![\"Afterward](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Copy-of-Taming-the-Devil-2.jpg?resize=640%2C360&ssl=1\")
<\/h2>\n<\/h2>\n\u201cOh, there\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0one, of course, but you\u2019ll never know it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cfeature.\u201d 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: \u201cWell, there\u2019s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo\u2019s cousins, and you can get it for a song.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms\u2014its remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar necessities\u2014were 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly uncomfortable,\u201d Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted; \u201cthe least hint of \u2018convenience\u2019 would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again.\u201d And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin recommended was\u00a0really<\/i>\u00a0Tudor 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s too uncomfortable to be true!\u201d 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: \u201cAnd the ghost? You\u2019ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s answering hilarity.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, Dorsetshire\u2019s full of ghosts, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, yes; but that won\u2019t do. I don\u2019t want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody else\u2019s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises.\u00a0Is<\/i>\u00a0there a ghost at Lyng?\u201d<\/p>\n
His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back tantalizingly: \u201cOh, there\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0one, of course, but you\u2019ll never know it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNever know it?\u201d Boyne pulled her up. \u201cBut what in the world constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t say. But that\u2019s the story.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat there\u2019s a ghost, but that nobody knows it\u2019s a ghost?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell\u2014not till afterward, at any rate.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTill afterward?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot till long, long afterward.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if it\u2019s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn\u2019t its\u00a0signalement<\/i>\u00a0been handed down in the family? How has it managed to preserve its incognito?\u201d<\/p>\n
Alida could only shake her head. \u201cDon\u2019t ask me. But it has.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then suddenly\u2014\u201d Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of divination\u2014\u201csuddenly, long afterward, one says to one\u2019s self,\u00a0\u2018That was<\/i>\u00a0it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s clear pupils. \u201cI suppose so. One just has to wait.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, hang waiting!\u201d Ned broke in. \u201cLife\u2019s too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can\u2019t we do better than that, Mary?\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cEconomic Basis of Culture\u201d; 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014a nest of counties, as they put it\u2014that 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s that,\u201d Ned had once enthusiastically explained, \u201cthat gives such depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They\u2019ve been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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 \u201cworry\u201d had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her\u2014the introduction, and a synopsis of the opening chapter\u2014gave evidences of a firm possession of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.<\/p>\n
The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with \u201cbusiness\u201d 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\u00a0she<\/i>\u00a0who had a secret to keep from him!<\/p>\n
The thought that there\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the dim, long room.<\/p>\n
\u201cCan it be the house?\u201d she mused.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy, of course\u2014the house is haunted!\u201d she reflected.<\/p>\n
The ghost\u2014Alida\u2019s imperceptible ghost\u2014after 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, \u201cThey du say so, Ma\u2019am,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that\u2019s why it beats its beautiful wings in vain in the void,\u201d Mary had laughingly concluded.<\/p>\n
\u201cOr, rather,\u201d Ned answered, in the same strain, \u201cwhy, amid so much that\u2019s ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as\u00a0the<\/i>\u00a0ghost.\u201d And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly unaware of the loss.<\/p>\n
Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning\u2014a 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\u2019s own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband\u00a0had<\/i>\u00a0acquired 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. \u201cWhat, after all, except for the fun of the\u00a0frisson<\/i>,\u201d she reflected, \u201cwould he really care for any of their old ghosts?\u201d And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one\u2019s greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one\u00a0did<\/i>\u00a0see a ghost at Lyng, one did not know it.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot till long afterward,\u201d Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned\u00a0had<\/i>\u00a0seen 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\u2014the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd now the other way,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp \u201cHullo!\u201d that made her turn to glance at him.<\/p>\n
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\u2014a man in loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her\u2014who 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\u2014seen enough to make him push past her with a sharp \u201cWait!\u201d and dash down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for the descent.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat was it? Who was it?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cWho?\u201d he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe man we saw coming toward the house.\u201d Boyne shrugged his shoulders. \u201cSo 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?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cIt\u2019s the ghost!\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0having 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\u2019s; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s really too absurd,\u201d she laughed out from the threshold, \u201cbut I never\u00a0can<\/i>\u00a0remember!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRemember what?\u201d Boyne questioned as they drew together.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you think you\u2019d seen it?\u201d he asked, after an appreciable interval.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy, I actually took\u00a0you<\/i>\u00a0for it, my dear, in my mad determination to spot it!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMe\u2014just now?\u201d His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a faint echo of her laugh. \u201cReally, dearest, you\u2019d better give it up, if that\u2019s the best you can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, I give it up\u2014I give it up. Have\u00a0you?\u201d<\/i>\u00a0she asked, turning round on him abruptly.<\/p>\n
