“What is her ailment?” I asked then, as casually as I could.
“Oh, she’s had a shock of some kind. I don’t know much about it. These people are all as tight-mouthed with me as though I was a perfect stranger, Mr. Seaverns.”
“Indeed!”
“And then, you see”—though I was far from seeing the connection between the statement and the fact she had just enunciated—“there are ghosts in this house.”
“No!” I thought it well to pretend ignorance on this head.
“Oh my, yes! Didn’t my husband tell you? But that’s just like him.”
“And have you seen . . . anything . . . Mrs. Ormes?”
“No, never. Still, I must say, things happen. I don’t see why Ormond didn’t warn you. I don’t see why he doesn’t sell this place. These Ormeses seem to think it’s nobody’s business, but I always say a person ought to be told, so he’ll not be caught unawares, don’t you see? Don’t you think so, Mr. Seaverns?”
“Oh, undoubtedly! But you say that things happen?”
“Yes. Queer things. Sometimes I think the place is bewitched. I’m sure I’d sell this house, if it was mine, and move out of these hills.”
I questioned her again as to the happenings she spoke of; but evidently she had caught a breath of caution and wished no longer to pursue the subject. Her mouth closed tightly. The lips, I thought, were far too thin and straight to have been the voluptuously heavy lips that had lain sucking against my throat the night before, though why I persisted in supposing that that mysterious mouth had been a voluptuously heavy one, I do not know.
“Oh, some other time we’ll talk . . . after you’ve been here a while and had your own experiences,” she assured me.
“You think, then, that I’m likely to have experiences of that sort?”
“If you don’t, Mr. Seaverns,” she said, smiling upon me in what she apparently wanted me to think was a kindly and hospitable fashion, “you’ll be the only one who’s ever missed ’em at Ormesby. I only hope they don’t disturb you too much. But now I must go to see about lunch. You’ll excuse me, won’t you?”
I rose—we had been sitting—and bowed. She started away from me toward the door, but hesitated, turning toward the shelves, picked a novel from one of them, blowing dust from the edges of its leaves and squinting nearsightedly at the title.
“Phooey! It’s too old and out of date. They did use to write such disgustingly tame and uninteresting novels, didn’t they? A person has to read through page after page and chapter after chapter of the dreariest description before ever finding out what the man and woman are going to do. I like to . . . well, just plump right into the middle of things, all at once. Don’t you? Who’s your favorite author, Mr. Seaverns?”
She had probably remembered that I made pretension to literary knowledge. But she did not wait for me to reply to her question.
“Personally,” she continued, “I like Booth Tarkington, don’t you? Don’t you think he’s too sweet for anything?”
I murmured assent, marveling upon the swiftness with which she had dropped her pose of the busy housewife and assumed that of the gushing girl. Besides, I saw no reason to differ from her in her characterization of that maker of popular confections. Nevertheless, I doubted that Mr. Tarkington was this woman’s favorite novelist. I rather fancied that she was endeavoring to impress me with the soundness of her literary taste, and that she really read fiction of an even more evanescent kind than that she had mentioned. Somehow she reminded me of the Molly Bloom revealed in that final pitiless chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses.
But her chatter had certainly driven the ghosts out of that chilly room!
She left me, at last, after informing me that luncheon would be served at one o’clock. I flung my coat aside, rolled up the sleeves of my shirt, and prepared to make a start on the books. All chance of catching Gray and idling through the day with her was now quite lost. It would be necessary to clear some shelves at one end of the line of bookcases; then, as I noted down titles, authors, and the contents of each volume, I should have a place at which to begin my work of sorting and arranging the books. I did not suppose I should be troubled by any further unexplained noises or motions of the typewriter, unless I should be again visited by the Lady in Mauve.
However, I was interrupted, this time by the entrance of the man Hobbs, who came to inform me that I was wanted on the telephone. It was Ormes, calling me from his office in New York.
“Hello? Hello, Seaverns! I called to tell you about——” a noise of static or of clicking terminal plugs drowned his words during several seconds, then I heard again——“yes, just got in. But remember my aunt’s illness. You must be very careful not to startle her in any way. If you see her about the house, always be sure to call yourself gently to her attention, not abruptly. Understand? It’s her nerves. Doctor says she mustn’t be frightened. Liable to cause . . . well, you understand. By the way, Seaverns, I’ve got a coop in the stable that you can use. Prob’ly needs some fixin’. But Gray’ll tell you ’bout it. You can use that car whenever you feel like it. That’s all. Everything O.K. so far?”
“Yes. I’m busy sorting books. Can’t tell you anything about ’em yet.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t expect you to. Met Gray yet?”
“Yes. Yes, I met her at breakfast.”
“Sure it was Gray? But of course it was. She’s all right. You’ll get along with her. Well, that’s all, I guess.”
“And I’ve had a chat with Mrs. Ormes. So now I’m acquainted all ’round.”
“Good. I’ll be seein’ you a week from Sat’day, I guess. So long.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Ormes.”
