by Michael Sims
After the benediction, as we were leaving our places, I was slightly surprised, again, to see that Mrs. Marden, instead of going out with her companions, had come up the aisle to join us, having apparently something to say to her daughter. She said it, but in an instant I observed that it was only a pretext—her real business was with me. She pushed Charlotte forward and suddenly murmured to me: “Did you see him?”
“The gentleman who sat down here? How could I help seeing him?”
“Hush!” she said, with the intensest excitement; “don’t speak to her—don’t tell her!” She slipped her hand into my arm, to keep me near her, to keep me, it seemed, away from her daughter. The precaution was unnecessary, for Teddy Bostwick had already taken possession of Miss Marden, and as they passed out of church in front of me I saw one of the other men close up on her other hand. It appeared to be considered that I had had my turn. Mrs. Marden withdrew her hand from my arm as soon as we got out, but not before I felt that she had really needed the support. “Don’t speak to any one—don’t tell any one!” she went on.
“I don’t understand. Tell them what?”
“Why, that you saw him.”
“Surely they saw him for themselves.”
“Not one of them, not one of them.” She spoke in a tone of such passionate decision that I glanced at her—she was staring straight before her. But she felt the challenge of my eyes and she stopped short, in the old brown timber porch of the church, with the others well in advance of us, and said, looking at me now and in a quite extraordinary manner: “You’re the only person, the only person in the world.”
“But you, dear madam?”
“Oh me—of course. That’s my curse!” And with this she moved rapidly away from me to join the body of the party. I hovered on its outskirts on the way home, for I had food for rumination. Whom had I seen and why was the apparition—it rose before my mind’s eye very vividly again—invisible to the others? If an exception had been made for Mrs. Marden, why did it constitute a curse, and why was I to share so questionable an advantage? This inquiry, carried on in my own locked breast, kept me doubtless silent enough during luncheon. After luncheon I went out on the old terrace to smoke a cigarette, but I had only taken a couple of turns when I perceived Mrs. Marden’s moulded mask at the window of one of the rooms which opened on the crooked flags. It reminded me of the same flitting presence at the window at Brighton the day I met Charlotte and walked home with her. But this time my ambiguous friend didn’t vanish; she tapped on the pane and motioned me to come in. She was in a queer little apartment, one of the many reception-rooms of which the ground-floor at Tranton consisted; it was known as the Indian room and had a decoration vaguely Oriental—bamboo lounges, lacquered screens, lanterns with long fringes and strange idols in cabinets, objects not held to conduce to sociability. The place was little used, and when I went round to her we had it to ourselves. As soon as I entered she said to me: “Please tell me this; are you in love with my daughter?”
I hesitated a moment. “Before I answer your question, will you kindly tell me what gives you the idea? I don’t consider that I have been very forward.”
Mrs. Marden, contradicting me with her beautiful anxious eyes, gave me no satisfaction on the point I mentioned; she only went on strenuously:
“Did you say nothing to her on the way to church?”
“What makes you think I said anything?”
“The fact that you saw him.”
“Saw whom, dear Mrs. Marden?”
“Oh, you know,” she answered, gravely, even a little reproachfully, as if I were trying to humiliate her by making her phrase the unphraseable.
“Do you mean the gentleman who formed the subject of your strange statement in church—the one who came into the pew?”
“You saw him, you saw him!” Mrs. Marden panted, with a strange mixture of dismay and relief.
“Of course I saw him; and so did you.”
“It didn’t follow. Did you feel it to be inevitable?”
I was puzzled again. “Inevitable?”
“That you should see him?”
“Certainly, since I’m not blind.”
“You might have been; every one else is.” I was wonderfully at sea, and I frankly confessed it to my interlocutress; but the case was not made clearer by her presently exclaiming: “I knew you would, from the moment you should be really in love with her! I knew it would be the test—what do I mean?—the proof.”
“Are there such strange bewilderments attached to that high state?” I asked, smiling.
“You perceive there are. You see him, you see him!” Mrs. Marden announced, with tremendous exaltation. “You’ll see him again.”
“I’ve no objection; but I shall take more interest in him if you’ll kindly tell me who he is.”
She hesitated, looking down a moment; then she said, raising her eyes: “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me first what you said to her on the way to church.”
“Has she told you I said anything?”
“Do I need that?” smiled Mrs. Marden.
“Oh yes, I remember—your intuitions! But I’m sorry to see they’re at fault this time; because I really said nothing to your daughter that was the least out of the way.”
“Are you very sure?”
“On my honour, Mrs. Marden.”
“Then you consider that you’re not in love with her?”
“That’s another affair!” I laughed.
“You are—you are! You wouldn’t have seen him if you hadn’t been.”
“Who the deuce is he, then, madam?” I inquired with some irritation.
She would still only answer me with another question. “Didn’t you at least want to say something to her—didn’t you come very near it?”
The question was much to the point; it justified the famous intuitions. “Very near it—it was the turn of a hair. I don’t know what kept me quiet.”
