I
“Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden, came
back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent significance as she stood, in
the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her
lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question
was the central, the pivotal “feature.” Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a
country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in
England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it
in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several
practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: “Well, there’s Lyng, in
Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo’s cousins, and you can get it for a song.”
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms — its remoteness from
a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities —
were exactly those pleading in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in
search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with
unusual architectural felicities.
“I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly
uncomfortable,” Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted;
“the least hint of ‘convenience’ would make me think it had been bought out of an
exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again.” And they had proceeded to
enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing
to believe that the house their cousin recommended was really Tudor till they learned
it had no heating system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till she
assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the watersupply.
“It’s too uncomfortable to be true!” Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the
avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short
his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse to distrust: “And the ghost? You’ve been
concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!”
Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being
possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of
tone in Alida’s answering hilarity.
“Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.”
“Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody
else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at Lyng?”
His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back
tantalizingly: “Oh, there is one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”
“Never know it?” Boyne pulled her up. “But what in the world constitutes a ghost
except the fact of its being known for one?”
“I can’t say. But that’s the story.”
“That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?”
“Well — not till afterward, at any rate.”
“Till afterward?”
“Not till long, long afterward.”
“But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t its signalement
been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?”
Alida could only shake her head. “Don’t ask me. But it has.”
“And then suddenly —” Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of
divination — “suddenly, long afterward, one says to one’s self, ‘That was it?’”
She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question fell on the
banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across
Alida’s clear pupils. “I suppose so. One just has to wait.”
“Oh, hang waiting!” Ned broke in. “Life’s too short for a ghost who can only be
enjoyed in retrospect. Can’t we do better than that, Mary?”
But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three
months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were established at Lyng, and the
life they had yearned for to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had
actually begun for them.
It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a widehooded fireplace,
under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the
downs were darkening to a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such
sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years the souldeadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his
engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of
the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to
taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new state to be one of idleness; but
they meant to give themselves only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of
painting and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the
production of his long-planned book on the “Economic Basis of Culture”; and with
such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered; they could not get
far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the past.
Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of remoteness out of
all proportion to its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the everrecurring wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island — a nest of counties, as
they put it — that for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went so
far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a difference.
“It’s that,” Ned had once enthusiastically explained, “that gives such depth to their
effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They’ve been able to lay the butter so thick
on every exquisite mouthful.”
The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house, hidden
under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a
protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to
the Boynes, abound the more richly in its special sense — the sense of having been for
centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most
vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the
quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the
yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths,
strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional
brush of an intenser memory.
The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when,
waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and stood among
the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his
long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred to be
unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried security of their personal
relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he
needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning’s
work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined it would, and
the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been there in his engineering days.
Then he had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native demon of
“worry” had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her — the
introduction, and a synopsis of the opening chapter — gave evidences of a firm
possession of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.
The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with
“business” and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible element of anxiety
was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then? But physically he had gained since
they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only
within a week that she had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless
in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a
secret to keep from him!
The thought that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a
sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the dim, long room.
“Can it be the house?” she mused.
The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling
themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping
from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the
hooded hearth.
“Why, of course — the house is haunted!” she reflected.
The ghost — Alida’s imperceptible ghost — after figuring largely in the banter of
their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded as too ineffectual for
imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made
the customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, “They
du say so, Ma’am,” the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had
apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a
time the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profitand-loss account,
agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with
supernatural enhancements.
“And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that’s why it beats its beautiful wings in
vain in the void,” Mary had laughingly concluded.
“Or, rather,” Ned answered, in the same strain, “why, amid so much that’s ghostly,
it can never affirm its separate existence as the ghost.” And thereupon their invisible
housemate had finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous enough
to make them promptly unaware of the loss.
Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her
with a new sense of its meaning — a sense gradually acquired through close daily
contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that
possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own
past; and if one could only get into close enough communion with the house, one
might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on one’s own account. Perhaps,
in his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the
afternoon, her husband had acquired it already, and was silently carrying the dread
weight of whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of
the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to
do so was almost as great a breach of goodbreeding as to name a lady in a club. But
this explanation did not really satisfy her. “What, after all, except for the fun of the
frisson,” she reflected, “would he really care for any of their old ghosts?” And thence
she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one’s
greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the
case, since, when one did see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it.
“Not till long afterward,” Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned had seen one
when they first came, and had known only within the last week what had happened to
him? More and more under the spell of the hour, she threw back her searching
thoughts to the early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay confusion
of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote
corners of the house as treasure after treasure of their habitation revealed itself to
them. It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain soft
afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the first rapturous flurry of
exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had pressed (like a novel
heroine) a panel that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to an
unsuspected flat ledge of the roof — the roof which, from below, seemed to slope
away on all sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.
The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down to
snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her discovery. She
remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge, he had passed his arm about her
while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped
contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the
shadow of the cedar on the lawn.
“And now the other way,” he had said, gently turning her about within his arm; and
closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long, satisfying draft, the picture
of the gray-walled court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching
up to the highroad under the downs.
It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt his arm
relax, and heard a sharp “Hullo!” that made her turn to glance at him.
Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow of anxiety,
of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure
of a man — a man in loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her — who was sauntering
down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a stranger seeking his
way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness and
grayness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its
garb; but her husband had apparently seen more — seen enough to make him push
past her with a sharp “Wait!” and dash down the twisting stairs without pausing to
give her a hand for the descent.
A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch at the chimney
against which they had been leaning, to follow him down more cautiously; and when
she had reached the attic landing she paused again for a less definite reason, leaning
over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the silence of the brown, sun-flecked
depths below. She lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the
closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow flights of
steps till she reached the lower hall.
The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and hall and court
were empty. The library door was open, too, and after listening in vain for any sound
of voices within, she quickly crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone,
vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.
He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the shadow of anxiety
had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer
than usual.
“What was it? Who was it?” she asked.
“Who?” he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.
“The man we saw coming toward the house.”
He seemed honestly to reflect. “The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters; I dashed
after him to say a word about the stable-drains, but he had disappeared before I could
get down.”
“Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.”
Boyne shrugged his shoulders. “So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the
interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?”
That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing, had, indeed,
been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a
height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare
spine heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the
other incident’s having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had
kept it stored away in the unconscious fold of association from which it now
emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there could
have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash himself from the roof in
the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they were always on the
watch for one or the other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying in
wait for them, and dashing out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And
certainly in the distance the gray figure had looked like Peters.
Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband’s explanation of it
to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the familiar
appearance of Peters made him anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime
necessity to confer with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains, had the
failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one of
these considerations had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with
which they now marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that
they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.
II
Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library was now
completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light the outer world
still held.
As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in the tapering
perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for
an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, “It’s the ghost!”
She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of whom, two
months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from the roof was now, at his
predestined hour, about to reveal himself as not having been Peters; and her spirit
sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the
clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to
her weak sight as her husband’s; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered,
with the confession of her folly.
“It’s really too absurd,” she laughed out from the threshold, “but I
never can remember!”
“Remember what?” Boyne questioned as they drew together.
“That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.”
Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response in his
gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face.
“Did you think you’d seen it?” he asked, after an appreciable interval.
“Why, I actually took you for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!”
“Me — just now?” His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo
of her laugh. “Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if that’s the best you can do.”
“Yes, I give it up — I give it up. Have you?” she asked, turning round on him
abruptly.
The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into
Boyne’s face as he bent above the tray she presented.
“Have you?” Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her
errand of illumination.
“Have I what?” he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of
worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.
“Given up trying to see the ghost.” Her heart beat a little at the experiment she was
making.
Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the hearth.
“I never tried,” he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.
“Well, of course,” Mary persisted, “the exasperating thing is that there’s no use
trying, since one can’t be sure till so long afterward.”
He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a pause, during
which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands, he lifted his head to say
abruptly, “Have you any idea how long?”
Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat she looked up,
startled, at her husband’s profile, which was darkly projected against the circle of
lamplight.
