Again I saw Mrs. Vanderbridge, with her nervous gesture, glance in the direction of the hall, and to my amazement, as she did so, a woman’s figure glided noiselessly over the old Persian rug at the door, and entered the dining-room. I was wondering why no one spoke to her, why she spoke to no one, when I saw her sink into a chair on the other side of Mr. Vanderbridge and unfold her napkin. She was quite young, younger even than Mrs. Vanderbridge, and though she was not really beautiful, she was the most graceful creature I had ever imagined. Her dress was of grey stuff, softer and more clinging than silk, and of a peculiar misty texture and colour, and her parted hair lay like twilight on either side of her forehead. She was not like any one I had ever seen before—she appeared so much frailer, so much more elusive, as if she would vanish if you touched her. I can’t describe, even months afterwards, the singular way in which she attracted and repelled me.
At first I glanced inquiringly at Mrs. Vanderbridge, hoping that she would introduce me, but she went on talking rapidly in an intense, quivering voice, without noticing the presence of her guest by so much as the lifting of her eyelashes. Mr. Vanderbridge still sat there, silent and detached, and all the time the eyes of the stranger—starry eyes with a mist over them—looked straight through me at the tapestried wall at my back. I knew she didn’t see me and that it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to her if she had seen me. In spite of her grace and her girlishness I did not like her, and I felt that this aversion was not on my side alone. I do not know how I received the impression that she hated Mrs. Vanderbridge—never once had she glanced in her direction—yet I was aware, from the moment of her entrance, that she was bristling with animosity, though animosity is too strong a word for the resentful spite, like the jealous rage of a spoiled child, which gleamed now and then in her eyes. I couldn’t think of her as wicked any more than I could think of a bad child as wicked. She was merely wilful and undisciplined and—I hardly know how to convey what I mean—selfish.
After her entrance the dinner dragged on heavily. Mrs. Vanderbridge still kept up her nervous chatter, but nobody listened, for I was too embarrassed to pay any attention to what she said, and Mr. Vanderbridge had never recovered from his abstraction. He was like a man in a dream, not observing a thing that happened before him, while the strange woman sat there in the candlelight with her curious look of vagueness and unreality. To my astonishment not even the servants appeared to notice her, and though she had unfolded her napkin when she sat down, she wasn’t served with either the roast or the salad. Once or twice, particularly when a new course was served, I glanced at Mrs. Vanderbridge to see if she would rectify the mistake, but she kept her gaze fixed on her plate. It was just as if there were a conspiracy to ignore the presence of the stranger, though she had been, from the moment of her entrance, the dominant figure at the table. You tried to pretend she wasn’t there, and yet you knew—you knew vividly that she was gazing insolently straight through you.
The dinner lasted, it seemed, for hours, and you may imagine my relief when at last Mrs. Vanderbridge rose and led the way back into the drawing-room. At first I thought the stranger would follow us, but when I glanced round from the hall she was still sitting there beside Mr. Vanderbridge, who was smoking a cigar with his coffee.
“Usually he takes his coffee with me,” said Mrs. Vanderbridge, “but tonight he has things to think over.”
“I thought he seemed absent-minded.”
“You noticed it, then?” She turned to me with her straightforward glance, “I always wonder how much strangers notice. He hadn’t been well of late, and he has these spells of depression. Nerves are dreadful things, aren’t they?”
I laughed. “So I’ve heard, but I’ve never been able to afford them.”
“Well, they do cost a great deal, don’t they?” She had a trick of ending her sentences with a question, “I hope your room is comfortable, and that you don’t feel timid about being alone on that floor. If you haven’t nerves, you can’t get nervous, can you?”
“No, I can’t get nervous.” Yet while I spoke, I was conscious of a shiver deep down in me, as if my senses reacted again to the dread that permeated the atmosphere.
As soon as I could, I escaped to my room, and I was sitting there over a book, when the maid—her name was Hopkins, I had discovered—came in on the pretext of inquiring if I had everything I needed. One of the innumerable servants had already turned down my bed, so when Hopkins appeared at the door, I suspected at once that there was a hidden motive underlying her ostensible purpose.
“Mrs. Vanderbridge told me to look after you,” she began. “She is afraid you will be lonely until you learn the way of things.”
“No, I’m not lonely,” I answered. “I’ve never had time to be lonely.”
“I used to be like that; but time hangs heavy on my hands now. That’s why I’ve taken to knitting.” She held out a grey yarn muffler. “I had an operation a year ago, and since then Mrs. Vanderbridge has had another maid—a French one—to sit up for her at night and undress her. She is always so fearful of overtaxing us, though there isn’t really enough work for two lady’s maids, because she is so thoughtful that she never gives any trouble if she can help it.”