The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light struck up into Boyne\u2019s face as he bent above the tray she presented.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave\u00a0you?\u201d<\/i>\u00a0Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared on her errand of illumination.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave I what?\u201d he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never tried,\u201d he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, of course,\u201d Mary persisted, \u201cthe exasperating thing is that there\u2019s no use trying, since one can\u2019t be sure till so long afterward.\u201d<\/p>\n
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, \u201cHave you any idea\u00a0how long?\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n
Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat she looked up, startled, at her husband\u2019s profile, which was darkly projected against the circle of lamplight.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo; none. Have\u00a0you<\/i>\u201d she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an added keenness of intention.<\/p>\n
Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned back with it toward the lamp.<\/p>\n
\u201cLord, no! I only meant,\u201d he explained, with a faint tinge of impatience, \u201cis there any legend, any tradition, as to that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot that I know of,\u201d she answered; but the impulse to add, \u201cWhat makes you ask?\u201d was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-maid with tea and a second lamp.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m dying for my tea, you know; and here\u2019s a letter for you,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNed! What\u2019s this? What does it mean?\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s what? You fairly made me jump!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis article\u2014from the \u2018Waukesha Sentinel\u2019\u2014that a man named Elwell has brought suit against you\u2014that there was something wrong about the Blue Star Mine. I can\u2019t understand more than half.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh,\u00a0that<\/i>!\u201d He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar. \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you\u2019d got bad news.\u201d<\/p>\n
She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under the reassuring touch of his composure.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou knew about this, then\u2014it\u2019s all right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCertainly I knew about it; and it\u2019s all right.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what\u00a0is<\/i>\u00a0it? I don\u2019t understand. What does this man accuse you of?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.\u201d Boyne had tossed the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair near the fire. \u201cDo you want to hear the story? It\u2019s not particularly interesting\u2014just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut who is this Elwell? I don\u2019t know the name.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, he\u2019s a fellow I put into it\u2014gave him a hand up. I told you all about him at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI daresay. I must have forgotten.\u201d Vainly she strained back among her memories. \u201cBut if you helped him, why does he make this return?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over. It\u2019s all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing bored you.\u201d<\/p>\n
His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the American wife\u2019s detachment from her husband\u2019s professional interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention on Boyne\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her reassurance.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut doesn\u2019t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about it?\u201d<\/p>\n
He answered both questions at once: \u201cI didn\u2019t speak of it at first because it\u00a0did<\/i>\u00a0worry me\u2014annoyed me, rather. But it\u2019s all ancient history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of the \u2018Sentinel.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
She felt a quick thrill of relief. \u201cYou mean it\u2019s over? He\u2019s lost his case?\u201d<\/p>\n
There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne\u2019s reply. \u201cThe suit\u2019s been withdrawn\u2014that\u2019s all.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of being too easily put off. \u201cWithdrawn because he saw he had no chance?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, he had no chance,\u201d Boyne answered.<\/p>\n
She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her thoughts.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow long ago was it withdrawn?\u201d<\/p>\n
He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. \u201cI\u2019ve just had the news now; but I\u2019ve been expecting it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJust now\u2014in one of your letters?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes; in one of my letters.\u201d<\/p>\n
She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had placed himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met the smiling clearness of his eyes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s all right\u2014it\u2019s all right?\u201d she questioned, through the flood of her dissolving doubts; and \u201cI give you my word it never was righter!\u201d he laughed back at her, holding her close.<\/p>\n
One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the next day\u2019s incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery of her sense of security.<\/p>\n
It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper article,\u2014as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,\u2014had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband\u2019s affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.<\/p>\n
It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his mouth, above his papers, and now she had her own morning\u2019s task to perform. The task involved on such charmed winter days almost as much delighted loitering about the different quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and borders. There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her, such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place, without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter months were all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to the kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something wrong about the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned exotics,\u2014even the flora of Lyng was in the note!\u2014she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day being too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out again and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green to the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a view of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale gold moisture of the air.<\/p>\n
Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused, mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and hospitably smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it, such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, \u201cfor one\u2019s good,\u201d so complete a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned\u2019s into the harmonious pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the sun.<\/p>\n
She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener, accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one figure was in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man, who, for reasons she could not on the spot have specified, did not remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority on hot-house boilers. The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a gentleman\u2014perhaps a traveler\u2014desirous of having it immediately known that his intrusion is involuntary. The local fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing it. But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she asked, in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his attitude: \u201cIs there any one you wish to see?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to see Mr. Boyne,\u201d he replied. His intonation, rather than his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar note, looked at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving \u201con business,\u201d and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.<\/p>\n
Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but she was jealous of her husband\u2019s morning hours, and doubtful of his having given any one the right to intrude on them.<\/p>\n
\u201cHave you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot exactly an appointment,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen I\u2019m afraid, this being his working-time, that he can\u2019t receive you now. Will you give me a message, or come back later?\u201d<\/p>\n
The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would come back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of the house. As his figure receded down the walk between the yew hedges, Mary saw him pause and look up an instant at the peaceful house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck her, with a tardy touch of compunction, that it would have been more humane to ask if he had come from a distance, and to offer, in that case, to inquire if her husband could receive him. But as the thought occurred to her he passed out of sight behind a pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from Dorchester.<\/p>\n
The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues that they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his train, and beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed confabulation among the greenhouses. She was startled to find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly luncheon-time, and she half expected, as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to meet her. But she found no one in the court but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.<\/p>\n
Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay to which the morning\u2019s conference had committed her. The knowledge that she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the vague apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had said, things in general had never been \u201crighter.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously worded inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an absent-minded assent.<\/p>\n
She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall, and went to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed his normal measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses, the esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.<\/p>\n
Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her that he was not in the library.<\/p>\n
She turned back to the parlor-maid.<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.\u201d<\/p>\n
The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obeying orders and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of the injunction laid upon her. The struggle resulted in her saying doubtfully, \u201cIf you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne\u2019s not up-stairs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot in his room? Are you sure?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m sure, Madam.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary consulted the clock. \u201cWhere is he, then?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s gone out,\u201d Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have first propounded.<\/p>\n
Mary\u2019s previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round to the court. She crossed the hall to the glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but the parlor-maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to bring out recklessly, \u201cPlease, Madam, Mr. Boyne didn\u2019t go that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary turned back. \u201cWhere\u00a0did<\/i>\u00a0he go? And when?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam.\u201d It was a matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.<\/p>\n
\u201cUp the drive? At this hour?\u201d Mary went to the door herself, and glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare limes. But its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid Mr. Boyne leave no message?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces of chaos.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe gentleman? What gentleman?\u201d Mary wheeled about, as if to front this new factor.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe gentleman who called, Madam,\u201d said Trimmle, resignedly.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!\u201d<\/p>\n
Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached enough to note in Trimmle\u2019s eye the dawning defiance of the respectful subordinate who has been pressed too hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn\u2019t let the gentleman in,\u201d she replied, with the air of magnanimously ignoring the irregularity of her mistress\u2019s course.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou didn\u2019t let him in?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGo and ask Agnes, then,\u201d Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her look of patient magnanimity. \u201cAgnes would not know, Madam, for she had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of the new lamp from town\u2014\u201d Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new lamp\u2014\u201cand so Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary looked again at the clock. \u201cIt\u2019s after two! Go and ask the kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word.\u201d<\/p>\n
