PRAISE FOR THE GHOST-FEELER

‘Edith Wharton described herself as having an “intense Celtic sense of the supernatural.” The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural, selected and introduced by Peter Haining, contains nine stories that Wharton wrote between 1893 and 1935. While they display the elegant prose of her novels, these tales revolve around supernatural manifestations (vampires, doppelgangers) made credible by Wharton’s superb storytelling skills.’ – Publishers Weekly

‘Wharton is rich in implication ... the selection here is an excellent one.’ – Scotland on Sunday

THE GHOST-FEELER
Stories of Terror and the Supernatural

Diagnosed with typhoid fever at age of nine, Edith Wharton was beginning a long convalescence when she was given a book of ghost tales to read. Not only setting back her recovery, this reading opened up her fevered imagination to ‘a world haunted by formless horrors.’ So chronic was this paranoia that she was unable to sleep in a room with any book containing a ghost story. She was even moved to burn such volumes. These fears persisted until her late twenties.

She outgrew them but retained a heightened or ‘celtic’ (her term) sense of the supernatural. Wharton considered herself not ‘a ghost-seer’ – the term applied to those people who have claimed to have witnessed apparitions – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler,’ someone who senses what cannot be seen.

This experience and ability enabled Edith Wharton to write chilling tales that objectify this sense of unease. Far removed from the comfort and urbane elegance associated with the author’s famous novels, the stories in this volume deal with vampirism, isolation, and hallucination, and were praised by Henry James, L. P. Hartley, Graham Greene, and many others.

EDITH WHARTON

THE GHOST-FEELER

Stories of Terror and the Supernatural

Contents

The Duchess at Prayer (1901)

The Fullness of Life (1893)

A Journey (1899)

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell (1904)

Afterwards (1910)

The Triumph of Night (1914)

Bewitched (1926)

A Bottle of Perrier (1930)

The Looking-Glass (1935)

Introduction

It is a strange fact that for the first twenty-seven years of her life, a woman who is today regarded by several authorities on ghost fiction as one of the foremost writers of supernatural stories of her time, was quite unable to sleep in any room that contained so much as a single book of such tales. So unnerved was Edith Wharton by supernatural fiction that she later admitted to destroying any that she came across at home. But it was from her childhood traumas and anxieties that Wharton drew the inspiration for her stories of ghosts and terror to produce a steady flow of work that spanned her entire literary career and which today is worthy of the highest praise.

Born into a wealthy New York family in January 1862, this sensitive, responsive and obedient young lady led a cosseted and strictly disciplined life until a cathartic experience in the summer of 1870. On holiday in Europe in the Black Forest, Wharton suddenly collapsed and was diagnosed with typhoid fever. For several days she was close to death before finally rallying and beginning a long period of convalescence. To pass the time she asked for some books to read, and among those given to her was one from two friends which she could only later describe with a shudder as a ‘robber story’. This book, with its tales of robbers and ghosts, deeply affected her ‘intense Celtic sense of the supernatural’ and not only caused a set-back in her recovery but opened up to her fevered imagination ‘a world haunted by formless horrors’. For years thereafter, she said, a dark undefinable menace dogged her footsteps. ‘I had been a naturally fearless child,’ she explained, ‘now I lived in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot say – and even at the time I was never able to formulate my terror.’

Wharton also had a fear of old houses. One of her aunts, a stern, humourless spinster lady who had also suffered a death-threatening illness as a child, lived in almost reclusive isolation in a twenty-four-roomed Gothic mansion at Rhinecliff, New York. The building was ugly, dark and uncomfortable and the little girl could never visit the place without having nightmares afterwards.

Both of these influences contributed to Wharton’s overwhelming fear of ghost and horror stories, a fear that persisted through her childhood, into her teens, and even her early twenties. ‘I could not sleep in a room with a book containing a ghost story,’ she confessed later. ‘I frequently had to burn books of this kind, because it frightened me to know that they were downstairs in the library!’ When, however, the urge to write possessed the young woman, she determined to exorcize the ghosts and goblins that haunted her.

Later in her life when Wharton was firmly established as a famous novelist and double-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, she could write freely of the terrors that had so affected her imagination as well as her convictions about the supernatural world.

The celebrated reply (I forget whose): ‘No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,’ is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many. To ‘believe’, in that sense, is a conscious act of the intellect, and it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing.

For this very reason, Edith Wharton considered herself not a ‘ghost-seer’ – to use the term so often applied to those people who claim to have witnessed a spirit – but rather a ‘ghost-feeler’, someone who senses what cannot be seen. It is this fact which determined my choice of a title for this collection.

Between youth and old age, Wharton had plucked up the courage to read the works by the great masters of the genre and listed among her favourites three British authors, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Walter de la Mare, and two fellow Americans, Francis Marion Crawford and Fitz James O’Brien. At the very pinnacle, though, she placed Henry James and his novel, The Turn of the Screw; she considered no other writer had come near to equalling its imaginative handling of the supernatural. She might be considered biased, however, since James had, in fact, become her friend and the guiding light of her literary career.

Wharton has, in turn, earned her own coterie of admirers. The American critic George D. Meadows, for example, says that, ‘Mrs. Wharton works with the sure touch of an Emily Brontë, although with more restraint’; while the English novelist Anita Brookner believes she had ‘an abiding fascination for the comfortably established world of haunted houses and revenants, wives or husbands betrayed, or dead too soon’.

As I belong to this circle of admirers, assembling this collection has for me been a special pleasure. It has provided some surprises, too. For example, I spent one day wading through dusty copies of the early issues of Harper’s Monthly Magazine, to which Wharton contributed a number of her short stories, in the hope that I might come across some undiscovered gems. And there, in the index to volume II (1851), I found an essay entitled ‘The Ghost That Appeared to Mrs. Wharton’. Of course, it had been published ten years before Wharton was born, but in succeeding volumes I came across a number of other supernatural stories by anonymous writers. I could not help wondering whether this magazine, popular with her parents and always to be found in the family library, had been another – until now – unacknowledged source of her inspiration?

In the stories that follow, Edith Wharton demonstrates her feeling for the supernatural and her knowledge of terror, both garnered from personal experience.

* * *

‘The Duchess at Prayer’ is a story of terror and punishment that could just as easily have been written by Edgar Allan Poe, whose work clearly influenced Wharton. Both writers shared a love for the town of Newport, where both of them spent periods of their lives. It was here, during the summer of 1900, that ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ was written, and according to an anonymous reviewer in the American magazine, Independent (June 1901), the tale might have been based on an incident ‘which Balzac once developed somewhat differently’. In the same year, Harper’s Monthly Magazine called it a tale about ‘the brute facts of sin’ and added that ‘it could only have been written by one who has truly known horror’. In her recent study, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life (1994), Eleanor Dwight suggests that the story reflects a plight familiar to Wharton and many young wives of the period, that of ‘The woman abandoned by her husband for long periods of time and then expected to be sexually available to him when he returns’.

There is little doubt that ‘The Fullness of Life’, published at the end of 1893, reflects the state of Wharton’s own married life at the time. She had been wed in 1885 to Edward Wharton, a man thirteen years older than her, who had little feeling for literature and art, preferred the company of other male New York socialites, and quickly lost interest in the artistic and physical needs of his young bride. Soon, in fact, the unsatisfactory state of her marriage was to cause Edith to form several intense friendships, and in 1907 she had a deeply passionate affair with a New York journalist named Morton Fullerton which released her sensuality and also had a profound effect upon the tenor of her later writing.

Some years after its publication, Wharton described ‘The Fullness of Life’ to her editor at Scribner’s, Edward Burlingame, as ‘one long shriek – I may not write any better, but at least I hope that I write in a lower key’. And probably because of its intensely personal nature – not to mention the fact that it must have annoyed Teddy Wharton, who could hardly have failed to grasp its implict suggestion – Wharton suppressed the work from her subsequent collections of stories. I know of few other stories of the afterlife more absorbing than this one. Eleanor Dwight believes that the tale may also have been partly inspired by a supernatural experience the author had while visiting Florence. She marvelled at the architectural beauty of the Church of San Michele, ‘when she experienced a wonderful vision and felt herself being “borne onwards along a mighty current”’.

Wharton returned to the subject of death in ‘A Journey’, published in June 1899. Here again, Wharton’s sensitivity and the idea of death as a physical presence make the story memorable.

As in ‘The Duchess at Prayer’, there are elements of sexuality to be found in ‘The Lady’s Maid’s Bell’, written in 1904, and Wharton’s first true ghost story. Readers on both sides of the Atlantic were deeply moved by this tale of adultery mingled with supernatural protection, with its superbly evoked atmosphere of dark and mysterious events occurring in an unstable household.

Just how successfully Wharton had confronted the demons of her childhood is evident in ‘Afterwards’, a tale written in 1910 and generally considered to be her most successful ghost story. Jack Sullivan, writing in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), believes that Wharton ‘converted the primal dread from her childhood into the haunted library scene’, which is the setting for one of the pivotal moments in the story.

New England in the grip of a blizzard is the backdrop for ‘The Triumph of Night’, published in 1914, and featuring the innovation of a doppelgänger. The ugly, malevolent spirit is the double of a well-known financier who has virtually imprisoned a young man suffering from advanced tuberculosis, in the hope of benefiting from his death. When the snow drives another traveller into the company of this pair and the man sees the doppelgänger for himself, he is faced with a stark choice: to save the stricken boy or flee from the house.

Interestingly, this story had been written several years earlier while Wharton was far away from America, staying in Paris. The French capital was then almost flooded from torrential rain, and this may well have set the tone of a piece that features fiscal misdealings, mysterious death and bloodstained hands.

Wharton returned to the locale of New England for ‘Bewitched’, a tale of vampirism, then a subject virtually untouched by women writers. The importance of the story was spotted on publication by the New York Times’s critic who wrote on 2 May 1926: ‘“Bewitched” has much of the same tragic power which was the commanding feature of Ethan Frome.’

It is an atmospheric and disturbing tale about a distracted wife, Mrs Rutledge, who appeals to her local Deacon for help because her husband, Saul, is having an affair. But this is no ordinary affair: he is infatuated with a dead woman who is relentlessly draining away his vitality. Even in the superstitious backwoods of New England, the poor woman does not find it easy to come to terms with what is happening or to get others to take the necessary action to put a stop to the vampire’s activities. The influence of this story can be seen in a number of subsequent tales of the undead written by women – not the least of them the sensual and exotic vampire novels of Anne Rice.

The deceptive title of ‘A Bottle of Perrier’, which Wharton wrote in 1930, lures the reader almost unsuspectingly into a tale of murder and suspense set in a new locality: the African desert. This story was greatly admired by the late doyen of mystery fiction, Ellery Queen, who republished it in his magazine in 1948 with the following illuminating preface:

It has been said of Edith Wharton’s work that ‘her characters are given sharp, clear, consistent shape’. You will find that true of ‘A Bottle of Perrier’: young Medford, the velvet-foot Gosling, and especially the strange archaeologist, Henry Almodham, are sharp and clear and consistent against the shimmering background of the desert. It has also been said that Edith Wharton’s style is a ‘clear, luminous medium in which things are seen in precise and striking outline’. You will find that also true: the mystery and menace of the infinite sands, the enervating heat, the timelessness, the silence, the inaccessibility – all become luminous; but there is something else, something brooding and haunting, which becomes clear and finally emerges ‘in precise and striking outline’ ...

Small wonder that this story should have captivated many other literary figures including L. P. Hartley, who called it ‘an ingenious exercise in sustained suspense’ and Graham Greene, who referred to it as ‘that superb horror story’.

Wharton’s mentor, Henry James, was a particular admirer of the final story in this collection, ‘The Looking-Glass’, which he called a ‘diabolical little cleverness’. The story was contributed to The Century in 1935 and, curiously, not included in the collections of Wharton’s work published immediately prior to and just after her death. It also appeared under the title ‘The Mirror’, and its heroine, Moyra Attlee, recounts the strange and unexpected visions she witnesses in an old looking-glass.

Edith Wharton died on 11 August 1937 at her French home in St Brice-sous-Fôret, just north of Paris, and she was buried at Versailles. Three months later, in a tribute to her work in the supernatural genre, the English critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor neatly encapsulated the secret of why her stories of ghosts and terror deserved to be read then and still do today, over half a century later:

She is a story-teller whose speech is naturally quiet and unhurried. Her stories have a half-eerie, half-cosy charm of their own. You begin to feel the silence around your chair; she is a past mistress of that curious art which makes you put the book down for an instant, poke the fire, and settle back with the thought: ‘Well, here I am, reading a ghost story – what could be more agreeable?’

There is nothing more for me to add beyond suggesting that the reader immediately take Mr Shawe-Taylor’s advice.

PETER HAINING
Boxford, Suffolk

The Duchess at Prayer

I

Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house, that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors ...

II

From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue barred by a ladder of cypress shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes, and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-coloured lichen had sheeted the balustrade as with fine lamince of gold, vineyards stooped to the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I hugged the sunshine.

‘The Duchess’s apartments are beyond,’ said the old man.

He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a lira to the gatekeeper’s child. He went on, without removing his eye:

‘For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the Duchess.’

‘And no one lives her now?’

‘No one, sir. The Duke goes to Como for the summer season.’

I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.

‘And that’s Vicenza?’

‘Proprio!’ The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading from the walls behind us. ‘You see the palace roof over there, just to the left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking flight? That’s the Duke’s town palace, built by Palladio.’

‘And does the Duke come there?’

‘Never. In winter he goes to Rome.’

‘And the palace and the villa are always closed?’

‘As you see – always.’

‘How long has this been?’

‘Since I can remember.’

I looked into his eyes; they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting nothing. ‘That must be a long time,’ I said involuntarily.

‘A long time,’ he assented.

I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts. Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of whining beggars; fauneared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.

‘Let us go in,’ I said.

The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a knife.

