been entirely herself in
+society, where, and in spite of everything that can be said against it,
+we can each, if we will, be more natural than out of it. The reason that
+most of us are not natural in it is that we want to play parts for which
+we are more or less unfit, and Marion Alderling never wished to play a
+part, I was sure. It would have sufficed her to be herself wherever she
+was, and the more people there were by, the more easily she could have
+been herself.
+
+I am not able to say now how much of all this is observation of previous
+facts, and how much speculation based upon subsequent occurrences. At the
+best I can only let it stand for characterization. In the same interest I
+will add a fact in relation to Mrs. Alderling which ought to have its
+weight against any undue appeal I have been making in her behalf. Without
+in the least blaming her, I will say that I think that Mrs. Alderling ate
+too much. She must have had naturally a strong appetite, which her active
+life sharpened, and its indulgence formed a sort of refuge from the
+pressure of the intense solitude in which she lived, and which was all
+the more a solitude because it was _solitude a deux_. I noticed that
+beyond the habit of cooks she partook of the dishes she had prepared,
+and that after Alderling and I had finished dinner, and he was impatient
+to get at his pipe, she remained prolonging her dessert. One night, when
+he and I came in from the veranda, she was standing at the sideboard,
+bent over a saucer of something, and she made me think of a large
+tortoise-shell cat which has got at the cream. I expected in my nerves to
+hear her lap, and my expectation was heightened by the soft, purring
+laugh with which she owned that she was hungry, and those berries were so
+nice.
+
+At the risk of giving the effect of something sensuous, even sensual, in
+her, I find myself insisting upon this detail, which did not lessen her
+peculiar charm. As far as the mystical quality of the situation was
+concerned, I fancy your finding that rather heightened by her innocent
+_gourmandise_. You must have noticed how inextricably, for this life at
+least, the spiritual is trammeled in the material, how personal character
+and ancestral propensity seem to flow side by side in the same individual
+without necessarily affecting each other. On the moral side Mrs.
+Alderling was no more to be censured for the refuge which her nerves
+sought from the situation in over-eating than Alderling for the smoking
+in which he escaped from the pressure they both felt from one another;
+and she was not less fitted than he for their joint experience.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+I do not suppose it was with the notion of keeping her weight down that
+Mrs. Alderling rowed a good deal on the cove before the cottage; but she
+had a boat, which she managed very well, and which she was out in, pretty
+much the whole time when she was not cooking, or eating or sleeping, or
+roaming the berry-pastures with me, or sitting to Alderling for his
+Madonnas. He did not care for the water himself; he said he knew every
+inch of that cove, and was tired of it; but he rather liked his wife's
+going, and they may both have had an unconscious relief from each other
+in the absences which her excursions promoted. She swam as well as she
+rowed, and often we saw her going down water-proofed to the shore, where
+we presently perceived her pulling off in her bathing-dress. Well out in
+the cove she had the habit of plunging overboard, and after a good swim,
+she rowed back, and then, discreetly water-proofed again, she climbed the
+lawn back to the house. Now and then she took me out in her boat, but so
+far as I remember, Alderling never went with her. Once I ventured to ask
+him if he never felt anxious about her. He said no, he should not have
+been afraid to go with her, and she could take better care of herself
+than he could. Besides, by means of their telepathy they were in constant
+communion, and he could make her feel at any sort of chance, that he did
+not wish her to take it, and she would not. This was the only occasion
+when he treated their peculiar psychomancy boastfully, and the only
+occasion when I felt a distinct misgiving of his sincerity.
+
+The day before I left, Mrs. Alderling went down about eleven in the
+morning to her boat, and rowed out into the cove. She rowed far toward
+the other shore, whither, following her with my eyes from Alderling's
+window, I saw its ridge blotted out by a long low cloud. It was straight
+and level as a wall, and looked almost as dense, and I called Alderling.
+
+"Oh, that fog won't come in before afternoon," he said. "We usually get
+it about four o'clock. But even if it does," he added dreamily, "Marion
+can manage. I'd trust her anywhere in this cove in any kind of weather."