“That was quite enough,” said Mrs. Marden. “It isn’t what you say that determines it; it’s what you feel. That’s what he goes by.”
I was annoyed, at last, by her reiterated reference to an identity yet to be established, and I clasped my hands with an air of supplication which covered much real impatience, a sharper curiosity and even the first short throbs of a certain sacred dread. “I entreat you to tell me whom you’re talking about.”
She threw up her arms, looking away from me, as if to shake off both reserve and responsibility. “Sir Edmund Orme.”
“And who is Sir Edmund Orme?”
At the moment I spoke she gave a start. “Hush, here they come.” Then as, following the direction of her eyes, I saw Charlotte Marden on the terrace, at the window, she added, with an intensity of warning: “Don’t notice him—never!”
Charlotte, who had had her hands beside her eyes, peering into the room and smiling, made a sign that she was to be admitted, on which I went and opened the long window. Her mother turned away, and the girl came in with a laughing challenge: “What plot, in the world are you two hatching here?” Some plan—I forget what—was in prospect for the afternoon, as to which Mrs. Marden’s participation or consent was solicited—my adhesion was taken for granted—and she had been half over the place in her quest. I was flurried, because I saw that Mrs. Marden was flurried (when she turned round to meet her daughter she covered it by a kind of extravagance, throwing herself on the girl’s neck and embracing her), and to pass it off I said, fancifully, to Charlotte:
“I’ve been asking your mother for your hand.”
“Oh, indeed, and has she given it?” Miss Marden answered, gayly.
“She was just going to when you appeared there.”
“Well, it’s only for a moment—I’ll leave you free.”
“Do you like him, Charlotte?” Mrs. Marden asked, with a candour I scarcely expected.
“It’s difficult to say it before him isn’t it?” the girl replied, entering into the humour of the thing, but looking at me as if she
didn’t like me.
She would have had to say it before another person as well, for at that moment there stepped into the room from the terrace (the window had been left open), a gentleman who had come into sight, at least into mine, only within the instant. Mrs. Marden had said “Here they come,” but he appeared to have followed her daughter at a certain distance. I immediately recognised him as the personage who had sat beside us in church. This time I saw him better, saw that his face and his whole air were strange. I speak of him as a personage, because one felt, indescribably, as if a reigning prince had come into the room. He held himself with a kind of habitual majesty, as if he were different from us. Yet he looked fixedly and gravely at me, till I wondered what he expected of me. Did he consider that I should bend my knee or kiss his hand? He turned his eyes in the same way on Mrs. Marden, but she knew what to do. After the first agitation produced by his approach she took no notice of him whatever; it made me remember her passionate adjuration to me. I had to achieve a great effort to imitate her, for though I knew nothing about him but that he was Sir Edmund Orme I felt his presence as a strong appeal, almost as an oppression. He stood there without speaking—young, pale, handsome, clean-shaven, decorous, with extraordinary light blue eyes and something old-fashioned, like a portrait of years ago, in his head, his manner of wearing his hair. He was in complete mourning (one immediately felt that he was very well dressed), and he carried his hat in his hand. He looked again strangely hard at me, harder than any one in the world had ever looked before; and I remember feeling rather cold and wishing he would say something. No silence had ever seemed to me so soundless. All this was of course an impression intensely rapid; but that it had consumed some instants was proved to me suddenly by the aspect of Charlotte Marden, who stared from her mother to me and back again (he never looked at her, and she had no appearance of looking at him), and then broke out with: “What on earth is the matter with you? You’ve such odd faces!” I felt the colour come back to mine, and when she went on in the same tone: “One would think you had seen a ghost!” I was conscious that I had turned very red. Sir Edmund Orme never blushed, and I could see that he had no capacity for embarrassment. One had met people of that sort, but never any one with such a grand indifference.
“Don’t be impertinent; and go and tell them all that I’ll join them,” said Mrs. Marden with much dignity, but with a quaver in her voice.
“And will you come—you?” the girl asked, turning away. I made no answer, taking the question, somehow, as meant for her companion. But he was more silent than I, and when she reached the door (she was going out that way), she stopped, with her hand on the knob, and looked at me, repeating it. I assented, springing forward to open the door for her, and as she passed out she exclaimed to me mockingly: “You haven’t got your wits about you—you sha’n’t have my hand!”
I closed the door and turned round to find that Sir Edmund Orme had during the moment my back was presented to him retired by the window. Mrs. Marden stood there and we looked at each other long. It had only then—as the girl flitted away—come home to me that her daughter was unconscious of what had happened. It was that, oddly enough, that gave me a sudden, sharp shake, and not my own perception of our visitor, which appeared perfectly natural. It made the fact vivid to me that she had been equally unaware of him in church, and the two facts together—now that they were over—set my heart more sensibly beating. I wiped my forehead, and Mrs. Marden broke out with a low distressful wail: “Now you know my life—now you know my life!”