‘The Duchess’s apartments,’ he said.

Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit haughtily ignored us.

‘Duke Ercole II,’ the old man explained, ‘by the Genoese Priest.’

It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, highnosed and cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a round yes or no. One of the Duke’s hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned the pages of a folio propped on a skull.

‘Beyond is the Duchess’s bedroom,’ the old man reminded me.

Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a daïs the bedstead, grim, nuptial, official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.

The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow, and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo’s lenient goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth-century dress!

‘No one has slept here’, said the old man, ‘since the Duchess Violante.’

‘And she was —?’

‘The lady there – first Duchess of Duke Ercole II.’

He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked a door at the farther end of the room. ‘The chapel,’ he said. ‘This is the Duchess’s balcony.’ As I turned to follow him the Duchess tossed me a sidelong smile.

I stepped into a grated tribune above a chapel festooned with stucco. Pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters; the artificial roses in the altar vases were grey with dust and age, and under the cobwebby rosettes of the vaulting a bird’s nest clung. Before the altar stood a row of tattered armchairs and I drew back at sight of a figure kneeling near them.

‘The Duchess,’ the old man whispered. ‘By the Cavaliere Bernini.’

It was the image of a woman in furred robes and spreading fraise, her hand lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned shrine. Her face was hidden, and I wondered whether it were grief or gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no living prayer joined her marble invocation. I followed my guide down the tribune steps, impatient to see what mystic version of such terrestrial graces the ingenious artist had found – the Cavaliere was master of such arts. The Duchess’s attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the pose of her head, the tender slope of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face – it was a frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt, and agony so possessed a human countenance ...

The old man crossed himself and shuffled his feet on the marble.

‘The Duchess Violante,’ he repeated.

‘The same as in the picture?’

‘Eh – the same.’

‘But the face – what does it mean?’

He shrugged his shoulders and turned deaf eyes on me. Then he shot a glance round the sepulchral place, clutched my sleeve and said, close to my ear: ‘It was not always so.’

‘What was not?’

‘The face – so terrible.’

‘The Duchess’s face?’

‘The statue’s. It changed after —”

‘After?’

‘It was put here.’

‘The statue’s face changed —?’

He mistook my bewilderment for incredulity, and his confidential finger dropped from my sleeve. ‘Eh, that’s the story. I tell what I’ve heard. What do I know?’ He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. This is a bad place to stay in – no one comes here. It’s too cold. But the gentleman said, I must see everything?’

I let the lire sound. ‘So I must – and hear everything. This story, now – from whom did you have it?’

His hand stole back. One that saw it, by God!’

‘That saw it?’

‘My grandmother, then. I’m a very old man.’

‘You grandmother? Your grandmother was —?’

‘The Duchess’s serving girl, with respect to you.’

‘Your grandmother? Two hundred years ago?’

‘Is it too long ago? That’s as God pleases. I am a very old man, and she was a very old woman when I was born. When she died she was as black as a miraculous virgin, and her breath whistled like the wind in a keyhole. She told me the story when I was a little boy. She told it to me out there in the garden, on a bench by the fish pond, one summer night of the year she died. It must be true, for I can show you the very bench we sat on ...’

III

Noon lay heavier on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watches by a deadbed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames, and the bench in the laurustinus niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of dead flies. Before us lay the fish pond, a yellow marble slab above rotting secrets. The villa looked across it, composed as a dead face, with the cypresses flanking it for candles ...

IV

‘Impossible, you say, that my mother’s mother should have been the Duchess’s maid? What do I know? It is so long since anything has happened here that the old things seem nearer, perhaps, than to those who live in cities ... But how else did she know about the statue then? Answer me that, sir! That she saw with her eyes, I can swear to, and never smiled again, so she told me, till they put her first child in her arms; ... for she was taken to wife by the steward’s son, Antonio, the same who had carried the letters ... But where am I? Ah, well ... she was a mere slip, you understand, my grandmother, when the Duchess died, a niece of the upper maid, Nencia, and suffered about the Duchess because of her pranks and the funny songs she knew. It’s possible, you think, she may have heard from others what she afterward fancied she had seen herself? How that is, it’s not for an unlettered man to say; though indeed I myself seem to have seen many of the things she told me. This is a strange place. No one comes here, nothing changes, and the old memories stand up as distinct as the statues in the garden ...

‘It began the summer after they came back from the Brenta. Duke Ercole had married the lady from Venice, you must know; it was a gay city, then, I’m told, with laughter and music on the water, and the days slipped by like boats running with the tide. Well, to humour her, he took her back the first autumn to the Brenta. Her father, it appears, had a grand palace there, with such gardens, bowling-alleys, grottoes, and casinos as never were; gondolas bobbing at the water-gates, a stable full of gilt coaches, a theater full of players, and kitchens and offices full of cooks and lackeys to serve up chocolate all day long to the fine ladies in masks and furbelows, with their pet dogs and their blackamoors and their abates. Eh! I know it all as if I’d been there; for Nencia, you see, my grandmother’s aunt, travelled with the Duchess, and came back with her eyes round as platters, and not a word to say for the rest of the year to any of the lads who’d courted her here in Vicenza.

‘What happened there I don’t know – my grandmother could never get at the rights of it, for Nencia was mute as a fish where her lady was concerned – but when they came back to Vicenza the Duke ordered the villa set in order; and in the spring he brought the Duchess here and left her. She looked happy enough, my grandmother said, and seemed no object for pity. Perhaps, after all, it was better than being shut up in Vicenza, in the tall painted rooms where priests came and went as softly as cats prowling for birds, and the Duke was for ever closeted in his library, talking with learned men. The Duke was a scholar; you noticed he was painted with a book? Well, those that can read ’em make out that they’re full of wonderful things; as a man that’s been to a fair across the mountains will always tell his people at home it was beyond anything they’ll ever see. As for the Duchess, she was all for music, play-acting, and young company. The Duke was a silent man, stepping quietly, with his eyes down, as though he’d just come from confession; when the Duchess’s lap-dog yapped at his heels he danced like a man in a swarm of hornets; when the Duchess laughed he winced as if you’d drawn a diamond across a window-pane. And the Duchess was always laughing.

‘When she first came to the villa she was very busy laying out the gardens, designing grottoes, planting groves and planning all manner of agreeable surprises in the way of water-jets that drenched you unexpectedly, and hermits in caves, and wild men that jumped at you out of thickets. She had a very pretty taste in such matters, but after a while she tired of it, and there being no one for her to talk to but her maids and the chaplain – a clumsy man deep in his books – why, she would have strolling players out from Vicenza, mountebanks and fortune-tellers from the market-place, travelling doctors and astrologers, and all manner of trained animals. Still it could be seen that the poor lady pined for company, and her waiting women, who loved her, were glad when the Cavaliere Ascanio, the Duke’s cousin, came to live at the vineyard across the valley – you see the pinkish house over there in the mulberries, with a red roof and a pigeon-cote?

‘The Cavaliere Ascanio was a cadet of one of the great Venetian houses, pezzi grossi of the Golden Book. He had been meant for the Church, I believe, but what! he set fighting above praying, and cast in his lot with the captain of the Duke of Mantua’s bravi, himself a Venetian of good standing, but a little at odds with the law. Well, the next I know, the Cavaliere was in Venice again, perhaps not in good odour on account of his connection with the gentleman I speak of. Some say he tried to carry off a nun from the convent of Santa Croce; how that may be I can’t say; but my grandmother declared he had enemies there, and the end of it was that on some pretext or other the Ten banished him to Vicenza. There, of course, the Duke, being his kinsman, had to show him a civil face; and that was how he first came to the villa.

‘He was a fine young man, beautiful as a Saint Sebastian, a rare musician, who sang his own songs to the lute in a way that used to make my grandmother’s heart melt and run through her body like mulled wine. He had a good word for everybody, too, and was always dressed in the French fashion, and smelt as sweet as a bean-field, and every soul about the place welcomed the sight of him.

‘Well, the Duchess, it seemed, welcomed it too; youth will have youth, and laughter turns to laughter; and the two matched each other like the candlesticks on an altar. The Duchess – you’ve seen her portrait – but to hear my grandmother, sir, it no more approached her than a weed comes up to a rose. The Cavaliere, indeed, as became a poet, paragoned her in his song to all the pagan goddesses of antiquity; and doubtless these were finer to look at than mere women; but so, it seemed, was she; for, to believe my grandmother, she made other women look no more than the big French fashion-doll that used to be shown on Ascension days in the Piazza. She was one, at any rate, that needed no outlandish finery to beautify her; whatever dress she wore became her as feathers fit the bird; and her hair didn’t get its colour by bleaching on the housetop. It glittered of itself like the threads in an Easter chasuble, and her skin was whiter than fine wheaten bread and her mouth as sweet as a ripe fig ...

‘Well, sir, you could no more keep them apart than the bees and the lavender. They were always together, singing, bowling, playing cup and ball, walking in the gardens, visiting the aviaries, and petting her Grace’s trick-dogs and monkeys. The Duchess was as gay as a foal, always playing pranks and laughing, tricking out her animals like comedians, disguising herself as a peasant or a nun (you should have seen her one day pass herself off to the chaplain as a mendicant sister), or teaching the lads and girls of the vineyards to dance and sing madrigals together. The Cavaliere had a singular ingenuity in planning such entertainments, and the days were hardly long enough for their diversions. But towards the end of the summer the Duchess fell quiet and would hear only sad music, and the two sat together much in the gazebo at the end of the garden. It was there the Duke found them one day when he drove out from Vicenza in his gilt coach. He came but once or twice a year to the villa, and it was, as my grandmother said, just a part of her poor lady’s ill-luck to be wearing that day the Venetian habit, which uncovered the shoulders in a way the Duke always scowled at, and her curls loose and powdered with gold. Well, the three drank chocolate in the gazebo, and what happened no one knew, except that the Duke, on taking leave, gave his cousin a seat in his carriage; but the Cavaliere never returned.

‘Winter approaching, and the poor lady thus finding herself once more alone, it was surmised among her women that she must fall into a deeper depression of spirits. But far from this being the case, she displayed such cheerfulness and equanimity of humour that my grandmother, for one, was half-vexed with her for giving no more thought to the poor young man who, all this time, was eating his heart out in the house across the valley. It is true she quitted her gold-laced gowns and wore a veil over her head; but Nencia would have it she looked the lovelier for the change, and so gave the Duke greater displeasure. Certain it is that the Duke drove out oftener to the villa, and though he found his lady always engaged in some innocent pursuit, such as embroidery or music, or playing games with her young women, yet he always went away with a sour look and a whispered word to the chaplain. Now as to the chaplain, my grandmother owned there had been a time when her Grace had not handled him over-wisely. For, according to Nencia, it seems that his reverence, who seldom approached the Duchess, being buried in his library like a mouse in a cheese – well, one day he made bold to appeal to her for a sum of money, a large sum, Nencia said, to buy certain tall books, a chest full of them, that a foreign pedlar had brought him; whereupon the Duchess, who could never abide a book, breaks out at him with a laugh and a flash of her old spirit – “Holy Mother of God, must I have more books about me? I was nearly smothered with them in the first year of my marriage”; and the chaplain turning red at the affront, she added: “You may buy them and welcome, my good chaplain, if you can find the money; but as for me, I am yet seeking a way to pay for my turquoise necklace, and the statue of Daphne at the end of the bowling-green, and the Indian parrot that my black boy brought me last Michaelmas from the Bohemians – so you see I’ve no money to waste on trifles”; and as he backs out awkwardly she tosses at him over her shoulder: “You should pray to Saint Blandina to open the Duke’s pocket!” to which he returned very quietly; “Your Excellency’s suggestion is an admirable one, and I have already entreated that blessed martyr to open the Duke’s understanding.”

‘Thereat, Nencia said (who was standing by), the Duchess flushed wonderfully red and waved him out of the room; and then “Quick!” she cried to my grandmother (who was too glad to run on such errands). “Call me Antonio, the gardener’s boy, to the box-garden; I’ve a word to say to him about the new clove-carnations ...”

‘Now I may not have told you, sir, that in the crypt under the chapel there has stood, for more generations than a man can count, a stone coffin containing a thigh-bone of the blessed Saint Blandina of Lyons, a relic offered, I’ve been told, by some great Duke of France to one of our own dukes when they fought the Turk together; and the object, ever since, of particular veneration in this illustrious family. Now, since the Duchess had been left to herself, it was observed she affected a fervent devotion to this relic, praying often in the chapel and even causing the stone slab that covered the entrance to the crypt to be replaced by a wooden one, that she might at will descend and kneel by the coffin. This was matter of edification to all the household, and should have been peculiarly pleasing to the chaplain; but, with respect to you, he was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.

‘However that may be, the Duchess, when she dismissed him, was seen running to the garden, where she talked earnestly with the boy Antonio about the new clove-carnations, and the rest of the day she sat indoors and played sweetly on the virginal. Now Nencia always had it in mind that her Grace had made a mistake in refusing that request of the chaplain’s; but she said nothing, for to talk reason to the Duchess was of no more use than praying for rain in a drought.

‘Winter came early that year, there was snow on the hills by All Souls, the wind stripped the gardens, and the lemon-trees were nipped in the lemon-house. The Duchess kept her room in this black season, sitting over the fire, embroidering, reading books of devotion (which was a thing she had never done), and praying frequently in the chapel. As for the chaplain, it was a place he never set foot in but to say mass in the morning, with the Duchess overhead in the tribune, and the servants aching with rheumatism on the marble floor. The chaplain himself hated the cold, and galloped through the mass like a man with witches after him. The rest of the day he spent in his library, over a brazier, with his eternal books ...

