“Are you so sure it’s overwork,” David demanded, “and not the beginning of typhoid? She does look downright ill, you know. My own impulse would be to send for a doctor. Could there be anything unwholesome about the house—any eighteenth-century germ that has escaped our scourings?”
We all brooded for a moment on the possibility this opened.
“Do you think distraction would help her?” Anthony asked. “Because I have it here!”—he tapped his breast-pocket, triumphantly. “I’ve patched together in the last few days a good part of the history of Burleigh House. I had meant not to tell you yet, but secrecy is consuming me.”
“Dole the stories out to us one at a time,” David lazily suggested, his interest half-paralyzed by the sheer weight of the August atmosphere. “We’ll inaugurate a series of Nights—if not a Thousand and One, then as many as you please. And you’ll begin to-night, of course. Can you go as far back as Judge Timothy?”
“Yes—if you would rather begin there. Though I hadn’t planned—”
“Then it’s settled,” I interrupted. And this was indeed so precisely I what we had all been thirstily waiting for that I thought it a sufficient pretext for disturbing Beatrice on the spot. Moreover, David’s hints had freshly stimulated my own smoldering anxiety in regard to my friend. I had been too passive—I should have forced her to spare herself. The unnamable fears that I had felt on the day of her arrival recurred and pierced me.
In the Long Chamber I found her rather wearily putting away her work for the day. She stood by her table, a slender, drooping figure with a sheaf of fluttering papers in her hand, and faced me—still without the look of affectionate welcome I had so missed of late; merely with a sweet patience and courtesy. I should perhaps have approached my end by gentle, gradual arts, but my concern for her abruptly overflowed in unconsidered words. I begged her to admit to me that she wasn’t well, that I might insist on proper care for her. I blamed bitterly my own laxity in allowing her to wear herself out as she had done. The publication of her husband’s book on a certain day could not, I urged, be a matter so imperative that she must sacrifice her youth, her life, to it. By every obligation of our old friendship I implored her to intrust herself to me—and I laid especial stress on my responsibility to her absent husband.
“You were all vigor and loveliness when you came to us,” I reminded her. “And now—now—you are so changed!”
She looked at me in a half-startled fashion as I said this, and a dim, ambiguous smile trembled on her lips.
“Yes—he will find me changed.” She spoke thoughtfully, but quite without emphasis. “But that is something I must face alone.”
If she had said no more than this she would have left me with the impression that the distant Dr. Vesper was a subtler Bluebeard. And indeed a look of secrecy and dread that I now for the first time caught flowing darkly over her candid face was wretchedly that of the wife who has opened the forbidden door and is haunted by the intolerable knowledge that must shortly betray her. Could it, after all, be a worse than physical suffering that was draining her eyes of their look of life? She had begun to move uneasily about, and I felt that she would have been glad to have me leave her. But unable longer to endure the intervening shield, I made a desperate effort to demolish it, to force her reluctant confidence; and with hot cheeks and trembling voice I stammered crude, disconnected sentences on the frequent failure of men to understand women and situations…on the indulgence with which we were forced to regard many masculine traits…
“Oh, you have thought that?” she interrupted me, almost shrilly—“that my husband caused me suffering? Why, Molly, I supposed you knew, that everybody knew, how utterly, stainlessly good he is. It is I, oh, always I, who fall short.” She took my hand gently. “You must not go until I have told you how it is.” And we sat down together.
Much of what she then told me I did indeed already know, but under a different complexion from that with which she now invested it—how at nineteen she had married Edward Vesper almost frivolously, with no sense of sacredness, lightly assuming—though this was, of course, true enough—that she was bestowing a blessing by becoming the wife of the man for whom she felt a merely childlike affection. How, afterward, she had discovered that the marriage had been urged, hurried, by her poor, desperate mother, who, with four younger children, was at the end of everything; and how Dr. Vesper’s money had supported them all ever since.…
“Then I saw,” Beatrice slowly went on, after a little, though I saw what the words were costing her, “how narrowly my own foolish ignorance had saved me from baseness. I had married for my own advantage a man who gave me perfect love. Facing this, I saw that from that moment I was bound to give more than I had ever dreamed of giving. And that, if I couldn’t love my husband as he so wonderfully loved me, I must at least offer him the most sedulous counterfeit I could muster. That the least abatement of unremitting devotion would be treachery.… Well, that has been my life, and always, until now, I have known that no woman could do more—”
She would have gone on, the momentum of an impulsive confidence is so great, but at that point the maid came in search of me, announcing dinner. So, after a violent flurry of dressing, Beatrice and I contrived, ten minutes later, to be with the others in the dining-room. The disclosure she had made to me, with its intensely characteristic light on the apparent enigmas of her marriage, seemed for the time to have loosed a painful restraint. She talked with gentle gaiety, exchanging swift jests with the imperturbable Anthony, for whom I knew she had come to have a genuine liking, and seeming humanly at home with all of us, rather than driven, as one could fancy her latterly to have been, by some invisible harriers.
It even seemed natural and expected when, after dinner, Beatrice, who had so often spent her evenings alone, chose to seat herself at the old spinet and coax from it a few dim spectral chords.
