by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)
But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. ‘Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?’
He almost scowled for it. ‘As different as that – ?’
Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. ‘Haven’t you exactly wanted to know how different? So this morning,’ she said, ‘you appeared to me.’
‘Like him?’
‘A black stranger!’
‘Then how did you know it was I?’
‘Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you mightn’t have been – to show you, you see, how I’ve thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me – that my wonder might be answered. So I knew,’ she went on; ‘and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had – and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. He seemed to tell me of that. So why,’ she strangely smiled, ‘shouldn’t I like him?’
It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. ‘You “like” that horror – ?’
‘I could have liked him. And to me,’ she said, ‘he was no horror. I had accepted him.’
‘ “Accepted” –?’ Brydon oddly sounded.
‘Before, for the interest of his difference – yes. And as I didn’t disown him, as I knew him – which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn’t, my dear – well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him.’
She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand – still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, ‘You “pitied” him?’ he grudgingly, resentfully asked.
‘He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged,’ she said.
‘And haven’t I been unhappy? Am not I – you’ve only to look at me! – ravaged?’
‘Ah I don’t say I like him better,’ she granted after a thought. ‘But he’s grim, he’s worn – and things have happened to him. He doesn’t make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.’
‘No’ – it struck Brydon: ‘I couldn’t have sported mine “downtown.” They’d have guyed me there.’
‘His great convex pince-nez – I saw it, I recognized the kind – is for his poor ruined sight.10 And his poor right hand – !’
‘Ah!’ Brydon winced – whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, ‘He has a million a year,’ he lucidly added. ‘But he hasn’t you.’
‘And he isn’t – no, he isn’t – you!’ she murmured as he drew her to his breast.
MARY AUSTIN
The Readjustment
Emma Jeffries had been dead and buried three days. The sister who had come to the funeral had taken Emma’s child away with her, and the house was swept and aired; then, when it seemed there was least occasion for it, Emma came back. The neighbour woman who had nursed her was the first to know it. It was about seven of the evening in a mellow gloom: the neighbour woman was sitting on her own stoop with her arms wrapped in her apron, and all at once she found herself going along the street under an urgent sense that Emma needed her. She was half-way down the block before she recollected that this was impossible, for Mrs Jeffries was dead and buried; but as soon as she came opposite the house she was aware of what had happened. It was all open to the summer air; except that it was a little neater, not otherwise than the rest of the street. It was quite dark; but the presence of Emma Jeffries streamed from it and betrayed it more than a candle. It streamed out steadily across the garden, and even as it reached her, mixed with the smell of the damp mignonette, the neighbour woman owned to herself that she had always known Emma would come back.1
‘A sight stranger if she wouldn’t,’ thought the woman who had nursed her. ‘She wasn’t ever one to throw off things easily.’
Emma Jeffries had taken death as she had taken everything in life, hard. She had met it with the same bright, surface competency that she had presented to the squalor of the encompassing desertness, to the insuperable commonness of Sim Jeffries, to the affliction of her crippled child; and the intensity of her wordless struggle against it had caught the attention of the townspeople and held it in a shocked curious awe. She was so long a-dying, lying there in that little low house, hearing the abhorred footsteps going about her rooms and the vulgar procedure of the community encroach upon her like the advances of the sand wastes on an unwatered field. For Emma had always wanted things different, wanted them with a fury of intentness that implied offensiveness in things as they were. And the townspeople had taken offence, the more so because she was not to be surprised in any inaptitude for their own kind of success. Do what you could, you could never catch Emma Jeffries in a wrapper after three o’clock in the afternoon.2 And she would never talk about the child – in a country where so little ever happened that even trouble was a godsend if it gave you something to talk about. It was reported that she did not even talk to Sim. But there the common resentment got back at her. If she had thought to effect anything with Sim Jeffries against the benumbing spirit of the place, the evasive hopefulness, the large sense of leisure that ungirt the loins, if she still hoped somehow to get away with him to some place for which by her dress, by her manner, she seemed forever and unassailably fit, it was foregone that nothing would come of it. They knew Sim Jeffries better than that. Yet so vivid had been the force of her wordless dissatisfaction that when the fever took her and she went down like a pasteboard figure in the damp, the wonder was that nothing toppled with her. And, as if she too had felt herself indispensable, Emma Jeffries had come back.