+
+He went back to his work, and painted away for five or six minutes. Then
+he asked me, still at the window, "What's that fog doing now?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," I answered. "I should say it was making in."
+
+"Do you see Marion?"
+
+"Yes, she seems to be taking her bath."
+
+Again he painted a while before he asked, "Has she had her dip?"
+
+"She's getting back into her boat."
+
+"All right," said Alderling, in a tone of relief. "She's good to beat
+any fog in these parts ashore. I wish you would come and look at this
+a minute."
+
+I went, and we lost ourselves for a time in our criticism of the picture.
+He was harder on it than I was. He allowed, _"C'est un bon portrait_, as
+the French used to say of a faithful landscape, though I believe now the
+portrait can't be too good for them. I can't say about landscape. But in
+a Madonna I feel that there can be too much Marion, not for me, of
+course, but for the ideal, which I suppose we are bound to respect.
+Marion is not spiritual, but I would not have her less of the earth
+earthy, for all the angels that ever spread themselves 'in strong level
+flight.'"
+
+I recognized the words from "The Blessed Damozel," and I made bold to be
+so personal as to say, "If her hair were a little redder than 'the color
+of ripe corn' one might almost feel that the Blessed Damozel had been
+painted from Mrs. Alderling. It's the lingering earthiness in her that
+makes the Damozel so divine."
+
+"Yes, that was a great conception. I wonder none of the fellows do that
+kind of thing now."
+
+I laughed and said, "Well, so few of them have had the advantage of
+seeing Mrs. Alderling. And besides, Rosettis don't happen every day."
+
+"It was the period, too. I always tell her that she belongs among the
+later eighteen sixties. But she insists that she wasn't even born then.
+Marion is tremendously single-minded."
+
+"She has her mind all on you."
+
+He looked askance at me. "You've noticed--"
+
+"I've noticed that your mind is all on her."
+
+"Not half as much!" he protested, fervidly. "I don't think it's good for
+her, though of course I like it. That is, in a way. Sometimes it's
+rather too--" He suddenly flung his brush from him, and started up, with
+a loudly shouted, "Yes, yes! I'm coming," and hurled himself out of the
+garret which he used for his studio, and cleared the stairs with two
+bounds.
+
+By the time I reached the outer door of the cottage, he was a dark blur
+in the white blur of the fog which had swallowed up the cove, and was
+rising round the house-walls from the grass. I heard him shouting,
+"Marion!" and a faint mellow answer, far out in the cove, "Hello!" and
+then--
+
+"Where are you?" and her answer "Here!" I heard him jump into a boat, and
+the thump of the oars in the row-locks, and then the rapid beat of the
+oars while he shouted, "Keep calling!" and she answered,--
+
+"I will!" and called "Hello! Hello! Hello!"
+
+I made my mental comment that this time their mystical means of
+communication was somehow not working. But after her last hello, no sound
+broke the white silence of the fog except the throb of Alderling's oars.
+She was evidently resting on hers, lest she should baffle his attempts to
+find her by trying to find him.
+
+I suppose ten minutes or so had passed, when the dense air brought me the
+sound of low laughing that was also like the sound of low sobbing, and
+then I knew that they had met somewhere in the blind space. I began to
+hear rowing again, but only as of one boat, and suddenly out of the mist,
+almost at my feet, Alderling's boat shot up on the shelving beach, and
+his wife leaped ashore from it, and ran past me up the lawn, while he
+pulled her boat out on the gravel. She must have been trailing it from
+the stern of his.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+I was abroad when Mrs. Alderling died, but I heard that it was from a
+typhoid fever which she had contracted from the water in their well, as
+was supposed. The water-supply all along that coast is scanty, and that
+summer most of the wells were dry, and quite a plague of typhoid raged
+among the people from drinking the dregs. The fever might have gone the
+worse with her because of her over-fed robustness; at any rate it went
+badly enough.
+
+I first heard of her death from Minver at the club, and I heard with
+still greater astonishment that Alderling was down there alone where she
+had died. Minver said that somebody ought to go down and look after the
+poor old fellow, but nobody seemed to feel it exactly his office.