I put up the receiver, wondering why I had called my old friend “Mr. Ormes.” Yet I knew in my heart that it was due to the fact of my employment by him. I was working for him, taking his money, being ruled by his orders. I had known him since college days, and it had never previously entered my head to address him by such a title, save on the more or less formal occasions incident to “introducing” people. The fact that I had just called him “Mister” rankled within me, making me ashamed of my servility and furious with the instinct which had called it into evidence. The trouble with us in America is, we are too close to the peasantry from which all of us have sprung. We love a lord with the love of a woman for protection, and for precisely the same reason, though we largely do it under the guise of respecting “success,” that idol of the underdog.
But my mood of self-condemnation was changed by catching a first sight of Mrs. Hobbs, a wizened little creature, gray-haired, and with an even more evil squint than her husband boasted. She crossed my path, carrying broom and dust pan, bowed slightly and shyly, and was gone. But someone had shown an outward respect toward me. My spirit was lifted up at once, and my ego swelled and was proud.
I turned back toward the library, entered it and picked up my coat. I was in no mood for work upon the listing and ordering of Ormond Ormes’s books. I would go out to the garage and see what kind of car he had placed at my disposal. Besides, I wanted to ponder on a fresh mystery that troubled me. Why had Ormes telephoned me? I could not believe that it was for the foolish reason of warning me to be careful of his Aunt Barbara’s nerves. I was not a blundering booby to go frightening ailing females into nervous fits. No, that specious excuse had been given to cover a deeper reason. Why had he asked whether I was “sure it was Gray” I had met at table that morning? Was he jealous, then, of his wife’s company? Good Lord! Did the fool suppose that I felt any urge to flirt with that wife of his?
The car proved to be a coupé of fair quality, not above two years old, and still presenting an appearance of shiny respectability, which showed that it had been driven always along the safe and comfortable roads, doing its little job without protest and avoiding collisions with opposite opinions, I mean,
of course, opposite powers. No one was about. The dogs had been penned in the kennel. The door of the car (I smiled, remembering my college mate’s use of the vulgar pronunciation “coop”) was unlocked and the key in place over the ignition switch. I got in, pressed the starting pedal and was rewarded by an instant firing of the motor. The engine ran smoothly, silently, efficiently. I backed out and ran down to the road, turning away from Pittsfield, wondering why Ormes had said that the machine stood in need of repairs. There were a few small rattles and squeaks, such as are never absent from the body of a car of this value, but I could discover nothing seriously wrong.
I wanted to be alone for an hour or two, and not only alone in the physical sense. I needed to be out of reach of the influences of Ormesby. I must come to a decision without further delay. As I had told my friend Ormond, I was no scholar, and I knew only a few of the most obvious facts concerning New England’s early literature, or its later literature, for the matter of that. That its present-day writing is representative more of an imaginary than of a real people is a thing known to every literate man. I was vaguely conscious that there had been a real beginning in New England toward an independent esthetic, but that it had been suppressed or snuffed out, first by the rise of the magnificoes of Boston and Hartford, later by the migration of intellect to New York and to the West. Beyond that I knew nothing. More, I cared nothing about it. I was lazy, and I had not yet found the work I really wanted to do. It seemed to me that I ought to tell Ormond Ormes plainly that his job was not for me to undertake. Then, though I should be without a roof to shelter me and without prospects of a single meal to follow my last, I should at least be a free man once more. I need not feel impelled to address an old schoolfellow as “Mister.”
I had not been twelve hours at Ormesby, yet the mysterious influence of the place had already got its grip upon me. Undoubtedly there were ghosts in the house. I was quite willing to believe that now. Whether the Lady in Mauve had been a spectre, a living woman, or a figment of my disordered imagination, I was now convinced that something of evil haunted the place, and that no one who lived there could escape its influence.
There was Gray. I wanted to see more of Gray. It was not that I was in love with her, nor that I felt inclined to be in love with her. I told myself that I must soon tire of that asymmetrical face, and that the will I had sensed within her must soon clash with mine. Nevertheless there was a mystery about the girl that provoked solution. There was mystery in plenty about all the inmates of Ormesby, but about Gray there was a deeper problem to be solved. Gray was different. I wondered where she had wandered to, scanning the hilltops about me in the hope of catching sight of her tall, lithe figure, surrounded by her dogs. It would have been a delightful thing to have roamed those hills with Gray. Why hadn’t I done it?
My speedometer showed that I had ventured above twenty miles from Ormesby. Therefore I sought a convenient place at which to turn the car about. I was more than half resolved to resign (by telephone) as soon as I should have reached the house; and I did not feel at ease in this borrowed car. It would have been different had I been motoring over the countryside for the sake of relaxation after long hours of honest effort and diligent toil.
