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The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two



AFTERWARD
January 1910


I


"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."

The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a
bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp
perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the
December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the
library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they
sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very
house of which the library in question was the central, the
pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a
country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties,
had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight
to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case;
but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously,
several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it
out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's
cousins, and you can get it for a song."

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water
pipes, and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading
in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of
the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition,
with unusual architectural felicities.

"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the
two, had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience'
would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with
the pieces numbered, and set up again." And they had proceeded
to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions
and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin
recommended was REALLY Tudor till they learned it had no heating
system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds
till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-
supply.

"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued
to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively
wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a
sudden relapse to distrust: "And the ghost? You've been
concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!"

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her
laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent
perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida's
answering hilarity.

"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."

"Yes, yes; but that won't do. I don't want to have to drive ten
miles to see somebody else's ghost. I want one of my own on the
premises. IS there a ghost at Lyng?"

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that
she had flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there IS one, of course,
but you'll never know it."

"Never know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world
constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"

"I can't say. But that's the story."

"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"

"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."

"Till afterward?"

"Not till long, long afterward."

"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why
hasn't its signalement been handed down in the family? How has
it managed to preserve its incognito?"

Alida could only shake her head. "Don't ask me. But it has."

"And then suddenly--" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous
depth of divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's
self, 'THAT WAS it?'"

She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her
question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the
shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils.
"I suppose so. One just has to wait."

"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost
who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than
that, Mary?"

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to,
for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair
they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for
to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had
actually begun for them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-
hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the
sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to
a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such
sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years
the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne
had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness
that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue
Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the
leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new
state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting
and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of
the production of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of
Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could
be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world,
or plunge deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.
But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the
whole incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they
put it--that for the production of its effects so little of a
given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and
so short a distance a difference.

"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives
such depth to their effects, such relief to their least
contrasts. They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every
exquisite mouthful."

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact
that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,
abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having
been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had
probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and
Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December
afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she
rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.
Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long
tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred
to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried
security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude
that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the
morning's work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as
she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between
his eyes had never been there in his engineering days. Then he
had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native
demon of "worry" had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages
he had so far read to her--the introduction, and a synopsis of
the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession of his
subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had
done with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one
other possible element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were
his health, then? But physically he had gained since they had
come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed.
It was only within a week that she had felt in him the
undefinable change that made her restless in his absence, and as
tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who had a
secret to keep from him!

The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck
her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her
down the dim, long room.

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to
be piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and
layers of velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky
walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in
the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been
gradually discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary
had, indeed, as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the
customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a
vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to
impart. The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient
identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time
the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit-
and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly
concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so
much that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence
as THE ghost." And thereupon their invisible housemate had
finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous
enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier
curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense
gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of
the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that
possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but
secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close
enough communion with the house, one might surprise its secret,
and acquire the ghost-sight on one's own account. Perhaps, in
his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never
trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it
already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever
it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of
the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the
ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-
breeding as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did
not really satisfy her. "What, after all, except for the fun of
the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of
their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown back once more on
the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less
susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing
on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not
know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing
Ned HAD seen one when they first came, and had known only within
the last week what had happened to him? More and more under the
spell of the hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the
early days of their tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay
confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling
to each other from remote corners of the house as treasure after
treasure of their habitation revealed itself to them. It was in
this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain
soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the
first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of
the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel
that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to
an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the roof which, from
below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown
down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of
her discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the narrow
ledge, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to
the long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped
contentedly back to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the
fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.

"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about
within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed,
like some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled
court, the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching
up to the highroad under the downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she
had felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her
turn to glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a
shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face;
and, following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in
loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering
down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a
stranger seeking his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her
but a blurred impression of slightness and grayness, with
something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the figure
or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash
down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for
the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional
clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to
follow him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the
attic landing she paused again for a less definite reason,
leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the
silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths below. She lingered
there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a
door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow
flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and
after listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she
quickly crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone,
vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but
the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even,
as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

"What was it? Who was it?" she asked.