+Certainly I did not feel it mine, and I thought it rather a hardship when
+a few days after I found a letter from Alderling at the club quite
+piteously beseeching me to come to him. He had read of my arrival home,
+in a stray New York paper, and he was firing his letter, he said, at the
+club, with one chance in a thousand of hitting me with it. Rulledge was
+by when I read it, and he decided, with that unsparing activity of his,
+where other people are concerned, that I must go; I certainly could not
+resist such an appeal as that. He had a vague impression, he said, of
+something weird in the situation down there, and I ought to go and pull
+Alderling out of it; besides, I might find my account in it as a
+psychologist. I hesitated a day, out of self-respect, or self-assertion,
+and then, the weather coming on suddenly hot, in the beginning of
+September, I went.
+
+Of course I had meant to go, all along, but I was not so glad when I
+arrived, as I might have been if Alderling had given me a little
+warmer welcome. His mood had changed since writing to me, and the
+strongest feeling he showed at seeing me was what affected me very
+like a cold surprise.
+
+If I had broken in on a solitude in that place before, I was now the
+intruder upon a desolation. Alderling was living absolutely alone,
+except for the occasional presence of a neighboring widow--all the
+middle-aged women there are widows, with dim or dimmer memories of
+husbands lost off the Banks, or elsewhere at sea--who came in to get his
+meals and make his bed, and then had instructions to leave. It was in one
+of her prevailing absences that I arrived with my bag, and I had to
+hammer a long time with the knocker on the open door before Alderling
+came clacking down the stairs in his slippers from the top of the house,
+and gave me his somewhat defiant greeting. I could almost have said that
+he did not recognize me at the first bleared glance, and his inability,
+when he realized who it was, to make me feel at home, encouraged me to
+take the affair into my own hands.
+
+He looked frightfully altered, but perhaps it was the shaggy beard that
+he had let grow over his poor, lean muzzle, that mainly made the
+difference. His clothes hung gauntly upon him, and he had a weak-kneed
+stoop. His coat sleeves were tattered at the wrists, and one of them
+showed the white lining at the elbow. I simply shuddered at his shirt.
+
+"Will you smoke?" he asked huskily, almost at the first word, and with an
+effect of bewilderment in his hospitality that almost made me shed tears.
+
+"Well, not just yet, Alderling," I said. "Shall I go to my old room?"
+
+"Go anywhere," he answered, and he let me carry my bag to the chamber
+where I had slept before.
+
+It was quite as his wife would have arranged it, even to the detail of a
+triangular portion of the bedding turned down as she used to do it for
+me. The place was well aired and dusted, and gave me the sense of being
+as immaculately clean and fresh as Alderling was not. He sat down in a
+chair by the window, and he remained, while I laid out my things and made
+my brief toilet, unabashed by those incidents for which I did not feel it
+necessary to banish him, if he liked staying.
+
+We had supper by-and-by, a very well-cooked meal of fried fresh cod and
+potatoes, with those belated blackberries which grow so sweet when they
+hang long on the canes into September. There was a third plate laid, and
+I expected that when the housekeeper had put the dishes on the table, she
+would sit down with us, as the country-fashion still is, but she did not
+reappear till she came in with the dessert and coffee. Alderling ate
+hungrily, and much more than I had remembered his doing, but perhaps I
+formerly had the impression of Mrs. Alderling's fine appetite so strongly
+in mind that I had failed to note his. Certainly, however, there was a
+difference in one sort which I could not be mistaken in, and that was in
+his not talking. Her mantle of silence had fallen upon him, and whereas
+he used hardly to give me a chance in the conversation, he now let me do
+all of it. He scarcely answered my questions, and he asked none of his
+own; but I saw that he liked being talked to, and I did my best, shying
+off from his sorrow, as people foolishly do, and speaking banalities
+about my trip to Europe, and the Psychological Congress in Geneva, and
+the fellows at the club, and heaven knows what rot else.