“No; none. Have YOU?” she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added
keenness of intention.
Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned back with
it toward the lamp.
“Lord, no! I only meant,” he explained, with a faint tinge of impatience, “is there
any legend, any tradition, as to that?”
“Not that I know of,” she answered; but the impulse to add, “What makes you ask?”
was checked by the reappearance of the parlormaid with tea and a second lamp.
With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic office, Mary
Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of something mutely imminent which
had darkened her solitary afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself silently to
the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of
bewilderment by the change in her husband’s face. He had seated himself near the
farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something he
had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored
his features to their normal aspect? The longer she looked, the more definitely the
change affirmed itself. The lines of painful tension had vanished, and such traces of
fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort. He
glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.
“I’m dying for my tea, you know; and here’s a letter for you,” he said.
She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she proffered him, and,
returning to her seat, broke the seal with the languid gesture of the reader whose
interests are all inclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.
Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the letter falling to
them as she rose, while she held out to her husband a long newspaper clipping.
“Ned! What’s this? What does it mean?”
He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before she uttered it;
and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied each other, like adversaries
watching for an advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.
“What’s what? You fairly made me jump!” Boyne said at length, moving toward her
with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of apprehension was on his face
again, not now a look of fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that
gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.
Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.
“This article — from the ‘Waukesha Sentinel’ — that a man named Elwell has
brought suit against you — that there was something wrong about the Blue Star Mine.
I can’t understand more than half.”
They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment, she saw
that her words had the almost immediate effect of dissipating the strained
watchfulness of his look.
“Oh, that!” He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with the gesture of
one who handles something harmless and familiar. “What’s the matter with you this
afternoon, Mary? I thought you’d got bad news.”
She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under the
reassuring touch of his composure.
“You knew about this, then — it’s all right?”
“Certainly I knew about it; and it’s all right.”
“But what is it? I don’t understand. What does this man accuse you of?”
“Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.” Boyne had tossed the clipping
down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair near the fire. “Do you want
to hear the story? It’s not particularly interesting — just a squabble over interests in
the Blue Star.”
“But who is this Elwell? I don’t know the name.”
“Oh, he’s a fellow I put into it — gave him a hand up. I told you all about him at the
time.”
“I daresay. I must have forgotten.” Vainly she strained back among her memories.
“But if you helped him, why does he make this return?”
“Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over. It’s all
rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.”
His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the American
wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional interests, but in practice she had
always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne’s report of the transactions in
which his varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a
community where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of efforts
as arduous as her husband’s professional labors, such brief leisure as they could
command should be used as an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the
life they always dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had actually
drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but
hitherto such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of an
active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew
of the material foundation on which her happiness was built.
She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure of his face;
yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her reassurance.
“But doesn’t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about it?”
He answered both questions at once: “I didn’t speak of it at first because
it did worry me — annoyed me, rather. But it’s all ancient history now. Your
correspondent must have got hold of a back number of the ‘Sentinel.’”
She felt a quick thrill of relief. “You mean it’s over? He’s lost his case?”
There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne’s reply. “The suit’s been withdrawn —
that’s all.”
But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of being too
easily put off. “Withdrawn because he saw he had no chance?”
“Oh, he had no chance,” Boyne answered.
She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts.
“How long ago was it withdrawn?”
He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. “I’ve just had the
news now; but I’ve been expecting it.”
“Just now — in one of your letters?”
“Yes; in one of my letters.”
She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of waiting, that he
had risen, and strolling across the room, had placed himself on the sofa at her side.
She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp
it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met the smiling
clearness of his eyes.
“It’s all right — it’s all right?” she questioned, through the flood of her dissolving
doubts; and “I give you my word it never was righter!” he laughed back at her, holding
her close.
III
One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the next day’s
incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery of her sense of
security.
It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it accompanied
her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her from the fire, and reduplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the
Georgian teapot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions
of the previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper
article, — as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,-
had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. If she
had indeed been careless of her husband’s affairs, it was, her new state seemed to
prove, because her faith in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right
to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and
suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and
unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the cross-examination to which she
had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking doubts, and
had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.