She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought her there the kitchen-maid\u2019s statement that the gentleman had called about one o\u2019clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with him without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller\u2019s name, for he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.<\/p>\n
Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over, and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had apparently obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne\u2019s experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne\u2019s withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years, with their \u201cstand-up\u201d lunches and dinners rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he cultivated the last refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife\u2019s fancy for the unexpected; and declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.<\/p>\n
Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne\u2019s precautions would sooner or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him for part of the way.<\/p>\n
This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she turned toward home, the early twilight was setting in.<\/p>\n
She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile, had probably returned from the station by the highroad, there was little likelihood of their meeting on the way. She felt sure, however, of his having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the papers on her husband\u2019s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to luncheon.<\/p>\n
Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate pull.<\/p>\n
The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the usual.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in,\u201d she said, to justify her ring.<\/p>\n
\u201cVery well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in,\u201d said Trimmle, putting down the lamp.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot in? You mean he\u2019s come back and gone out again?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, Madam. He\u2019s never been back.\u201d<\/p>\n
The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot since he went out with\u2014the gentleman?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNot since he went out with the gentleman.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut who\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0the gentleman?\u201d Mary gasped out, with the sharp note of some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless noises.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat I couldn\u2019t say, Madam.\u201d Trimmle, standing there by the lamp, seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the same creeping shade of apprehension.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the kitchen-maid knows\u2014wasn\u2019t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe doesn\u2019t know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded paper.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of custom. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the folded paper.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he must have a name! Where is the paper?\u201d<\/p>\n
She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered documents that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an unfinished letter in her husband\u2019s hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dear Parvis,\u201d\u2014who was Parvis?\u2014\u201cI have just received your letter announcing Elwell\u2019s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript which had been swept together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a hurried or a startled gesture.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the kitchen-maid\u00a0saw<\/i>\u00a0him. Send her here,\u201d she commanded, wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a solution.<\/p>\n
Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her questions pat.<\/p>\n
The gentleman was a stranger, yes\u2014that she understood. But what had he said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so little\u2014had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling something on a bit of paper, had requested that it should at once be carried in to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen you don\u2019t know what he wrote? You\u2019re not sure it\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0his name?\u201d<\/p>\n
The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?\u201d<\/p>\n
The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen together.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they went out of the house?\u201d<\/p>\n
This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness, from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front door together.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what he looked like.\u201d<\/p>\n
But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid\u2019s endurance had been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to \u201cshow in\u201d a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting efforts at evocation, \u201cHis hat, mum, was different-like, as you might say\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDifferent? How different?\u201d Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent impressions.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale\u2014a youngish face?\u201d Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger\u2014the stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he, and why had Boyne obeyed his call?<\/p>\n
It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they had often called England so little\u2014\u201csuch a confoundedly hard place to get lost in.\u201d<\/p>\n
A confoundedly hard place to get lost in!<\/i>\u00a0That had been her husband\u2019s phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne\u2019s name blazing from the walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his wife\u2019s anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something they would never know!<\/p>\n
In the fortnight since Boyne\u2019s disappearance there had been no word of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid had seen him leave the house, and no one else had seen \u201cthe gentleman\u201d who accompanied him. All inquiries in the neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger\u2019s presence that day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the neighboring villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either of the local railway-stations. The sunny English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.<\/p>\n
Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its highest pressure, had ransacked her husband\u2019s papers for any trace of antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to her, that might throw a faint ray into the darkness. But if any such had existed in the background of Boyne\u2019s life, they had disappeared as completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except\u2014if it were indeed an exception\u2014the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter, read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded little enough for conjecture to feed on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have just heard of Elwell\u2019s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer\u2014\u201d That was all. The \u201crisk of trouble\u201d was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he had assured his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter itself declared that the plaintiff was dead. It took several weeks of exhaustive cabling to fix the identity of the \u201cParvis\u201d to whom the fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable to divine with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.<\/p>\n
