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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 _ménage_ 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.”
“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.”
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 Tourguénief’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.