+
+He listened, but I do not know whether he heard much of my clack, and I
+got very tired of it myself at last. When I had finished my blackberries,
+he asked mechanically, in an echo of my former visit, with a repetition
+of his gesture towards the coffee-pot, "More?" I shook my head, and then
+he led the way out to the veranda, stopping to get his pipe and tobacco
+from the mantel on the way. But when we sat down in the early falling
+September twilight outside, he did not light his pipe, letting me smoke
+my cigarette alone.
+
+"Are you off your tobacco?" I asked.
+
+"I don't smoke," he answered, but he did not explain why, and I did not
+feel authorized to ask.
+
+The talk went on as lopsidedly as before, and I began to get sleepy. I
+made bold to yawn, but Alderling did not mind that, and then I made bold
+to say that I thought I would go to bed. He followed me indoors, saying
+that he would go to bed, too. The hall was lighted from a hanging-lamp
+and two clear-burning hand-lamps which the widow had put for us on a
+small table. She had evidently gone home, and left us to ourselves. He
+took one lamp and I the other, and he started up stairs before me. If he
+were not coming down again, he meant to let the hanging-lamp burn, and I
+had nothing to say about that; but I suggested, concerning the wide-open
+door behind me, "Shall I close the door, Alderling?" and he answered,
+without looking round, "I don't shut it."
+
+He led the way into my room, and he sat down as when I had come, and
+absently watched my processes of getting into bed. There was something
+droll, and yet miserable, in his behavior. At first, I thought he might
+be staying merely for the comfort of a human presence, and again, I
+thought he might be afraid, for I felt a little creepy myself, for no
+assignable reason, except that Absence, which he must have been
+incomparably more sensible of than I. From certain ineffectual movements
+that he made, and from certain preliminary noises in his throat, which
+ended in nothing, I decided that he wished to say something to me, tell
+me something, and could not. But I was selfishly sleepy, and it seemed to
+me that anything he had on his mind would keep there till morning, at
+least, and that if he got it off on mine now, it might give me a night of
+wakeful speculation. So when I got into bed and pulled the sheet up under
+my chin, I said, "Well, I don't want to turn you out, old fellow."
+
+He stared, and answered, "Oh!" and went without other words, carrying his
+lamp with him and moving with a weak-kneed shuffle, like a very old man.
+
+He was going to leave the door open behind him, but I called out, "I wish
+you'd shut me in, Alderling," and after a hesitation, he came back and
+closed the door.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+We breakfasted as silently on his part as we had supped, but when we had
+finished, and I was wondering what he was going to let me do with myself,
+and on the whole what the deuce I had come for, he said, in the longest
+speech I had yet had from him, "Wouldn't you like to come up and see what
+I've been doing?"
+
+I said I should like it immensely, and he led the way up stairs, as far
+As his attic studio. The door of that, like the other doors in the house,
+stood open, and I got the emotion which the interior gave me, full force,
+at the first glance. The place was so startlingly alive with that dead
+woman on a score of canvases in the character in which he had always
+painted her, that I could scarcely keep from calling out; but I went
+about, pretending to examine the several Madonnas, and speaking rubbish
+about them, while he stood stoopingly in the midst of them like the
+little withered old man he looked. When I had emptied myself of my chaff,
+I perceived that the time had come.
+
+I glanced about for a seat, and was going to take that in which Mrs.
+Alderling used to pose for him, but he called out with sudden sharpness,
+"Not that!" and without appearing to notice, I found a box which I
+inverted, and sat down on.
+
+"Tell me about your wife, Alderling," I said, and he answered with a sort
+of scream, "I wanted you to ask me! Why didn't you ask me before? What
+did you suppose I got you here for?"
+
+With that he shrank down, a miserable heap, in his own chair, and bowed
+his hapless head and cried. It was more affecting than any notion I can
+give you of it, and I could only wait patiently for his grief to wash
+itself out in one of those paroxysms which come to bereavement and leave
+it somehow a little comforted when they pass.
+
+"I was waiting, for the stupid reasons you will imagine, to let you speak
+first," I said, "but here in her presence I couldn't hold in any longer."
+
+He asked with strange eagerness, "You noticed that?"
+
+I chose to feign that he meant in the pictures. "Over and over again,"
+I answered.