This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight\u2019s feverish search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed. Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.<\/p>\n
Even Mary Boyne\u2019s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.<\/p>\n
These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of \u201cchange.\u201d Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold. She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and her own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.<\/p>\n
No, she would never know what had become of him\u2014no one would ever know. But the house\u00a0knew<\/i>; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means.<\/p>\nV<\/h3>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t say it\u00a0wasn\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0straight, yet don\u2019t say it\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0straight. It was business.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at the speaker.<\/p>\n
When, half an hour before, a card with \u201cMr. Parvis\u201d on it had been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of Boyne\u2019s unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person to whom her husband\u2019s last known thought had been directed.<\/p>\n
Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,\u2014in the manner of a man who has his watch in his hand,\u2014had set forth the object of his visit. He had \u201crun over\u201d to England on business, and finding himself in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell\u2019s family.<\/p>\n
The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary\u2019s bosom. Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject. Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?<\/p>\n
\u201cI know nothing\u2014you must tell me,\u201d she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of \u201cgetting ahead\u201d of some one less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had \u201cput him on\u201d to the Blue Star scheme.<\/p>\n
Parvis, at Mary\u2019s first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his impartial glasses.<\/p>\n
\u201cBob Elwell wasn\u2019t smart enough, that\u2019s all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It\u2019s the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it\u2019s what the scientists call the survival of the fittest,\u201d said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.<\/p>\n
Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then\u2014you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. \u201cOh, no, I don\u2019t. I don\u2019t even say it wasn\u2019t straight.\u201d He glanced up and down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the definition he sought. \u201cI don\u2019t say it\u00a0wasn\u2019t<\/i>\u00a0straight, and yet I don\u2019t say it\u00a0was<\/i>\u00a0straight. It was business.\u201d After all, no definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.<\/p>\n
Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut Mr. Elwell\u2019s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, yes, they knew he hadn\u2019t a leg to stand on, technically. It was when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You see, he\u2019d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he was up a tree. That\u2019s why he shot himself when they told him he had no show.\u201d<\/p>\n
The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe shot himself? He killed himself because of\u00a0that?<\/i>\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, he didn\u2019t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before he died.\u201d Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone grinding out its \u201crecord.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, he didn\u2019t have to try again,\u201d said Parvis, grimly.<\/p>\n
They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glass thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut if you knew all this,\u201d she began at length, hardly able to force her voice above a whisper, \u201chow is it that when I wrote you at the time of my husband\u2019s disappearance you said you didn\u2019t understand his letter?\u201d<\/p>\n
Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. \u201cWhy, I didn\u2019t understand it\u2014strictly speaking. And it wasn\u2019t the time to talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find your husband.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary continued to scrutinize him. \u201cThen why are you telling me now?\u201d<\/p>\n
Still Parvis did not hesitate. \u201cWell, to begin with, I supposed you knew more than you appear to\u2014I mean about the circumstances of Elwell\u2019s death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter\u2019s been raked up again. And I thought, if you didn\u2019t know, you ought to.\u201d<\/p>\n
She remained silent, and he continued: \u201cYou see, it\u2019s only come out lately what a bad state Elwell\u2019s affairs were in. His wife\u2019s a proud woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and taking sewing at home, when she got too sick\u2014something with the heart, I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after, and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help. That attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people began to wonder why\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. \u201cHere,\u201d he continued, \u201chere\u2019s an account of the whole thing from the \u2018Sentinel\u2019\u2014a little sensational, of course. But I guess you\u2019d better look it over.\u201d<\/p>\n
He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of a clipping from the \u201cSentinel\u201d had first shaken the depths of her security.<\/p>\n
As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring head-lines, \u201cWidow of Boyne\u2019s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,\u201d ran down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was her husband\u2019s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought if you felt disposed to put your name down\u2014\u201d she heard Parvis continue.<\/p>\n
She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a cry.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the man\u2014the man who came for my husband!\u201d<\/p>\n
She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself, and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the man! I should know him anywhere!\u201d she cried in a voice that sounded in her own ears like a scream.<\/p>\n
Parvis\u2019s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless, fog-muffled windings.<\/p>\n
\u201cMrs. Boyne, you\u2019re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a glass of water?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no, no!\u201d She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically clenching the newspaper. \u201cI tell you, it\u2019s the man! I\u00a0know<\/i>\u00a0him! He spoke to me in the garden!\u201d<\/p>\n
Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait. \u201cIt can\u2019t be, Mrs. Boyne. It\u2019s Robert Elwell.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRobert Elwell?\u201d Her white stare seemed to travel into space. \u201cThen it was Robert Elwell who came for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCame for Boyne? The day he went away?\u201d Parvis\u2019s voice dropped as hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her gently back into her seat. \u201cWhy, Elwell was dead! Don\u2019t you remember?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was saying.<\/p>\n
\u201cDon\u2019t you remember Boyne\u2019s unfinished letter to me\u2014the one you found on his desk that day? It was written just after he\u2019d heard of Elwell\u2019s death.\u201d She noticed an odd shake in Parvis\u2019s unemotional voice. \u201cSurely you remember that!\u201d he urged her.<\/p>\n
Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had died the day before her husband\u2019s disappearance; and this was Elwell\u2019s portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words\u2014words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live there.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was the man who spoke to me,\u201d she repeated.<\/p>\n
She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. \u201cHe thinks me mad; but I\u2019m not mad,\u201d she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.<\/p>\n
She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking straight at Parvis: \u201cWill you answer me one question, please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen\u2014when?\u201d Parvis stammered.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes; the date. Please try to remember.\u201d<\/p>\n
She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. \u201cI have a reason,\u201d she insisted gently.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, yes. Only I can\u2019t remember. About two months before, I should say.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI want the date,\u201d she repeated.<\/p>\n
Parvis picked up the newspaper. \u201cWe might see here,\u201d he said, still humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. \u201cHere it is. Last October\u2014the\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
She caught the words from him. \u201cThe 20th, wasn\u2019t it?\u201d With a sharp look at her, he verified. \u201cYes, the 20th. Then you\u00a0did<\/i>\u00a0know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know now.\u201d Her white stare continued to travel past him. \u201cSunday, the 20th\u2014that was the day he came first.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parvis\u2019s voice was almost inaudible. \u201cCame\u00a0here<\/i>\u00a0first?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou saw him twice, then?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, twice.\u201d She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. \u201cHe came first on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.\u201d She felt a faint gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have forgotten.<\/p>\n
Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw him from the roof,\u201d she went on. \u201cHe came down the lime-avenue toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cElwell had vanished?\u201d Parvis faltered.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. \u201cI couldn\u2019t think what had happened. I see now. He\u00a0tried<\/i>\u00a0to come then; but he wasn\u2019t dead enough\u2014he couldn\u2019t reach us. He had to wait for two months; and then he came back again\u2014and Ned went with him.\u201d<\/p>\n
She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, my God! I sent him to Ned\u2014I told him where to go! I sent him to this room!\u201d she screamed out.<\/p>\n
She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou won\u2019t know till afterward,\u201d it said. \u201cYou won\u2019t know till long, long afterward.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mary and Ned Boyne, a wealthy American couple, purchase Lyng, an old English country house rumored to be haunted. They’re intrigued by the estate agent’s cryptic comment that they won’t know it’s haunted until “afterward.” Shortly after moving in, Ned mysteriously disappears following a visit from an unidentified man, leaving Mary bewildered and desperate for answers.<\/p>\n
For months, Mary searches for clues about her husband’s disappearance, but finds nothing. Her life becomes a cycle of uncertainty and fading hope. Eventually, she learns from Mr. Parvis, a lawyer, that Ned had made his fortune by ruining a man named Robert Elwell in a business deal. Elwell had attempted suicide and died two months later, just before Ned’s disappearance.<\/p>\n
With growing horror, Mary realizes that the mysterious visitor was Elwell’s ghost, come to exact revenge. She remembers seeing the ghost once before, on the day of Elwell’s suicide attempt, but didn’t understand its significance at the time. The story concludes with Mary’s devastating realization that she had unknowingly directed Elwell’s ghost to her husband on the day he vanished, finally understanding the meaning of “afterward” in the most tragic way possible.<\/p>\n
Edith Wharton (1862-1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer. Born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy New York family, she was educated privately and traveled extensively in Europe during her youth.<\/p>\n
Wharton began her literary career in her late 30s, publishing her first novel, “The Valley of Decision,” in 1902. She gained significant recognition with “The House of Mirth” (1905), a critique of the society in which she was raised. Her most famous work, “The Age of Innocence” (1920), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making her the first woman to receive this award.<\/p>\n
Known for her sharp wit and keen observations of upper-class New York society, Wharton wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including novels, short story collections, and works on architecture, gardens, and interior design. Her writing often explored themes of personal and social conflicts, focusing on the constraints placed on women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.<\/p>\n
Wharton was also noted for her friendship with Henry James and her humanitarian work during World War I, for which she was awarded the French Legion of Honor. She spent much of her adult life in France, where she died in 1937, leaving behind a rich literary legacy that continues to be studied and admired today.<\/p>\n
A wealthy American couple buys an old English manor rumored to be haunted, but they’re told they won’t realize it’s haunted until “afterward.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":65841,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[344],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classic-horror"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":65842,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65840\/revisions\/65842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.everywritersresource.com\/shortstories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}