‘You’ll wonder, sir, if I’m ever to get to the gist of the story; and I’ve gone slowly, I own, for fear of what’s coming. Well, the winter was long and hard. When it fell cold the Duke ceased to come out from Vicenza, and not a soul had the Duchess to speak to but her maid-servants and the gardeners about the place. Yet it was wonderful, my grandmother said, how she kept her brave colours and her spirits; only it was remarked that she prayed longer in the chapel, where a brazier was kept burning for her all day. When the young are denied their natural pleasures they turn often enough to religion; and it was a mercy, as my grandmother said, that she, who had scarce a live sinner to speak to, should take such comfort in a dead saint.

‘My grandmother seldom saw her that winter, for though she showed a brave front to all, she kept more and more to herself, choosing to have only Nencia about her, and dismissing even her when she went to pray. For her devotion has that mark of true piety, that she wished it not to be observed; so that Nencia had strict orders, on the chaplain’s approach, to warn her mistress if she happened to be in prayer.

‘Well, the winter passed, and spring was well forward, when my grandmother one evening had a bad fright. That it was her own fault I won’t deny, for she’d been down the lime-walk with Antonio when her aunt fancied her to be stitching in her chamber; and seeing a sudden light in Nencia’s window, she took fright lest her disobedience be found out, and ran up quickly through the laurel-grove to the house. Her way lay by the chapel, and as she crept past it, meaning to slip in through the scullery, and groping her way, for the dark had fallen and the moon was scarce up, she heard a crash close behind her, as though some one had dropped from a window of the chapel. The young fool’s heart turned over, but she looked round as she ran, and there, sure enough, was a man scuttling across the terrace; and as he doubled the corner of the house my grandmother swore she caught the whisk of the chaplain’s skirts. Now that was a strange thing, certainly; for why should the chaplain be getting out of the chapel window when he might have passed through the door? For you may have noticed, sir, there’s a door leads from the chapel into the saloon on the ground floor; the only other way out being through the Duchess’s tribune.

‘Well, my grandmother turned the matter over, and next time she met Antonio in the lime-walk (which, by reason of her fright, was not for some days) she laid before him what had happened; but to her surprise he only laughed and said: “You little simpleton, he wasn’t getting out of the window, he was trying to look in”; and not another word could she get from him.

‘So the reason moved on to Easter, and news came the Duke had gone to Rome for that holy festivity. His comings and goings made no change at the villa, and yet there was no one there but felt easier to think his yellow face was on the far side of the Apennines, unless perhaps it was the chaplain.

‘Well, it was one day in May that the Duchess, who had walked long with Nencia on the terrace, rejoicing at the sweetness of the prospect and the pleasant scent of the gillyflowers in the stone vases, the Duchess towards mid-day withdrew to her rooms, giving orders that her dinner should be served in her bedchamber. My grandmother helped to carry in the dishes, and observed, she said, the singular beauty of the Duchess, who in honour of the fine weather had put on a gown of shot-silver and hung her bare shoulders with pearls, so that she looked fit to dance at court with an emperor. She had ordered, too, a rare repast for a lady that heeded so little what she ate – jellies, game-pasties, fruits in syrup, spiced cakes and a flagon of Greek wine; and she nodded and clapped her hands as the women set it before her, saying again and again, “I shall eat well today.”

‘But presently another mood seized her, she turned from the table, called for her rosary, and said to Nencia: “The fine weather has made me neglect my devotions. I must say a litany before I dine.”

‘She ordered the women out and barred the door, as her custom was; and Nencia and my grandmother went downstairs to work in the linen-room.

‘Now the linen-room gives on the courtyard, and suddenly my grandmother saw a strange sight approaching. First up the avenue came the Duke’s carriage (whom all thought to be in Rome), and after it, drawn by a long string of mules and oxen, a cart carrying what looked like a kneeling figure wrapped in death-clothes. The strangeness of it struck the girl dumb, and the Duke’s coach was at the door before she had the wit to cry out that it was coming. Nencia, when she saw it, went white and ran out of the room. My grandmother followed, scared by her face, and the two fled along the corridor to the chapel. On the way they met the chaplain, deep in a book, who asked in surprise where they were running, and when they said to announce the Duke’s arrival, he fell into such astonishment, and asked them so many questions, and uttered such Ohs and Ahs, that by the time he let them by the Duke was at their heels. Nencia reached the chapel-door first, and cried out that the Duke was coming; and before she had a reply he was at her side, with the chaplain following.

‘A moment later the door opened and there stood the Duchess. She held her rosary in one hand and had drawn a scarf over her shoulders; but they shone through it like the moon in a mist, and her countenance sparkled with beauty.

‘The Duke took her hand with a bow. “Madam,” he said, “I could have had no greater happiness than thus to surprise you at your devotions.”

‘“My own happiness”, she replied, “would have been greater had your Excellency prolonged it by giving me notice of your arrival.”

‘“Had you expected me, Madam,” said he, “your appearance could scarcely have been more fitted to the occasion. Few ladies of your youth and beauty array themselves to venerate a saint as they would to welcome a lover.”

‘“Sir,” she answered, “having never enjoyed the latter opportunity, I am constrained to make the most of the former. — What’s that?” she cried, falling back, and the rosary dropped from her hand.

‘There was a loud noise at the other end of the saloon, as of a heavy object being dragged down the passage; and presently a dozen men were seen hauling across the threshold the shrouded thing from the οχ-cart. The Duke waved his hand toward it. “That,” said he, “Madam, is a tribute to your extraordinary piety. I have heard, with peculiar satisfaction of your devotion to the blessed relics in this chapel, and to commemorate a zeal which neither the rigours of winter nor the sultriness of summer could abate, I have ordered a sculptured image of you, marvellously executed by the Cavaliere Bernini, to be placed before the altar over the entrance to the crypt.”

‘The Duchess, who had grown pale, nevertheless smiled playfully at this. “As to commemorating my piety,” she said, “I recognize there one of your Excellency’s pleasantries—”

‘“A pleasantry?” the Duke interrupted; and he made a sign to the men, who had now reached the threshold of the chapel. In an instant the wrappings fell from the figure, and there knelt the Duchess to the life. A cry of wonder rose from all, but the Duchess herself stood whiter than the marble.

‘“You will see,” says the Duke, “this is no pleasantry, but a triumph of the incomparable Bernini’s chisel. The likeness was done from your miniature portrait by the divine Elisabetta Sirani, which I sent to the master some six months ago, with what results all must admire.”

‘“Six months!” cried the Duchess, and seemed about to fall; but his Excellency caught her by the hand.

‘“Nothing,” he said, “could better please me than the excessive emotion you display, for true piety is ever modest, and your thanks could not take a form that better became you. And now,” says he to the men, “let the image be put in place.”

‘By this time, life seemed to have returned to the Duchess, and she answered him with a deep reverence. “That I should be overcome by so unexpected a grace, your Excellency admits to be natural; but what honours you accord it is my privilege to accept, and I entreat only that in mercy to my modesty the image be placed in the remotest part of the chapel.”

‘At that the Duke darkened. “What! You would have this masterpiece of a renowned chisel, which, I disguise not, cost me the price of a good vineyard in gold pieces, you would have it thrust out of sight like the work of a village stonecutter?”

‘“It is my semblance, not the sculptor’s work, I desire to conceal.”

‘“If you are fit for my house, Madam, you are fit for God’s, and entitled to the place of honour in both. Bring the statue forward, you dawdlers!” he called out to the men.

‘The Duchess fell back submissively. “You are right, sir, as always; but I would at least have the image stand on the left of the altar, that, looking up, it may behold your Excellency’s seat in the tribune.”

‘“A pretty thought, Madam, for which I thank you; but I design before long to put my companion image on the other side of the altar; and the wife’s place, as you know, is at her husband’s right hand.”

‘“True, my Lord – but, again, if my poor presentment is to have the unmerited honour of kneeling beside yours, why not place both before the altar, where it is our habit to pray in life?”

‘“And where, Madam, should we kneel if they took our places? Besides,” says the Duke, still speaking very blandly, “I have a more particular purpose in placing your image over the entrance to the crypt; for not only would I thereby mark your special devotion to the blessed saint who rests there, but, by sealing up the opening in the pavement, would assure the perpetual preservation of that holy martyr’s bones, which hitherto have been too thoughtlessly exposed to sacrilegious attempts.”

‘“What attempts, my Lord?” cries the Duchess. “No one enters this chapel without my leave.”

‘“So I have understood, and can well believe from what I have learned of your piety; yet at night a malefactor might break in through a window, Madam, and your Excellency not know it.”

‘“I’m a light sleeper,” said the Duchess.

‘The Duke looked at her gravely. “Indeed?” said he. “A bad sign at your age. I must see that you are provided with a sleeping-draught.”

‘The Duchess’s eyes filled. “You would deprive me, then, of the consolation of visiting those venerable relics?”

‘“I would have you keep eternal guard over them, knowing no one to whose care they may more fittingly be entrusted.”

‘At this the image was brought close to the wooden slab that covered the entrance to the crypt, when the Duchess, springing forward, placed herself in the way.

‘“Sir, let the statue be put in place tomorrow, and suffer me, tonight, to say a last prayer beside those holy bones.”

‘The Duke stepped instantly to her side. “Well thought, Madam; I will go down with you now, and we will pray together.”

‘“Sir, your long absences have, alas! given me the habit of solitary devotion, and I confess that any presence is distracting.”

‘“Madam, I accept your rebuke. Hitherto, it is true, the duties of my station have constrained me to long absences; but henceforward I remain with you while you live. Shall we go down into the crypt together?”

‘“No; for I fear for your Excellency’s ague. The air there is excessively damp.”

‘“The more reason you should no longer be exposed to it; and to prevent the intemperance of your zeal I will at once make the place inaccessible.”

‘The Duchess at this fell on her knees on the slab, weeping excessively and lifting her hands to Heaven.

“Oh” she cried, “you are cruel, sir, to deprive me of access to the sacred relics that have enabled me to support with resignation the solitude to which your Excellency’s duties have condemned me; and if prayer and meditation give me any authority to pronounce on such matters, suffer me to warn you, sir, that I fear the blessed Saint Blandina will punish us for thus abandoning her venerable remains!”

‘The Duke at this seemed to pause, for he was a pious man, and my grandmother thought she saw him exchange a glance with the chaplain; who, stepping timidly forward, with his eyes on the ground, said; “There is indeed much wisdom in her Excellency’s words, but I would suggest, sir, that her pious wish might be met, and the saint more conspicuously honoured, by transferring the relics from the crypt to a place beneath the altar.”

‘“True!” cried the Duke, “and it shall be done at once.”

‘But thereat the Duchess rose to her feet with a terrible look.

‘“No,” she cried, “by the body of God! For it shall not be said that, after your Excellency has chosen to deny every request I addressed to him, I owe his consent to the solicitation of another!”

‘The chaplain turned red and the Duke yellow, and for a moment neither spoke.

‘Then the Duke said, “Here are words enough, Madam. Do you wish the relics brought up from the crypt?”

‘“I wish nothing that I owe to another’s intervention!”

‘“Put the image in place then,” says the Duke furiously; and handed her Grace to a chair.

‘She sat there, my grandmother said, straight as an arrow, her hands locked, her head high, her eyes on the Duke, while the statue was dragged to its place; then she stood up and turned away. As she passed by Nencia, “Call me Antonio,” she whispered; but before the words were out of her mouth the Duke stepped between them.

‘“Madam,” says he, all smiles now, “I have travelled straight from Rome to bring you the sooner this proof of my esteem. I lay last night at Monselice, and have been on the road since daybreak. Will you not invite me to supper?”

‘“Surely, my Lord,” said the Duchess. “It shall be laid in the dining-parlour within the hour.”

‘“Why not in your chamber and at once, Madam? Since I believe it is your custom to sup there.”

‘“In my chamber?” says the Duchess, in disorder.

‘“Have you anything against it?” he asked.

‘“Assuredly not, sir, if you will give me time to prepare myself.”

‘“I will wait in your cabinet,” said the Duke.

‘At that, said my grandmother, the Duchess gave one look, as the souls in hell may have looked when the gates closed on our Lord; then she called Nencia and passed to her chamber.

‘What happened there my grandmother could never learn, but that the Duchess, in great haste, dressed herself with extraordinary splendour, powdering her hair with gold, painting her face and bosom, and covering herself with jewels till she shone like our Lady of Loretto; and hardly were these preparations complete when the Duke entered from the cabinet, followed by the servants carrying supper. Thereupon the Duchess dismissed Nencia, and what follows my grandmother learned from a pantry-lad who brought up the dishes and waited in the cabinet; for only the Duke’s body-servant entered the bedchamber.

‘Well, according to this boy, sir, who was looking and listening with his whole body, as it were, because he had never before been suffered so near the Duchess, it appears that the noble couple sat down in great good humour, the Duchess playfully reproving her husband for his long absence, while the Duke swore that to look so beautiful was the best way of punishing him. In this tone the talk continued, with such gay sallies on the part of the Duchess, such tender advances on the Duke’s, that the lad declared they were for all the world like a pair of lovers courting on a summer’s night in the vineyard; and so it went till the servant brought in the mulled wine.

‘“Ah,” the Duke was saying at that moment, “this agreeable evening repays me for the many dull ones I have spent away from you; nor do I remember to have enjoyed such laughter since the afternoon last year when we drank chocolate in the gazebo with my cousin Ascanio. And that reminds me,” he said, “is my cousin in good health?”

‘“I have no reports of it,” says the Duchess. “But your Excellency should taste these figs stewed in malmsey —”

‘“I am in the mood to taste whatever you offer,” said he; and as she helped him to the figs, he added, “if my enjoyment were not complete as it is, I could almost wish my cousin Ascanio were with us. The fellow is rare good company at supper. What do you say, Madam? I hear he’s still in the country; shall we send for him to join us?”

‘“Ah,” said the Duchess, with a sigh and a languishing look, “I see your Excellency wearies of me already.”

‘“I, Madam? Ascanio is a capital good fellow, but to my mind his chief merit at this moment is his absence. It inclines me so tenderly to him that, by God, I could empty a glass to his good health.”

