“You?” she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.
It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art. The difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdale’s balance.
“Why not?” he said, restoring the book. “Isn’t it my hour?” And as she made no answer, he added gently, “Unless it’s some one else’s?”
She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. “Mine, merely,” she said.
“I hope that doesn’t mean that you’re unwilling to share it?”
“With you? By no means. You’re welcome to my last crust.”
He looked at her reproachfully. “Do you call this the last?”
She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. “It’s a way of giving it more flavor!”
He returned the smile. “A visit to you doesn’t need such condiments.”
She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.
“Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste,” she confessed.
Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into the imprudence of saying, “Why should you want it to be different from what was always so perfectly right?”
She hesitated. “Doesn’t the fact that it’s the last constitute a difference?”
“The last—my last visit to you?”
“Oh, metaphorically, I mean—there’s a break in the continuity.”
Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!
“I don’t recognize it,” he said. “Unless you make me—” he added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.
She turned to him with grave eyes. “You recognize no difference whatever?”
“None—except an added link in the chain.”
“An added link?”
“In having one more thing to like you for—your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many.” He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.
Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. “Was it that you came for?” she asked, almost gaily.
“If it is necessary to have a reason—that was one.”
“To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?”
“To tell you how she talks about you.”
“That will be very interesting—especially if you have seen her since her second visit to me.”
“Her second visit?” Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and moved to another. “She came to see you again?”
“This morning, yes—by appointment.”
He continued to look at her blankly. “You sent for her?”
“I didn’t have to—she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you have seen her since.”
Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. “I saw her off just now at the station.”
“And she didn’t tell you that she had been here again?”
“There was hardly time, I suppose—there were people about—” he floundered.
“Ah, she’ll write, then.”
He regained his composure. “Of course she’ll write: very often, I hope. You know I’m absurdly in love,” he cried audaciously.
She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. “Oh, my poor Thursdale!” she murmured.
“I suppose it’s rather ridiculous,” he owned; and as she remained silent, he added, with a sudden break—“Or have you another reason for pitying me?”
Her answer was another question. “Have you been back to your rooms since you left her?”
“Since I left her at the station? I came straight here.”
“Ah, yes—you COULD: there was no reason—” Her words passed into a silent musing.
Thursdale moved nervously nearer. “You said you had something to tell me?”
“Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your rooms.”
“A letter? What do you mean? A letter from HER? What has happened?”
His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. “Nothing has happened—perhaps that is just the worst of it. You always HATED, you know,” she added incoherently, “to have things happen: you never would let them.”
“And now—?”
“Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To know if anything had happened.”
“Had happened?” He gazed at her slowly. “Between you and me?” he said with a rush of light.
The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between them that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.
“You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?”
His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.
Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: “I supposed it might have struck you that there were times when we presented that appearance.”
He made an impatient gesture. “A man’s past is his own!”
“Perhaps—it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is naturally inexperienced.”
“Of course—but—supposing her act a natural one—” he floundered lamentably among his innuendoes—“I still don’t see—how there was anything—”
“Anything to take hold of? There wasn’t—”
“Well, then—?” escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: “She can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!”
“But she does,” said Mrs. Vervain.
Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid ring of the girl’s praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution. The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct query: “Won’t you explain what you mean?”
Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.
At last she said slowly: “She came to find out if you were really free.”
Thursdale colored again. “Free?” he stammered, with a sense of physical disgust at contact with such crassness.
“Yes—if I had quite done with you.” She smiled in recovered security. “It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions.”
“Yes—well?” he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.
“Well—and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she wanted me to define MY status—to know exactly where I had stood all along.”
Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue. “And even when you had told her that—”
“Even when I had told her that I had HAD no status—that I had never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant,” said Mrs. Vervain, slowly—“even then she wasn’t satisfied, it seems.”
He uttered an uneasy exclamation. “She didn’t believe you, you mean?”
“I mean that she DID believe me: too thoroughly.”
“Well, then—in God’s name, what did she want?”
“Something more—those were the words she used.”
“Something more? Between—between you and me? Is it a conundrum?”
He laughed awkwardly.
“Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes.”
“So it seems!” he commented. “But since, in this case, there wasn’t any—” he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.
“That’s just it. The unpardonable offence has been—in our not offending.”
He flung himself down despairingly. “I give it up!—What did you tell her?” he burst out with sudden crudeness.
“The exact truth. If I had only known,” she broke off with a beseeching tenderness, “won’t you believe that I would still have lied for you?”
“Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?”
“To save you—to hide you from her to the last! As I’ve hidden you from myself all these years!” She stood up with a sudden tragic import in her movement. “You believe me capable of that, don’t you? If I had only guessed—but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out of me with a spring.”