"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

"The man we saw coming toward the house."

He seemed honestly to reflect. "The man? Why, I thought I saw
Peters; I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains,
but he had disappeared before I could get down."

"Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw
him."

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. "So I thought; but he must have
got up steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a
scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?"

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than
nothing, had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic
of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had
dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine
heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the
mere fact of the other incident's having occurred on the very day
of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the
unconscious fold of association from which it now emerged; for in
itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there
could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash
himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It
was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the
other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying
in wait for them, and dashing out at them with questions,
reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the distance the gray
figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's
explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety
on his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him
anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to
confer with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains,
had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary
could not say that any one of these considerations had occurred
to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now
marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that
they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.



II


Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The
library was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how
much faint light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped
itself in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a
mere blot of deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as
it moved toward her, her heart thumped to the thought, "It's the
ghost!"

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man
of whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from
the roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal
himself as NOT having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the
impending fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick
of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and
character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her husband's;
and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the
confession of her folly.

"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold,
"but I never CAN remember!"

"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.

"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no
response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged,
preoccupied face.

"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable
interval.

"Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad
determination to spot it!"

"Me--just now?" His arm dropped away, and he turned from her
with a faint echo of her laugh. "Really, dearest, you'd better
give it up, if that's the best you can do."

"Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have YOU?" she asked, turning
round on him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the
light struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she
presented.

"Have YOU?" Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had
disappeared on her errand of illumination.

"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the
sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the
letters.

"Given up trying to see the ghost." Her heart beat a little at
the experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow
of the hearth.

"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a
newspaper.

"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is
that there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long
afterward."

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but
after a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically
between his hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you
any idea HOW LONG?"

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her
seat she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was
darkly projected against the circle of lamplight.

"No; none. Have YOU?" she retorted, repeating her former phrase
with an added keenness of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently
turned back with it toward the lamp.

"Lord, no! I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of
impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"

"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impulse to add, "What
makes you ask?" was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-
maid with tea and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily
domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that
sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her
solitary afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself silently
to the details of her task, and when she looked up from it she
was struck to the point of bewilderment by the change in her
husband's face. He had seated himself near the farther lamp, and
was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it something
he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point of
view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The
longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed
itself. The lines of painful tension had vanished, and such
traces of fatigue as lingered were of the kind easily
attributable to steady mental effort. He glanced up, as if drawn
by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

"I'm dying for my tea, you know; and here's a letter for you," he
said.

She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she
proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with
the languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all
inclosed in the circle of one cherished presence.

Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the
letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her
husband a long newspaper clipping.

"Ned! What's this? What does it mean?"

He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry
before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and
she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an
advantage, across the space between her chair and his desk.

"What's what? You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length,
moving toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The
shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of
fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that
gave her the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

"This article--from the 'Waukesha Sentinel'--that a man named
Elwell has brought suit against you--that there was something
wrong about the Blue Star Mine. I can't understand more than
half."

They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her
astonishment, she saw that her words had the almost immediate
effect of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.

"Oh, THAT!" He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it
with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and
familiar. "What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I
thought you'd got bad news."

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly
under the reassuring touch of his composure.

"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"

"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."

"But what IS it? I don't understand. What does this man accuse
you of?"

"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar." Boyne had
tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an
arm-chair near the fire. "Do you want to hear the story? It's
not particularly interesting--just a squabble over interests in
the Blue Star."

"But who is this Elwell? I don't know the name."

"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you
all about him at the time."

"I daresay. I must have forgotten." Vainly she strained back
among her memories. "But if you helped him, why does he make
this return?"

"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him
over. It's all rather technical and complicated. I thought that
kind of thing bored you."

His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she
deprecated the American wife's detachment from her husband's
professional interests, but in practice she had always found it
difficult to fix her attention on Boyne's report of the
transactions in which his varied interests involved him.
Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community where
the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such
brief leisure as they could command should be used as an escape
from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they always
dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had
actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself
if she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no
more than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now,
for the first time, it startled her a little to find how little
she knew of the material foundation on which her happiness was
built.

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