It rained throughout the evening, with a wailing of the wind in the gables, and a weeping and a sobbing of the water from the eaves that Mrs. Westangle’s guests, securely housed from the storm, made the most of for weirdness. There had been a little dancing, which gave way to so much sitting-out that the volunteer music abruptly ceased as if in dudgeon, and there was nothing left but weirdness to bring young hearts together. Weirdness can do a good deal with girls lounging in low chairs, and young men on rugs round a glowing hearth at their feet; and every one told some strange thing that had happened at first hand, or second or third hand, either to himself or herself, or to their fathers or brothers or grandmothers or old servants. They were stimulated in eking out these experiences not only by the wildness of the rain without, but by the mystery of being shut off from the library into the drawing-room and hall while the preparations for the following night were beginning. But weirdness is not inexhaustible, even when shared on such propitious terms between a group of young people rapidly advanced in intimacy by a week’s stay under the same roof, and at the first yawn a gay dispersion of the votaries ended it all.
The yawn came from Bushwick, who boldly owned, when his guilt was brought home to him, that he was sleepy, and then as he expected to be scared out of a year’s growth the next night, and not be able to sleep for a week afterwards, he was now going to bed. He shook hands with Mrs. Westangle for good-night. The latest to follow him was Verrian, who, strangely alert, and as far from drowsiness as he had ever known himself, was yet more roused by realizing that Mrs. Westangle was not letting his hand go at once, but, unless it was mere absent-mindedness, was conveying through it the wish to keep him. She fluttered a little more closely up to him, and twittered out, “Miss Shirley wants me to let you know that she has told me about your coming together, and everything.”
“Oh, I’m very glad,” Verrian said, not sure that it was the right thing.
“I don’t know why she feels so, but she has a right to do as she pleases about it. She’s not a guest.”
“No,” Verrian assented.
“It happens very well, though, for the ghost-seeing that people don’t know she’s here. After that I shall tell them. In fact, she wants me to, for she must be on the lookout for other engagements. I am going to do everything I can for her, and if you hear of anything—”
Verrian bowed, with a sense of something offensive in her words which he could not logically feel, since it was a matter of business and was put squarely on a business basis. “I should be very glad,” he said, noncommittally.
“She was sure from the first,” Mrs. Westangle went on, as if there were some relation between the fact and her request, “that you were not the actor. She knew you were a writer.”
“Oh, indeed!” Verrian said.
“I thought that if you were writing for the newspapers you might know how to help her-”
“I’m not a newspaper writer,” Verrian answered, with a resentment which she seemed to feel, for she said, with a sort of apology in her tone:
“Oh! Well, I don’t suppose it matters. She doesn’t know I’m speaking to you about that; it just came into my head. I like to help in a worthy object, you know. I hope you’ll have a good night’s rest.”
She turned and looked round with the air of distraction which she had after speaking to any one, and which Verrian fancied came as much from a paucity as from a multiplicity of suggestion in her brain, and so left him standing. But she came back to say, “Of course, it’s all between ourselves till after to-morrow night, Mr. Verrian.”
“Oh, certainly,” he replied, and went vaguely off in the direction of the billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco’s substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned quickly, with a certain expectance in his nerves, and saw nothing more ghostly than Bushwick standing at the corner of the table and apparently hesitating how to speak to him.
He said, “Hello!” and at this Bushwick said:
“Look here!”
“Well?” Verrian asked, looking at him.
“How does it happen you’re up so late, after everybody else is wrapped in slumber?”
“I might ask the same of you.”
“Well, I found I wasn’t making it a case of sleep, exactly, and so I got up.”
“Well, I hadn’t gone to bed for much the same reason. Why couldn’t you sleep? A real-estate broker ought to have a clean conscience.”
“So ought a publisher, for that matter. What do you think of this ghost-dance, anyway?”
“It might be amusing—if it fails.” Verrian was tempted to add the condition by the opportunity for a cynicism which he did not feel. It is one of the privileges of youth to be cynical, whether or no.
Bushwick sat down before the fire and rubbed his shins with his two hands unrestfully, drawing in a long breath between his teeth. “These things get on to my nerves sometimes. I shouldn’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”
“On Mrs. Westangle’s account?”