“The truth that you and I had never—”
“Had never—never in all these years! Oh, she knew why—she measured us both in a flash. She didn’t suspect me of having haggled with you—her words pelted me like hail. ‘He just took what he wanted—sifted and sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of cinders. And you let him—you let yourself be cut in bits’—she mixed her metaphors a little—‘be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he’s Shylock—and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut out of you.’ But she despises me the most, you know—far the most—” Mrs. Vervain ended.
The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.
Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of reticence and ambiguity had fallen.
His first words were characteristic. “She DOES despise me, then?” he exclaimed.
“She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the heart.”
He was excessively pale. “Please tell me exactly what she said of me.”
“She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed an unwillingness to be taken with reservations—she thinks you would have loved her better if you had loved some one else first. The point of view is original—she insists on a man with a past!”
“Oh, a past—if she’s serious—I could rake up a past!” he said with a laugh.
“So I suggested: but she has her eyes on his particular portion of it. She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling her.”
Thursdale drew a difficult breath. “I never supposed—your revenge is complete,” he said slowly.
He heard a little gasp in her throat. “My revenge? When I sent for you to warn you—to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?”
“You’re very good—but it’s rather late to talk of saving me.” He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.
“How you must care!—for I never saw you so dull,” was her answer. “Don’t you see that it’s not too late for me to help you?” And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: “Take the rest—in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied to her—she’s too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I sha’n’t have been wasted.”
His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.
It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and took her hand.
“You would do it—you would do it!”
She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.
“Good-by,” he said, kissing it.
“Good-by? You are going—?”
“To get my letter.”
“Your letter? The letter won’t matter, if you will only do what I ask.”
He returned her gaze. “I might, I suppose, without being out of character. Only, don’t you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?”
“Harm HER?”
“To sacrifice you wouldn’t make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been—sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to fall on HER?”
She looked at him long and deeply. “Ah, if I had to choose between you—!”
“You would let her take her chance? But I can’t, you see. I must take my punishment alone.”
She drew her hand away, sighing. “Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you.”
“For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me.”
She shook her head with a slight laugh. “There will be no letter.”
Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look. “No letter? You don’t mean—”
“I mean that she’s been with you since I saw her—she’s seen you and heard your voice. If there IS a letter, she has recalled it—from the first station, by telegraph.”
He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. “But in the mean while I shall have read it,” he said.
The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.
The End
THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND
As first published in Atlantic Monthly, August 1904
I
“Above all,” the letter ended, “don’t leave Siena without seeing Doctor Lombard’s Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its remotest corners, and has lately picked up an undoubted Leonardo, which came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of the missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according to the most competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched example of the best period.
“Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures; but we struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas in Siena three years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get a peep at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I hear he refuses to have it reproduced. I want badly to use it in my monograph on the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me, and if you can’t persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at least jot down a detailed description of the picture and get from him all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian governments have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he refuses to sell at any price, though he certainly can’t afford such luxuries; in fact, I don’t see where he got enough money to buy the picture. He lives in the Via Papa Giulio.”
Wyant sat at the table d’hote of his hotel, re-reading his friend’s letter over a late luncheon. He had been five days in Siena without having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not from any indifference to the opportunity presented, but because it was his first visit to the strange red city and he was still under the spell of its more conspicuous wonders—the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron torch-holders with a gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; t
he pageant of Pope Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the dusk of mouldering chapels—and it was only when his first hunger was appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was still untasted.
He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room, with a nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man with lustrous eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of the table, perusing the Fanfulla di Domenica. This gentleman, his daily vis-a-vis, returned the nod with a Latin eloquence of gesture, and Wyant passed on to the ante-chamber, where he paused to light a cigarette. He was just restoring the case to his pocket when he heard a hurried step behind him, and the lustrous-eyed young man advanced through the glass doors of the dining-room.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said in measured English, and with an intonation of exquisite politeness; “you have let this letter fall.”
Wyant, recognizing his friend’s note of introduction to Doctor Lombard, took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn away when he perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him with a gaze of melancholy interrogation.
“Again pardon me,” the young man at length ventured, “but are you by chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?”
“No,” returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of foreign advances. Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with a guarded politeness: “Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his house. I see it is not given here.”
The young man brightened perceptibly. “The number of the house is thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you—it is well known in Siena. It is called,” he continued after a moment, “the House of the Dead Hand.”
Wyant stared. “What a queer name!” he said.
“The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many hundred years has been above the door.”
Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other added: “If you would have the kindness to ring twice.”
“To ring twice?”
“At the doctor’s.” The young man smiled. “It is the custom.”
It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-colored hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The map in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course, pausing at every other step to fill his eye with some fresh image of weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the sunshine and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting cornices of Doctor Lombard’s street, and Wyant walked for some distance in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on a doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a woman’s—a dead drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house, and had sunk struggling into death.
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