+
+He would not have my feint. "I don't mean in these wretched caricatures!"
+
+"Well?" I assented provisionally.
+
+"I mean her very self, listening, looking, living--waiting!"
+
+Whether I had insanity or sorrow to deal with, I could not gainsay the
+unhappy man, and I only said what I really felt: "Yes, the place seems
+strangely full of her. I wish you would tell me about her."
+
+He asked, with a certain slyness, "Have you heard anything about her
+already? At the club? From that fool woman in the kitchen?"
+
+"For heaven's sake, no, Alderling!"
+
+"Or about me?"
+
+"Nothing whatever!"
+
+He seemed relieved of whatever suspicion he felt, but he said finally,
+and with an air of precaution, "I should like to know just how much you
+mean by the place seeming full of her."
+
+"Oh, I suppose the association of her personality with the whole
+house, and especially this room. I didn't mean anything preternatural,
+I believe."
+
+"Then you don't believe in a life after death?" he demanded with a kind
+of defiance.
+
+I thought this rather droll, seeing what his own position had been, but
+that was not the moment for the expression of my amusement. "The tendency
+is to a greater tolerance of the notion," I said. "Men like James and
+Royce, among the psychologists, and Shaler, among the scientists,
+scarcely leave us at peace in our doubts, any more, much less our
+denials."
+
+He said, as if he had forgotten the question: "They called it a very
+light case, and they thought she was getting well. In fact, she did get
+well, and then--there was a relapse. They laid it to her eating some
+fruit which they allowed her."
+
+Alderling spoke with a kind of bitter patience, but in my own mind I was
+not able to put all the blame on the doctors. Neither did I blame that
+innocently earthy creature, who was of no more harm in her strong
+appetite than any other creature which gluts its craving as simply as it
+feels it. The sense of her presence was deepened by the fact of those
+childlike self-indulgences which Alderling's words recalled to me. I made
+no comment, however, and he asked gloomily, as if with a return of his
+suspicion, "And you haven't heard of anything happening afterward?"
+
+"I don't know what you refer to," I told him, "but I can safely say I
+haven't, for I haven't heard anything at all."
+
+"They contended that it _didn't_ happen," he resumed. "She died, they
+said, and by all the tests she had been dead two whole days. She died
+with her hand in mine. I was not trying to hold her back; she had a kind
+of majestic preoccupation in her going, so that I would not have dared to
+detain her if I could. You've seen them go, and how they seem to draw
+those last, long, deep breaths, as if they had no thought in the world
+but of the work of getting out of it. When her breathing stopped I
+expected it to go on, but it did not go on, and that was all. Nothing
+startling, nothing dramatic, just simple, natural, _like her!_ I gave her
+hand back, I put it on her breast myself, and crossed the other on it.
+She looked as if she were sleeping, with that faint color hovering in her
+face, which was not wasted, but I did not make-believe about it; I
+accepted the fact of her death. In your 'Quests of the Occult,'"
+Alderling broke off, with a kind of superiority that was of almost the
+quality of contempt, "I believe you don't allow yourself to be daunted by
+a diametrical difference of opinion among the witnesses of an occurrence,
+as to its nature, or as to its reality, even?" "Not exactly that," I
+said. "I think I argued that the passive negation of one witness ought
+not to invalidate the testimony of another as to his experience. One
+might hear and see things, and strongly affirm them, and another,
+absorbed in something else, or in a mere suspense of the observant
+faculties, might quite as honestly declare that so far as his own
+knowledge was concerned, nothing of the kind happened. I held that in
+such a case, counter-testimony should not be allowed to invalidate the
+testimony for the fact."
+
+"Yes, that is what I meant," said Alderling. "You say it more clearly in
+the book, though."
+
+"Oh, of course."
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+He began again, more remotely from the affair in hand than he had left
+off, as if he wanted to give himself room for parley with my possible
+incredulity. "You know how it was with Marion about my not believing that
+I should live again. Her notion was a sort of joke between us, especially
+when others were by, but it was a serious thing with her, in her heart.
