The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

by R. A. Dick

  Miles did not speak, and out of his silence grew all the tuning orchestra of the wood, as if the tapping of the woodpecker, the song of the blackbird and the thrush, the call of the cuckoo, the rustling of the leaves, the tinkling of the stream and sighing of the breeze, the muted twitterings of the insects, were all part of some great finale to bring down the curtain on the last act of tragedy.

  She pushed him away suddenly before it could fall. “No,” she cried, “no—it’s not true.”

  Still Miles made no answer, kneeling there before her, like some suppliant child rather than a conquering lover.

  “But it is true,” she said slowly and covered her face with her hands. “You lied to me,” she said, past tears in her grief, “you lied to me!”

  “No,” he protested at last, “I told no lies.”

  “Not with your lips,” she said, “but you were living a lie that was beyond words.”

  “It was and is no lie that I love you,” said Miles.

  “If you had loved me really, you must have told me the whole truth about yourself,” said Lucy, “and about your life.”

  “But you made me feel a new man with a new life,” pleaded Miles. “Olivia’s husband seemed quite another man, a dull middle-aged man with no ideals and no future.”

  “Yet with a past and three sons,” said Lucy.

  “I will divorce Olivia,” said Miles, “and we will marry and go on being happy.”

  “Can one be really happy at some one else’s expense?” said Lucy dully.

  “I gave her the London house as a wedding present, and she has a good income,” replied Miles.

  “Enough to repay her for the loss of a husband?” asked Lucy.

  “She will get over it,” said Miles easily. “Olivia isn’t romantic, and she is fonder of the children than of me.”

  “Yet she would always be there—between us,” said Lucy sombrely.

  “Don’t be so Victorian, darling,” said Miles. He rose from his knees and seated himself on the tree trunk beside her and put his arm around her. “After all, what is divorce nowadays?”

  “I have never had anything to do with it,” said Lucy, “but it has always seemed rather sordid to me—a confession of failure and a breaking of vows.”

  “You take it all much too seriously, my love,” said Miles. “People are divorced every day. It isn’t nearly as alarming as you make it sound.”

  “You speak as if you knew,” said Lucy slowly. “Do you know from personal experience, Miles?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “I was once in a divorce suit.”

  “With Olivia?” asked Lucy.

  “Oh, no, before I met her,” answered Miles.

  “And you didn’t marry that other woman?” said Lucy.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Miles, “she had thin ankles and I bought her off!”

  “I see,” said Lucy, and shivered a little.

  “You’re cold, little one,” he said, and drew her closer, but she sprang up, away from his embrace.

  “No,” she said, “no—you must give me time to think—it was all so—so beautiful and now—now I feel quite a different sort of woman and as if I should have known that you were married—but how could I—how could I have known?”

  “You are very young,” said Miles, but he no longer said it as if she reminded him of spring and new beginnings but rather of some wayward child making a scene over a broken toy in the nursery. “You make too much of it all.”

  “I am thinking of your wife,” said Lucy, “and how she would hate me.”

  “Olivia never hates anyone,” he replied, “unless they are unkind to the children—she puts them first all the time. She even refused to come to Switzerland this winter because she didn’t want to leave them.”

  He sat there on the log, looking up at her, and presently he smiled and held out a hand.

  “Come, Lucy,” he said, “how can it be wrong when we make each other so happy?”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered brokenly, “I just don’t know. I must have a little time by myself—you make me feel so weak, as if you had taken away my will as well as my heart.”

  “Have I taken away your heart?” he asked, smiling. “Then how can you live without me?”

  How, indeed, cried Lucy inwardly; but she shook her head and made no answer with her lips.

  “You will come to me here to-morrow,” he said, “and try and grow up a little, my dear, but not too much, for I love you very well as you are.”

  Tears came to her eyes at the tenderness in his voice, and she turned and stumbled away, crushing the bluebells beneath her feet, hurrying away from her own weakness, hurrying away from enchantment, while she yet had power to resist.