‘With that the Duke caught up his goblet and signed to the servant to fill the Duchess’s.

‘“Here’s to the cousin,” he cried, standing, “who has the good taste to stay away when he’s not wanted. I drink to his very long life — and you, Madam?”

‘At this the Duchess, who had sat staring at him with a changed face, rose also and lifted her glass to her lips.

‘“And I to his happy death,” says she in a wild voice; and as she spoke the empty goblet dropped from her hand and she fell down on the floor.

‘The Duke shouted to her women that she had swooned, and they came and lifted her to the bed ... She suffered horribly all night, Nencia said, twisting herself like a heretic at the stake, but without a word escaping her. The Duke watched by her, and toward daylight sent for the chaplain; but by then she was unconscious, and, her teeth being locked, our Lord’s body could not be passed through them.

‘The Duke announced to his relations that his lady had died after partaking too freely of spiced wine and an omelette of carp’s roe, at a supper she had prepared in honour of his return; and the next year he brought home a new Duchess, who gave him a son and five daughters ...’

V

The sky had turned to a steel grey, against which the villa stood out sallow and inscrutable. A wind strayed through the gardens, loosening here and there a yellow leaf from the sycamores; and the hills across the valley were purple as thunder clouds.

* * *

‘And the statue —?’ I asked.

‘Ah, the statue. Well, sir, this is what my grandmother told me, here on this very bench where we’re sitting. The poor child, who worshipped the Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress, spent a night of horror, you may fancy, shut out from her lady’s room, hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke’s lean face in the door, and the chaplain skulking in the antechamber with his eyes on his breviary. No one minded her that night or the next morning; and towards dusk, when it became known the Duchess was no more, the poor girl felt the pious wish to say a prayer for her dead mistress. She crept to the chapel and stole in unobserved. The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you know – and the moaning seemed to come from its lips. My grandmother turned cold, but something she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking out, and she turned and ran from the place. In the passage she fell in a swoon; and when she came to her senses, in her own chamber, she heard that the Duke had locked the chapel door and forbidden any to set foot there ... The place was never opened again till the Duke died, some ten years later; and then it was that the other servants, going in with the new heir, saw for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her bosom ...’

‘And the crypt?’ I asked. ‘Has it never been opened?’

‘Heaven forbid, sir!’ cried the old man, crossing himself. ‘Was it not the Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?’

The Fullness of Life

I

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadowgrasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentiments of pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten – through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of colourless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine ... and that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband’s boots – those horrible boots – and that no one would come to bother her about the next day’s dinner ... or the butcher’s book ...

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth Ah, now it was rising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed; ... her mouth was full; ... she was choking ... Help!

‘It is all over,’ said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with official composure.

The clock struck three. They remembered it afterwards. Someone opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husband into another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking boots.

II

She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in front of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars, expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her, she distinguished the outlines of landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley’s vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape – the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve – something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo’s, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

‘And so death is not the end after all,’ in sheer gladness she heard herself exclaiming aloud. ‘I always knew that it couldn’t be. I believed in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then Darwin himself said that he wasn’t sure about the soul – at least, I think he did – and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there was St George Mivart —’

Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.

‘How beautiful! How satisfying!’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps now I shall really know what it is to live.’

As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heartbeats, and looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of Life.

‘Have you never really known what it is to live?’ the Spirit of Life asked her.

‘I have never known’, she replied, ‘that fullness of life which we all feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not been without scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes to one sometimes far out at sea.’

‘And what do you call the fullness of life?’ the Spirit asked again.

‘Oh, I can’t tell you, if you don’t know,’ she said, almost reproachfully. ‘Many words are supposed to define it – love and sympathy are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that they are the right ones, and so few people really know what they mean.’

‘You were married,’ said the Spirit, ‘yet you did not find the fullness of life in your marriage?’

‘Oh, dear, no,’ she replied, with an indulgent scorn, ‘my marriage was a very incomplete affair.’

‘And yet you were fond of your husband?’

‘You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple. But I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawingroom, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.’

‘And your husband’, asked the Spirit, after a pause, ‘never got beyond the family sitting-room?’

‘Never,’ she returned, impatiently; ‘and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlour, I felt like crying out to him: “Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but find the handle of the door?”’

‘Then,’ the Spirit continued, ‘those moments of which you lately spoke, which seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the fullness of life, were not shared with your husband?’

‘Oh, no – never. He was different. His boots creaked, and he always slammed the door when he went out, and he never read anything but railway novels and the sporting advertisements in the papers – and – and, in short, we never understood each other in the least.’

‘To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite sensations?’

‘I can hardly tell. Sometimes to the perfume of a flower; sometimes to a verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a picture or a sunset, or to one of those calm days at sea, when one seems to be lying in the hollow of a blue pearl; sometimes, but rarely, to a word spoken by someone who chanced to give utterance, at the right moment, to what I felt but could not express.’

‘Someone whom you loved?’ asked the Spirit.

‘I never loved anyone, in that way,’ she said, rather sadly, ‘nor was I thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or three who, by touching for an instant upon a certain chord of my being, had called forth a single note of that strange melody which seemed sleeping in my soul. It has seldom happened, however, that I have owed such feelings to people; and no one ever gave me a moment of such happiness as it was my lot to feel one evening in the Church of Or San Michele, in Florence.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said the Spirit.

‘It was near sunset on a rainy spring afternoon in Easter week. The clouds had vanished, dispersed by a sudden wind, and as we entered the church the fiery panes of the high windows shone out like lamps through the dusk. A priest was at the high altar, his white cope a livid spot in the incense-laden obscurity, the light of the candles flickering up and down like fireflies about his head; a few people knelt near by. We stole behind them and sat down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna.

‘Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had never been in the church before; and in that magical light I saw for the first time the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the sculptured bas-reliefs and canopy of the marvellous shrine. The marble, worn and mellowed by the subtle hand of time, took on an unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in some remote way of the honey-coloured columns of the Parthenon, but more mystic, more complex, a colour not bom of the sun’s inveterate kiss, but made up of cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs’ tombs, and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of Siena, or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian Bellini in the Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of the Middle Ages, richer, more solemn, more significant than the limpid sunshine of Greece.

‘The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat there, bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of the marble miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a casket of ivory and enriched with jewel-like incrustations and tarnished gleams of gold, I felt myself borne onward along a mighty current, whose source seemed to be in the very beginning of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered as they went all the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor. Life in all its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the spirit of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been familiar.

‘As I gazed, the mediæval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna seemed to melt and flow into their primal forms, so that the folded lotus of the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots and fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beauty born of man’s hand from the Ganges to the Baltic quivered and mingled in Orcagna’s apotheosis of Mary. And so the river bore me on, past the alien face of antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of Greece, till I swam upon the fiercely rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with its swirling eddies of passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry and art; I heard the rhythmic blow of the craftsmen’s hammers in the goldsmiths’ workshops and on the walls of churches, the party-cries of armed factions in the narrow streets, the organ-roll of Dante’s verse, the crackle of the faggots around Arnold of Brescia, the twitter of the swallows to which St Francis preached, the laughter of the ladies listening on the hillside to the quips of the Decameron, while plague-struck Florence howled beneath them – all this and much more I heard, joined in strange unison with voices earlier and more remote, fierce, passionate, or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that I thought of the song that the morning stars sang together and felt as though it were sounding in my ears. My heart beat to suffocation, the tears burned my lids, the joy, the mystery of it seemed too intolerable to be borne. I could not understand even then the words of the song; but I knew that if there had been someone at my side who could have heard it with me, we might have found the key to it together.

‘I turned to my husband, who was sitting beside me in an attitude of patient dejection, gazing into the bottom of his hat; but at that moment he rose, and stretching his stiffened legs, said, mildly: “Hadn’t we better be going? There doesn’t seem to be much to see here, and you know the table d’hote dinner is at half-past six o’clock.”’

Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the Spirit of Life said: ‘There is a compensation in store for such needs as you have expressed.’

‘Oh, then you do understand?’ she exclaimed. ‘Tell me what compensation, I entreat you!’

‘It is ordained’, the Spirit answered, ‘that every soul which seeks in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmost being shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity.’

A glad cry broke from her lips.

‘Ah, shall I find him at last?’ she cried, exultant.

‘He is here,’ said the Spirit of Life.

She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in that unwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than his face) drew her towards him with an invincible force.

‘Are you really he?’ she murmured.

‘I am he,’ he answered.

She laid her hand in his and drew him towards the parapet which overhung the valley.

‘Shall we go down together,’ she asked him, ‘into that marvellous country; shall we see it together, as if with the selfsame eyes, and tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?’

‘So’, he replied, ‘have I hoped and dreamed.’

‘What?’ she asked, with rising joy. ‘Then you, too, have looked for me?’

‘All my life.’

‘How wonderful! And did you never, never find anyone in the other world who understood you?’

‘Not wholly – not as you and I understand each other.’

‘Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy,’ she sighed.

They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into sapphirine space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the threshold, heard now and then a floating fragment of their talk blown backwards like the stray swallows which the wind sometimes separates from their migratory tribe.

‘Did you never feel at sunset —’

‘Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so. Did you?’

‘Do you remember that line in the third canto of the “Inferno”?’

‘Ah, that line – my favourite always. Is it possible —’

‘You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike Apteros?’

‘You mean the one who is tying her sandal? Then you have noticed, too, that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in those flying folds of her drapery?’

‘After a storm in autumn have you never seen —’

‘Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters – the perfume of the carnation, Leonardo; that of the rose, Titian; the tuberose, Crivelli —’

‘I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it.’

‘Have you never thought —’

‘Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had.’

‘But surely you must have felt —’

‘Oh, yes, yes; and you, too —’

‘How beautiful! How strange —’

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: ‘Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river.’

As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenly withdrawn, and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance of her soul.

‘A home,’ she repeated, slowly, ‘a home for you and me to live in for all eternity?’

‘Why not, love? Am I not the soul that yours has sought?’

‘Y-yes – yes, I know – but, don’t you see, home would not be like home to me, unless —’

‘Unless?’ he wonderingly repeated.

She did not answer, but she thought to herself, with an impulse of whimsical inconsistency, ‘Unless you slammed the door and wore creaking boots.’

But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptible degrees was leading her towards the shining steps which descended to the valley.

‘Come, O my soul’s soul,’ he passionately implored; ‘why delay a moment? Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too short to hold such bliss as ours. It seems to me that I can see our home already. Have I not always seen it in my dreams? It is white, love, is it not, with polished columns, and a sculptured cornice against the blue? Groves of laurel and oleander and thickets of roses surround it; but from the terrace where we walk at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands and cool meadows where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goes delicately towards the river. Indoors our favourite pictures hang upon the walls and the rooms are lined with books. Think, dear, at last we shall have time to read them all. With which shall we begin? Come, help me to choose. Shall it be “Faust” or the Vita Nuova, the “Tempest” or “Les Caprices de Marianne,” or the thirty-first canto of the Paradise, or “Epipsychidion” or “Lycidas”? Tell me, dear, which one?’

As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips; but it died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless, resisting the persuasion of his hand.

‘What is it?’ he entreated.

‘Wait a moment,’ she said, with a strange hesitation in her voice. ‘Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself? Is there no one on earth whom you sometimes remember?’

‘Not since I have seen you,’ he replied; for, being a man, he had indeed forgotten.

Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened on her soul.

‘Surely, love,’ he rebuked her, ‘it was not that which troubled you? For my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has melted like a cloud before the moon. I never lived until I saw you.’

She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing herself with a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved towards the Spirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold.

‘I want to ask you a question,’ she said, in a troubled voice.

‘Ask,’ said the Spirit.

‘A little while ago,’ she began, slowly, ‘you told me that every soul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to find one here.’

‘And have you not found one?’ asked the Spirit.

‘Yes; but will it be so with my husband’s soul also?’

‘No,’ answered the Spirit of Life, ‘for your husband imagined that he had found his soul’s mate on earth in you; and for such delusions eternity itself contains no cure.’

She gave a little cry. Was it of disappointment or triumph?

‘Then – then what will happen to him when he comes here?’

‘That I cannot tell you. Some field of activity and happiness he will doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being active and happy.’

She interrupted, almost angrily: ‘He will never be happy without me.’

‘Do not be too sure of that,’ said the Spirit.

She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: ‘He will not understand you here any better than he did on earth.’

‘No matter,’ she said; ‘I shall be the only sufferer, for he always thought that he understood me.’

‘His boots will creak just as much as ever —’

‘No matter.’

‘And he will slam the door —’

‘Very likely.’

‘And continue to read railway novels —’

She interposed, impatiently: ‘Many men do worse than that.’

‘But you said just now’, said the Spirit, ‘that you did not love him.’

‘True,’ she answered, simply; ‘but don’t you understand that I shouldn’t feel at home without him? It is all very well for a week or two – but for eternity! After all, I never minded the creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don’t suppose it will ache here; and he was always so sorry when he had slammed the door, only he never could remember not to. Besides, no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless. His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of stamps and visiting-cards. He would never remember to have his umbrella recovered, or to ask the price of anything before he bought it. Why, he wouldn’t even know what novels to read. I always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a forgery and a successful detective.’

She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with a mien of wonder and dismay.

‘Don’t you see’, she said, ‘that I can’t possibly go with you?’

‘But what do you intend to do?’ asked the Spirit of Life.

‘What do I intend to do?’ she returned, indignantly. ‘Why, I mean to wait for my husband, of course. If he had come here first he would have waited for me for years and years; and it would break his heart not to find me here when he comes.’ She pointed with a contemptuous gesture to the magic vision of hill and vale sloping away to the translucent mountains. ‘He wouldn’t give a fig for all that,’ she said, ‘if he didn’t find me here.’

‘But consider,’ warned the Spirit, ‘that you are now choosing for eternity. It is a solemn moment.’