+Perhaps it had originally come to her as a mere fancy, and from
+entertaining it playfully, she found herself with a mental inmate that
+finally dispossessed her judgment. You remember how literally she brought
+those Scripture texts to bear on it?"
+
+"Yes. May I say that it was very affecting?"
+
+"Affecting!" Alderling repeated in a tone of amaze at the inadequacy of
+my epithet. "She was always finding things that bore upon the point.
+After awhile she got to concealing them, as if she thought they annoyed
+me. They never did; they amused me; and when I saw that she had something
+of the sort on her mind, I would say, 'Well, out with it, Marion!' She
+would always begin, 'Well, you may laugh!'" and as he repeated her words
+Alderling did laugh, forlornly, and as I must say, rather
+bloodcurdlingly.
+
+I could not prompt him to go on, but he presently did so himself,
+desolately enough. "I suppose, if I was in her mind at all in that
+supreme moment, when she seemed to be leaving this life behind with such
+a solemn effect of rating it at nothing, it may have been a pang to her
+that I was not following her into the dark, with any ray of hope for
+either of us. She could not have returned from it with the expectation of
+convincing me, for I used to tell her that if one came back from the
+dead, I should merely know that he had been mistaken about being dead,
+and was giving me a dream from his trance. She once asked me if I thought
+Lazarus was not really dead, with a curious childlike interest in the
+miracle, and she was disheartened when I reminded her that Lazarus had
+not testified of any life hereafter, and it did not matter whether he had
+been really dead or not when he was resuscitated, as far as that was
+concerned. Last year, we read the Bible a good deal together here, and to
+tease her I pretended to be convinced of the contrary by the very
+passages that persuaded her. As she told you, she did not care for
+herself. You remember that?"
+
+"Distinctly," I said.
+
+"It was always so. She never cared. I was perfectly aware that if she
+could have assured life hereafter to me, she would have given her life
+here to do it. You know how some women, when they are married, absolutely
+give themselves up, try to lose themselves in the behoof of their
+husbands? I don't say it rightly; there are no words that will express
+the utterness of their abdication."
+
+"I know what you mean," I said, "and it was one of the facts which most
+interested me in Mrs. Alderling."
+
+"Because I wasn't worthy of it? No man is!"
+
+"It wasn't a question of that in my mind; I don't believe that occurred
+to me. It was the _Ding an sich_ that interested me, or as it related
+itself to her, and not the least as it related itself to you. Such a
+woman's being is a cycle of self-sacrifice, so perfect, so essential,
+from birth to death, as to exclude the notion of volition. She is what
+she does. Of course she has to put her sacrifice into words from time to
+time, but its true language is acts, and the acts themselves only
+clumsily express it. There is a kind of tyranny in it for the man, of
+course. It requires self-sacrifice to be sacrificed to, and I don't
+suppose a woman has any particular merit in what is so purely natural. It
+appears pathetic when it is met with ingratitude or rejection, but when
+it has its way it is no more deserving our reverence than eating or
+sleeping. It astonishes men because they are as naturally incapable of it
+as women are capable of it."
+
+I was mounted and was riding on, forgetful of Alderling, and what he had
+to tell me, if he had anything, but he recalled me to myself by having
+apparently forgotten me, for when I paused, he took up his affair at a
+quite different point, and as though that were the question in hand.
+
+"That gift, or knack, or trick, or whatever it was, of one compelling the
+presence of the other by thinking or willing it, was as much mine as
+hers, and she tried sometimes to get me to say that I would use it with
+her if she died before I did; and if she were where the conditions were
+opposed to her coming to me, my will would help her to overcome the
+hinderance; our united wills would form a current of volition that she
+could travel back on against all obstacles. I don't know whether I make
+myself clear?" he appealed.
+
+"Yes, perfectly," I said. "It is very curious." He said in a kind of
+muse, "I don't know just where I was." Then he began again, "Oh, yes! It
+was at the ceremony--down there in the library. Some of the country
+people came in; I suppose they thought they ought, and I suppose they
+wanted to; it didn't matter to me. I had sent for Doctor Norrey, as soon
+as the relapse came, and he was there with me. Of course there was the
+minister, conducting the services. He made a prayer full of helpless
+repetitions, which I helplessly noticed, and some scrambling remarks,
+mostly misdirected at me, affirming and reaffirming that the sister they
+had lost was only gone before, and that she was now in a happier world.