“I guess Mrs. Westangle could stand it. Look here!” It was rather a customary phrase of his, Verrian noted. As he now used it he looked alertly round at Verrian, with his hands still on his shins. “What’s the use of our beating round the bush?”
Verrian delayed his answer long enough to decide against the aimless pun of asking, “What Bushwick?” and merely asked, “What bush?”
“The bush where the milk in the cocoanut grows. You don’t pretend that you believe Mrs. Westangle has been getting up all these fairy stunts?”
Verrian returned to his cigar, from which the ashen wraith dropped into his lap. “I guess you’ll have to be a little clearer.” But as Bushwick continued silently looking at him, the thing could not be left at this point, and he was obliged to ask of his own initiative, “How much do you know?”
Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still on Verrian’s profile. “As much as Miss Macroyd could tell me.”
“Ah, I’m still in the dark,” Verrian politely regretted, but not with a tacit wish to wring Miss Macroyd’s neck, which he would not have known how to account for.
“Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a professional assistant who’s doing the whole job for her, and that she came down on the same train with herself and you.”
“Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at the station?” Verrian demanded, in a burst of rage, “and left us to get here the best way we could?”
Bushwick grinned. “She supposed there were other carriages, and when she found there weren’t she hurried the victoria back for you.”
“You think she believes all that? I’m glad she has the decency to be ashamed of her behavior.”
“I’m not defending her. Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself.”
The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it. After the first few whiffs he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said, “Who was your fair friend?”
If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul. “This afternoon?” Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, “That was she.” Then he went on, wrathfully: “She’s a girl who has to make her living, and she’s doing it in a new way that she’s invented for herself. She has supposed that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a money consideration. She’s not a guest in the house, and she won’t take herself on a society basis at all. I don’t know what her history is, and I don’t care. She’s a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It’s all inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much of the case, and if you’re knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick, I want you to get it straight. That’s why I’m talking of it, and not because I think you’ve any right to know anything about it.”
“Thank you,” Bushwick returned, unruffled. “It’s about what Miss Macroyd told me. That’s the reason I don’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”
Verrian did not notice him. He found it more important to say: “She’s so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she wouldn’t have wished, in Mrs. Westangle’s interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is going on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it, that’s her affair.”
“She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would; and she only told it to Miss Macroyd this afternoon on compulsion, after Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle had to account for the young lady’s presence there in your company. Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I assure you, my dear fellow, the matter hasn’t gone any further.”
“Oh, it’s quite indifferent to me,” Verrian retorted. “I’m nothing but a dispassionate witness of the situation.”
“Of course,” Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even an unreasonable grudge could hardly resist it, “If you call it dispassionate.”
Verrian could not help laughing. “Well, passionate, then. I don’t know why it should be so confoundedly vexatious. But somehow I would have chosen Miss Macroyd—Is she specially dear to you?”
“Not the least!”
“I would have chosen her as the last person to have the business, which is so inexpressibly none of my business—”
“Or mine, as I think you remarked,” Bushwick interposed.
“Come out through,” Verrian concluded, accepting his interposition with a bow.
“I see what you mean,” Bushwick said, after a moment’s thought. “But, really, I don’t think it’s likely to go further. If you want to know, I believe Miss Macroyd feels the distinction of being in the secret so much that she’ll prefer to hint round till Mrs. Westangle gives the thing away. She had to tell me, because I was there with her when she saw you with the young lady, to keep me from going with my curiosity to you. Come, I do think she’s honest about it.”
“Don’t you think they’re rather more dangerous when they’re honest?”
“Well, only when they’re obliged to be. Cheer up! I don’t believe Miss Macroyd is one to spoil sport.”
“Oh, I think I shall live through it,” Verrian said, rather stiffening again. But he relaxed, in rising from his chair, and said, “Well, good-night, old fellow. I believe I shall go to bed now.”
“You won’t wait for me till my pipe’s out?”
“No, I think not. I seem to be just making it, and if I waited I might lose my grip.” He offered Bushwick a friendly hand.
“Do you suppose it’s been my soothing conversation? I’m like the actor that the doctor advised to go and see himself act. I can’t talk myself sleepy.”