‘Choosing!’ she said, with a half-sad smile. ‘Do you still keep up here that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that you knew better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else – never, never.’

‘So be it,’ said the Spirit. ‘Here, as on earth, each one must decide for himself.’

She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost wistfully. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I should have liked to talk with you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say you will find someone else a great deal cleverer —’

And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift farewell and turned back towards the threshold.

‘Will my husband come soon?’ she asked the Spirit of Life.

‘That you are not destined to know,’ the Spirit replied.

‘No matter,’ she said, cheerfully; ‘I have all eternity to wait in.’

And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the creaking of his boots.

A Journey

As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence. Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband’s curtains across the aisle ...

She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear him if he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months and it irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this increasing childish petulance seemed to give expression to their imperceptible estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another through a sheet of glass they were close together, almost touching, but they could not hear or feel each other: the conductivity between them was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation, and she fancied sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look with which he supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the fault was hers. She was too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease. Her self-reproachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers still bounded ahead of life, preempting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while his lagged behind, vainly struggling to overtake her.

When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her days had been as bare as the whitewashed schoolroom where she forced innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in on the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the encloser of remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed. Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her wings.

At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air would set him right; but when he came back this assurance was explained as having of course included a winter in a dry climate. They gave up their pretty house, storing the wedding presents and new furniture, and went to Colorado. She had hated it there from the first. Nobody knew her or cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had made, or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting-cards which were still a surprise to her. And he kept growing worse. She felt herself beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought by so direct a temperament. She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually, undefinably ceasing to be himself. The man she had married had been strong, active, gently masterful: the male whose pleasure it is to clear a way through the material obstructions of life; but now it was she who was the protector, he who must be shielded from importunities and given his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling. The routine of the sick-room bewildered her; this punctual administering of medicine seemed as idle as some uncomprehended religious mummery.

There were moments, indeed, when warm gushes of pity swept away her instinctive resentment of his condition, when she still found his old self in his eyes as they groped for each other through the dense medium of his weakness. But these moments had grown rare. Sometimes he frightened her: his sunken expressionless face seemed that of a stranger; his voice was weak and hoarse; his thin-lipped smile a mere muscular contraction. Her hand avoided his damp soft skin, which had lost the familiar roughness of health: she caught herself furtively watching him as she might have watched a strange animal. It frightened her to feel that this was the man she loved; there were hours when to tell him what she suffered seemed the one escape from her fears. But in general she judged herself more leniently, reflecting that she had perhaps been too long alone with him, and that she would feel differently when they were at home again, surrounded by her robust and buoyant family. How she had rejoiced when the doctors at last gave their consent to his going home! She knew, of course, what the decision meant; they both knew. It meant that he was to die; but they dressed the truth in hopeful euphuisms, and at times, in the joy of preparation, she really forgot the purpose of their journey, and slipped into an eager allusion to next year’s plans.

At last the day of leaving came. She had a dreadful fear that they would never get away; that somehow at the last moment he would fail her; that the doctors held one of their accustomed treacheries in reserve; but nothing happened. They drove to the station, he was installed in a seat with a rug over his knees and a cushion at his back, and she hung out of the window waving unregretful farewells to the acquaintances she had really never liked till then.

The first twenty-four hours had passed off well. He revived a little and it amused him to look out of the window and to observe the humours of the car. The second day he began to grow weary and to chafe under the dispassionate stare of the freckled child with the lump of chewing-gum. She had to explain to the child’s mother that her husband was too ill to be disturbed: a statement received by that lady with a resentment visibly supported by the maternal sentiment of the whole car ...

That night he slept badly and the next morning his temperature frightened her: she was sure he was growing worse. The day passed slowly, punctuated by the small irritations of travel. Watching his tired face, she traced in its contractions every rattle and jolt of the train, till her own body vibrated with sympathetic fatigue. She felt the others observing him too, and hovered restlessly between him and the line of interrogative eyes. The freckled child hung about him like a fly; offers of candy and picture-books failed to dislodge her: she twisted one leg around the other and watched him imperturbably. The porter, as he passed, lingered with vague proffers of help, probably inspired by philanthropic passengers swelling with the sense that ‘something ought to be done’; and one nervous man in a skull-cap was audibly concerned as to the possible effect on his wife’s health.

The hours dragged on in a dreary inoccupation. Towards dusk she sat down beside him and he laid his hand on hers. The touch startled her. He seemed to be calling her from far off. She looked at him helplessly and his smile went through her like a physical pang.

‘Are you very tired?’ she asked.

‘No, not very.’

‘We’ll be there soon now.’

‘Yes, very soon.’

‘This time tomorrow –’

He nodded and they sat silent. When she had put him to bed and crawled into her own berth she tried to cheer herself with the thought that in less than twenty-four hours they would be in New York. Her people would all be at the station to meet her – she pictured their round unanxious faces pressing through the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell him too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no time: the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering were making her aware of a certain coarseness of texture in the family sensibilities.

Suddenly she thought she heard him call. She parted the curtains and listened. No, it was only a man snoring at the other end of the car. His snores had a greasy sound, as though they passed through tallow. She lay down and tried to sleep ... Had she not heard him move? She started up trembling ... The silence frightened her more than any sound. He might not be able to make her hear – he might be calling her now ... What made her think of such things? It was merely the familiar tendency of an overtired mind to fasten itself on the most intolerable chance within the range of its forebodings ... Putting her head out, she listened; but she could not distinguish his breathing from that of the other pairs of lungs about her. She longed to get up and look at him, but she knew the impulse was a mere vent for her restlessness, and the fear of disturbing him restrained her ... The regular movement of his curtain reassured her, she knew not why; she remembered that he had wished her a cheerful good-night; and the sheer inability to endure her fears a moment longer made her put them from her with an effort of her whole sound tired body. She turned on her side and slept.

She sat up stiffly, staring out at the dawn. The train was rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation. The air of the car was close, and she pushed up her window to let in the keen wind. Then she looked at her watch: it was seven o’clock, and soon the people about her would be stirring. She slipped into her clothes, smoothed her dishevelled hair and crept to the dressing-room. When she had washed her face and adjusted her dress she felt more hopeful. It was always a struggle for her not to be cheerful in the morning. Her cheeks burned deliciously under the coarse towel and the wet hair about her temples broke into strong upward tendrils. Every inch of her was full of life and elasticity. And in ten hours they would be at home!

She stepped to her husband’s berth: it was time for him to take his early glass of milk. The window-shade was down, and in the dusk of the curtained enclosure she could just see that he lay sideways, with his face away from her. She leaned over him and drew up the shade. As she did so she touched one of his hands. It felt cold ...

She bent closer, laying her hand on his harm and calling him by name. He did not move. She spoke again more loudly; she grasped his shoulder and gently shook it. He lay motionless. She caught hold of his hand again: it slipped from her limply, like a dead thing. A dead thing? ... Her breath caught. She must see his face. She leaned forward, and hurriedly, shrinkingly, with a sickening reluctance of the flesh, laid her hands on his shoulders and turned him over. His head fell back; his face looked small and smooth; he gazed at her with steady eyes.

She remained motionless for a long time, holding him thus; and they looked at each other. Suddenly she shrank back: the longing to scream, to call out, to fly from him, had almost overpowered her. But a strong hand arrested her. Good God! If it were known that he was dead they would be put off the train at the next station–

In a terrifying flash of remembrance there arose before her a scene she had once witnessed in travelling, when a husband and wife, whose child had died in the train, had been thrust out at some chance station. She saw them standing on the platform with the child’s body between them; she had never forgotten the dazed look with which they followed the receding train. And this was what would happen to her. Within the next hour she might find herself on the platform of some strange station, alone with her husband’s body ... Anything but that! It was too horrible – quivered like a creature at bay.

As she cowered there, she felt the train moving more slowly. It was coming then – they were approaching a station! She saw again the husband and wife standing on the lonely platform; and with a violent gesture she drew down the shade to hide her husband’s face.

Feeling dizzy, she sank down on the edge of the berth, keeping away from his outstretched body, and pulling the curtains close, so that he and she were shut into a kind of sepulchral twilight. She tried to think. At all costs she must conceal the fact that he was dead. But how? Her mind refused to act: she could not plan, combine. She could think of no way but to sit there, clutching the curtains, all day long ...

She heard the porter making up her bed; people were beginning to move about the car; the dressing-room door was being opened and shut. She tried to rouse herself. At length with a supreme effort she rose to her feet, stepping into the aisle of the car and drawing the curtains tight behind her. She noticed that they still parted slightly with the motion of the car, and finding a pin in her dress she fastened them together. Now she was safe. She looked round and saw the porter. She fancied he was watching her.

‘Ain’t he awake yet?’ he enquired.

‘No,’ she faltered.

‘I got his milk all ready when he wants it. You know you told me to have it for him by seven.’

She nodded silently and crept into her seat.

At half-past eight the train reached Buffalo. By this time the other passengers were dressed and the berths had been folded back for the day. The porter, moving to and fro under his burden of sheets and pillows, glanced at her as he passed. At length he said: ‘Ain’t he going to get up? You know we’re ordered to make up the berths as early as we can.’

She turned cold with fear. They were just entering the station.

‘Oh, not yet,’ she stammered. ‘Not till he’s had his milk. Won’t you get it, please?’

‘All right. Soon as we start again.’

When the train moved on he reappeared with the milk. She took it from him and sat vaguely looking at it: her brain moved slowly from one idea to another, as though there were stepping-stones set far apart across a whirling flood. At length she became aware that the porter still hovered expectantly.

‘Will I give it to him?’ he suggested.

‘Oh, no,’ she cried, rising. ‘He – he’s asleep yet, I think –’

She waited till the porter had passed on; then she unpinned the curtains and slipped behind them. In the semi-obscurity her husband’s face stared up at her like a marble mask with agate eyes. The eyes were dreadful. She put out her hand and drew down the lids. Then she remembered the glass of milk in her other hand: what was she to do with it? She thought of raising the window and throwing it out; but to do so she would have to lean across his body and bring her face close to his. She decided to drink the milk.

She returned to her seat with the empty glass and after a while the porter came back to get it.

‘When’ll I fold up his bed? he asked.

Oh, not now – not yet; he’s ill – he’s very ill. Can’t you let him stay as he is? The doctor wants him to lie down as much as possible.’

He scratched his head. ‘Well, if he’s really sick –’

He took the empty glass and walked away, explaining to the passengers that the party behind the curtains was too sick to get up just yet.

She found herself the centre of sympathetic eyes. A motherly woman with an intimate smile sat down beside her.

‘I’m real sorry to hear your husband’s sick. I’ve had a remarkable amount of sickness in my family and maybe I could assist you. Can I take a look at him?’

‘Oh, no – no, please! He mustn’t be disturbed.’

The lady accepted the rebuff indulgently.

‘Well, it’s just as you say, of course, but you don’t look to me as if you’d had much experience in sickness and I’d have been glad to assist you. What do you generally do when you husband’s taken this way?’

‘I – I let him sleep.’

‘Too much sleep ain’t any too healthful either. Don’t you give him any medicine?’

‘Ye – yes.’

‘Don’t you wake him to take it?’

‘Yes.’

‘When does he take the next dose?’

‘Not for – two hours–’

The lady looked disappointed. ‘Well, if I was you I’d try giving it oftener. That’s what I do with my folks.’

After that many faces seemed to press upon her. The passengers were on their way to the dining-car, and she was conscious that as they passed down the aisle they glanced curiously at the closed curtains. One lantern-jawed man with prominent eyes stood still and tried to shoot his projecting glance through the division between the folds. The freckled child, returning from breakfast, waylaid the passers with a buttery clutch, saying in a loud whisper, ‘He’s sick’; and once the conductor came by, asking for tickets. She shrank into her corner and looked out of the window at the flying trees and houses, meaningless hieroglyphs of an endlessly unrolled papyrus.

Now and then the train stopped, and the newcomers on entering the car stared in turn at the closed curtains. More and more people seemed to pass – their faces began to blend fantastically with the images surging in her brain ...

Later in the day a fat man detached himself from the mist of faces. He had a creased stomach and soft pale lips. As he pressed himself into the seat facing her she noticed that he was dressed in black broadcloth, with a soiled white tie.

‘Husband’s pretty bad this morning, is he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dear, dear! Now that’s terribly distressing, ain’t it?’ an apostolic smile revealed his gold-filled teeth.

‘Of course you know there’s no such thing as sickness. Ain’t that a lovely thought? Death itself is but a delusion of our grosser senses. On’y lay yourself open to the influx of the sperrit, submit yourself passively to the action of the divine force, and disease and dissolution will cease to exist for you. If you could indooce your husband to read this little pamphlet –’

The faces about her again grew indistinct. She had a vague recollection of hearing the motherly lady and the parent of the freckled child ardently disputing the relative advantages of trying several medicines at once, or of taking each in turn; the motherly lady maintaining that the competitive system saved time; the other objecting that you couldn’t tell which remedy had effected the cure; their voices went on and on, like bell-buoys droning through a fog ... The porter came up now and then with questions that she did not understand, but that somehow she must have answered since he went away again without repeating them; every two hours the motherly lady reminded her that her husband ought to have his drops; people left the car and others replaced them ...

Her head was spinning and she tried to steady herself by clutching at her thoughts as they swept by, but they slipped away from her like bushes on the side of a sheer precipice down which she seemed to be falling. Suddenly her mind grew clear again and she found herself vividly picturing what would happen when the train reached New York. She shuddered as it occurred to her that he would be quite cold and that some one might perceive he had been dead since morning.

She thought hurriedly: –‘If they see I am not surprised they will suspect something. They will ask questions, and if I tell them the truth they won’t believe me – no one would believe me! It will be terrible’ – and she kept repeating to herself: –T must pretend I don’t know. I must pretend I don’t know. When they open the curtains I must go up to him quite naturally – and then I must scream.’ ... She had an idea that the scream would be very hard to do.