“In God’s name who is he—what is he?”
“He’s a man I wronged.”
“How did you wrong him?”
“Oh, awfully—years ago.”
“Years ago? Why, he’s very young.”
“Young—young?” cried Mrs. Marden. “He was born before I was!”
“Then why does he look so?”
She came nearer to me, she laid her hand on my arm, and there was something in her face that made me shrink a little. “Don’t you understand—don’t you feel?” she murmured, reproachfully.
“I feel very queer!” I laughed; and I was conscious that my laugh betrayed it.
“He’s dead!” said Mrs. Marden, from her white face.
“Dead?” I panted. “Then that gentleman was—?” I couldn’t even say the word.
“Call him what you like—there are twenty vulgar names. He’s a perfect presence.”
“He’s a splendid presence!” I cried. “The place is haunted—haunted!” I exulted in the word as if it represented the fulfilment of my dearest dream.
“It isn’t the place—more’s the pity! That has nothing to do with it!”
“Then it’s you, dear lady?” I said, as if this were still better.
“No, nor me either—I wish it were!”
“Perhaps it’s me,” I suggested with a sickly smile.
“It’s nobody but my child—my innocent, innocent child!” And with this Mrs. Marden broke down—she dropped into a chair and burst into tears. I stammered some question—I pressed on her some bewildered appeal, but she waved me off, unexpectedly and passionately. I persisted—couldn’t I help her, couldn’t I intervene? “You have intervened,” she sobbed; “you’re in it, you’re in it.”
“I’m very glad to be in anything so curious,” I boldly declared.
“Glad or not, you can’t get out of it.”
“I don’t want to get out of it—it’s too interesting.”
“I’m glad you like it. Go away.”
“But I want to know more about it.”
“You’ll see all you want—go away!”
“But I want to understand what I see.”
“How can you—when I don’t understand myself?”
“We’ll do so together—we’ll make it out.”
At this she got up, doing what she could to obliterate her tears. “Yes, it will be better together—that’s why I’ve liked you.”
“Oh, we’ll see it through!” I declared.
“Then you must control yourself better.”
“I will, I will—with practice.”
“You’ll get used to it,” said Mrs. Marden, in a tone I never forgot. “But go and join them—I’ll come in a moment.”
I passed out to the terrace and I felt that I had a part to play. So far from dreading another encounter with the “perfect presence,” as Mrs. Marden called it, I was filled with an excitement that was positively joyous. I desired a renewal of the sensation—I opened myself wide to the impression; I went round the house as quickly as if I expected to overtake Sir Edmund Orme. I didn’t overtake him just then, but the day was not to close without my recognising that, as Mrs. Marden had said, I should see all I wanted of him.
We took, or most of us took, the collective sociable walk which, in the English country-house, is the consecrated pastime on Sunday afternoons. We were restricted to such a regulated ramble as the ladies were good for; the afternoons, moreover, were short, and by five o’clock we were restored to the fireside in the hall, with a sense, on my part at least, that we might have done a little more for our tea. Mrs. Marden had said she would join us, but she had not appeared; her daughter, who had seen her again before we went out, only explained that she was tired. She remained invisible all the afternoon, but this was a detail to which I gave as little heed as I had given to the circumstance of my not having Miss Marden to myself during all our walk. I was too much taken up with another emotion to care; I felt beneath my feet the threshold of the strange door, in my life, which had suddenly been thrown open and out of which unspeakable vibrations played up through me like a fountain. I had heard all my days of apparitions, but it was a different thing to have seen one and to know that I should in all probability see it familiarly, as it were, again. I was on the look-out for it, as a pilot for the flash of a revolving light, and I was ready to generalise on the sinister subject, to declare that ghosts were much less alarming and much more amusing than was common
ly supposed. There is no doubt that I was extremely nervous. I couldn’t get over the distinction conferred upon me—the exception (in the way of mystic enlargement of vision), made in my favour. At the same time I think I did justice to Mrs. Marden’s absence; it was a commentary on what she had said to me—“Now you know my life.” She had probably been seeing Sir Edmund Orme for years, and, not having my firm fibre, she had broken down under him. Her nerve was gone, though she had also been able to attest that, in a degree, one got used to him. She had got used to breaking down.
Afternoon tea, when the dusk fell early, was a friendly hour at Tranton; the firelight played into the wide, white last-century hall; sympathies almost confessed themselves, lingering together, before dressing, on deep sofas, in muddy boots, for last words, after walks; and even solitary absorption in the third volume of a novel that was wanted by some one else seemed a form of geniality. I watched my moment and went over to Charlotte Marden when I saw she was about to withdraw. The ladies had left the place one by one, and after I had addressed myself particularly to Miss Marden the three men who were near her gradually dispersed. We had a little vague talk—she appeared preoccupied, and heaven knows I was—after which she said she must go: she should be late for dinner. I proved to her by book that she had plenty of time, and she objected that she must at any rate go up to see her mother: she was afraid she was unwell.