  But in the night temptation returned and with it Captain Gregg to combat it.

  “If you won’t think of Olivia’s children, think of your own,” he said sternly.

  “Eva will look after them,” she said.

  “That woman! What chance will the poor little brats have with her?” stormed the captain.

  “You are always telling me that Cyril is not my son,” said Lucy stonily.

  “And what of Anna, who is so very much your daughter?” said the captain. “Think of her.”

  “Must I forever be thinking of other people?” said Lucy. “Can I have no happiness for myself?”

  “Would you be happy, knowing Anna to be miserable, knowing Olivia to be left?” asked the captain.

  “Olivia doesn’t understand him,” said Lucy.

  “Balderdash!” said the captain. “The trouble is she understands him a damn sight too well. She’s a thoroughly nice woman with a sense of humour and a sense of honour.”

  “Indeed,” said Lucy, “yet she neglects him for the children—she wouldn’t go to Switzerland with him at Christmas because of them.”

  “Her baby was born on New Year’s Eve,” retorted Captain Gregg, “which didn’t prevent Master Miles going off and enjoying himself with a red-haired wench of loose morals, but perhaps he hasn’t told you about her?”

  “He has told me everything,” said Lucy.

  “And that’s a damned lie,” said the captain, “he never mentioned her. He makes holiday with any attractive woman who comes along.”

  “And I suppose you think he is merely making holiday with me,” said Lucy.

  “I’m sure of it, me dear,” said the captain quietly.

  “Well, you are mistaken,” said Lucy proudly. “He wants to marry me.”

  “The sad thing about women is that they believe so much that a man tells them with his lips, and will not listen to what is told them by his actions,” said the captain.

  “I believe in Miles,” said Lucy. “He has never had a chance.”

  “I know,” said Captain Gregg, “you believe you can alter what his father has bred in his bone and his mother has fostered in his heart. Like most women you are riddled with the missionary instinct, that always seeks to change a man’s nature and make it a little higher than the angels; whereas a man knows he can’t remake any woman, and if his wife doesn’t suit him, he accepts her as she is or goes out and finds another——”

  “As Miles wishes to do,” interrupted Lucy triumphantly.

  “Miles doesn’t want a wife,” said Captain Gregg, “all he wants is a mother and a mistress.”

  “I won’t listen to you—I won’t listen to you!” Lucy covered her ears with her hands and drove the captain’s voice away.

  But reason, without Captain Gregg to rouse her opposition, refused to be shut out, and in the morning, though the sun shone from a clear blue sky, her own horizons were black with heavy clouds of foreboding. She felt all her emotions to be drawn taut, as if the strings of her heart were being torn apart in a spiritual tug-of-war, and since Anna was one of the contestants, though unwittingly, it was on her younger child that the tension of her overwrought state vented itself, in nagging over trivial lapses of manners through the morning meal, till the child’s eyes were full of
bewilderment, and she fell silent, sitting very straight and still, remembering at the end of breakfast to fold up her table napkin without reminder, creeping out of the house to school. Cyril sat smugly superior behind the shield of his mother’s indifference, and left her with a bright farewell, swaggering on his way.

  All through the morning the struggle went on. Now she would run to Miles and tell him all her doubts and fears; now she would never see him again, and who was the red-haired woman of whom the captain had spoken? Now she felt exalted in the power of her love to make giants of them both eternally; now she felt abased in the weakness of selfish desire to the semblance of a dwarf. And surely, reason cried, if he loved you he would have been to see you to reassure you of his love; but I have told him never to come in the morning when I am busy, she argued against it; still this is no ordinary occasion, reason persisted. And now pride took a hand, and held her prisoner in the house till the time of their afternoon tryst in the wood was past, and the clock struck through the long afternoon like a knell for dying hopes, till the sun began to go down beyond the town and with it her resolution. But now that duty held her to the house by the children’s needs, she felt she must be gone at all costs and, hastily preparing a cold supper for them, she left a note for Anna telling her that she had been called away, and that they must have their supper and go to bed like good children, and that she would soon be home.