Gradually new thoughts crowded upon her, vivid and urgent; she tried to separate and retrain them, but they beset her clamorously, like her schoolchildren at the end of a hot day, when she was too tired to silence them. Her head grew confused, and she felt a sick fear of forgetting her part, of betraying herself by some unguarded word or look.

‘I must pretend I don’t know,’ she went on murmuring. The words had lost their significance, but she repeated them mechanically, as though they had been a magic formula, until suddenly she heard herself saying: ‘I can’t remember, I can’t remember!’

Her voice sounded very loud, and she looked about her in terror; but no one seemed to notice that she had spoken.

As she glanced down the car her eye caught the curtains of her husband’s berth, and she began to examine the monotonous arabesques woven through their heavy folds. The pattern was intricate and difficult to trace; she gazed fixedly at the curtains and as she did so the thick stuff grew transparent and through it she saw her husband’s face – his dead face. She struggled to avert her look, but her eyes refused to move and her head seemed to be held in a vice. At last, with an effort that left her weak and shaking, she turned away; but it was of no use; close in front of her, small and smooth, was her husband’s face. It seemed to be suspended in the air between her and the false braids of the woman who sat in front of her. With an uncontrollable gesture she stretched out her hand to push the face away, and suddenly she felt the touch of his smooth skin. She repressed a cry and half started from her seat. The woman with the false braids looked around, and feeling that she must justify her movement in some way she rose and lifted her travelling-bag from the opposite seat. She unlocked the bag and looked into it; but the first object her hand met was a small flask of her husband’s, thrust there at the last moment, in the haste of departure. She locked the bag and closed her eyes ... his face was there again, hanging between her eyeballs and lids like a waxen mask against a red curtain ...

She roused herself with a shiver. Had she fainted or slept? Hours seemed to have elapsed; but it was still broad day, and the people about her were sitting in the attitudes as before.

A sudden sense of hunger made her aware that she had eaten nothing since morning. The thought of food filled her with disgust, but she dreaded a return of faintness, and remembering that she has some biscuits in her bag she took one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she hastily swallowed a little brandy from her husband’s flask. The burning sensation in her throat acted as a counter-irritant, momentarily relieving the dull ache of her nerves. Then she felt a gently stealing warmth, as though a soft air fanned her, and the swarming fears relaxed their clutch, receding through the stillness that enclosed her, a stillness soothing as the spacious quietude of a summer day. She slept.

Through her sleep she felt the impetuous rush of the train. It seemed to be life itself that was sweeping her on with headlong inexorable force – sweeping her into darkness and terror, and the awe of unknown days. – Now all at once everything was still – not a sound, not a pulsation ... She was dead in her turn, and lay beside him with smooth upstaring face. How quiet it was! – and yet she heard feet coming, the feet of the men who were to carry them away ... She could feel too – she felt a sudden prolonged vibration, a series of hard rocks, and then another plunge into darkness: the darkness of death this time – a black whirlwind on which they were both spinning like leaves, in wild uncoiling spirals, with millions and millions of the dead ...

She sprang up in terror. Her sleep must have lasted a long time, for the winter day had paled and the lights had been lit. The car was in confusion, and as she regained her self-possession she saw that the passengers were gathering up their wraps and bags. The woman with the false braids had brought from the dressing-room a sickly ivy-plant in a bottle, and the Christian Scientist was reversing his cuffs. The porter passed down the aisle with his impartial brush. An impersonal figure with a gold-banded cap asked for her husband’s ticket. A voice shouted ‘Baig-gage express!’ and she heard the clicking of metal as the passengers handed over their checks.

Presently her window was blocked by an expanse of sooty wall, and the train passed into the Harlem tunnel. The journey was over; in a few minutes she would see her family pushing their joyous way through the throng at the station. Her heart dilated. The worst terror was past ...

‘We’d better get him up now, hadn’t we?’ asked the porter, touching her arm.

He had her husband’s hat in his hand and was meditatively revolving it under his brush.

She looked at the hat and tried to speak; but suddenly the car grew dark. She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell face downward, striking her head against the dead man’s berth.

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell

I

It was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I’d been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I’d boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn’t made me fatter, and I didn’t see why my luck should ever turn. It did though – or I thought so at the time. A Mrs Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, ‘Why, Hartley,’ says she, ‘I believe I’ve got the very place for you. Come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.’

The next day, when I called, she told me the lady she’d in mind was a niece of hers, a Mrs Brympton, a youngish lady, but something of an invalid, who lived all the year round at her country-place on the Hudson, owing to not being able to stand the fatigue of town life.

‘Now, Hartley,’ Mrs Railton said, in that cheery way that always made me feel things must be going to take a turn for the better – ‘now understand me; it’s not a cheerful place I’m sending you to. The house is big and gloomy; my niece is nervous, vapourish; her husband – well, he’s generally away; and the two children are dead. A year ago I would as soon have thought of shutting a rosy active girl like you into a vault; but you’re not particularly brisk yourself just now, are you? and a quiet place, with country air and wholesome food and early hours, ought to be the very thing for you. Don’t mistake me,’ she added, for I suppose I looked a trifle downcast; ‘you may find it dull, but you won’t be unhappy. My niece is an angel. Her former maid, who died last spring, had been with her twenty years and worshipped the ground she walked on. She’s a kind mistress to all, and where the mistress is kind, as you know, the servants are generally good-humoured, so you’ll probably get on well enough with the rest of the household. And you’re the very woman I want for my niece: quiet, well-mannered, and educated above your station. You read aloud well, I think? That’s a good thing; my niece likes to be read to. She wants a maid that can be something of a companion: her last was, and I can’t say how she misses her. It’s a lonely life Well, have you decided?’

‘Why, ma’am,’ I said, ‘I’m not afraid of solitude.’

‘Well, then, go; my niece will take you on my recommendation. I’ll telegraph her at once and you can take the afternoon train. She has no one to wait on her at present, and I don’t want you to lose any time.’

I was ready enough to start, yet something in me hung back; and to gain time I asked, ‘And the gentleman, ma’am?’

‘The gentleman’s almost always away, I tell you,’ said Mrs Railton, quick-like – ‘and when he’s there,’ says she suddenly, ‘you’ve only to keep out of his way.’

I took the afternoon train and got out at D— station at about four o’clock. A groom in a dog-cart was waiting, and we drove off at a smart pace. It was a dull October day, with rain hanging close overhead, and by the time we turned into Brympton Place woods the daylight was almost gone. The drive wound through the woods for a mile or two, and came out on a gravel court shut in with thickets of tall black-looking shrubs. There were no lights in the windows and the house did look a bit gloomy.

I had asked no questions of the groom, for I never was one to get my notion of new masters from their other servants: I prefer to wait and see for myself. But I could tell by the look of everything that I had got into the right kind of house, and that things were done handsomely. A pleasant-faced cook met me at the back door and called the housemaid to show me up to my room. ‘You’ll see madam later,’ she said. ‘Mrs Brympton has a visitor.’

I hadn’t fancied Mrs Brympton was a lady to have many visitors, and somehow the words cheered me. I followed the housemaid upstairs, and saw, through a door on the upper landing, that the main part of the house seemed well furnished, with dark panelling and a number of old portraits. Another flight of stairs led us up to the servants’ wing. It was almost dark now, and the housemaid excused herself for not having brought a light. ‘But there’s matches in your room,’ she said, ‘and if you go careful you’ll be all right. Mind the step at the end of the passage. Your room is just beyond.’

I looked ahead as she spoke, and half-way down the passage I saw a woman standing. She drew back into a doorway as we passed and the housemaid didn’t appear to notice her. She was a thin woman with a white face, and a darkish stuff gown and apron. I took her for the housekeeper and thought it odd that she didn’t speak, but just gave me a long look as she went by. My room opened into a square hall at the end of the passage. Facing my door was another which stood open; the housemaid exclaimed when she saw it:

‘There – Mrs Blinder’s left that door open again!’ said she, closing it.

‘Is Mrs Blinder the housekeeper?’

‘There’s no housekeeper: Mrs Blinder’s the cook.’

‘And is that her room?’

‘Laws, no,’ said the housemaid, cross-like. ‘That’s nobody’s room. It’s empty, I mean, and the door hadn’t ought to be open. Mrs Brympton wants it kept locked.’

She opened my door and led me into a neat room, nicely furnished, with a picture or two on the walls; and having lit a candle she took leave, telling me that the servants’-hall tea was at six, and that Mrs Brympton would see me afterwards.

I found them a pleasant-spoken set in the servants’ hall, and by what they let fall I gathered that, as Mrs Railton had said, Mrs Brympton was the kindest of ladies; but I didn’t take much notice of their talk, for I was watching to see the pale woman in the dark gown come in. She didn’t show herself, however, and I wondered if she ate apart; but if she wasn’t the housekeeper, why should she? Suddenly it struck me that she might be a trained nurse, and in that case her meals would of course be served in her room. If Mrs Brympton was an invalid it was likely enough she had a nurse. The idea annoyed me, I own, for they’re not always the easiest to get on with, and if I’d known I shouldn’t have taken the place. But there I was and there was no use pulling a long face over it; and not being one to ask questions I waited to see what would turn up.

When tea was over the housemaid said to the footman: ‘Has Mr Ranford gone?’ and when he said yes, she told me to come up with her to Mrs Brympton.

Mrs Brympton was lying down in her bedroom. Her lounge stood near the fire and beside it was a shaded lamp. She was a delicate-looking lady, but when she smiled I felt there was nothing I wouldn’t do for her. She spoke very pleasantly, in a low voice, asking me my name and age and so on, and if I had everything I wanted, and if I wasn’t afraid of feeling lonely in the country.

‘Not with you I wouldn’t be, madam,’ I said, and the words surprised me when I’d spoken them, for I’m not an impulsive person; but it was just as if I’d thought aloud.

She seemed pleased at that, and said she hoped I’d continue in the same mind; then she gave me a few directions about her toilet, and said Agnes the housemaid would show me next morning where things were kept.

‘I am tired tonight, and shall dine upstairs,’ she said. ‘Agnes will bring me my tray, that you may have time to unpack and settle yourself; and later you may come and undress me.’

‘Very well, ma’am,’ I said. ‘You’ll ring, I suppose?’

I thought she looked odd.

‘No – Agnes will fetch you,’ says she quickly, and took up her book again.

Well – that was certainly strange: a lady’s maid having to be fetched by the housemaid whenever her lady wanted her! I wondered if there were no bells in the house; but the next day I satisfied myself that there was one in every room, and a special one ringing from my mistress’s room to mine; and after that it did strike me as queer that, whenever Mrs Brympton wanted anything, she rang for Agnes, who had to walk the whole length of the servants’ wing to call me.

But that wasn’t the only queer thing in the house. The very next day I found out that Mrs Brympton had no nurse; and then I asked Agnes about the woman I had seen in the passage the afternoon before. Agnes said she had seen no one, and I saw that she thought I was dreaming. To be sure, it was dusk when we went down the passage, and she had excused herself for not bringing a light; but I had seen the woman plain enough to know her again if we should meet. I decided that she must have been a friend of the cook’s, or of one of the other women servants; perhaps she had come down from town for a night’s visit, and the servants wanted it kept secret. Some ladies are very stiff about having their servants’ friends in the house overnight. At any rate, I made up my mind to ask no more questions.

In a day or two another odd thing happened. I was chatting one afternoon with Mrs Blinder, who was a friendly-disposed woman, and had been longer in the house than the other servants, and she asked me if I was quite comfortable and had everything I needed. I said I had no fault to find with my place or with my mistress, but I thought it odd that in so large a house there was no sewing-room for the lady’s maid.

‘Why,’ says she, ‘there is one: the room you’re in is the old sewing-room.’

‘Oh,’ said I; ‘and where did the other lady’s maid sleep?’

At that she grew confused, and said hurriedly that the servants’ rooms had all been changed last year, and she didn’t rightly remember.

That struck me as peculiar, but I went on as if I hadn’t noticed: ‘Well, there’s a vacant room opposite mine, and I mean to ask Mrs Brympton if I mayn’t use that as a sewing-room.’

To my astonishment, Mrs Blinder went white and gave my hand a kind of squeeze. ‘Don’t do that, my dear,’ said she, tremblinglike. ‘To tell you the truth, that was Emma Saxon’s room, and my mistress has kept it closed ever since her death.’

‘And who was Emma Saxon?’

‘Mrs Brympton’s former maid.’

‘The one that was with her so many years?’ said I, remembering what Mrs Railton had told me.

Mrs Blinder nodded.

‘What sort of woman was she?’

‘No better walked the earth,’ said Mrs Blinder. ‘My mistress loved her like a sister.’

‘But I mean – what did she look like?’

Mrs Blinder got up and gave me a kind of angry stare. ‘I’m no great hand at describing,’ she said; ‘and I believe my pastry’s rising.’ And she walked off into the kitchen and shut the door after her.

II

I had been near a week at Brympton before I saw my master. Word came that he was arriving one afternoon, and a change passed over the whole household. It was plain that nobody loved him below stairs. Mrs Blinder took uncommon care with the dinner that night, but she snapped at the kitchen-maid in a way quite unusual with her; and Mr Wace, the butler, a serious low-spoken man, went about his duties as if he’d been getting ready for a funeral. He was a great Bible-reader, Mr Wace was, and had a beautiful assortment of texts at his command; but that day he used such dreadful language that I was about to leave the table, when he assured me it was all out of Isaiah; and I noticed that whenever the master came Mr Wace took to the prophets.

About seven, Agnes called me to my mistress’s room; and there I found Mr Brympton. He was standing on the hearth; a big, fair, bull-necked man, with a red face and little bad-tempered blue eyes: the kind of man a young simpleton might have thought handsome, and would have been like to pay dear for thinking it.