“It must be nice to be rich,” I said idly, as I turned a page of my book. Then I added almost before I realized what I was saying, “The other lady doesn’t look as if she had so much money.”
Her face turned paler if that were possible, and for a minute I thought she was going to faint. “The other lady?”
“I mean the one who came down late to dinner—the one in the grey dress. She wore no jewels, and her dress wasn’t low in the neck.”
“Then you saw her?” There was a curious flicker in her face as if her pallor came and went.
“We were at the table when she came in. Has Mr. Vanderbridge a secretary who lives in the house?”
“No, he hasn’t a secretary except at his office. When he wants one at the house, he telephones to his office.”
“I wondered why she came, for she didn’t eat any dinner, and nobody spoke to her—not even Mr. Vanderbridge.”
“Oh, he never speaks to her. Thank God, it hasn’t come to that yet.”
“Then why does she come? It must be dreadful to be treated like that, and before the servants, too. Does she come often?”
“There are months and months when she doesn’t. I can always tell by the way Mrs. Vanderbridge picks up. You wouldn’t know her, she is so full of life—the very picture of happiness. Then one evening she—the Other One, I mean—comes back again, just as she did tonight, just as she did last summer, and it all begins over from the beginning.”
“But can’t they keep her out—the Other One? Why do they let her in?”
“Mrs. Vanderbridge tries hard. She tries all she can every minute. You saw her tonight?”
“And Mr. Vanderbridge? Can’t he help her?”
She shook her head with an ominous gesture. “He doesn’t know.”
“He doesn’t know she is there? Why, she was close by him. She never took her eyes off him except when she was staring through me at the wall.”
“Oh, he knows she is there, but not in that way. He doesn’t know that any one else knows.”
I gave it up, and after a minute she said in an oppressed voice, “It seems strange that you should have seen her. I never have.”
“But you know all about her.”
“I know and I don’t know. Mrs. Vanderbridge lets things drop sometimes—she gets ill and feverish very easily—but she never tells me anything outright. She isn’t that sort.”
“Haven’t the servants told you about her—the Other One?”
At this, I thought, she seemed startled. “Oh, they don’t know anything to tell. They feel that something is wrong; that is why they never stay longer than a week or
two—we’ve had eight butlers since autumn—but they never see what it is.”
She stooped to pick up the ball of yarn which had rolled under my chair. “If the time ever comes when you can stand between them, you will do it?” she asked.
“Between Mrs. Vanderbridge and the Other One?”
Her look answered me.
“You think, then, that she means harm to her?”
“I don’t know. Nobody knows—but she is killing her.”
The clock struck ten, and I returned to my book with a yawn, while Hopkins gathered up her work and went out, after wishing me a formal goodnight. The odd part about our secret conferences was that as soon as they were over, we began to pretend so elaborately to each other that they had never been.
“I’ll tell Mrs. Vanderbridge that you are very comfortable,” was the last remark Hopkins made before she sidled out of the door and left me alone with the mystery. It was one of those situations—I am obliged to repeat this over and over—that was too preposterous for me to believe in even while I was surrounded and overwhelmed by its reality. I didn’t dare face what I thought, I didn’t dare face even what I felt; but I went to bed shivering in a warm room, while I resolved passionately that if the chance ever came to me I would stand between Mrs. Vanderbridge and this unknown evil that threatened her.
* * * *
In the morning Mrs. Vanderbridge went out shopping, and I did not see her until the evening, when she passed me on the staircase as she was going out to dinner and the opera. She was radiant in blue velvet, with diamonds in her hair and at her throat, and I wondered again how any one so lovely could ever be troubled.
“I hope you had a pleasant day, Miss Wrenn,” she said kindly. “I have been too busy to get off any letters, but tomorrow we shall begin early.” Then, as if from an afterthought, she looked back and added, “There are some new novels in my sitting-room. You might care to look over them.”
When she had gone, I went upstairs to the sitting-room and turned over the books, but I couldn’t, to save my life, force an interest in printed romances, after meeting Mrs. Vanderbridge and remembering the mystery that surrounded her. I wondered if “the Other One,” as Hopkins called her, lived in the house, and I was still wondering this when the maid came in and began putting the table to rights.
“Do they dine out often?” I asked.
“They used to, but since Mr. Vanderbridge hasn’t been so well, Mrs. Vanderbridge doesn’t like to go without him. She only went tonight because he begged her to.”
She had barely finished speaking when the door opened, and Mr. Vanderbridge came in and sat down in one of the big velvet chairs before the wood fire. He had not noticed us, for one of his moods was upon him, and I was about to slip out as noiselessly as I could when I saw that the Other One was standing in the patch of firelight on the hearthrug. I had not seen her come in, and Hopkins evidently was still unaware of her presence, for while I was watching, I saw the maid turn towards her with a fresh log for the fire. At the moment it occurred to me that Hopkins must be either blind or drunk, for without hesitating in her advance, she moved on the stranger, holding the huge hickory log out in front of her. Then, before I could utter a sound or stretch out a hand to stop her, I saw her walk straight through the grey figure and carefully place the log on the andirons.