“You might try it,” Verrian said, going out.
The men who had talked of going away on Thursday seemed to have found it practicable to stay. At any rate, they were all there on the Saturday night for the ghost-seeing, and, of course, none of the women had gone. What was more remarkable, in a house rather full of girls, nobody was sick; or, at least, everybody was well enough to be at dinner, and, after dinner, at the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically, preceded the supernatural part of the evening’s amusement. It was the decorum of a woman who might have been expected not to have it that Mrs. Westangle had arranged that the evening’s amusement should not pass the bound between Saturday night and Sunday morning. The supper was to be later, but that was like other eating and drinking on the Sabbath; and it was to be a cold supper.
At half-past ten the dancing stopped in the foyer and the drawing-room, and by eleven the guests were all seated fronting the closed doors of the library. There were not so many of them but that in the handsome space there was interval enough to lend a desired distance to the apparitions; and when the doors were slid aside it was applausively found that there was a veil of gauze falling from the roof to the floor, which promised its aid in heightening the coming mystery. This was again heightened by the universal ignorance as to how the apparitions were to make their advents and on what terms.
It was with an access of a certain nervous anxiety that Verrian found himself next Miss Macroyd, whose frank good-fellowship first expressed itself in a pleasure at the chance which he did not share, and then extended to a confidential sympathy for the success of the enterprise which he did not believe she felt. She laughed, but ‘sotto voce’, in bending her head close to his and whispering, “I hope she’ll be equal to her ‘mise en scene’. It’s really very nice. So simple.” Besides the gauze veil, there was no preparation except in the stretch of black drapery which hid the book-shelves at the farther wall of the library.
“Mrs. Westangle’s note is always simplicity,” Verrian returned.
“Oh yes, indeed! And you wish to keep up the Westangle convention?”
“I don’t see any reason for dropping it.”
“Oh, none in the world,” she mocked.
He determined to push her, since she had tried to push him, and he asked, “What reason could there be?”
“Now, Mr. Verrian, asking a woman for a reason! I shall begin to think some one else wrote your book, too! Perhaps she’ll take up supplying ideas to authors as well as hostesses. Of course, I mean Mrs. Westangle.”
Verrian wished he had not tried to push Miss Macroyd, and he was still grinding his teeth in a vain endeavor to get out some fit retort between them, when he saw Bushwick shuffling to his feet, in the front row of the spectators, and heard him beginning a sort of speech.
“Ladies and gentlemen: Mrs. Westangle has chosen me, because a real-estate broker is sometimes an auctioneer, and may be supposed to have the gift of oratory, to make known the conditions on which you may interview the ghosts which you are going to see. Anybody may do it who will comply with the conditions. In the first place, you have got to be serious, and to think up something that you would really like to know about your past, present, or future. Remember, this is no joking matter, and the only difference between the ghost that you will see here and a real materialization under professional auspices is that the ghost won’t charge you anything. Of course, if any lady or gentleman—especially lady—wishes to contribute to any charitable object, after a satisfactory interview with the ghost, a hat will be found at the hall-door for the purpose, and Mrs. Westangle will choose the object: I have put in a special plea for my own firm, at a season when the real-estate business is not at its best.” By this time Bushwick had his audience laughing, perhaps the more easily because they were all more or less in a hysterical mood, which, whether we own it or not, is always induced by an approximation to the supernatural. He frowned and said, “NO laughing!” and then they laughed the more. When he had waited for them to be quiet he went on gravely, “The conditions are simply these: Each person who chooses may interview the ghost, keeping a respectful distance, but not so far off but that the ghost can distinctly hear a stage whisper. The question put must be seriously meant, and it must be the question which the questioner would prefer to have answered above everything else at the time being. Certain questions will be absolutely ruled out, such as, ‘Does Maria love me?’ or, ‘Has Reuben ever been engaged before?’ The laughter interrupted the speaker again, and Verrian hung his head in rage and shame; this stupid ass was spoiling the hope of anything beautiful in the spectacle and turning it into a gross burlesque. Somehow he felt that the girl who had invented it had meant, in the last analysis, something serious, and it was in her behalf that he would have liked to choke Bushwick. All the time he believed that Miss Macroyd, whose laugh sounded above the others, was somehow enjoying his indignation and divining its reason.