“There’s the prelude for your story, Anthony,” David remarked when she had finished.
“It’s a perfect one,” Anthony declared. “Those are, of course, the very sounds with which Anne Burleigh beguiled her solemn days.”
I had caught a note in his voice that awed me a little. “Anne Burleigh—you’re to tell us of her! Then it won’t, of course, be a cheerful story. Why is it that it has always been she, rather than any of the others, for whom our hearts have vaguely ached?”
“Cheerful? But of course not,” Anthony rejoined with energy. “It can’t be that you wanted me to discover simple tales of domestic lethargy. That isn’t the sort of thing that leaves its impress on a family—and a house. That wouldn’t be a story.”
Then, as we urged him to begin, he altered his tone and turned to David a serious face. “You’ll have to understand,” he said, “that I’m taking a great liberty—with you and with your ancestors. This story that I’ve made out and that I’ll repeat to you is, as a matter of fact, very largely—inferred. It’s by no means an explicit tradition. But the inference seems to me so plain—and after living here in the house it is, oddly, so credible—and, well, you must forgive me, if, after all, you prefer to leave the inference unformulated.”
None of us spoke; and I let my sewing drop in my lap.
“As you know,” Anthony began, “Judge Timothy Burleigh married Anne Steele when she was seventeen. A year or two afterward, when they were living in this new and splendid Burleigh House, Sophia Steele, the young wife’s sister, came to pay a visit. In this young girl’s diary, which tells so much else, and which I’ve had the astonishing fortune to discover, she records her impression of her sister, who looked ‘very maidenly, though the wife of so great a man and the mistress of so fine a house.’ But I won’t read you her crabbed little sentences—you can see them for yourselves later; I’ll simply try to make a connected story.…
“Judge Timothy does not appear to have markedly played the lover to his charming little bride,
but Sophia heard him praise her for her obedience, saying that it was the prime virtue in a wife. I had supposed that the housewives of that day had exacting responsibilities, but possibly because it was so fine a thing to be the Judge’s wife, or else because her youth exempted her, little Mistress Burleigh seems to have had abundant leisure. She would play the spinet for hours at a time or she would sit with her baby boy—”
“The boy must have been Colonel Jonathan,” David, who has always been rather too fond of facts, interposed. “Anne Burleigh had but one child.”
“You see her, don’t you, as I do,” Anthony went on, “forlorn little Maeterlinckian heroine, treated as a child by her husband and practising rigidly the submission he exacted of her? It must have been a dull household, in spite of the splendid entertaining that took place at intervals, or sister Sophia wouldn’t have had so much leisure to write in her diary. And it must have been an unnatural one, or—the climax wouldn’t have flamed so suddenly. Something had to happen in such a house—and it did happen, as I make out, when a young relative of the Burleighs from Virginia came North to seek advancement in the law through his distinguished relative, the Judge. This young man, Brian Calvert, was asked to Burleigh House as a guest. It is very plain that he was keenly admired from the first by little sister Sophia, who meticulously describes his height and beauty and ‘merry manners.’ The Judge, I imagine, did not diffuse much merriment through the house. But the Virginian probably didn’t see little Sophia; his attention was too completely and frankly absorbed. So she stayed apart, a sad, involuntary little spy, not critical or even fully comprehending, but vaguely and innocently envious, I gather, of an unknown mysterious thing with which the air about her had suddenly become surcharged. Anne Burleigh herself, poor child, was doubtless almost as far from understanding what had befallen her. At all events, there seems to have been no concealment. Anne and Calvert spent long days together, sitting under the trees in the garden. No one knows whether he said a word of love to her—I could almost believe that he did not. But the young, innocent creatures were none the less firmly in the grasp of the elemental force that was about to shatter them. It may have been love of the kind that absolutely cannot yield to reason, and that could never adapt itself to a slow cooling and decline—”
“Of course, they had to die,” Beatrice Vesper broke in. “One cannot love like that—and live.”
Her voice held somber secrets. It was as though she were speaking of something intimately real. I tried to see her face, but the shadow veiled it.
Anthony paused for a moment as though he, too, were amazed at her interruption. “Yes,” he said, “there had to be a tragic issue.… The happenings of a certain day were told long after, but vaguely, in Sophia’s journal. Perhaps the child herself only suspected.… One day Brian Calvert was ill and remained in his room. When evening came Anne suggested taking some supper to him. The Judge reminded her, and rather ungently, that such an errand was for a servant to perform.… An hour later she burst into her sister’s bedroom in a passion of fear. She had for the first time eluded and disobeyed her husband, taking to Calvert’s room a porringer of gruel that she had made herself. The Judge, whom she doubtless supposed busy with his books, heard her step, followed her, and, entering the room a moment later, discovered her in Calvert’s arms. I am sure they had never kissed before, but to her husband this was no extenuation. The Judge forced Anne from the room. Listening outside, she heard the sound of swords—and more—and worse.… Brian Calvert was never seen again. Anne Burleigh herself fell ill, and a few months later she died.”
I felt that we had heard as much as we could bear, but David did not understand my signal, and advanced his literal and perfectly reasonable inquiry:
“Are you sure that Calvert was killed?”