He swung about when I came in, and looked me over in a trice. I knew what the look meant, from having experienced it once or twice in my former places. Then he turned his back on me, and went on talking to his wife; and I knew what that meant, too. I was not the kind of morsel he was after. The typhoid had served me well enough in one way: it kept that kind of gentleman at arm’s-length.

‘This is my new maid, Hartley,’ says Mrs Brympton in her kind voice; and he nodded and went on with what he was saying.

In a minute or two he went off, and left my mistress to dress for dinner, and I noticed as I waited on her that she was white, and chill to the touch.

Mr Brympton took himself off the next morning, and the whole house drew a long breath when he drove away. As for my mistress, she put on her hat and furs (for it was a fine winter morning) and went out for a walk in the gardens, coming back quite fresh and rosy, so that for a minute, before her colour faded, I could guess what a pretty young lady she must have been, and not so long ago, either.

She had met Mr Ranford in the grounds, and the two came back together, I remember, smiling and talking as they walked along the terrace under my window. That was the first time I saw Mr Ranford, though I had often heard his name mentioned in the hall. He was a neighbour, it appeared, living a mile or two beyond Brympton, at the end of the village; and as he was in the habit of spending his winters in the country he was almost the only company my mistress had at that season. He was a slight tall gentleman of about thirty, and I thought him rather melancholy-looking till I saw his smile, which had a kind of surprise in it, like the first warm day in spring. He was a great reader, I heard, like my mistress, and the two were for ever borrowing books of one another, and sometimes (Mr Wace told me) he would read aloud to Mrs Brympton by the hour, in the big dark library where she sat in the winter afternoons. The servants all liked him, and perhaps that’s more of a compliment than the masters suspect. He had a friendly word for every one of us, and we were all glad to think that Mrs Brympton had a pleasant companionable gentleman like that to keep her company when the master was away. Mr Ranford seemed on excellent terms with Mr Brympton too; though I couldn’t but wonder that two gentlemen so unlike each other should be so friendly. But then I knew how the real quality can keep their feelings to themselves.

As for Mr Brympton, he came and went, never staying more than a day or two, cursing the dullness and the solitude, grumbling at everything, and (as I soon found out) drinking a deal more than was good for him. After Mrs Brympton left the table he would sit half the night over the old Brympton port and madeira, and once, as I was leaving my mistress’s room rather later than usual, I met him coming up the stairs in such a state that I turned sick to think of what some ladies have to endure and hold their tongues about.

The servants said very little about their master; but from what they let drop I could see it had been an unhappy match from the beginning. Mr Brympton was coarse, loud, and pleasure-loving; my mistress quiet, retiring, and perhaps a trifle cold. Not that she was not always pleasant-spoken to him: I thought her wonderfully forbearing; but to a gentleman as free as Mr Brympton I dare say she seemed a little offish.

Well, things went on quietly for several weeks. My mistress was kind, my duties were light, and I got on well with the other servants. In short, I had nothing to complain of; yet there was always a weight on me. I can’t say why it was so, but I know it was not the loneliness that I felt. I soon got used to that; and being still languid from the fever I was thankful for the quiet and the good country air. Nevertheless, I was never quite easy in my mind. My mistress, knowing I had been ill, insisted that I should take my walk regular, and often invented errands for me – a yard of ribbon to be fetched from the village, a letter posted, or a book returned to Mr Ranford. As soon as I was out of doors my spirits rose, and I looked forward to my walks through the bare moist-smelling woods; but the moment I caught sight of the house again my heart dropped down like a stone in a well. It was not a gloomy house exactly, yet I never entered it but a feeling of gloom came over me.

Mrs Brympton seldom went out in winter; only on the finest days did she walk an hour at noon on the south terrace. Excepting Mr Ranford, we had no visitors but the doctor, who drove over from D— about once a week. He sent for me once or twice to give me some trifling direction about my mistress, and though he never told me what her illness was, I thought, from a waxy look she had now and then of a morning, that it might be the heart that ailed her. The season was soft and unwholesome, and in January we had a long spell of rain. That was a sore trial to me, I own, for I couldn’t go out, and sitting over my sewing all day, listening to the drip, drip of the eaves, I grew so nervous that the least sound made me jump. Somehow, the thought of that locked room across the passage began to weigh on me. Once or twice, in the long rainy nights, I fancied I heard noises there; but that was nonsense, of course, and the daylight drove such notions out of my head. Well, one morning Mrs Brympton gave me quite a start of pleasure by telling me she wished me to go to town for some shopping. I hadn’t known till then how low my spirits had fallen. I set off in high glee, and my first sight of the crowded streets and the cheerful-looking shops quite took me out of myself. Towards afternoon, however, the noise and confusion began to tire me, and I was actually looking forward to the quiet of Brympton, and thinking how I should enjoy the drive home through the dark woods, when I ran across an old acquaintance, a maid I had once been in service with. We had lost sight of each other for a number of years, and I had to stop and tell her what had happened to me in the interval. When I mentioned where I was living she rolled up her eyes and pulled a long face.

‘What! The Mrs Brympton that lives all the year at her place on the Hudson? My dear, you won’t stay there three months.’

‘Oh, but I don’t mind the country,’ says I, offended somehow at her tone. ‘Since the fever I’m glad to be quiet.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not the country I’m thinking of. All I know is she’s had four maids in the last six months, and the last one, who was a friend of mine, told me nobody could stay in the house.’

‘Did she say why?’ I asked.

‘No – she wouldn’t give me her reason. But she says to me, Mrs Ansey, she says, if ever a young woman as you know of thinks of going there, you tell her it’s not worth while to unpack her boxes.’

‘Is she young and handsome?’ said I, thinking of Mr Brympton.

‘Not her! She’s the kind that mothers engage when they’ve gay young gentlemen at college.’

Well, though I knew the woman was an idle gossip, the words stuck in my head, and my heart sank lower than ever as I drove up to Brympton in the dusk. There was something about the house – I was sure of it now ...

When I went in to tea I heard that Mr Brympton had arrived, and I saw at a glance that there had been a disturbance of some kind. Mrs Blinder’s hand shook so that she could hardly pour the tea, and Mr Wace quoted the most dreadful texts full of brimstone. Nobody said a word to me then, but when I went up to my room, Mrs Blinder followed me.

‘Oh, my dear,’ says she, taking my hand, ‘I’m so glad and thankful you’ve come back to us!’

That struck me, as you may imagine. ‘Why,’ said I, ‘did you think I was leaving for good?’

‘No, no, to be sure,’ said she, a little confused, ‘but I can’t a-bear to have madam left alone for a day even.’ She pressed my hand hard, and, ‘Oh, Miss Hartley,’ says she, ‘be good to your mistress, as you’re a Christian woman.’ And with that she hurried away, and left me staring.

A moment later Agnes called me to Mrs Brympton. Hearing Mr Brympton’s voice in her room, I went round by the dressing-room, thinking I would lay out her dinner-gown before going in. The dressing-room is a large room with a window over the portico that looks toward the gardens. Mr Brympton’s apartments are beyond. When I went in, the door into the bedroom was ajar, and I heard Mr Brympton saying angrily: ‘One would suppose he was the only person fit for you to talk to.’

‘I don’t have many visitors in winter,’ Mrs Brympton answered quietly.

‘You have me!’ he flung at her, sneeringly.

‘You are here so seldom,’ said she.

‘Well – whose fault is that? You make the place about as lively as the family vault—’

With that I rattled the toilet-things, to give my mistress warning, and she rose and called me in.

The two dined alone, as usual, and I knew by Mr Wace’s manner at supper that things must be going badly. He quoted the prophets something terrible, and worked on the kitchen-maid so that she declared she wouldn’t go down alone to put the cold meat in the ice-box. I felt nervous myself, and after I had put my mistress to bed I was half-tempted to go down again and persuade Mrs Blinder to sit up a while over a game of cards. But I heard her door closing for the night and so I went on to my own room. The rain had begun again, and the drip, drip, drip seemed to be dropping into my brain. I lay awake listening to it, and turning over what my friend in town had said. What puzzled me was that it was always the maids who left ...

After a while I slept; but suddenly a loud noise wakened me. My bell had rung. I sat up, terrified by the unusual sound, which seemed to go on jangling through the darkness. My hands shook so that I couldn’t find the matches. At length I struck a light and jumped out of bed. I began to think I must have been dreaming; but I looked at the bell against the wall, and there was the little hammer still quivering.

I was just beginning to huddle on my clothes when I heard another sound. This time it was the door of the locked room opposite mine softly opening and closing. I heard the sound distinctly, and it frightened me so that I stood stock-still. Then I heard a footstep hurrying down the passage toward the main house. The floor being carpeted, the sound was very faint, but I was quite sure it was a woman’s step. I turned cold with the thought of it, and for a minute or two I dursn’t breathe or move. Then I came to my senses.

‘Alice Hartley,’ says I to myself, ‘someone left that room just now and ran down the passage ahead of you. The idea isn’t pleasant, but you may as well face it. Your mistress has rung for you, and to answer her bell you’ve got to go the way that other woman has gone.’

Well – I did it. I never walked faster in my life, yet I thought I should never get to the end of the passage or reach Mrs Brympton’s room. On the way I heard nothing and saw nothing: all was dark and quiet as the grave. When I reached my mistress’s door the silence was so deep that I began to think I must be dreaming, and was half-minded to turn back. Then a panic seized me, and I knocked.

There was no answer, and I knocked again, loudly. To my astonishment the door was opened by Mr Brympton. He started back when he saw me, and in the light of my candle his face looked red and savage.

‘Yοu?’ he said, in a queer voice. ‘How many of you are there, in God’s name?’

At that I felt the ground give under me; but I said to myself that he had been drinking, and answered as steadily as I could: ‘May I go in, sir? Mrs Brympton has rung for me.’

‘You may all go in, for what I care,’ says he, and, pushing by me, walked down the hall to his own bedroom. I looked after him as he went, and to my surprise I saw that he walked as straight as a sober man.

I found my mistress lying very weak and still but she forced a smile when she saw me, and signed to me to pour out some drops for her. After that she lay without speaking, her breath coming quick, and her eyes closed. Suddenly she groped out with her hand, and ‘Emma,’ says she, faintly.

‘It’s Hartley, madam,’ I said. ‘Do you want anything?’

She opened her eyes wide and gave me a startled look.

‘I was dreaming,’ she said. ‘You may go now, Hartley, and thank you kindly. I’m quite well again, you see.’ And she turned her face away from me.

III

There was no more sleep for me that night, and I was thankful when daylight came.

Soon afterwards, Agnes called me to Mrs Brympton. I was afraid she was ill again, for she seldom sent for me before nine, but I found her sitting up in bed, pale and drawn-looking, but quite herself.

‘Hartley,’ says she quickly, ‘will you put on your things at once and go down to the village for me? I want this prescription made up’ – here she hesitated a minute and blushed – ‘and I should like you to be back again before Mr Brympton is up.’

‘Certainly, madam,’ I said.

‘And – stay a moment’ – she called me back as if an idea had just struck her – ‘while you’re waiting for the mixture, you’ll have time to go on to Mr Ranford’s with this note.’

It was a two-mile walk to the village, and on my way I had time to turn things over in my mind. It struck me as peculiar that my mistress should wish that prescription made up without Mr Brympton’s knowledge; and, putting this together with the scene of the night before, and with much else that I had noticed and suspected, I began to wonder if the poor lady was weary of her life, and had come to the mad resolve of ending it. The idea took such hold on me that I reached the village on a run, and dropped breathless into a chair before the chemist’s counter. The good man, who was just taking down his shutters, stared at me so hard that it brought me to myself.

‘Mr Limmel,’ I says, trying to speak indifferent, ‘will you run your eye over this, and tell me if it’s quite right?’

He put on his spectacles and studied the prescription.

‘Why, it’s one of Dr Walton’s,’ says he. ‘What should be wrong with it?’

‘Well – is it dangerous to take?’

‘Dangerous – how do you mean?’

I could have shaken the man for his stupidity.

‘I mean – if a person was to take too much of it – by mistake of course—’ says I, my heart in my throat.

‘Lord bless you, no. It’s only lime-water. You might feed it to a baby by the bottleful.’

I gave a great sigh of relief and hurried on to Mr Ranford’s. But on the way another thought struck me. If there was nothing to conceal about my visit to the chemist’s, was it my other errand that Mrs Brympton wished me to keep private? Somehow, that thought frightened me worse than the other. Yet the two gentlemen seemed fast friends, and I would have staked my head on my mistress’s goodness. I felt ashamed of my suspicions, and concluded that I was still disturbed by the strange events of the night. I left the note at Mr Ranford’s, and hurrying back to Brympton, slipped in by a side door without being seen, as I thought.

An hour later, however, as I was carrying in my mistress’s breakfast, I was stopped in the hall by Mr Brympton.

‘What were you doing out so early?’ he says, looking hard at me.

‘Early – me, sir?’ I said, in a tremble.

‘Come, come,’ he says, an angry red spot coming out on his forehead, ‘didn’t I see you scuttling home through the shrubbery an hour or more ago?’

I’m a truthful woman by nature, but at that a lie popped out ready-made. ‘No, sir, you didn’t,’ said I, and looked straight back at him.

He shrugged his shoulders and gave a sullen laugh. ‘I suppose you think I was drunk last night?’ he asked suddenly.

‘No, sir, I don’t,’ I answered, this time truthfully enough.

He turned away with another shrug. ‘A pretty notion my servants have of me!’ I heard him mutter as he walked off.