+
+"The singing and the praying and the preaching came to an end, and then
+there was that soul-sickening hush, that exanimate silence, of which the
+noise of rustling clothes and scraping feet formed a part, as the people
+rose in the hall, where chairs had been put for them, leaving me and
+Norrey alone with Marion. Every fibre of my frame recognized the moment
+of parting, and protested. A tremendous wave of will swept through me and
+from me, a resistless demand for her presence, and it had power upon her.
+I heard her speak, and say, as distinctly as I repeat the words, 'I will
+come for you!' and the youth and the beauty that had been growing more
+and more wonderful in her face, ever since she died, shone like a kind of
+light from it. I answered her, 'I am ready now!' and then Norrey scuffled
+to his feet, with a conventional face of sympathy, and said, 'No hurry,
+my dear Alderling,' and I knew he had not heard or seen anything, as well
+as I did afterwards when I questioned him. He thought I was giving them
+notice that they could take her away. What do you think?"
+
+"How what do I think?" I asked.
+
+"Do you think that it happened?"
+
+There was something in Alderling's tone and manner that made me, instead
+of answering directly that I did not, temporize and ask, "Why?"
+
+"Because--because," and Alderling caught his breath, like a child that is
+trying to keep itself from crying, "because _I_ don't." He broke into a
+sobbing that seemed to wrench and tear his poor little body, and if I had
+thought of anything to say, I could not have said it to his headlong
+grief with any hope of assuaging it. "I am satisfied now," he said, at
+last, wiping his wet face, and striving for some composure of its
+trembling features, "that it was all a delusion, the effect of my
+exaltation, of my momentary aberration, perhaps. Don't be afraid of
+saying what you really think," he added scornfully, "with the notion of
+sparing me. You couldn't doubt it, or deny it, more completely than I
+do."
+
+[Illustration: "HE BROKE INTO A SOBBING THAT SEEMED TO WRENCH AND TEAR"]
+
+I confess this unexpected turn struck me dumb. I did not try to say
+anything, and Alderling went on.
+
+"I don't deny that she is living, but I can't believe that I shall ever
+live to see her again, or if you prefer, die to see her. There is the
+play of the poor animal instinct, or the mechanical persistence of
+expectation in me, so that I can't shut the doors without the sense of
+shutting her out, can't put out the lights without feeling that I am
+leaving her in the dark. But I know it is all foolishness, as well as you
+do, all craziness. If she is alive it is because she believed she should
+live, and I shall perish because I didn't believe. I should like to
+believe, now, if only to see her again, but it is too late. If you disuse
+any member of your body, or any faculty of your mind, it withers away and
+if you deny your soul your soul ceases to be."
+
+I found myself saying, "That is very interesting," from a certain force
+of habit, which you have noted in me, when confronted with a novel
+instance of any kind. "But," I suggested, "why not act upon the reverse
+of that principle, and create the fact by affirmation which you think
+your denial destroys?"
+
+"Because," he repeated wearily, "it is too late. You might as well ask
+the fakir who has held his arm upright for twenty years, till it has
+stiffened there, to restore the dry stock by exercise. It is too late,
+I tell you."
+
+"But, look here, Alderling," I pursued, beginning to taste the joy of
+argument. "You say that your will had such power upon her after you knew
+her to be dead that you made her speak to you?"
+
+"No, I don't say that now," he returned. "I know now that it was a
+delusion."
+
+"But if you once had that power of summoning her to you, by strongly
+wishing for her presence, when you were both living here, why doesn't it
+stand to reason that you could do it still, if she is living there and
+you are living here?"
+
+"I never had any such power," he replied, with the calm of absolute
+tragedy. "That was a delusion too. I leave the doors open for her, night
+and day, because I must, but if she came I should know it was not she."