“Entirely sure,” Anthony said, a little dryly, “though there isn’t a shadow of proof. Can you imagine such a husband hesitating or failing of his purpose?”
“You believe that they fought each other in this house?” David went on, in his solemn effort to realize the thing. “And there is no record of it? But where can it have been? You don’t know that, of course?”
“Yes, I know,” Anthony admitted, slowly. “It was in the guest-room. They called it the Long Chamber.”
“The Long Chamber!” David repeated. And he turned toward Beatrice his honest, unperceiving eyes.
Beatrice had been sitting motionless. Now she rose hastily. “Why should you feel it tragic that he died?” she demanded, almost with brusqueness, but without looking at any one of us. “He would have chosen it. It was no unwilling death—that much I know.” Her voice, usually so calm, was roughened with agitation. “I have stayed too long,” she added. “I am very tired and should have gone earlier. But the story held us so.
She was gone before I had found words to detain her, and we all sat silent. Then Anthony said:
“I felt it before I had half finished the story. I know it now. She has seen Calvert’s ghost!”
“That’s preposterous!” David exclaimed.
“Because you haven’t seen it yourself’?” our friend inquired, quietly. “But, my dear David, have you ever slept in that room? And in any case what would the ghost of that young lover have to say to you?”
“Or to Beatrice Vesper, for that matter?” I added.
Anthony shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?” he said. “I admit that if it were the usual family specter, I can’t conceive her risking a second encounter. But Calvert’s apparition—that might perhaps be less formidable.… Still, it’s all much queerer than I like—and I’m not even sure I want her to tell.”
David began to be troubled. “Molly, you know her. We don’t. Is she so infernally secretive? Could she see a ghost in our house without telling us? And why shouldn’t she tell?”
I sat brooding, conscious that I was trembling a response to every lightest breath of air. There were secrets about; the troubled atmosphere was heavy with them. Something had happened to Beatrice, as any one but my dear dull David could have seen. But since we three were so blindly in the dark, how and whence could it have come? Anthony was, of course, uncommonly astute, yet I had no curiosity as to the guesses I saw him shrewdly elaborating. He did not know Beatrice’s sound, unassailable simplicity as I knew it.
We were all, indeed, unnaturally alert, tensely awaiting we knew not what, so that when the door-bell rang we all started as though the sound had some portentous significance—holding our breath, fairly, until the maid came in with an envelope which she said was for Mrs. Vesper.
“It’s a cable,” I said. “I’ll take it up to her.”
A half-hour must have passed since she had gone upstairs, yet when I knocked she came to her door fully dressed. When she saw the envelope she asked me to stay until she had read the message—which was, she told me, a moment later, from her husband. He was sailing and would arrive in a week.
With a sense of relief that was almost disloyal I welcomed this definite, prosaic event. At least it would dissipate the vapors that had gathered. “Can’t we send for him to come directly here?” I suggested. “Must you meet him in New York when it is so hot and you’re not really well?”
She laid her hand gently on my arm, instinctively trying to soften the harsh abruptness of what she was about to say.
“Why shouldn’t I tell you? I shall never see him again.”
The words sounded so unreasoning that I felt myself growing literally cold. “But, dear Beatrice—it was such a little time ago—in this very room—that you told me—”
“Of his goodness and his love. And of the obligations they imposed on me. But now—if I can’t fully meet them—if I’m not the same—”
Her phrases were still without meaning to me. I tried vaguely to protest. “But your courage—”
“Oh, I had courage—for a lifetime. But I was mercifull
y blindfolded. Now, when I know—”
Anthony’s confident statement recurred to me, precipitating dim suspicions, intimations, of my own.
“Beatrice, what is it that you have learned to know?” I demanded, firmly. “What is it that you have—seen?”
She cast a quick glance toward the old mirror, dull-rimmed, garlanded, in which she had gaily told me that she expected to see Anne Burleigh’s child—like face. “Seen?” she repeated. “Oh, dear Molly, it’s not alone what I have seen.… But there is something that lives on here, in this room, of which I merely knew the name.… I have felt it almost from the first moment. And there have been hours when I have so shared in it—when I have lived with an intensity I had never dreamed of—”
“Beatrice,”—I pressed her for something more definite—“you have seen Anne Burleigh?”
“Oh, it’s not she who has left the deathless element,” Beatrice said. “It’s the man who loved her, who loved so well that he did not need to live. You see his love was so complete that it gained an earthly immortality of its own. It is here—now. I did not know such things could be. And, oh, Molly, I have tried not to know! You have seen how I have struggled to fill up my time and thought with work. I have not welcomed this other new thing, I have shrunk from it. But it has seized me and stripped my eyes and dazzled them—and I know what love can be.”
“Brian Calvert has taught you!” I could not help the words. And, in spite of me, they sounded like an accusation.
“If it were only a lesson I could unlearn,” she answered, quietly. “If I could only forget the sweet terror of it all.”
“The terror of dreams and visions? But, dear Beatrice, that fades and vanishes.”
“It is already vanished. But not before it has changed me past all helping. You can see how, after this, I can never—pretend to love.”
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 17