“Other questions, touching intemperance or divorce, the questioner will feel must not be asked; though it isn’t necessary to more than suggest this, I hope; it will be left entirely to the good taste and good feeling of the—party. We all know what the temptations of South Dakota and the rum fiend are, and that to err is human, and forgive divine.” He paused, having failed to get a laugh, but got it by asking, confidentially, “Where was I? Oh!”—he caught himself up—“I remember. Those of you who are in the habit of seeing ghosts need not be told that a ghost never speaks first; and those who have never met an apparition before, but are in the habit of going to the theatre, will recall the fact that in W. Shakespeare’s beautiful play of ‘Hamlet’ the play could not have gone on after the first scene if Horatio had not spoken to the ghost of Hamlet’s father and taken the chances of being snubbed. Here there are no chances of that kind; the chances are that you’ll wish the ghost had not been entreated: I think that is the phrase.”
In the laugh that followed a girl on Miss Macroyd’s other hand audibly asked her, “Oh, isn’t he too funny?”
“Delicious!” Miss Macroyd agreed. Verrian felt she said it to vex him.
“Now, there’s just one other point,” Bushwick resumed, “and then I have done. Only one question can be allowed to each person, but if the questioner is a lady she can ask a question and a half, provided she is not satisfied with the answer. In this case, however, she will only get half an answer. Now I have done, and if my arguments have convinced any one within the sound of my voice that our ghost really means business, I shall feel fully repaid for the pains and expense of getting up these few impromptu remarks, to which I have endeavored to give a humorous character, in order that you may all laugh your laugh out, and no unseemly mirth may interrupt the subsequent proceedings. We will now have a little music, and those who can recall my words will be allowed to sing them.”
In the giggling and chatter which ensued the chords softly played passed into ears that might as well have been deaf; but at last there was a general quiescence of expectation, in which every one’s eyes were strained to pierce through the gauze curtain to the sombre drapery beyond. The wait was so long that the tension relaxed and a whispering began, and Verrian felt a sickness of pity for the girl who was probably going to make a failure of it. He asked himself what could have happened to her. Had she lost courage? Or had her physical strength, not yet fully renewed, given way under the stress? Or had she, in sheer disgust for the turn the affair had been given by that brute Bushwick, thrown up the whole business? He looked round for Mrs. Westangle; she was not there; he conjectured—he could only conjecture—that she was absent conferring with Miss Shirley and trying to save the day.
A long, deeply sighed “Oh-h-h-h!” shuddering from many lips made him turn abruptly, and he saw, glimmering against the pall at the bottom of the darkened library, a figure vaguely white, in which he recognized a pose, a gesture familiar to him. For the others the figure was It, but for him it was preciously She. It was she, and she was going to carry it through; she was going to triumph, and not fail. A lump came into his 96 throat, and a mist blurred his eyes, which, when it cleared again, left him staring at nothing.
A girl’s young voice uttered the common feeling, “Why, is that all?”
“It is, till some one asks the ghost a question; then it will reappear,” Bushwick rose to say. “Will Miss Andrews kindly step forward and ask the question nearest her heart?”
“Oh no!” the girl answered, with a sincerity that left no one quite free to laugh.
“Some other lady, then?” Bushwick suggested. No one moved, and he added, “This is a difficulty which had been foreseen. Some gentleman will step forward and put the question next his heart.” Again no one offered to go forward, and there was some muted laughter, which Bushwick checked. “This difficulty had been foreseen, too. I see that I shall have to make the first move, and all that I shall require of the audience is that I shall not be supposed to be in collusion with the illusion. I hope that after my experience, whatever it is, some young woman of courage will follow.”
He passed into the foyer, and from that came into the library, where he showed against the dark background in an attitude of entreaty slightly burlesqued. The ghost reappeared.
“Shall I marry the woman I am thinking of?” he asked.
The phantom seemed to hesitate; it wavered like a pale reflection cast against the pall. Then, in the tones which Verrian knew, the answer came:
“Ask her. She will tell you.”