  Panic overtook her as she hurried over the cliff path. Had not Miles said at their first meeting that she had saved him from suicide? Supposing those careless words held more behind them than appeared? Might he not even now be lying at the foot of the white cliffs, with sea-gulls singing his requiem?

  Running, she came to the top of the hill and gazed down into the hollow. The grey cottage scarcely showed in the gathering gloom; only from the western window a light shone out, making a beam of gold across the darkness. The little patch of garden it lit up between the trees looked unreal, as if it were part of the scenery on a lime-lit stage. And as if it were Lucy’s cue for entry, a woman’s laugh rang out through the open window, a coarse rich laugh that died away on the sound of deeper laughter.

  If I hid I could see through the window without being seen, thought Lucy desperately, but knew that this was a situation to be faced boldly in all its truth. Yet when she flung open the door, without knocking, the lamp-lit scene held as little reality for her as if it were, indeed, part of a play upon a lime-lit stage.

  A red-haired woman in a green dress sat facing her in the armchair; by her side, his arms about her, knelt Miles looking up at her, his hair falling over his forehead, his mouth a little open.

  And Lucy seemed to know the play by heart. She knew the woman would lean back and stare boldly across at her with pale green eyes, that Miles would start up and come across to her, saying, “My dear, I waited hours for you and you never came, and when I got back to the cottage I found my cousin had motored down to see me.”

  And, “Cousin Miles,” the red-haired woman said, taking out a tortoise-shell case from a brown handbag and lighting a cigarette from it with a gold lighter, “cousin, why not sister, so much less suspicious and we both have red hair?”

  “I said cousin,” said Miles, and he turned away, and though Lucy could not see his face, she knew that there was a stage direction there for a wink and a frown of warning.

  “I thought you had deserted me—” that was Miles’ speech again, and, the directions said, reproachfully. He was putting the blame for this situation on her, staring at her with his candid eyes that held no truth in them; for life was nothing but a play to him, thought Lucy, gazing back at him still with this strange feeling of detachment. He could go from one play to another, always the central figure, always bringing down the curtain when comedy threatened to turn to tragedy or domesticity, leaving the other players stranded, to think out their own endings to their ruined plot; but thought Lucy, it was she who held the book of this play and she would end it in her own manner.

  “I have deserted you,” she said gravely. “Good-bye, Miles.” She shut the door quietly behind her as she went out, knowing that the red-haired woman would hold him from following her, if need be by force with her grasping hands.

  Captain Gregg’s voice was very quiet when he came to her that evening.

  “Nothing that I can say would be adequate,” he said. “It would be useless for me to tell you that you were in love with a man that never existed, because he did exist in your mind and heart. All I do ask is that you try and forgive me, bloody fool that I am.”

  “I forgive you,” said Lucy dully. “I should probably have met him in any case.”

  “No,” said the captain, “if I hadn’t sent him up the hill that day he would have left the following morning. It was all my fault.”

  “I forgive you,” repeated Lucy.

  “But I cannot forgive myself,” said the captain. “I should have known better, because interfering unasked in other people’s lives, whether from kindness or cruelty, is one of the greater sins, and I knew it. It was my own damn pride. I thought you needed a lesson, and I am the one that should be taught. I am, indeed, a poor representative of either world, and I shall go away until I have learned greater wisdom. Shall I go away, Lucy?” he asked humbly.

  But she did not answer him with her voice or her thoughts. She sat there, staring at the ghost of her own happiness.

  PART THREE

  I

  Captain Gregg did not come back, and the years followed each other, seeming to gather greater pace with their going, till a season seemed no more than a month, and a year no more than a season.