So she isn’t real, after all, she is merely a phantom, I found myself thinking, as I fled from the room, and hurried along the hall to the staircase. She is only a ghost, and nobody believes in ghosts any longer. She is something that I know doesn’t exist, yet even, though she can’t possibly be, I can swear that I have seen her. My nerves were so shaken by the discovery that as soon as I reached my room I sank in a heap on the rug, and it was here that Hopkins found me a little later when she came to bring me an extra blanket.
“You looked so upset I thought you might have seen something,” she said. “Did anything happen while you were in the room?”
“She was there all the time—every blessed minute. You walked right through her when you put the log on the fire. Is it possible that you didn’t see her?”
“No, I didn’t see anything out of the way.” She was plainly frightened. “Where was she standing?”
“On the hearthrug in front of Mr. Vanderbridge. To reach the fire you had to walk straight through her, for she didn’t move. She didn’t give way an inch.”
“Oh, she never gives way. She never gives way living or dead.”
This was more than human nature could stand.
“In heavens name,” I cried irritably, “who is she?”
“Don’t you know?” She appeared genuinely surprised. “Why, she is the other Mrs. Vanderbridge. She died fifteen years ago, just a year after they were married, and people say a scandal was hushed up about her, which he never knew. She isn’t a good sort, that’s what I think of her, though they say he almost worshipped her.”
“And she still has this hold on him?”
“He can’t shake it off, that’s what’s the matter with him, and if it goes on, he will end his days in an asylum. You see, she was very young, scarcely more than a girl, and he got the idea in his head that it was marrying him that killed her. If you want to know what I think, I believe she put it there for a purpose.”
“You mean—?” I was so completely at sea that I couldn’t frame a rational question. “I mean she haunts him purposely in order to drive him out of his mind. She was always that sort, jealous and exacting, the kind that clutches and strangles a man, and I’ve often thought, though I’ve no head for speculation, that we carry into the next world the traits and feelings that have got the better of us in this one. It seems to me only common sense to believe that we’re obliged to work them off somewhere until we are free of them. That is the way my first lady used to talk, anyhow, and I’ve never found anybody that could give me a more sensible idea.”
“And isn’t there any way to stop it? What has Mrs. Vanderbridge done?”
“Oh, she can’t do anything now. It has got beyond her, though she has had doctor after doctor, and tried everything she could think of. But, you see, she is handicapped because she can’t mention it to her husband. He doesn’t know that she knows.”
“And she won’t tell him?”
“She is the sort that would die first—just the opposite from the Other One—for she leaves him free, she never clutches and strangles. It isn’t her way.” For a moment she hesitated, and then added grimly—“I’ve wondered if you could do anything?”
“If I could? Why, I am a perfect stranger to them all.”
“That’s why I’ve been thinking it. Now, if you could corner her some day—the Other One—and tell her up and down to her face what you think of her.”
The idea was so ludicrous that it made me laugh in spite of my shaken nerves. “They would fancy me out of my wits! Imagine stopping an apparition and telling it what you think of it!”
“Then you might try talking it over with Mrs. Vanderbridge. It would help her to know that you see her also.”
But the next morning, when I went down to Mrs. Vanderbridge’s room, I found that she was too ill to see me. At noon a trained nurse came on the case, and for a week we took our meals together in the morning-room upstairs. She appeared competent enough, but I am sure that she didn’t so much as suspect that there was anything wrong in the house except the influenza which had attacked Mrs. Vanderbridge the night of the opera. Never once during that week did I catch a glimpse of the Other One, though I felt her presence whenever I left my room and passed through the hall below. I knew all the time as well as if I had seen her that she was hidden there, watching, watching—
At the end of the week Mrs. Vanderbridge sent for me to write some letters, and when I went into her room, I found her lying on the couch with a tea-table in front of her. She asked me to make th
e tea because she was still so weak, and I saw that she looked flushed and feverish, and that her eyes were unnaturally large and bright. I hoped she wouldn’t talk to me, because people in that state are apt to talk too much and then to blame the listener; but I had hardly taken my seat at the tea-table before she said in a hoarse voice—the cold had settled on her chest:
“Miss Wrenn, I have wanted to ask you ever since the other evening—did you—did you see anything unusual at dinner? From your face when you came out I thought—I thought—”
I met this squarely. “That I might have? Yes, I did see something.”
“You saw her?”
“I saw a woman come in and sit down at the table, and I wondered why no one served her. I saw her quite distinctly.”
“A small woman, thin and pale, in a grey dress?”
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 19