The phantom had scored a hit, and the applause was silenced with difficulty; but Verrian felt that Miss Shirley had lost ground. It could not have been for the easy cleverness of such a retort that she had planned the affair. Yet, why not? He was taking it too seriously. It was merely business with her.
“And I haven’t even the right to half a question more!” Bushwick lamented, in a dramatized dejection, and crossed slowly back from the library to his place.
“Why, haven’t you got enough?” one of the men asked, amidst the gay clamor of the women.
The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was discussed with ready wonder. Another of the men went round to tempt his fate, and the phantom suddenly reappeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start of dismay. “I forgot what I was going to ask, he faltered.
“I know what it was,” the apparition answered. “You had better sell.”
“But they say it will go to a hundred!” the man protested.
“No back—talk, Rogers!” Bushwick interposed. “That was the understanding.
“But we didn’t understand,” one of the girls said, coming to the rescue, “that the ghost was going to answer questions that were not asked. That would give us all away.”
“Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to answer,” Bushwick said.
“Well, I will,” the girl returned. And she swept round into the library, where she encountered the phantom with a little whoop as it started into sight before her. “I’m not going to be scared out of it!” she said, defiantly. “It’s simply this: Did the person I suspect really take the ring.”
The answer came, “Look on the floor under your dressing-table!”
“Well, if I find it there,” the girl addressed the company, “I’m a spiritualist from this time forth.” And she came back to her place, where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had lately lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dismissed.
Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women, having once started, needed no more urging. One after another they confronted and questioned the oracle with increasing sincerity.
Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, “Hadn’t you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?”
“I’m afraid I should be fatuous, too,” he said. “But you?”
“Oh, thank you, I don’t believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty one—very graceful, I mean. I suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would be getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we’re only reading the fatigue into her. The ghost may be merely overdone.”
“It might easily be that,” Verrian assented.
“Oh, may I ask it something now?” a girl’s voice appealed to Bushwick. It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle’s guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a child’s unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened, there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at, but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.
“Oh, dear!” Miss Macroyd whispered. “What is that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder?”
Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and doubted.
The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her place round to the ghost’s in a haste that expressed a fear that it might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more simply.
She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. “Oh, I don’t know how to begin,” she said, quite as if she and the phantom were alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a sense of its human quality. “But you will understand, won’t you! You’ll think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I’m going to be serious—”
The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than before. “It’s about the—the truth. Do you think if sometimes we don’t tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?”
“I don’t understand,” the phantom answered. “Say it again—or differently.”
“Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?”
“Never!” the ghost answered, with a passion that thrilled to Verrian’s heart.
“Oh, dear!” the girl said; and then, as if she had been going to continue, she stopped.
“You’ve still got your half-question, Miss Andrews,” Bushwick interposed.
“Even if we didn’t mean it to deceive harmfully?” the girl pursued. “If it was just on impulse, something we couldn’t seem to help, and we didn’t see it in its true light at the time—”
The ghost made no answer. It stood motionless.
“It is offended,” Bushwick said, without knowing the Shakespearian words. “You’ve asked it three times half a question, Miss Andrews. Now, Mr. Verrian, it’s your turn. You can ask it just one-quarter of a question. Miss Andrews has used up the rest of your share.”
Verrian rose awkwardly and stood a long moment before his chair. Then he dropped back again, saying, dryly, “I don’t think I want to ask it anything.”
{0119}
The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through the floor, but lay there like a white shawl trailed along the bottom of the dark curtain.
“And is that all?” Miss Macroyd asked Verrian. “I was just getting up my courage to go forward. But now, I suppose—”
“Oh, dear!” Miss Andrews called out. “Perhaps it’s fainted. Hadn’t we better—”
There were formless cries from the women, and the men made a crooked rush forward, in which Verrian did not join. He remained where he had risen, with Miss Macroyd beside him.
“Perhaps it’s only a coup de theatre!” she said, with her laugh. “Better wait.”
Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. “She has fainted!” he called. “Get some water, somebody!”
The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so very early that he could sit down to breakfast with his mother only a little later than their usual hour.
She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into the apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they could come at once to the history of his absence over their coffee. “You must have had a very good time, to stay so long. After you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would be Saturday till I got your telegram. But I’m glad you stayed. You certainly needed the rest.”