The neighbour woman crossed the street, and as she passed the far corner of the garden, Jeffries spoke to her. He had been standing, she did not know how long a time, behind the syringa-bush, and moved even with her along the fence until they came to the gate.3 She could see in the dusk that before speaking he wet his lips with his tongue.
‘She’s in there,’ he said, at last.
‘Emma?’
He nodded. ‘I been sleeping at the store since – but I thought I’d be more comfortable – as soon as I opened the door there she was.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No.’
‘How do you know, then?’
‘Don’t you know?’
The neighbour felt there was nothing to say to that.
‘Come in,’ he whispered, huskily. They slipped by the rose-tree and the wistaria, and sat down on the porch at the side. A door swung inward behind them. They felt the Presence in the dusk beating like a pulse.
‘What do you think she wants?’ said Jeffries. ‘Do you reckon it’s the boy?’
‘Like enough.’
‘He’s better off with his aunt. There was no one here to take care of him like his mother wanted.’ He raised his voice unconsciously with a note of justification, addressing the room behind.
‘I am sending fifty dollars a month,’ he said; ‘he can go with the best of them.’
He went on at length to explain all the advantage that was to come to the boy from living at Pasadena, and the neighbour woman bore him out in it.4
‘He was glad to go,’ urged Jeffries to the room. ‘He said it was what his mother would have wanted.’
They were silent then a long time, while the Presence seemed to swell upon them and encroached upon the garden.
Finally, ‘I gave Ziegler the order for the monument yesterday,’ Jeffries threw out, appeasingly. ‘It’s to cost three hundred and fifty.’
The Presence stirred. The neighbour thought she could fairly see the controlled tolerance with which Emma Jeffries endured the evidence of Sim’s ineptitudes.
They sat on helplessly without talking after that until the woman’s husband came to the fence and called her.
‘Don’t go,’ begged Sim.
‘Hush,’ she said. ‘Do you
want all the town to know? You had naught but good from Emma living, and no call to expect harm from her now. It’s natural she should come back – if – if she was lonesome like – in – the place where she’s gone to.’
‘Emma wouldn’t come back to this place,’ Jeffries protested, ‘without she wanted something.’
‘Well, then, you’ve got to find out,’ said the neighbour woman.
All the next day she saw, whenever she passed the house, that Emma was still there. It was shut and barred, but the Presence lurked behind the folded blinds and fumbled at the doors. When it was night and the moths began in the columbine under the windows, it went out and walked in the garden.
Jeffries was waiting at the gate when the neighbour woman came. He sweated with helplessness in the warm dusk, and the Presence brooded upon them like an apprehension that grows by being entertained.
‘She wants something,’ he appealed, ‘but I can’t make out what. Emma knows she is welcome to everything I’ve got. Everybody knows I’ve been a good provider.’
The neighbour woman remembered suddenly the only time she had ever drawn close to Emma Jeffries touching the boy. They had sat up with it together all one night in some childish ailment, and she had ventured a question. ‘What does his father think?’ And Emma had turned her a white, hard face of surpassing dreariness.
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted, ‘he never says.’
‘There’s more than providing,’ suggested the neighbour woman.
‘Yes. There’s feeling … but she had enough to do to put up with me. I had no call to be troubling her with such.’ He left off to mop his forehead, and began again.
‘Feelings!’ he said, ‘there’s times a man gets so wore out with feelings he doesn’t have them any more.’
He talked, and presently it grew clear to the woman that he was voiding all the stuff of his life, as if he had sickened on it and was now done. It was a little soul knowing itself and not good to see. What was singular was that the Presence left off walking in the garden, came and caught like a gossamer on the ivy-tree, swayed by the breath of his broken sentences. He talked, and the neighbour woman saw him for once as he saw himself and Emma, snared and floundering in an inexplicable unhappiness. He had been disappointed, too. She had never relished the man he was, and it made him ashamed. That was why he had never gone away, lest he should make her ashamed among her own kind. He was her husband, he could not help that though he was sorry for it. But he could keep the offence where least was made of it. And there was a child – she had wanted a child; but even then he had blundered – begotten a cripple upon her. He blamed himself utterly, searched out the roots of his youth for the answer to that, until the neighbour woman flinched to hear him. But the Presence stayed.