Not till I had settled down to my afternoon’s sewing did I realize how the events of the night had shaken me. I couldn’t pass that locked door without a shiver. I knew I had heard someone come out of it, and walk down the passage ahead of me. I thought of speaking to Mrs Blinder or to Mr Wace, the only two in the house who appeared to have an inkling of what was going on, but I had a feeling that if I questioned them they would deny everything, and that I might learn more by holding my tongue and keeping my eyes open. The idea of spending another night opposite the locked room sickened me, and once I was seized with the notion of packing my trunk and taking the first train to town; but it wasn’t in me to throw over a kind mistress in that manner, and I tried to go on with my sewing as if nothing had happened. I hadn’t worked ten minutes before the sewing machine broke down. It was one I had found in the house, a good machine but a trifle out of order; Mrs Blinder said it had never been used since Emma Saxon’s death. I stopped to see what was wrong, and as I was working at the machine a drawer which I had never been able to open slid forward, and a photograph fell out. I picked it up and sat looking at it in a maze. It was a woman’s likeness, and I knew I had seen the face somewhere – the eyes had an asking look that I had felt on me before. And suddenly I remembered the pale woman in the passage.

I stood up, cold all over, and ran out of the room. My heart seemed to be thumping in the top of my head, and I felt as if I should never get away from the look in those eyes. I went straight to Mrs Blinder. She was taking her afternoon nap, and sat up with a jump when I came in.

‘Mrs Blinder,’ said I, ‘who is that?’ And I held out the photograph.

She rubbed her eyes and stared.

‘Why, Emma Saxon,’ says she. ‘Where did you find it?’

I looked hard at her for a minute. ‘Mrs Blinder,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen that face before.’

Mrs Blinder got up and walked over to the looking-glass. ‘Dear me! I must have been asleep,’ she says. ‘My front is all over one ear. And now do run along, Miss Hartley, dear, for I hear the clock striking four, and I must go down this very minute and put on the Virginia ham for Mr Brympton’s dinner.’

IV

To all appearances, things went on as usual for a week or two. The only difference was that Mr Brympton stayed on, instead of going off as he usually did, and that Mr Ranford never showed himself. I heard Mr Brympton remark on this one afternoon when he was sitting in my mistress’s room before dinner.

‘Where’s Ranford?’ says he. ‘He hasn’t been near the house for a week. Does he keep away because I’m here?’

Mrs Brympton spoke so low that I couldn’t catch her answer.

‘Well,’ he went on, ‘two’s company and three’s trumpery; I’m sorry to be in Ranford’s way, and I suppose I shall have to take myself off again in a day or two and give him a show.’ And he laughed at his own joke.

The very next day, as it happened, Mr Ranford called. The footman said the three were very merry over their tea in the library, and Mr Brympton strolled down to the gate with Mr Ranford when he left.

I have said that things went on as usual; and so they did with the rest of the household; but as for myself, I had never been the same since the night my bell had rung. Night after night I used to lie awake, listening for it to ring again, and for the door of the locked room to open stealthily. But the bell never rang, and I heard no sound across the passage. At last the silence began to be more dreadful to me than the most mysterious sounds. I felt that someone was cowering there, behind the locked door, watching and listening as I watched and listened, and I could almost have cried out, ‘Whoever you are, come out and let me see you face to face, but don’t lurk there and spy on me in the darkness!’

Feeling as I did, you may wonder I didn’t give warning. Once I very nearly did so; but at the last moment something held me back. Whether it was compassion for my mistress, who had grown more and more dependent on me, or unwillingness to try a new place, or some other feeling that I couldn’t put a name to, I lingered on as if spellbound, though every night was dreadful to me, and the days but little better.

For one thing, I didn’t like Mrs Brympton’s looks. She had never been the same since that night, no more than I had. I thought she would brighten up after Mr Brympton left, but though she seemed easier in her mind, her spirits didn’t revive, nor her strength either. She had grown attached to me and seemed to like to have me about; and Agnes told me one day that, since Emma Saxon’s death, I was the only maid her mistress had taken to. This gave me a warm feeling for the poor lady, though after all there was little I could do to help her.

After Mr Brympton’s departure Mr Ranford took to coming again, though less often than formerly. I met him once or twice in the grounds, or in the village, and I couldn’t but think there was a change in him too; but I set it down to my disordered fancy.

The weeks passed, and Mr Brympton had now been a month absent. We heard he was cruising with a friend in the West Indies, and Mr Wace said that was a long way off, but though you had the wings of a dove and went to the uttermost parts of the earth, you couldn’t get away from the Almighty. Agnes said that as long as he stayed away from Brympton the Almighty might have him and welcome; and this raised a laugh, though Mrs Blinder tried to look shocked, and Mr Wace said the bears would eat us.

We were all glad to hear that the West Indies were a long way off, and I remember that, in spite of Mr Wace’s solemn looks, we had a very merry dinner that day in the hall. I don’t know if it was because of my being in better spirits, but I fancied Mrs Brympton looked better too, and seemed more cheerful in her manner. She had been for a walk in the morning, and after luncheon she lay down in her room, and I read aloud to her. When she dismissed me I went to my own room feeling quite bright and happy, and for the first time in weeks walked past the locked door without thinking of it. As I sat down to my work I looked out and saw a few snowflakes falling. The sight was pleasanter than the eternal rain, and I pictured to myself how pretty the bare gardens would look in their white mantle. It seemed to me as if the snow would cover up all the dreariness, indoors as well as out.

The fancy had hardly crossed my mind when I heard a step at my side. I looked up, thinking it was Agnes.

‘Well, Agnes—’ said I, and the words froze on my tongue; for there, in the door, stood Emma Saxon.

I don’t know how long she stood there. I only know I couldn’t stir or take my eyes from her. Afterwards I was terribly frightened, but at the time it wasn’t fear I felt, but something deeper and quieter. She looked at me long and long, and her face was just one dumb prayer to me – but how in the world was I to help her? Suddenly she turned, and I heard her walk down the passage. This time I wasn’t afraid to follow – I felt that I must know what she wanted. I sprang up and ran out. She was at the other end of the passage, and I expected her to take the turn towards my mistress’s room; but instead of that she pushed open the door that led to the back stairs. I followed her down the stairs, and across the passageway to the back door. The kitchen and hall were empty at that hour, the servants being off duty, except for the footman, who was in the pantry. At the door she stood still a moment, with another look at me; then she turned the handle, and stepped out. For a minute I hesitated. Where was she leading me to? The door had closed softly after her, and I opened it and looked out, half-expecting to find that she had disappeared. But I saw her a few yards off hurrying across the courtyard to the path through the woods. Her figure looked black and lonely in the snow, and for a second my heart failed me and I thought of turning back. But all the while she was drawing me after her; and catching up an old shawl of Mrs Blinder’s I ran out into the open.

Emma Saxon was in the wood-path now. She walked on steadily, and I followed at the same pace till we passed out of the gates and reached the highroad. Then she struck across the open fields to the village. By this time the ground was white, and as she climbed the slope of a bare hill ahead of me I noticed that she left no footprints behind her. At sight of that my heart shrivelled up within me and my knees were water. Somehow it was worse here than indoors. She made the whole countryside seem lonely as the grave, with none but us two in it, and no help in the wide world.

Once I tried to go back; but she turned and looked at me, and it was as if she had dragged me with ropes. After that I followed her like a dog. We came to the village and she led me through it, past the church and the blacksmith’s shop, and down the lane to Mr Ranford’s. Mr Ranford’s house stands close to the road: a plain old-fashioned building, with a flagged path leading to the door between box-borders. The lane was deserted, and as I turned into it I saw Emma Saxon pause under the old elm by the gate. And now another fear came over me. I saw that we had reached the end of our journey, and that it was my turn to act. All the way from Brympton I had been asking myself what she wanted of me, but I had followed in a trance, as it were, and not till I saw her stop at Mr Ranford’s gate did my brain begin to clear itself. I stood a little way off in the snow, my heart beating fit to strangle me, and my feet frozen to the ground; and she stood under the elm and watched me.

I knew well enough that she hadn’t led me there for nothing. I felt there was something I ought to say or do – but how was I to guess what it was? I had never thought harm of my mistress and Mr Ranford, but I was sure now that, from one cause or another, some dreadful thing hung over them. She knew what it was; she would tell me if she could; perhaps she would answer if I questioned her.

It turned me faint to think of speaking to her; but I plucked up heart and dragged myself across the few yards between us. As I did so, I heard the house door open and saw Mr Ranford approaching. He looked handsome and cheerful, as my mistress had looked that morning, and at sight of him the blood began to flow again in my veins.

‘Why, Hartley,’ said he, ‘what’s the matter? I saw you coming down the lane just now, and came out to see if you had taken root in the snow.’ He stopped and stared at me. ‘What are you looking at?’ he says.

I turned towards the elm as he spoke, and his eyes followed me; but there was no one there. The lane was empty as far as the eye could reach.

A sense of helplessness came over me. She was gone, and I had not been able to guess what she wanted. Her last look had pierced me to the marrow; and yet it had not told me! All at once, I felt more desolate than when she had stood there watching me. It seemed as if she had left me all alone to carry the weight of the secret I couldn’t guess. The snow went round me in great circles, and the ground fell away from me ...

A drop of brandy and the warmth of Mr Ranford’s fire soon brought me to, and I insisted on being driven back at once to Brympton. It was nearly dark, and I was afraid my mistress might be wanting me. I explained to Mr Ranford that I had been out for a walk and had been taken with a fit of giddiness as I passed his gate. This was true enough; yet I never felt more like a liar than when I said it.

When I dressed Mrs Brympton for dinner she remarked on my pale looks and asked what ailed me. I told her I had a headache, and she said she would not require me again that evening, and advised me to go to bed.

It was a fact that I could scarcely keep on my feet; yet I had no fancy to spend a solitary evening in my room. I sat downstairs in the hall as long as I could hold my head up; but by nine I crept upstairs, too weary to care what happened if I could but get my head on a pillow. The rest of the household went to bed soon afterwards; they kept early hours when the master was away, and before ten I heard Mrs Blinder’s door close, and Mr Wace’s soon after.

It was a very still night, earth and air all muffled in snow. Once in bed I felt easier, and lay quiet, listening to the strange noises that come out in a house after dark. Once I thought I heard a door open and close again below: it might have been the glass door that led to the gardens. I got up and peered out of the window; but it was in the dark of the moon, and nothing visible outside but the streaking of snow against the panes.

I went back to bed and must have dozed, for I jumped awake to the furious ringing of my bell. Before my head was clear I had sprung out of bed and was dragging on my clothes. It is going to happen now, I heard myself saying; but what I meant I had no notion. My hands seemed to be covered with glue – I thought I should never get into my clothes. At last I opened my door and peered down the passage. As far as my candle-flame carried, I could see nothing unusual ahead of me. I hurried on, breathless; but as I pushed open the baize door leading to the main hall my heart stood still, for there at the head of the stairs was Emma Saxon, peering dreadfully down into the darkness.

For a second I couldn’t stir; but my hand slipped from the door, and as it swung shut the figure vanished. At the same instant there came another sound from below stairs – a stealthy mysterious sound, as of a latch-key turning in the house door. I ran to Mrs Brympton’s room and knocked.

There was no answer, and I knocked again. This time I heard someone moving in the room; the bolt slipped back and my mistress stood before me. To my surprise, I saw that she had not undressed for the night. She gave me a startled look.

‘What is this, Hartley?’ she says in a whisper. ‘Are you ill? What are you doing here at this hour?’

‘I am not ill, madam; but my bell rang.’

At that she turned pale, and seemed about to fall.

‘You are mistaken,’ she said harshly; ‘I didn’t ring. You must have been dreaming.’ I had never heard her speak in such a tone. ‘Go back to bed,’ she said, closing the door on me.

But as she spoke I heard sounds again in the hall below; a man’s step this time; and the truth leaped out on me.

‘Madam,’ I said, pushing past her, ‘there is someone in the house—’

‘Someone—?’

‘Mr Brympton, I think – I hear his step below—’

A dreadful look came over her, and without a word, she dropped flat at my feet. I fell on my knees and tried to lift her: by the way she breathed I saw it was no common faint. But as I raised her head there came quick steps on the stairs and across the hall: the door was flung open, and there stood Mr Brympton, in his travelling-clothes, the snow dripping from him. He drew back with a start as he saw me kneeling by my mistress.

‘What the devil is this?’ he shouted. He was less high-coloured than usual, and the red spot came out on his forehead.

‘Mrs Brympton has fainted, sir,’ said I.

He laughed unsteadily and pushed by me. ‘It’s a pity she didn’t choose a more convenient moment. I’m sorry to disturb her, but—’

I raised myself up, aghast at the man’s action.

‘Sir,’ said I, ‘are you mad? What are you doing?’

‘Going to meet a friend,’ said he, and seemed to make for the dressing-room.

At that my heart turned over. I don’t know what I thought or feared; but I sprang up and caught him by the sleeve.

‘Sir, sir,’ said I, ‘for pity’s sake look to your wife!’

He shook me off furiously.

‘It seems that’s done for me,’ says he, and caught hold of the dressing-room door.

At that moment I heard a slight noise inside. Slight as it was, he heard it too, and tore the door open; but as he did so he dropped back. On the threshold stood Emma Saxon. All was dark behind her, but I saw her plainly, and so did he. He threw up his hands as if to hide his face from her; and when I looked again she was gone.

He stood motionless, as if the strength had run out of him; and in the stillness my mistress suddenly raised herself, and opening her eyes fixed a look on him. Then she fell back, and I saw the death-flutter pass over her ...

We buried her on the third day, in a driving snowstorm. There were few people in the church, for it was bad weather to come from town, and I’ve a notion my mistress was one that hadn’t many near friends. Mr Ranford was among the last to come, just before they carried her up the aisle. He was in black, of course, being such a friend of the family, and I never saw a gentleman so pale. As he passed me I noticed that he leaned a trifle on a stick he carried; and I fancy Mr Brympton noticed it too, for the red spot came out sharp on his forehead, and all through the service he kept staring across the church at Mr Ranford, instead of following the prayers as a mourner should.

When it was over and we went out to the graveyard, Mr Ranford had disappeared, and as soon as my poor mistress’s body was underground, Mr Brympton jumped into the carriage nearest the gate and drove off without a word to any of us. I heard him call out, ‘To the station,’ and we servants went back alone to the house.