It was as clear, thank Heaven! As the bright outer light that surprised her almost
with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her daily round of the
gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library
door, by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his mouth, above his
papers, and now she had her own morning’s task to perform. The task involved on
such charmed winter days almost as much delighted loitering about the different
quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and borders.
There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her, such opportunities to
bring out the latent graces of the old place, without a single irreverent touch of
alteration, that the winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn
executed. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a
peculiar zest to her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to the
kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the
walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their
cot. There was something wrong about the piping of the hothouse, and she was
expecting an authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and
make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the
greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned
exotics, — even the flora of Lyng was in the note! — she learned that the great man
had not arrived, and the day being too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she
came out again and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green to the
gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass terrace, commanding,
over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a view of the long house-front, with its
twisted chimney-stacks and the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the
pale gold moisture of the air.
Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused, mild light, it
sent her, from its open windows and hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some
warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience. She
had never before had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it, such a conviction that
its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, “for one’s good,” so
complete a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned’s into the harmonious
pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the sun.
She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener,
accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one figure was in sight, that
of a youngish, slightly built man, who, for reasons she could not on the spot have
specified, did not remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority on hothouse boilers. The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of
a gentleman — perhaps a traveler-desirous of having it immediately known that his
intrusion is involuntary. The local fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the more
intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the stranger dissemble a
camera, or justify his presence by producing it. But he made no gesture of any sort,
and after a moment she asked, in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of
his attitude: “Is there any one you wish to see?”
“I came to see Mr. Boyne,” he replied. His intonation, rather than his accent, was
faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar note, looked at him more closely. The brim
of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her shortsighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving “on business,” and civilly but
firmly aware of his rights.
Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but she was
jealous of her husband’s morning hours, and doubtful of his having given any one the
right to intrude on them.
“Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?” she asked.
He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.
“Not exactly an appointment,” he replied.
“Then I’m afraid, this being his working-time, that he can’t receive you now. Will
you give me a message, or come back later?”
The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would come back later, and
walked away, as if to regain the front of the house. As his figure receded down the
walk between the yew hedges, Mary saw him pause and look up an instant at the
peaceful house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck her, with a tardy
touch of compunction, that it would have been more humane to ask if he had come
from a distance, and to offer, in that case, to inquire if her husband could receive him.
But as the thought occurred to her he passed out of sight behind a pyramidal yew,
and at the same moment her attention was distracted by the approach of the
gardener, attended by the bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from
Dorchester.
The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues that they
resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his train, and beguiled Mary into
spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed confabulation among the
greenhouses. She was startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly
luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the house, to see her
husband coming out to meet her. But she found no one in the court but an undergardener raking the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she
guessed Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.
Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there, at her
writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay to which the
morning’s conference had committed her. The knowledge that she could permit
herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the vague
apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an element of her recovered
security, of the sense that, as Ned had said, things in general had never been “righter.”
She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlor-maid, from the
threshold, roused her with a dubiously worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving
luncheon. It was one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were
divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an
absent-minded assent.
She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in rebuke of such
offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps sounded down the passage, and
Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall, and went to the library door. It was
still closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious
that he should not exceed his normal measure of work. As she stood there, balancing
her impulses, the esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon,
and Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.
Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him at
the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room; but her call brought no
response, and gradually it became clear to her that he was not in the library.
She turned back to the parlor-maid.
“Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.”
The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obeying orders
and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid upon her.
The struggle resulted in her saying doubtfully, “If you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne’s not
up-stairs.”
“Not in his room? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Madam.”
Mary consulted the clock. “Where is he, then?”
“He’s gone out,” Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has
respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have first
propounded.
Mary’s previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to the
gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that he had taken the
shorter way by the south door, instead of going round to the court. She crossed the
hall to the glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlormaid, after
another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out recklessly, “Please, Madam,
Mr. Boyne didn’t go that way.”