  Lucy, in the restlessness of her sorrow, changed her way of living at first. She no longer had any peace in solitude and sought out work in a way that would have gladdened the heart of her sisters-in-law, helping at the Girls’ Club and the Women’s Institute, at the summer Camp for Slum Children and the winter Soup Kitchen for the Poor, until an attack of influenza followed by pneumonia, drove her back, on the advice of her doctor, into her old quiet existence, which she resumed with a relief that surprised her. The dog Tags had died the summer before, and Anna, saving up her pocket money, had bought her, as a Christmas present, a Pekinese of no certain pedigree. Then memory itself seemed to take on the ease of a lap dog, and she found that she could remember Miles with tolerance, and gratitude for the happiness he had given her.

  The Pekinese was fawn-coloured, with a black face and a curling ostrich feather of a tail. Lucy called her Miss Ming, and painted a dog basket lacquer red for her to sleep in at the foot of her own bed; but Miss Ming had other ideas about her sleeping quarters and invariably insinuated herself under the eider-down, against Lucy’s feet, as soon as she was asleep, creeping out again in the morning before she waked, till one night Lucy was awakened by a fierce growling, and heard the almost forgotten voice of Captain Gregg booming in her ears.

  “Take the damn dog off the bed—off my bed—bless my soul, it will be between the sheets next.”

  “Oh! So you’ve come back,” said Lucy, hauling Miss Ming up into her arms and stifling her growls for fear that she should awaken the children.

  “And quite time, too,” said the captain. “It’s not healthy to have a flea-ridden dog sleeping in your bed—in my bed.”

  “She’s not flea-ridden,” said Lucy indignantly, “poor little pet! What a thing to say about my best girl!”

  “Oh, my God,” said Captain Gregg in disgust, “what sort of talk is that for a sensible woman?”

  “I thought you liked dogs,” said Lucy.

  “So I do like dogs,” replied the captain, “not furred frogs like that—it’s an insult to call a creature like that a dog, blast it.”

  “You don’t seem to have changed,” said Lucy. “I thought you’d come back full of noble talk and wise sayings.”

  “Oh, so you were sure I would come back,” said the captain.

  “I was too busy to think of you at all till just lately,” said Lucy, “though
when I was ill I thought of you once or twice. Have you been learning a great deal?”

  “I’m not a very good pupil,” said the captain. “My thoughts kept wandering back here. I’m still too interested in Mammon, I dare say.”

  “Meaning me?” asked Lucy pleasantly.

  “Meaning you and my house,” said the captain. “I thought at any minute you might make another will leaving it to those Slum Children.”

  “You still don’t trust me, I see,” said Lucy.

  “Well, admit that the idea did cross your mind,” said the captain.

  “Yes, it did,” said Lucy. “It would seem a more natural will for me to make, and Cyril is growing up and may ask questions about such things. He wants to go into the church. He has won a scholarship to a theological college.”

  “I know,” said Captain Gregg, “and Anna wants to be a ballet dancer.”

  “She hasn’t said so,” remarked Lucy.

  “No, but she will as soon as she leaves school, and then there’ll be ructions with Master Cyril, you mark my words,” said the captain.

  “But why should there be?” asked Lucy. “They each have their own lives to live.”

  “Cyril has never been the same since he won that scholarship and was taken up by the Bishop of Whitchester as his pet protégé,” said the captain, “and a more narrow-minded man I have seldom heard.”

  “How do you know about all this?” asked Lucy.

  “Oh, I take an interest and I’ve been about,” said the captain.

  “Oh!” said Lucy and was silent, clasping Miss Ming’s warm little body to her.

  “Yes, I’ve seen Miles,” said the captain quietly. “You were well out of that, me dear. He has grown stout and bald and his taste in women gets younger and younger. They laugh at him and take all he’ll give them and turn him down, when he runs back to his wife to be consoled.”

  “She hasn’t divorced him?” asked Lucy.