It was too bad, I thought, that I must be soon leaving the Berkshires. I was not now seeing them for the first time, but no one who has ever seen them can weary of their loveliness. I knew, moreover, a little of the legends and traditions to which they had given birth. I had once climbed Monument Mountain and pried into that cave which was reputed to have given refuge to Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes during the sudden fury of a mountain storm. I had visited friends throughout the country now famous as having been the scene of William Cullen Bryant’s earlier efforts in verse and prose, where he had written “Thanatopsis,” which he had never bettered in all his long life of writing. I had heard of Catherine Sedgwick and had even read a part of her Hope Leslie. I knew the people Mrs. Wharton had saved from an utter oblivion in her Ethan Frome. And I still had friends—that is, I knew people—in and about Great Barrington, Lenox and Stockbridge. I felt myself at home in the Berkshire Hills. I certainly was not averse to summering among them. Nevertheless I drove back toward Ormesby firmly resolved to call its master on the telephone and resign my job.
I do not know, to this day, why I had come to this decision so abruptly. I do not think that I had really intended deciding upon anything. But I am inclined to suppose that the mystery of Gray presented itself to me as a mystery that I should never be wholly able to solve unless and until I gained back the freedom which had been mine. I might interest her, but somehow I felt that her pride would never let her love entirely her brother’s servant. And I wanted to know much more of Gray than her brother’s servant could be likely ever to learn.
It seems that I had been expecting to find Gray before reaching Ormesby. I had not been fully conscious of this expectation, barring my brief period of scanning the hilltops for sight of her figure; but when I saw her sitting on a bank beside the road, distant from the house about a mile and a half, I knew that I was in no wise surprised at finding her there. She was clad, moreover, as I had fancied she would be, in masculine shirt and breeches, with a hickory staff in her hand and three savage-looking dogs at her feet. I slowed the car to a stop before her.
“I was waiting for you,” she said, unsmilingly, but yet pleasantly enough.
“Were you? How did you know I was going to come here?”
“Easily enough. I saw you leave the house. I was coming down the hill back of it.”
“Well, I wanted to think before plunging into that work. Your brother telephoned, telling me to use this car whenever I wanted to. So I came out, hoping I’d find you.”
“Indeed? Why didn’t you accept my invitation this morning?”
“Naturally I thought I ought to go to work.”
“Come, Mr, Seaverns, are you really intending to start that ridiculous job?”
“Ridiculous? Perhaps it is . . . considering everything. But I’d intended starting it—yes.”
“And now you’ve changed your mind?”
“But how did you know that?”
“Haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not competent to perform it.”
“What’s your real reason?”
Her questioning irked me. It was not that, as a sister of her brother and his representative here, she had no business to ask such questions of me. I think it must have been the tone in which she asked, which seemed definitely hostile and disdainful, as if she doubted my ability as much as or more than I myself doubted it. And if that were the case, what right had this ugly girl to doubt? Looking steadily into her face at that moment, I saw that she was not at all handsome. I wondered indeed how I could have been led to think her even pretty.
“What’s your real reason?” she repeated, arrogantly, when I hesitated for want of words in which to answer her.
“I think,” I said, slowly—and where I found such a thing to say I do not yet know, since I had not intended saying anything remotely like it—“I think it must be because of the ghosts that walk by night at Ormesby, rather than those one sees there by day.”
“Oh! You’ve seen . . . something?”
“I have.”
“Tell me about it!”
Her manner had undergone an abrupt and a complete change. She rose from her seat on the flowering bank and came down to the road, standing beside the car and staring into my eyes. She was no longer the mistress of Ormesby, haughtily questioning an employee about his reasons for leaving her house and her brother’s unfinished work. She might have been a girl of twenty, or she might even have been a child, so naïve and frankly eager was she to hear what I might have to tell.
But I was not yet ready to take her wholly into my con
fidence. She had too recently showed me her will to dominate. I had been thinking of telling her about the Lady in Mauve. Now I altered that intention.
“There isn’t much to tell. I was in the library. I had been stooping over some books piled on the floor. When I looked up a man was standing before me.”
“A man? Are you sure?”
“Why . . . yes. Yes, I’m sure, Miss Ormes. A man about fifty years old, I should say.”
“Oh! How was he dressed?”
“In black.”
“Not in buff and wearing high boots?”
“Should he have been?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Then——”
“I do know, however, that you’re lying, Mr. Seaverns. You haven’t seen the man you speak of. You’re making fun of me.”
I opened the door of the car.
“Thank you,” I said, coldly. “Will you let me drive you to the house?”
I had expected a refusal; at least, I should not have been surprised had she refused to ride beside me. But she got in and sat down without a word. Her manner had changed again. Yet she was not again the arrogant, supercilious woman of wealth putting an inferior in his place. There was a little frown of thought between her brows. She appeared to have forgotten me and her own incipient anger. Nothing was said during the greater part of the short drive to the house, but when we had almost reached her private roadway she turned toward me, and without warning of any kind laid a hand upon my wrist.
“Don’t leave Ormesby, Mr. Seaverns!”
I looked into her face, but though it was turned fully toward me her eyes did not meet my own. Instead she gazed steadily at that place on my throat where I had found the mark.
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