“Yes, if those things are ever a rest.” He looked down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and she studied his attitude, since she could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might have come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should not be ready for it. “I’ve got rather a long story to tell you and rather a strange story,” he said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say to the Swedish serving-woman:
“You needn’t stay, Margit. I’ll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!” she added, when they were alone.
“Well,” he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, “I have seen the girl that wrote that letter.”
“Not Jerusha Brown?”
“Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same.”
“Now go on, Philip, and don’t miss a single word!” she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness. “You know I won’t hurry you or interrupt you, but you must—you really must-tell me everything. Don’t leave out the slightest detail.”
“I won’t,” he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.
“You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it.”
“Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.
He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel—”
“Yes, yes!”
“And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly—that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.”
“I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But—”
“And I don’t believe now that the hypothetical case brought any intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from the sickness she had been through—too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to find engagements after this.”
“Why shouldn’t she go on?” his mother asked, with a suspicion which she kept well out of sight.
“Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the catastrophe took her work out of the category of business and made her acceptance in it a matter of sentiment.”
“She explained it to you herself?”
“Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs. Westangle, though I don’t say that she had been more than negatively indifferent to Miss Shirley’s claim on her before. As it was, she sent for me to her room the next morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there. She said Mrs. Westangle would be down in a moment.”
Now, indeed, Mrs. Verrian could not govern herself from saying, “I don’t like it, Philip.”
“I knew you wouldn’t. It was what I said to myself at the time. You were so present with me that I seemed to have you there chaperoning the interview.” His mother shrugged, and he went on: “She said she wished to tell me something first, and then she said, ‘I want to do it while I have the courage, if it’s courage; perhaps it’s just desperation. I am Jerusha Brown.’”
His mother began, “But you said—” and then stopped herself.
“I know that I said she wasn’t, but she explained, while I sat there rather mum, that there was really another girl, and that the other girl’s name was really Jerusha Brown. She was the daughter of the postmaster in the village where Miss Shirley was passing the summer. In fact, Miss Shirley was boarding in the postmaster’s family, and the girls had become very friendly. They were reading my story together, and talking about it, and trying to guess how it would come out, just as the letter said, and they simultaneously hit upon the notion of writing to me. It seemed to them that it would be a good joke—I’m not defending it, mother, and I must say Miss Shirley didn’t defend it, either—to work upon my feelings in the way they tried, and they didn’t realize what they had done till Armiger’s letter came. It almost drove them wild, she said; but they had a lucid interval, and they took the letter to the girl’s father and told him what they had done. He was awfully severe with them for their foolishness, and said they must write to Armiger at once and confess the fact. Then they said they had written already, and showed him the second letter, and explained they had decided to let Miss Brawn write it in her person alone for the reason she gave in it. But Miss Shirley told him she was ready to take her full share of the blame, and, if anything came of it, she authorized him to put the whole blame on her.”
Verrian made a pause which his mother took for invitation or permission to ask, “And was he satisfied with that?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t, and it’s only just to Miss Shirley to say that she wasn’t, either. She didn’t try to justify it to me; she merely said she was so frightened that she couldn’t have done anything. She may have realized more than the Brown girl what they had done.”
“The postmaster, did he regard it as anything worse than foolishness?”
“I don’t believe he did. At any rate, he was satisfied with what his daughter had done in owning up.”
“Well, I always liked that girl’s letter. And did they show him your letter?”
“It seems that they did.”
“And what did he say about that?”
“I suppose, what I deserved. Miss Shirley wouldn’t say, explicitly. He wanted to answer it, but they wouldn’t let him. I don’t know but I should feel better if he had. I haven’t been proud of that letter of mine as time has gone on, mother; I think I behaved very narrow-mindedly, very personally in it.”
“You behaved justly.”
“Justly? I thought you had your doubts of that. At any rate, I had when it came to hearing the girl accusing herself as if she had been guilty of some monstrous wickedness, and I realized that I had made her feel so.”
“She threw herself on your pity!”
“No, she didn’t, mother. Don’t make it impossible for me to tell you just how it was.”
“I won’t. Go on.”
“I don’t say she was manly about it; that couldn’t be, but she was certainly not throwing herself on my pity, unless—unless—”
“What?”
“Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted to own up to me, because she could have no rest till she had done so; she couldn’t put it behind her till she had acknowledged it; she couldn’t work; she couldn’t get well.”
He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and in response he renewed his own resolution not to make himself the girl’s advocate with her, but to continue the dispassionate historian of the case. At the same time his memory was filled with the vision of how she had done and said the things he was telling, with what pathos, with what grace, with what beauty in her appeal. He saw the tears that came into her eyes at times and that she indignantly repressed as she hurried on in the confession which she was voluntarily making, for there was no outward stress upon her to say anything. He felt again the charm of the situation, the sort of warmth and intimacy, but he resolved not to let that feeling offset the impartiality of his story.
“No, I don’t say she threw herself on your mercy,” his mother said, finally. “She needn’t have told you anything.”
“Except for the reason she gave—that she couldn’t make a start for herself till she had done so. And she has got her own way to make; she is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a reason.”
“There’s reality in it, whatever it is; it’s a genuine motive,” Mrs. Verrian conceded.
“I think so,” Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from sounding too grateful.
Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked, “What had been the matter with her, did she say?”
“In her long sickness? Oh! A nervous fever of some sort.”
“From worrying about that experience?”
Verrian reluctantly admitted, “She said it made her want to die. I don’t suppose we can quite realize—”
“We needn’t believe everything she said to realize that she suffered. But girls exaggerate their sufferings. I suppose you told her not to think of it any more?”
Verrian gave an odd laugh. “Well, not unconditionally. I tried to give her my point of view. And I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too.”
“That was right. You must see that even cowardice couldn’t excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take all the chances.”
“And I’m afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations,” Verrian said, with another laugh. “I think that I wanted to stand well with the postmaster.”
There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the pitch of her son’s habitual seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to him. “And you were able to reassure her, so that she needn’t think of it any more?”
“What would you have wished me to do?” he returned, dryly. “Don’t you think she had suffered enough?”
“Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn’t seem the question of suffering. If there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right it.”
The notion struck Verrian’s artistic sense. “That’s true. That would make the ‘donnee’ of a strong story. Or a play. It’s a drama of fate. It’s Greek. But I thought we lived under another dispensation.”
“Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she was doing for Mrs. Westangle at once? Or has she some people?”
“No; only friends, as I understand.”
“Where is she from? Up country?”
“No, she’s from the South.”
“I don’t like Southerners!”
“I know you don’t, mother. But you must honor the way they work and get on when they come North and begin doing for themselves. Besides, Miss Shirley’s family went South after the war—”
“Oh, not even a REAL Southerner!”
“Mother!”
“I know! I’m not fair. I ought to beg her pardon. And I ought to be glad it’s all over. Shall you see her again?”
“It might happen. But I don’t know how or when. We parted friends, but we parted strangers, so far as any prevision of the future is concerned,” Verrian said.
His mother drew a long breath, which she tried to render inaudible. “And the girl that asked her the strange questions, did you see her again?”
“Oh yes. She had a curious fascination. I should like to tell you about her. Do you think there’s such a thing as a girl’s being too innocent?”
“It isn’t so common as not being innocent enough.”
“But it’s more difficult?”
“I hope you’ll never find it so, my son,” Mrs. Verrian said. And for the first time she was intentionally personal. “Go on.”
“About Miss Andrews?”
“Whichever you please.”
“She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming home from a walk, and wanted to talk with me about Miss Shirley.”
“I suppose Miss Shirley was the day’s heroine after what had happened?”
“The half-day’s, or quarter-day’s heroine, perhaps. She left on the church train for town yesterday morning soon after I saw her. Miss Andrews seemed to think I was an authority on the subject, and she approached me with a large-eyed awe that was very amusing, though it was affecting, too. I suppose that girls must have many worships for other girls before they have any worship for a man. This girl couldn’t separate Miss Shirley, on the lookout for another engagement, from the psychical part she had played. She raved about her; she thought she was beautiful, and she wanted to know all about her and how she could help her. Miss Andrews’s parents are rich but respectable, I understand, and she’s an only child. I came in for a share of her awe; she had found out that I was not only not Verrian the actor, but an author of the same name, and she had read my story with passionate interest, but apparently in that unliterary way of many people without noticing who wrote it; she seemed to have thought it was Harding Davis or Henry James; she wasn’t clear which. But it was a good deal to have had her read it at all in that house; I don’t believe anybody else had, except Miss Shirley and Miss Macroyd.”
Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily have interested her supremely to an immediate curiosity. “And how came she to think you would know so much about Miss Shirley?”
Verrian frowned. “I think from Miss Macroyd. Miss Macroyd seems to have taken a grandmotherly concern in my affairs through the whole week. Perhaps she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station the day we came, and meant to take it out of Miss Shirley and myself. She had seen us together in the woods, one day, and she must have told it about. Mrs. Westangle wouldn’t have spoken of us together, because she never speaks of anything unless it is going to count; and there was no one else who knew of our acquaintance.”
“Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods with the girl, any one might have seen you.”
“I didn’t. It was quite by accident that we met there. Miss Shirley was anxious to keep her presence in the house a secret from everybody.”
Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way, with this. She would not deal indirectly, with it, or in any wise covertly or surreptitiously. “It seems to me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness for secrecy,” she said.
“I think she has,” Verrian admitted. “Though, in this case, it was essential to the success of her final scheme. But she is a curious study. I suppose that timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be timid in everything.”
“Say it out, mother!” Verrian challenged her with a smile. “You’re not timid, anyway!”
“She had the courage to join in that letter, but not the courage to own her part in it. She was brave enough to confess that she had been sick of a nervous fever from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she wouldn’t have been brave enough to confess anything at all if she had believed she would be physically or morally strong enough to keep it.”
“Perhaps nobody—nobody but you, mother—is brave in the right time and place.”
She knew that this was not meant in irony. “I am glad you say that, Philip.”
“It’s only your due. But aren’t you a little too hard upon cowards, at times? For the sort of person she is, if you infer the sort from the worst appearance she has made in the whole business, I think she has done pretty well.”
“Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your resentment alone for the last six or eight months?”
“She may have thought that she was getting her share of the punishment in the fever my resentment brought on?”
“Philip, do you really believe that her fever, if she had one, came from that?”
“I think she believes it, and there’s no doubt but she was badly scared.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt of that!”
“But come, mother, why should we take her at the worst? Of course, she has a complex nature. I see that as clearly as you do. I don’t believe we look at her diversely, in the smallest particular. But why shouldn’t a complex nature be credited with the same impulses towards the truth as a single nature? Why shouldn’t we allow that Miss Shirley had the same wish to set herself right with me as Miss Andrews would have had in her place?”
“I dare say she wished to set herself right with you, but not from the same wish that Miss Andrews would have had. Miss Andrews would not have wished you to know the truth for her own sake. Her motive would have been direct-straight.”
“Yes; and we will describe her as a straight line, and Miss Shirley as a waving line. Why shouldn’t the waving line, at its highest points, touch the same altitude as the straight line?”
“It wouldn’t touch it all the time, and in character, or nature, as you call it, that is the great thing. It’s at the lowest points that the waving line is dangerous.”
“Well, I don’t deny that. But I’m anxious to be just to a person who hasn’t experienced a great deal of mercy for what, after all, wasn’t such a very heinous thing as I used to think it. You must allow that she wasn’t obliged to tell me anything about herself.”
“Yes, she was, Philip. As I said before, she hadn’t the physical or moral strength to keep it from you when she was brought face to face with you. Besides—” Mrs. Verrian hesitated.
“Out with it, mother! We, at least, won’t have any concealments.”
“She may have thought, she could clinch it in that way.”
“Clinch what?”
“You know. Is she pretty?”
“She’s—interesting.”
“That can always be managed. Is she tall?”
“NO, I think she’s rather out of style there; she’s rather petite.”
“And what’s her face like?”
“Well, she has no particular complexion, but it’s not thick. Her eyes are the best of her, though there isn’t much of them. They’re the ‘waters on a starry night’ sort, very sweet and glimmering. She has a kind of ground-colored hair and a nice little chin. Her mouth helps her eyes out; it looks best when she speaks; it’s pathetic in the play of the lips.”
“I see,” Mrs. Verrian said.