Mary turned back. “Where did he go? And when?”
“He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam.” It was a matter of principle
with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.
“Up the drive? At this hour?” Mary went to the door herself, and glanced across the
court through the long tunnel of bare limes. But its perspective was as empty as when
she had scanned it on entering the house.
“Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?” she asked.
Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos.
“No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman.”
“The gentleman? What gentleman?” Mary wheeled about, as if to front this new
factor.
“The gentleman who called, Madam,” said Trimmle, resignedly.
“When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!”
Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult her
husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so unusual an
injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached enough to note in
Trimmle’s eye the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been
pressed too hard.
“I couldn’t exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn’t let the gentleman in,” she
replied, with the air of magnanimously ignoring the irregularity of her mistress’s
course.
“You didn’t let him in?”
“No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes —”
“Go and ask Agnes, then,” Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her look of patient
magnanimity. “Agnes would not know, Madam, for she had unfortunately burnt her
hand in trying the wick of the new lamp from town —” Trimmle, as Mary was aware,
had always been opposed to the new lamp — “and so Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchenmaid instead.”
Mary looked again at the clock. “It’s after two! Go and ask the kitchen-maid if Mr.
Boyne left any word.”
She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought her there
the kitchen-maid’s statement that the gentleman had called about one o’clock, that
Mr. Boyne had gone out with him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did
not even know the caller’s name, for he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had
folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.
Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over, and Trimmle
had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had deepened to a first faint
tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so
unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had
apparently obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne’s
experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to
keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of surprises; but
since Boyne’s withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of
life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years, with their “stand-up”
lunches and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he cultivated the
last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife’s fancy for the
unexpected; and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of
pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.
Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen, it was evident
that all Boyne’s precautions would sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary
concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the
station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.
This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she went out herself
to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village postoffice, a mile or so away; and when she turned toward home, the early twilight was
setting in.
She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had
probably returned from the station by the highroad, there was little likelihood of their
meeting on the way. She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house before
her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without even pausing to inquire of
Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an
unwonted precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the papers on
her husband’s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to
luncheon.
Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed
the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long, silent, shadowy
room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and
lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them,
halfdiscerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in
the recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bellrope and gave it a desperate pull.
The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and
Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the usual.
“You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in,” she said, to justify her ring.
“Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in,” said Trimmle, putting down the lamp.
“Not in? You mean he’s come back and gone out again?”
“No, Madam. He’s never been back.”
The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.
“Not since he went out with — the gentleman?”
“Not since he went out with the gentleman.”
“But who was the gentleman?” Mary gasped out, with the sharp note of some one
trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless noises.
“That I couldn’t say, Madam.” Trimmle, standing there by the lamp, seemed
suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the same creeping shade
of apprehension.
“But the kitchen-maid knows — wasn’t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?”
“She doesn’t know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded paper.”
Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating the
unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional formula which, till
then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of custom. And at the same moment
her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.
“But he must have a name! Where is the paper?”
She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered documents that
littered it. The first that caught her eye was an unfinished letter in her husband’s
hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.
“My dear Parvis,” — who was Parvis? — “I have just received your letter announcing
Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be
safer —”
She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded paper was
discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript which had been swept
together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.
“But the kitchen-maid saw him. Send her here,” she commanded, wondering at her
dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a solution.
Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out of the room, and
when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling, Mary had regained her selfpossession, and had her questions pat.
The gentleman was a stranger, yes — that she understood. But what had he said?
And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was easily enough
answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so little — had merely asked
for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it
should at once be carried in to him.
“Then you don’t know what he wrote? You’re not sure it was his name?”
The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written it in
answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.
“And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?”
The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but she could
not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was opening it, she had
become aware that the visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped
out, leaving the two gentlemen together.
“But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they went out of
the house?”
This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness, from which
she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited
the statement that before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard
the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front door together.
“Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what he looked
like.”
