The House of the Dead Hand

by Edith Wharton

  "No -- I couldn't part with it," she answered.

  "It's too beautiful, -- too beautiful," -- he assented.

  "Too beautiful?" She turned on him with a curious stare. "I have never thought it beautiful, you know."

  He gave back the stare. "You have never -- "

  She shook her head. "It's not that. I hate it; I've always hated it. But he wouldn't let me -- he will never let me now."

  Wyant was startled by her use of the present tense. Her look surprised him, too: there was a strange fixity of resentment in her innocuous eye. Was it possible that she was laboring under some delusion? Or did the pronoun not refer to her father?

  "You mean that Doctor Lombard did not wish you to part with the picture?"

  "No -- he prevented me; he will always prevent me."

  There was another pause. "You promised him, then, before his death -- "

  "No; I promised nothing. He died too suddenly to make me." Her voice sank to a whisper. "I was free -- perfectly free -- or I thought I was till I tried."

  "Till you tried?"

  "To disobey him -- to sell the picture. Then I found it was impossible. I tried again and again; but he was always in the room with me."

  She glanced over her shoulder as though she had heard a step; and to Wyant, too, for a moment, the room seemed full of a third presence.

  "And you can't" -- he faltered, unconsciously dropping his voice to the pitch of hers.

  She shook her head, gazing at him mystically. "I can't lock him out; I can never lock him out now. I told you I should never have another chance."

  Wyant felt the chill of her words like a cold breath in his hair.

  "Oh" -- he groaned; but she cut him off with a grave gesture.

  "It is too late," she said; "but you ought to have helped me that day."