He had never talked to his wife about the child. How should he? There was the fact – the advertisement of his incompetence. And she had never talked to him. That was the one blessed and unassailable memory; that she had spread silence like a balm over his hurt. In return for it he had never gone away. He had resisted her that he might save her from showing among her own kind how poor a man he was. With every word of this ran the fact of his love for her – as he had loved her, with all the stripes of clean and uncleanness. He bared himself as a child without knowing; and the Presence stayed. The talk trailed off at last to the commonplaces of consolation between the retchings of his spirit. The Presence lessened and streamed toward them on the wind of the garden. When it touched them like the warm air of noon that lies sometimes in hollow places after nightfall, the neighbour woman rose and went away.
The next night she did not wait for him. When a rod outside the town – it was a very little one – the burrowing owls whoowhooed, she hung up her apron and went to talk with Emma Jeffries.5 The Presence was there, drawn in, lying close. She found the key between the wistaria and the first pillar of the porch, but as soon as she opened the door she felt the chill that might be expected by one intruding on Emma Jeffries in her own house.
‘ “The Lord is my shepherd,” ’ said the neighbour woman; it was the first religious phrase that occurred to her; then she said the whole of the psalm and after that a hymn.6 She had come in through the door and stood with her back to it and her hand upon the knob. Everything was just as Mrs Jeffries had left it, with the waiting air of a room kept for company.
‘Em,’ she said, boldly, when the chill had abated a little before the sacred words. ‘Em Jeffries, I’ve got something to say to you. And you’ve got to hear,’ she added with firmness, as the white curtains stirred duskily at the window. ‘You wouldn’t be talked to about your troubles when … you were here before; and we humoured you. But now there is Sim to be thought of. I guess you heard what you came for last night, and got good of it. Maybe it would have been better if Sim had said things all along instead of hoarding them in his heart, but any way he has said them now. And what I want to say is, if you was staying on with the hope of hearing it again, you’d be making a mistake. You was an uncommon woman, Emma Jeffries, and there didn’t none of us understand you very well, nor do you justice maybe; but Sim is only a common man, and I understand him because I’m that way myself. And if you think he’ll be opening his heart to you every night, or be any different from what he’s always been on acount of what’s happened, that’s a mistake too … and in a little while, if you stay, it will be as bad as it always was … Men are like that … You’d better go now while there’s understanding between you.’ She stood staring into the darkling room that seemed suddenly full of turbulence and denial. It seemed to beat upon her and take her breath, but she held on.
‘You’ve got to go … Em … and I’m going to stay until you do.’ She said this with finality, and then began again.
‘ “The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart,” ’ and repeated the passage to the end.7 Then as the Presence sank before it, ‘You better go, Emma,’ persuasively, and again after an interval:
‘ “He shall deliver thee in six troubles, yea, in seven shall no evil touch thee.” ’8
… The Presence gathered itself and was still. She could make out that it stood over against the opposite corner by the gilt easel with the crayon portrait of the child.
… ‘ “For thou shalt forget thy misery. Thou shalt remember it as waters that are past,” ’ concluded the neighbour woman, as she heard Jeffries on the gravel outside.9 What the Presence had wrought upon him in the night was visible in his altered mien. He looked more than anything else to be in need of sleep. He had eaten his sorrow, and that was the end of it – as it is with men.
‘I came to see if there was anything I could do for you,’ said the woman, neighbourly, with her hand upon the door.
‘I don’t know as there is,’ said he; ‘I’m much obliged, but I don’t know as there is.’
‘You see,’ whispered the woman over her shoulder, ‘not even to me.’ She felt the tug of her heart as the Presence swept past her.
The neighbour went out after that and walked in the ragged street, past the school-house, across the creek below the town, out by the fields, over the headgate, and back by the town again. It was full nine of the clock when she passed the Jeffries house. It looked, except for being a little neater, not other than the rest of the street. The door was open and the lamp was lit; she saw Jeffries, black against it. He sat reading in a book, like a man at ease in his own house.
EDITH WHARTON
Afterward
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 new perception of its 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.’1 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 out: ‘Well, there’s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo’s cousins, and you can get it for a song.’
The reason 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 favour 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 doubts and demands, 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 water-supply.
‘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 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 been struck by a note of flatness in Alida’s answering hilarity.
‘Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.’