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+Of course you know your own business, my dear Acton, but if you think of
+using the story of the Alderlings--and there is no reason why you should
+not, for they are both dead, without kith or kin surviving, so far as I
+know, unless he has some relatives in Germany, who would never penetrate
+the disguise you could give the case--it seems to me that here is your
+true climax. But I necessarily leave the matter to you, for I shall not
+touch it at any point where we could come into competition. In fact, I
+doubt if I ever touch it at all, for though all psychology is in a manner
+dealing with the occult, still I think I have done my duty by that side
+of it, as the occult is usually understood; and I am shy of its grosser
+instances, as things that are apt to bring one's scientific poise into
+question. However, you shall be the judge of what is best for you to do,
+when you have the whole story, and I will give it you without more ado,
+merely premising that I have a sort of shame for the aptness of the
+catastrophe. I shall respect you more if I hear that you agree with me as
+to the true climax of the tragedy, and have the heroism to reject the
+final event.
+
+I stayed with Alderling nearly a week, and I will own that I bored
+myself. In fact, I am not sure but we bored each other. At any rate, when
+I told him, the night before I intended going, that I meant to leave him
+in the morning, he seemed resigned, or indifferent, or perhaps merely
+inattentive. From time to time we had recurred to the matter of his
+experience, or his delusion, but with apparently increasing impatience on
+his part, and certainly decreasing interest on mine; so that at last I
+think he was willing to have me go. But in the morning he seemed
+reluctant, and pleaded with me to stay a few days longer with him. I
+alleged engagements, more or less unreal, for I was never on such terms
+with Alderling that I felt I need make any special sacrifice to him. He
+gave way, suspiciously, rather, and when I came down from my room after
+having put the last touches to my packing, I found him on the veranda
+looking out to seaward, where a heavy fog-bank hung.
+
+You will sense here the sort of _patness_ which I feel cheapens the
+catastrophe; and yet, as I consider it, again, the fact is not without
+its curious importance, and its bearing upon what went before. I do not
+know but it gives the whole affair a relief which it would not otherwise
+have.
+
+He was to have driven me to the station, some miles away, before noon,
+and I supposed we should sit down together, and try to have some sort of
+talk before I went. But Alderling appeared to have forgotten about my
+going, and after a while, took himself off to his studio, and left me
+alone to watch the inroads of the fog. It came on over the harbor
+rapidly, as on that morning when Mrs. Alderling had been so nearly lost
+in it, and presently the masts and shrouds of the shipping at anchor were
+sticking up out of it as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the
+sea under them.
+
+I amused myself watching it blot out one detail of the prospect after
+another, while the fog-horn lowed through it, and the bell-buoy, far out
+beyond the light-house ledge, tolled mournfully. The milk-white mass
+moved landward, and soon the air was blind with the mist which hid the
+grass twenty yards away. There was an awfulness in the silence, which
+nothing broke but the lowing of the horn, and the tolling of the bell,
+except when now and then the voice of a sailor came through it, like that
+of some drowned man sending up his hail from the bottom of the bay.
+
+Suddenly I heard a joyful shout from the attic overhead:
+
+"I am coming! I am coming!"
+
+It was Alderling calling out through his window, and then a cry came from
+over the water, which seemed to answer him, but which there is no reason
+in the world to believe was not a girlish shout from one of the yachts,
+swallowed up in the fog.
+
+His lunging descent of the successive stairways followed, and he burst
+through the doorway beside me, and without heeding me, ran bareheaded
+down the sloping lawn.
+
+I followed, with what notion of help or hinderance I should not find it
+easy to say, but before I reached the water's edge--in fact I never did
+reach it, and had some difficulty making my way back to the house,--I
+heard the rapid throb of the oars in the row-locks as he pulled through
+the white opacity.
+
+You know the rest, for it was the common property of our
+enterprising press at the time, when the incident was fully reported,
+with my ineffectual efforts to be satisfactorily interviewed as to
+the nothing I knew.
+
+The oarless boat was found floating far out to sea after the fog lifted.
+It was useless to look for Alderling's body, and I do not know that any
+search was made for it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Questionable Shapes, by William Dean Howells
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