But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became clear that the
limit of the kitchen-maid’s endurance had been reached. The obligation of going to
the front door to “show in” a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental
order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could
only stammer out, after various panting efforts at evocation, “His hat, mum, was
different-like, as you might say —”
“Different? How different?” Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in the same
instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, but temporarily lost under
layers of subsequent impressions.
“His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale — a youngish face?”
Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation. But if the kitchenmaid found any adequate answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener
down the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger — the stranger in the
garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her
that it was he who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was
he, and why had Boyne obeyed his call?
IV
It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they had often called
England so little — “such a confoundedly hard place to get lost in.”
A confoundedly hard place to get lost in! That had been her husband’s phrase. And
now, with the whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flash-lights from
shore to shore, and across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne’s name blazing from
the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and
down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact,
populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinxlike guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife’s anguished eyes as if
with the malicious joy of knowing something they would never know!
In the fortnight since Boyne’s disappearance there had been no word of him, no
trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that raise expectancy in
tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid
had seen him leave the house, and no one else had seen “the gentleman” who
accompanied him. All inquiries in the neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a
stranger’s presence that day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met
Edward Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighboring villages, or on
the road across the downs, or at either of the local railway-stations. The sunny
English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian
night.
Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its highest
pressure, had ransacked her husband’s papers for any trace of antecedent
complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to her, that might throw a
faint ray into the darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of Boyne’s
life, they had disappeared as completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor had
written his name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except — if it were
indeed an exception — the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act of
writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter, read and reread by his
wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded little enough for conjecture to feed
on.
“I have just heard of Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther risk
of trouble, it might be safer —” That was all. The “risk of trouble” was easily explained
by the newspaper clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her
husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new
information conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote
it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he had assured his wife
that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself declared that the plaintiff was
dead. It took several weeks of exhaustive cabling to fix the identity of the “Parvis” to
whom the fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these inquiries
had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the Elwell suit
were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern in it, but to have been
conversant with the facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and
he declared himself unable to divine with what object Boyne intended to seek his
assistance.
This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight’s feverish search, was not
increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed. Mary knew that the
investigations were still being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually
slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days,
flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained
assurance as the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal gait.
And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No doubt it occupied
them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less
space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by
the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human
experience.
Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It
still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more
rhythmical in their beat. There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like
the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless,
she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as
one of the fixed conditions of life.
These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of
stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of life with the incurious eye of
a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest
impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the
wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in
which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and
tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent
entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of “change.” Her friends
supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would
one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew
up about this imaginary state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the
depths of anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was
sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as
completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold. She had even
renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been
advanced by the press, the police, and her own agonized imagination. In sheer
lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the
blank fact that he was gone.
No, she would never know what had become of him — no one would ever know. But
the house knew; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew. For it
was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and
spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod
had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were
moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to
break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came,
and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that
betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been
the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised.
And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the futility of
seeking to break it by any human means.
V
“I don’t say it wasn’t straight, yet don’t say it was straight. It was business.”
Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at the speaker.
When, half an hour before, a card with “Mr. Parvis” on it had been brought up to
her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been a part of her
consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of Boyne’s unfinished letter. In
the library she had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald head
and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was
the person to whom her husband’s last known thought had been directed.
Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble, — in the manner of a man who has his
watch in his hand, — had set forth the object of his visit. He had “run over” to England
on business, and finding himself in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished
to leave it without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if the
occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell’s family.
The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary’s bosom. Did her
visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished phrase? She asked for
an elucidation of his question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her
continued ignorance of the subject. Was it possible that she really knew as little as
she said?
“I know nothing — you must tell me,” she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon
proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and
imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star
Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of
“getting ahead” of some one less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity
was young Robert Elwell, who had “put him on” to the Blue Star scheme.
Parvis, at Mary’s first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his
impartial glasses.
“Bob Elwell wasn’t smart enough, that’s all; if he had been, he might have turned
round and served Boyne the same way. It’s the kind of thing that happens every day in
business. I guess it’s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest,” said Mr. Parvis,
evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.
Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame; it was as
though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.
“But then — you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?”
Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. “Oh, no, I don’t. I don’t even say it
wasn’t straight.” He glanced up and down the long lines of books, as if one of them
might have supplied him with the definition he sought. “I don’t say it wasn’t straight,
and yet I don’t say it was straight. It was business.” After all, no definition in his
category could be more comprehensive than that.
Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent,
implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.
“But Mr. Elwell’s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I suppose the suit
was withdrawn by their advice.”
“Oh, yes, they knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, technically. It was when they
advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You see, he’d borrowed most
of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That’s why he shot himself
when they told him he had no show.”
The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.
“He shot himself? He killed himself because of that?”
“Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.”
Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its
“record.”
“You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?”
“Oh, he didn’t have to try again,” said Parvis, grimly.
They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eyeglass thoughtfully
about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of
rigid tension.
“But if you knew all this,” she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above
a whisper, “how is it that when I wrote you at the time of my husband’s disappearance
you said you didn’t understand his letter?”
Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. “Why, I didn’t understand it
— strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business
was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have
helped you to find your husband.”
Mary continued to scrutinize him. “Then why are you telling me now?”
Still Parvis did not hesitate. “Well, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than
you appear to — I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s death. And then people
are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been raked up again. And I thought, if you
didn’t know, you ought to.”
She remained silent, and he continued: “You see, it’s only come out lately what a
bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud woman, and she fought on as long
as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home, when she got too sicksomething with the heart, I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after,
and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That
attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was
started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in
the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why —”
Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. “Here,” he continued, “here’s an
account of the whole thing from the ‘Sentinel’ — a little sensational, of course. But I
guess you’d better look it over.”
He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did
so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the “Sentinel”
had first shaken the depths of her security.
As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring head-lines, “Widow
of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,” ran down the column of text to two
portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband’s, taken from a photograph made
the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the
one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the
photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him,
and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.
“I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down —” she heard Parvis
continue.
She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that
of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by
the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She
stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a
cry.
“This is the man — the man who came for my husband!”
She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped
backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm.
With an intense effort she straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which
she had dropped.
“It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that sounded in
her own ears like a scream.
Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless, fog-muffled
windings.
“Mrs. Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a glass of
water?”
“No, no, no!” She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically clenching the
newspaper. “I tell you, it’s the man! I know him! He spoke to me in the garden!”
Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. “It can’t be,
Mrs. Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.”
“Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space. “Then it was Robert
Elwell who came for him.”
“Came for Boyne? The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers rose. He
bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat.
“Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?”
Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.
“Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me — the one you found on his
desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s death.” She noticed an
odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. “Surely you remember that!” he urged her.
Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the
day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s portrait; and it was the
portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and
looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also
the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished
letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of
halfforgotten words — words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before
Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might
one day live there.
“This was the man who spoke to me,” she repeated.
She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he
imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips
were blue. “He thinks me mad; but I’m not mad,” she reflected; and suddenly there
flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.
She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her
voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: “Will you
answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?”
“When — when?” Parvis stammered.
“Yes; the date. Please try to remember.”
She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. “I have a reason,” she insisted
gently.
“Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should say.”
“I want the date,” she repeated.
Parvis picked up the newspaper. “We might see here,” he said, still humoring her.
He ran his eyes down the page. “Here it is. Last October — the —”
She caught the words from him. “The 20th, wasn’t it?” With a sharp look at her, he
verified. “Yes, the 20th. Then you did know?”
“I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday, the 20th —
that was the day he came first.”
Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came here first?”
“Yes.”
“You saw him twice, then?”
“Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first on the 20th of
October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for
the first time.” She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that
she might have forgotten.
Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.
“We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the limeavenue toward
the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He
was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had
vanished.”
“Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.
“Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t think what
had happened. I see now. He tried to come then; but he wasn’t dead enough — he
couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months; and then he came back again — and
Ned went with him.”
She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully
worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate
gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.
“Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned — I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!”
she screamed out.
She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling ruins; and she
heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to
get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying.
Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on
the lawn at Pangbourne.
“You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long, long afterward.”
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